5 ms·

This article feels a bit harsh. I recently started listening to him and my main complaint about him is that he can be boring. 4 hours about breathing and the co

This article feels a bit harsh. I recently started listening to him and my main complaint about him is that he can be boring. 4 hours about breathing and the correct way to breathe and I didn't feel like I understood what to take away from it at the end. I would need to go back and listen again and take detailed notes. The thing he lacks is the ability to summarize. I think he himself is a person who takes a lot of supplements and is looking for an edge in whatever way it comes. Maybe breathing a special way or ice showers or whatever. All that stuff feels like way past the basics that most listeners need to learn about. The best stuff I learned from him was basics, like alcohol is never good for you. And it's bad in low amounts in lots of subtle ways. That message will improve lives. I hope he doesn't hit the doctor Oz spiral but it doesn't seem like he has so far.

lez 4y ago
Breathwork is something that you should experience yourself to know what's in it for you. Notes won't help. Practice for 3-6 months, then listen to the podcast again. Then, you can relate Huberman's words with your own experience, and not be bored at all.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> alcohol is never good for you This episode, # 86, changed my life. I’ve not had a single drink of alcohol since i listened to it in august 2022. I don’t expect I will again. SCARED STRAIGHT. > thing he lacks is the ability to summarize Yes! I have a love/hate relationship with him because of this. Many of his episodes could be half the length, so i just do not listen to him very often. The alcohol episode is an exception and if a friend hadn’t recommended it, I would have missed it.
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  If he was sponsored by an alcohol company, wouldn’t he start saying that alcohol is actually good for your health?
  - pas 4y ago
    who knows. he seems to be a true believer in interesting (but statistically weak) papers... for a while there was seemingly some evidence that one glass of red wine a week was good for cardiovascular health. would he push that?
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> The thing he lacks is the ability to summarize. Yep. I rarely make it all the way through one of his 2+ hour podcasts. Sometimes you can find YouTube channels that pull out the most important parts of his longform podcasts into something that's maybe 10 or 15 minutes.
chihuahua 4y ago
I agree with your points. I feel like Huberman just goes on and on and on in excruciating details about various ultra-complicated processes in the human body, but there is little in the way of a useful summary or take-away. At the end, I don't know should I do with all this information, even if I was able to remember it. Maybe he just likes to hear himself talk. Any time a podcast is sponsored by "athletic greens" it makes me chuckle, because the product seems like 99.9% marketing in such an obvious way. The name alone is ridiculous. Very much like "Alpha Brain" being hawked relentlessly by Joe Rogan.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I just started listening to the cannabis episode and he spent several minutes discussing the various ways that nicotine (yes, nicotine) can be consumed. Why does an adult audience need a primer on how nicotine enters the body? And why spend several minutes on it? Is he talking to aliens who don’t know about the second-most consumed addictive substance on earth (his statistic)? It’s excruciatingly boring, but I keep hoping he’ll talk about the risks of cannabis on the brain and body. Maybe that comes in hour three after he’s told me the various ways humans consume water?
  - pas 4y ago
    It's because he's selling supplements... :/ I don't think he's dumb, but he's dangerously close to Dr Oz territory.
    - chihuahua 4y ago
      It took me a while to reach this conclusion, but I ended up unsubscribing from his podcast. It's just relentless biochemical babble with hardly any benefit to me. He even had an episode on sleep with his favorite "sleep supplement stack" and I tried that out and it doesn't do much for me. So maybe it's all just snake oil.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> The thing he lacks is the ability to summarize. That's a feature, not a bug. Discussing these topics for hours and hours is the primary draw of this type of info-tainment. The basics of healthy living and even 80-90% optimal diet/exercise could be summarized in a 1-hour podcast. The average Huberman listener would likely benefit more from improving sleep, exercise, diet, and other basics (which he does cover, but it only goes so far) than spending 4 hours learning about the latest round of supplements and associated research. But summaries don't get people excited, nor do they prime people to feel the placebo amplification effect (or just raw placebo effect) of the latest supplement they just spent 4 hours hearing about. "Try taking ____ supplement. It has shown to improve ____ in mice." is boring and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Four hours of excited discussion about molecules and scientific lingo feels like real science. It's hard to argue with someone so invested in a topic that they spend hours and hours talking about it. This supplement must work and I must use it if I want to get ahead. That's the goal of these long podcasts.
- ofcourseyoudo 4y ago
  I like Hubermann too but it's not "excited" discussion... it's a pretty long drone about these topics. I too wish his episodes were 33% the length they are.
  - da5is 4y ago
    Huberman is the reason I actually subscribed to Podcast Notes, just to be able to get the highlights.
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
My main problem with Huberman, and this applies to many in this genre, is that although he is faithfully describing the current research, he doesn't do much to qualify it. What I mean by that is measuring things about people is very very very difficult. Because of this, much of the research published about human subjects is not repeatable. It takes a long time to build evidence in a way that can account for the all confounding non-linear variables involved. He is stating the conclusions of the latest research as if they were proven laws of nature instead of just the research of a potentially flawed study. He's giving far more weight than they are warranted. He might know this intuitively, but the average Joe in his audience does not.

