The Long Con and Dirty Dong of Dr. Andrew Huberman, PhD.
How a Stanford neuroscience professor “took the red pill” and became an optimization guru in the manosphere.
When I first came across Andrew Huberman on Instagram during the pandemic, he had 12K followers.
His bio stated that he was a neuroscience professor at Stanford, and he looked the part. He was slim, clean-shaven, pale… like someone who spent a lot of time in a lab. He was doing a series called 100 days of neuroscience. I followed him.
Back then, Huberman’s posts were dense and scientific. He spoke well, and he did his own illustrations of eyeballs and optical nerves, some of which were surprisingly beautiful. The content was admittedly a bit boring, but that wasn’t Huberman’s fault. It was just… neuroscience.
Around 2022, his vibe began to shift.
First, he got jacked and grew a grody chin-beard. THEN HE STARTED YELLING HIS CAPTIONS AT US IN ALL CAPS. His thoughtful posts on neuroscience turned into self-optimization “protocols” that felt more Navy SEAL than college professor.
He started a podcast and interviewed hundreds of people, of whom only a handful were women. What had once felt like a community of nerds in a remote-learning classroom at Stanford suddenly felt like a weight-room in the manosphere.
What happened?
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I realized Huberman was a misogynist. Was it when I saw him hanging out with Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, slamming supplement powders, or carrying heavy things while covered in mud? Or was it when I noticed that, on the rare occasion that he does interview women on his podcast, it’s always about parenting or menopause, and he talks over them the entire time?
Whatever the moment was, it had become unmistakable. Huberman himself had transformed beyond recognition, and whatever this community was about was no longer for me.
I got interested in neuroscience in September 2010, when my dad got hit by a car while riding his bike.
He ended up in the ICU with a Traumatic Brain Injury, and had to have emergency surgery, in which doctors removed a disc of bone from his skull like the top of a jack-o-lantern, and sucked out the damaged brain tissue to relieve the pressure. That brain tissue would never grow back. Everything that had been stored there was gone. And more importantly, every neural pathway that went through that tissue would have to be re-routed.
My dad’s accident was a crash course in the wondrous ability of the human brain to forge new neural connections at any age — otherwise known as neural plasticity.
Watching my dad’s brain repair itself over six weeks in rehab and then months and years after that awakened me to the trinity of the mind, body, and soul. It changed my entire conception of identity, and set me on a path of personal exploration and self-development.
I was inspired to go inward and rewire my own brain — to apply the principles of neuroplasticity to my own life.
I became a dedicated practitioner of yoga, movement, and breathwork. I taught myself guitar, drawing, and painting. I became a devotee of the Korean Spa — where cold plunging is a tradition that goes back thousands of years. My goal was to break bad habits — mental, physical, and emotional. And to build new ones in their place that felt intentional, functional, and integrated.
The brain’s plasticity illuminates a powerful message — that we are not static beings, bound by our current circumstances or past experiences. All of us possess the innate ability to evolve, to overcome, and to grow.
My determination to do just that was what brought me to Huberman in the first place. And I believe that the desire to evolve, overcome, and grow is also what motivates the other 6 million people who follow him.
I also believe that this is the desire that Andrew Huberman exploited, when he decided to con us all.
Andrew Huberman’s metamorphosis from respected neuroscience professor to self-optimization guru is a case study on monetizing and abusing trust.
The “con” in “con artist” is short for “confidence.” Because at the heart of every con is building (and then breaking) trust. Whether the con itself is a simple scam or an elaborate fraud, the key element of any con artist’s operation is appearing trustworthy and authoritative, to gain and then exploit the confidence of their marks for personal gain.
Our trust in Huberman came first and foremost from his affiliation with Stanford. Though explicitly not affiliated with his podcast or protocols, the Stanford brand does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to conferring legitimacy upon his ventures outside of traditional academia.
Huberman also put in the time and blood, sweat, and tears to make enough neuroscience content to solidify his own brand online as an authority, an expert — as a serious person who can be trusted to tell the truth with precision and accuracy.
His marks were people seeking science-backed methods for personal growth and self-improvement.
Our desire for credible, effective ways to enhance our well-being made us receptive to Huberman’s offerings. Some of his protocols were completely legitimate — like looking at low-angle sunlight in the morning and evening. But before long, like so many charlatans before him, he started selling snake oil.
Anyone who bought AG1 was conned. But the real bait-and-switch is that his ideology of self-optimization is deeply and disturbingly interwoven with the misogyny of the manosphere.
The manosphere is a loose collection of online communities that espouse a mix of men’s rights, seduction techniques, and a philosophical stance against feminism.
The dominant narrative in the manosphere is that men are somehow oppressed by societal shifts toward gender equality — and that this oppression warrants a backlash.
Many in the manosphere consider themselves people who have chosen to “take the red pill” — a reference to The Matrix movie, in which the red pill represents being willing to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth about reality, while the blue pill means remaining content with the ordinary experience of ignorance.
