THE MEDI A MAR.

25, 2024

Andrew Huberman’s
Mechanisms of Control The
private and public seductions
of the world’s biggest pop
neuroscientist.
By Kerry Howley, a features writer for New
York Magazine since 2021.

Photo-Illustration: New York Magazine; Source image: Sciocomm Media

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading
recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
F
or the past three years, one of the biggest
podcasters on the planet has told a story to
millions of listeners across half a dozen shows:
There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy,
until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was
sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found
science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old

associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at
the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is
given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects
such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His
podcast is revelatory largely because it does not
condescend, which has not been the way of public-
health information in our time. He does not give the
impression of someone diluting science to universally
applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses.
“Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s
released volumetrically, but then it has to bind
someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled
receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the
density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how
he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-
hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this
writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

IN THIS ISSUE
 SEE ALL

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw

distinctions between neuromodulators and classical
neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then
adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his
elaborate morning routine. They will model the most
basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating,
seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their
friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro
podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is
a tenured Stanford professor associated with a
Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a
neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just
back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled
the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung
signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY)
apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other

scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too,
into celebrities, but these scientists will not be
Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we
have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored
with the wonders of biological function, generous to
interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in
endearing attempts to sound like a normal person
(“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that
we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is

made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes
find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels
kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan.
“The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic
people and focusing on good-quality social
interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,”
Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman
reminds his audience always of the possibilities of
neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As
an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce
of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the
tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period
after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.”
His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.”
He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of
“youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but
harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter

Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I
do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing
to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the
confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re
gonna figure this out.’ There’s something very powerful
about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be
okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out.”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and

also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up
and study all night long. He would be tenured at
Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in
mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high

school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and
psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast
frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard
work … like going to the gym and doing an effective
workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending.
Our cells will benefit from the careful management of
stress. “I love mechanism,” says Huberman; our
feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are
Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a
phenomenon not to be confused with
#DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the
man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must

give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward
inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew
Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he
very much was for a period this fall — a period in
which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank
no more than once a week, practiced physiological
sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my
living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during
which I began to think seriously, for the first time in
my life, about reducing stress, and during which both
my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit
from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water;
a period in which I realized that I not only liked this
podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast
— he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the

cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the
midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between
the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a
man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world
unseen by most professors. The problem with a man
always working on himself is that he may also be
working on you.

S
ome of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of
his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing,
staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of
framed science publications in which Huberman-
authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The
Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle
@hubermanlab, Andrew began posting
straightforward educational videos in which he talks
directly into the camera about subjects such as the
organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he
would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined
paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-
talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent
student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew
was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts
in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked
about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing
fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the
relationship between breathing and motivation. On
The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was
conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with

insight and informed advice. In a year of death and
disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping
away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was
always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are
mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real

name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone
about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her
mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with
two small kids from a previous relationship. She had
old friends who adored her and no trouble making
new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she
jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation,
losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in
fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept
track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could
organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for
reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I
asked her a question in her home recently, she said the
answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left
for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled
OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February

2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He
messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home
in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland.
That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off
Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was
courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the
podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to
clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided,
she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise,

good food, good information. They cared
immoderately about what went into their bodies.
Andrew could command a room and clearly took
pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome,
healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the
impression of working on himself; throughout their
relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy
merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello,
whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello
comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote
on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by
Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She
cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what
she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected
sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce

Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was
cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be
late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh
yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours
late.’ And then of course, all of these things were
planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh,
I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night
and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern.

Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as
hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up
included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello,
wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and
doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian
MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated
with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t
handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you
want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,”
says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls
Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.”
“I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him.
Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a

Colorado-based investigative journalist and
anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland
for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss
their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been
Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill
Us, who initially reached out, and the two became
friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed
Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray,
boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping.

Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a
half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He
puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice,
walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to
return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney.
Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy
working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman
says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went
to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went
on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard

to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,”
says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little
unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing
thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a
memory that one feels the need to watch what one
says; a stray comment could surface three years later.
And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m
saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but
I can tell something I said sent him down a path that
he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I
need to wait for him to come back.”