lez 4y ago

Breathwork is something that you should experience yourself to know what's in it for you. Notes won't help. Practice for 3-6 months, then listen to the podcast again. Then, you can relate Huberman's words with your own experience, and not be bored at all.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

> alcohol is never good for you This episode, # 86, changed my life. I’ve not had a single drink of alcohol since i listened to it in august 2022. I don’t expect I will again. SCARED STRAIGHT. > thing he lacks is the ability to summarize Yes! I have a love/hate relationship with him because of this. Many of his episodes could be half the length, so i just do not listen to him very often. The alcohol episode is an exception and if a friend hadn’t recommended it, I would have missed it.

AraceliHarker 4y ago
If he was sponsored by an alcohol company, wouldn’t he start saying that alcohol is actually good for your health?
- pas 4y ago
  who knows. he seems to be a true believer in interesting (but statistically weak) papers... for a while there was seemingly some evidence that one glass of red wine a week was good for cardiovascular health. would he push that?

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> The thing he lacks is the ability to summarize. Yep. I rarely make it all the way through one of his 2+ hour podcasts. Sometimes you can find YouTube channels that pull out the most important parts of his longform podcasts into something that's maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

chihuahua 4y ago

I agree with your points. I feel like Huberman just goes on and on and on in excruciating details about various ultra-complicated processes in the human body, but there is little in the way of a useful summary or take-away. At the end, I don't know should I do with all this information, even if I was able to remember it. Maybe he just likes to hear himself talk. Any time a podcast is sponsored by "athletic greens" it makes me chuckle, because the product seems like 99.9% marketing in such an obvious way. The name alone is ridiculous. Very much like "Alpha Brain" being hawked relentlessly by Joe Rogan.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I just started listening to the cannabis episode and he spent several minutes discussing the various ways that nicotine (yes, nicotine) can be consumed. Why does an adult audience need a primer on how nicotine enters the body? And why spend several minutes on it? Is he talking to aliens who don’t know about the second-most consumed addictive substance on earth (his statistic)? It’s excruciatingly boring, but I keep hoping he’ll talk about the risks of cannabis on the brain and body. Maybe that comes in hour three after he’s told me the various ways humans consume water?
- pas 4y ago
  It's because he's selling supplements... :/ I don't think he's dumb, but he's dangerously close to Dr Oz territory.
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    It took me a while to reach this conclusion, but I ended up unsubscribing from his podcast. It's just relentless biochemical babble with hardly any benefit to me. He even had an episode on sleep with his favorite "sleep supplement stack" and I tried that out and it doesn't do much for me. So maybe it's all just snake oil.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> The thing he lacks is the ability to summarize. That's a feature, not a bug. Discussing these topics for hours and hours is the primary draw of this type of info-tainment. The basics of healthy living and even 80-90% optimal diet/exercise could be summarized in a 1-hour podcast. The average Huberman listener would likely benefit more from improving sleep, exercise, diet, and other basics (which he does cover, but it only goes so far) than spending 4 hours learning about the latest round of supplements and associated research. But summaries don't get people excited, nor do they prime people to feel the placebo amplification effect (or just raw placebo effect) of the latest supplement they just spent 4 hours hearing about. "Try taking ____ supplement. It has shown to improve ____ in mice." is boring and doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Four hours of excited discussion about molecules and scientific lingo feels like real science. It's hard to argue with someone so invested in a topic that they spend hours and hours talking about it. This supplement must work and I must use it if I want to get ahead. That's the goal of these long podcasts.

ofcourseyoudo 4y ago
I like Hubermann too but it's not "excited" discussion... it's a pretty long drone about these topics. I too wish his episodes were 33% the length they are.
- da5is 4y ago
  Huberman is the reason I actually subscribed to Podcast Notes, just to be able to get the highlights.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

My main problem with Huberman, and this applies to many in this genre, is that although he is faithfully describing the current research, he doesn't do much to qualify it. What I mean by that is measuring things about people is very very very difficult. Because of this, much of the research published about human subjects is not repeatable. It takes a long time to build evidence in a way that can account for the all confounding non-linear variables involved. He is stating the conclusions of the latest research as if they were proven laws of nature instead of just the research of a potentially flawed study. He's giving far more weight than they are warranted. He might know this intuitively, but the average Joe in his audience does not.