In the context of the manosphere and self-optimization ideology, taking the red pill means awakening to beliefs that mainstream society suppresses male power and potential — and advocating for a return to traditional gender dynamics where men are dominant.
This ideology portrays men as victims of societal shifts toward equality and feminism, suggesting that true self-optimization and fulfillment come from rejecting these changes and embracing a more ‘primal’ form of masculinity.
Huberman’s ideology, cloaked in the appealing guise of self-optimization and stamped with the Stanford seal of approval, lures men in with the promise of unlocking their “true potential,” which is tacitly framed as reclaiming an imagined position of power.
Andrew Huberman’s trajectory from a Stanford neuroscience professor to a figure celebrated in the manosphere and self-optimization circles illustrates this confluence of ideas.
Initially attracting followers with his scientific credentials and insights into neuroscience, Huberman successfully established trust and authority, leveraging his affiliation with Stanford to confer legitimacy upon his extracurricular ventures.
But as Huberman’s focus shifted towards self-optimization protocols and partnerships with figures and ideologies aligned with the manosphere, the nature of his influence changed. His content began to emphasize physical prowess, mental toughness, and dominance; which, coupled with the conspicuous absence of female voices and perspectives, mirrored the manosphere’s valorization of traditional masculinity.
This pivot not only alienated some of his original audience but also attracted a new following drawn to the blend of scientific authority and red-pill philosophy.
Huberman has carefully cultivated his persona as the embodiment of his own ideology — the archetype of a man who has achieved conventional success, but chooses to reject the constraints of mainstream academia and society to pursue a version of truth that challenges contemporary norms.
This narrative that he is a maverick, outside the bounds of academic institutions or the mainstream media, resonates deeply with people who identify with feeling disenfranchised by modern discourses on equality, and are looking for a model of success that reaffirms their worldview.
Thus the allure of Huberman’s brand of self-optimization, underpinned by his scientific prestige, becomes a powerful tool for spreading and legitimizing the manosphere’s ideologies.
It taps into the desire for self-improvement and personal growth but does so by intertwining these goals with a regressive narrative on masculinity. This confluence of self-optimization culture and the manosphere, embodied by figures like Huberman, reveals a troubling dynamic where the quest for personal development veers into regressive and harmful beliefs that ultimately hurt women.
New York Magazine has entered the chat.
Some of us were less surprised than others when, this week, an article by Kerry Howley came out in New York Magazine, exposing a disturbing pattern of deceit and lies in Huberman’s personal and professional life.
Six (6) women came forward with horror stories about being duped, manipulated, and cheated on by Andrew Huberman — some for years on end, and remarkably, all overlapping at the same time. One woman claimed he gave her a strain of HPV that is linked to cancer.
And it wasn’t just exes. Co-workers and friends came forward with stories about his unfortunate habit of making and breaking commitments.
After the article dropped, many of Huberman’s 6 million followers rose up in his defense — and the shape their defense took was perhaps even more illuminating than the allegations themselves:
The women were liars.
Even if they were telling the truth, it didn’t matter, because his personal life was separate from his professional life.
Huberman had helped millions of people lead healthier lives. Who cares what he did to 6 women?
If the women were stupid enough to not notice that he was cheating on them, that was on them.
Everyone has HPV, so it doesn’t matter if he spread a cancer-causing variant of it recklessly and knowingly.
The piece was a hit-job.
It was hearsay. Gossip. A character assassination by the “mainstream media” and a handful of scorned women.
Huberman himself had no comment.
He did not apologize. He did not take accountability or acknowledge the article. He kept posting as if nothing had happened, though he did go through and ❤️ supportive comments.
Huberman will certainly survive this scandal, because his audience doesn’t care how badly he treats people — especially if those people are women. And his willingness to double down on that audience betrays an unsettling comfort with the manosphere’s less savory aspects.
But I have taken the red pill.
I can’t imagine how little self-respect you have to have to lie repeatedly to the people you are closest to. How low your self-worth would have to be to use people who loved you that badly. I can’t imagine how it feels to go sleep at night, no matter how many protocols you banged out that day, knowing that your word is worthless.
That you’re a liar.
That you have no honor.
I unsubscribe from Andrew Huberman, and I recommend that you do too.
In Conclusion: A Reflection on Values
The saga of Andrew Huberman’s rise and fall raises critical questions about the values we champion and the ideologies we allow to guide us.
The allure of becoming the optimized self should not come at the cost of empathy, respect, and equality. To live a lifestyle of self-optimization that conspicuously does not include the ethics of basic consideration, honesty, compassion, and kindness is some dark, empty, shallow shit.
Huberman serves as a cautionary reminder of the need for an enlightened approach to personal development — one that uplifts people, and rejects the divisive and harmful ideologies that seek to pit us against one another.