A
ndrew Huberman declined to be interviewed
for this story. Through a spokesman,
Huberman says he did not become exclusive
with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on,
that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based
on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their
Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he
“maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the
vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in

Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon
enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came
back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he
was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because

Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she
had been with before him, the two children she had
had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah
recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When
he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at
night and sometimes start again at two or three in the
morning.”
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.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try

to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I
don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive
friend just because of my personal observations and
disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he
was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his
blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying
there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about
the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the

extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent
Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book,
The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked
Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was
mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond.
Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not
respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In
2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review
the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says,
came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I
thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney.
Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused
Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing

relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed
to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an
island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a
month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He
did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled
the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think
Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says
Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity
to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own

podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his
role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that
this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his
particular combination of formality and
discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and
research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my
desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer
information about science and science-related tools to
the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some

efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an
episode in 2024. “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. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,”
read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved
my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for
everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would
have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun,

Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among
his most famous episodes is one in which he declares
moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie
puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including
Prohibition, has ever made more people think about
alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims
repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,”
he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who
consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-
restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint
even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably
followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how
even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every
workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine.
Huberman frequently refers to the importance of
“social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,”
always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately
leveraged for the one value consistently espoused:
physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal

and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she
says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and
hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as
much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together.

Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive
naturally; one can exert more control when
procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of
several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman
denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children
together, clarifying that they “decided to create
embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of

HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I
had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been
tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for
Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV.
According to the CDC, there is currently no approved
test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she
says, he told her you could contract HPV from many
things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and

deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist
David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman
Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic
Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking
about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men

and women leverage deception versus truth-telling
and communicating some of the things around mate
choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-

year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term
interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their
feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,”

Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a

larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so
which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You
can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs
with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here

Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple,
uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I

think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

B
y 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous.
Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford
professor’s top productivity routine” and
“Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.”
Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to
get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged
Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast,
Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in
Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in
Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives;
Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with

cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have
children with another man. She says he told her that
being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.”
“The pattern of your
11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told
her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set
of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting

smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again
and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and
confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your
protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies
Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage
intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on
Sarah’s decision to have children with another man,
and denies that he said being with her was like
bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr.
Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy

embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about
her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what
he called her bad choices, most especially having her
second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him.
A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident
and says he does not regard her having a second child
as a bad choice.

I
think it’s important to recognize that we might
have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett,
“or a model of how someone should conduct
themselves. And if they do something that is out of
sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not
necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our
model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-

system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the
science propagated on Huberman Lab depends
entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a
man who expounds for multiple hours a week on
subjects well outside his area of expertise. His
detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly
from limited animal studies, posits certainty where
there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far
from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend
to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as
he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human
knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are
greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient,
and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working

scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents
in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As
scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks
often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves”
reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit
the lab and even donate. I have never met a
Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such
a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing
2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn
“Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not
learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour
drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to
drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact
that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources,
barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a

‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a
lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman
Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of
mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized
rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged
their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright
nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down

before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs
apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar
laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the
researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500
rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for

Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is
operational and is in the process of moving from the
Department of Neurobiology to the Department of
Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman
says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in
use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast,

Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder
formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It
is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe
Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who
sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just
back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month
powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional
needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1
is, according to writer and professional debunker
Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the
space.” Here we have a powder that contains,
according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients,
far more than the typical supplement, which would
seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of
mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald
points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates
that each ingredient, which may or may not promote
good health in a certain dose, is likely included in
minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do
the math themselves; the company keeps many of the
numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed
that literally every supplement or ingredient within
this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains
McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add
up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in
terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the
problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically
not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one
learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022
episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics
are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included
not only for their individual benefit, but for the
synergy between them — how ingredients interact in
complex ways, and how combinations can lead to
additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about
podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of
Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never
make recommendations based on such tenuous
research. “People can choose which podcast they want
to listen to.”

W
henever Sarah had suspicions about
Andrew’s interactions with another woman,
he had a particular way of talking about the
woman in question. She says he said the women were
stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her
that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh
attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who
fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him.
(A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of
the denigration of women and the dead-baby story
and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most
of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably
were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and

Andrew could not go out without being thronged by
people. On a camping trip in Washington State that
same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with
ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs
meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was
round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s

phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked
his texts, and found conversations with someone we
will call Eve. Some of them took place during the
camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he

had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very
much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid
tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The

landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the
stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also
sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,”
he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So

many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work
through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of

woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where
Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is
intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in
2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for
a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form.
“You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the
distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary
listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be
interested in her internal life. He was busy all the
time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his
dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the
repair work on this,” he said when she called him out
for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter
my desire and commitment to see you, and establish
clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his
endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve,
to be serious about deepening their relationship,
which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the
impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She
was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he

talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our
children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for
book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly,
Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of
life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her.
“That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh
lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental
question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan,
that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it,
and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he
said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner
for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me
with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not
true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was

looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or
liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is
there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said.
They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged
him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she

remained in a committed relationship with
Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they
were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she
noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came
out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being
photographed. She says she did not leave him until
December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended,
as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place
for a couple of days and left for his place
to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go
Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at
his house and found him on the couch with another
woman. She could see them through the window. “If
you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do
not live in a glass house.”

O
n January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began
liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of
them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I
think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman.
Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?”
Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who
lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and
she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she
said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following
weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She
helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah,
“keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the
idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted
Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and
not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful
Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they
talked some more and brought her into the group
chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a
dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for
years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,”
given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth
woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been
apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s
lies and worried that the other women would seem
foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish
women were not, however, what she found. 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. “I can’t believe how
crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one
struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a
story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks
in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six
years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any
better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all
slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of

texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of
deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his

hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They
found days in which he would text nearly identical
pictures of himself to two of them at the same time.
They realized that the day before he had moved in
with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he
had also been with her in December 2023, the
weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a
sixth woman.
They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of
admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah
was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas
to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was
there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left
her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he
met Eve. They had a serious talk about their
relationship. They thought they were in a good place.
He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at

the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you …
For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely

schedule three Zooms in
a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took

on a sinister edge. It was communicating a
commitment that was not real, a profound interest in
the internality of women that was then used to
manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous

Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment,

“that he loves croissants.”

W
hile Huberman has been criticized for
having too few women guests on his
podcast, he is solicitous and deferential
W
toward those he interviews. In a January 2023
episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal
messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the
deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds
with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben
Barres, had experienced “intense
suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning.
“Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with
concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics …
are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned

about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he
preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman
was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,”
says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who
was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public,
and who would be crawling on the floor for him when
he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies
this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had
his little ways of checking in: “Good morning
beautiful.” There was a particular way he would
respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not

been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a
recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that
in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe
otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that
we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are
not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was
under that impression? Then you were giving her that
impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was

attracted; 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. They researched
non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate
organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that
they had had sex with someone who had an untold
number of partners. All of them wondered how many
others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the
other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in
the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women
traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never
found her.

T
ell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss
in November on the trip in which he slept with
Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality

characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism,
Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people
“feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent
moves. They view other people as pawns to be
manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those
“who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be
good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of
them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex

addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman
says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring
you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first
learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode
with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction
Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author
of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear
explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really

pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine
is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate
by downregulating my own dopamine receptors …
And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that
aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.”
Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she
explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I
keep indulging again and again and again,” she said,
“ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve
essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or
lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine
deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is
enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to
this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr.

Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a
playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably
right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she

said gently, “to something that is really socially
rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who

ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I
have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that
empathy for taking a really good situation and what
from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with

Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan
Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and
continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional
capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he
were “troubled” during their time together, that he was
complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom
she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get
involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow
through,” says someone he dated on and off between
2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She
hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

A
ndrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the
dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some
version of his origin story on The Rich Roll
Podcast; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia.
He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take
the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a
divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter
Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says
Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a
wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people
listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim
Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right?
To assume that it has always come easy.” His father
and mother agree that “after our divorce was an
incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not
agree” with some of his characterization of his past;
few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the

detention center in which he says he was held for a
month in high school. In a version of the story
Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We
lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves
while we were there.” (New York was unable to find an
account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-

pressure high school. Classmates describe him as
always with a skateboard; they remember him as
pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He
would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-
pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I
mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another
classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his
hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was
a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au
pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand
out to his classmates as out of control or
unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into
street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says
Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was
not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence,

Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In
therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s
experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame
immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son
of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital,
grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I
have never,” says Amit, “met a man more
interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s
relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We
were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me
something personal, and I suggested he talk to his
 therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going
to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He
told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for
Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,”

says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-
deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one
discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to
understand himself. There are hours of talking about
SUBSCRIBE
addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism
comes up consistently. One can see attempts to
understand and also places where those attempts
swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with
the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew
and Conti were describing the psychological
phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an
example to share: He once canceled an appointment
with a Stanford colleague. There was no response.
Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s
telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue
this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,”

Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty
salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an

example of somebody who has a, well, strong
aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know,
lashes back or is passive.”
This story is free for a limited time. Subscribe to
enjoy uninterrupted access.
“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel
SUBSCRIBE NOW
good enough no matter what this person has achieved.
So then there is a sense of the need and the right to
overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m

exerting significant control over you, right? And it may
be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on

Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her
unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the
generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed
down before” her “in the service of the ego” because
she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine

minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis
after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than
those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks
gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers
from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general
unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an
elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single
behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she
did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not

matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself
outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his
urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others.
Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh,
employed by this writer many times in the writing of
this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and
growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the
man he continues to be may not even matter to those
who buy questionable products he has recommended
and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners
who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo
Alto. The people who definitively find the space
between fantasy and reality to be a problem are
women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep,
sustained concern for their personal growth, and who,
in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an
image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false
belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration,
that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to
more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking.

“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.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New

York in February, and the group has only grown closer.
On any given day, one of the five can go into an
appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone
shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed
Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another
responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care
Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care
Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to
my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under
it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They
regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit
photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one
another’s pets. They are holding space for other
women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There

has been so much processing.” They are planning a
weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t
jump in as besties, but real friendships have been
built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a
beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura

Thompson.

Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support

our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If
you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the
March 25, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.

TA G S : THE MEDIA ANDREW HUBERMAN PODCASTS

NEW YORK MAGAZINE MORE

SHOW 298 COMMENTS

8:20 A.M. TRUMP TRIALS

Donald Trump Has a New Least

Favorite Judge
By ANDREW RICE
On Monday, Trump’s string of legal good
luck hit a wall in the form of New York State
judge Juan Merchan.
6:00 A.M. MAGA

January 6 Romanticism Has Become

Trump’s ‘Lost Cause’
By ED KILGORE
The former president’s decision to celebrate
the failed insurrection is part of an
elaborate myth in which he can never be defeated.

5:00 A.M. SCREEN TIME

Who’s Behind All the ‘Pussy in Bio’ on

X?
By JOHN HERRMAN
An investigation into the marketers and
scammers responsible for X’s most visible —
and most memeable — spambot problem.

MOST POPULAR

1. Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

By KERRY HOWLEY

2. What the Polls Say Today: RFK Jr. Now

Hurting Biden, Helping Trump
By ED KILGORE

3. CEO Dave Calhoun Leaps From Boeing,

Saved by Golden Parachute
By MAT T STIEB

4. Donald Trump Still Has All Kinds of Money

Problems
B y K E V I N T. D U G A N

5. Inside the Craziest College-Admissions

Season Ever 
By JEFFREY SELINGO
3/25/2024 THE MONEY GAME

Donald Trump Still Has All Kinds of

Money Problems
B y K E V I N T. D U G A N
He got nearly $300 million knocked off his
bond payment Monday, but that’s a
temporary victory.

3/25/2024 POLITICS

What We Know About Andy Kim, New

Jersey’s Likely Next Senator
By NIA PRATER
With Tammy Murphy suspending her
campaign, Representative Andy Kim is
poised to become the party’s nominee and New Jersey’s
next senator.

3/25/2024 EARLY AND OFTEN

Lisa Murkowski Could Hold Balance

of Power in Senate
By ED KILGORE
Owing very little to the GOP and alienated
from Trump, the Alaska senator could be in
the catbird seat after November.

3/25/2024 GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR CASH

CEO Dave Calhoun Leaps From

Boeing, Saved by Golden Parachute
By MAT T STIEB
The company is shaking up much of its C-
suite amid the ongoing fallout from the
Alaska Airlines flight’s midair blowout.
3/25/2024 EARLY AND OFTEN

Trump Gets Huge Break, Now Needs

$175 Million to Post Bond
By MAT T STIEB
An appellate court ruled that Trump has ten
more days to secure a bond in the business-
fraud case and no longer needs to post the full $454
million.

3/25/2024 THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Why Republicans Won’t Say Anything

About Obamacare
By JONATHAN CHAIT
Ignore the issue, win power, figure it out
later.

3/25/2024 THE MONEY GAME

How Screwed Is Trump?

B y K E V I N T. D U G A N
Unless he can find a way out of paying Tish
James, he will go bust on Monday.

3/25/2024 JUST ASKING QUESTIONS

Why the Election Might Come Down to

Pennsylvania’s Economy
B y K E V I N T. D U G A N
Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi on
why he’s cautiously optimistic about Biden’s
reelection.
3/24/2024 BAD IDEAS

Tammy Murphy Has Stopped Her Once

Unstoppable New Jersey Senate
Campaign
By CHAS DANNER
As it turns out, New Jersey Democrats
weren’t all that into the idea of giving the governor’s wife a
Senate seat — and backed Andy Kim instead.

3/24/2024 POLL POSITION

What the Polls Say Today: RFK Jr.

Now Hurting Biden, Helping Trump
By ED KILGORE
Initially the vaccine skeptic and conspiracy
theorist seemed to be drawing more votes
from Trump, but that’s changed — and it could change
again.

3/24/2024 THE CITY POLITIC

A Street-Level View From New York’s

Most Dangerous Neighborhood
By Errol Louis
Crown Heights is once again confronting a
surge in street violence with resolve.

3/23/2024 EARLY AND OFTEN

McConnell Stole a Supreme Court

Seat. Is That the Norm Now?
By ED KILGORE
Debate over whether Sotomayor should
retire reveals control of both the White
House and Senate may be necessary to confirm anyone
going forward.
3/23/2024 THE NATIONAL INTEREST

The Paramilitary Candidate

By JONATHAN CHAIT
Trump has made justice for insurrectionists
the center of his campaign.

3/22/2024 POLITICS

The Republican Party Is Too

Embarrassing for George Santos
By NIA PRATER
The disgraced ex-congressman announced
on Friday that he’ll be running as an
independent this time around.

3/22/2024 ROYAL RUMBLINGS

Kate Middleton News: A Complete

Guide for Daft Americans
By MARGARET HARTMANN
Confused by the Kate Middleton video?
Can’t tell Catherine from Camilla? Here’s a
crash course on the latest news and last few decades of
royal drama.

3/22/2024 ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

The Republican House Majority Is

Dwindling to Almost Nothing
By MAT T STIEB
Thanks to another imminent resignation,
Speaker Johnson will soon be handing on by
a thread.
3/22/2024 ROYALS

Kate Middleton Releases Video

Revealing Cancer Diagnosis
By MARGARET HARTMANN
The Princess of Wales said the cancer was
found following her surgery in January, and
came as a “huge shock.”

3/22/2024 TREMENDOUS CONTENT

Potential Trump VP Tim Scott

Schedules Wedding Around RNC
By MARGARET HARTMANN
Is the timing politically motivated, or are
the senator and his fiancée, Mindy Noce,
just eager to wed? It’s unclear!

3/22/2024 UKRAINE AID

Under Threat From Marjorie Taylor

Greene, GOP Speaker Faces Fateful
Choice
By ED KILGORE
Mike Johnson, still relatively new to the job,
must pick between abondoning Ukraine or relying on
Democrats to save his gavel.

3/22/2024 IT'S TOO MUCH WINNING

Trump Is About to Get $3 Billion

Richer Thanks to Truth Social
By MAT T STIEB
The company’s public offering is a huge
financial win for Trump, but it doesn’t
immediately solve his big bond problem.
3/22/2024 THAT HAPPENED

The Time Trump Was So Petty He

Made the Navy Hide the USS John S.
McCain
B y B E N JA M I N H A RT
Back in 2019, a Navy ship got caught up in
Trump’s absurd feud with the late senator, which
continues to this day.

ABOUT INTELLIGENCER ABOUT NEW YORK

MAGAZINE

NEWSLETTERS HELP

CONTAC T PRESS

MEDIA KIT WE’RE HIRING

P R I VA C Y TERMS

AD CHOICES DO NOT SELL OR SHARE

MY PERSONAL
INFORMATION

ACCESSIBILITY

INTELLIGENCER IS A VOX MEDIA NETWORK.

© 2024 VOX MEDIA, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.