Hi friends. Short newsletter this week, as this was not what I was intending to send, but I wanted to point out a significant underlying dynamic in the Andrew Huberman piece in New York Magazine. I think we can learn a lot from this pattern in real time—and start to break it.

For those who missed it, Kerry Howley wrote a piece about five women who all believed themselves to be in long-term, monogamous relationships with Andrew Huberman—they were having unprotected sex with him, one was attempting to get pregnant with him via IVF, etc. There are other components to the story as well, but it’s a portrait of someone involved in profound deception and what could be described as emotionally abusive behavior—and this person has put himself at the center of a brand where he dispenses advice to millions of people about how to live. (I made a video about this here.)

As some of you may remember, a month ago, I wrote a series of posts about the dominance of popular male podcasters in the wellness space who don’t platform or interview women (despite the fact that women are handily out-earning men in bio-medical PhDs). This series (“Ending the Manel”) included Huberman as his rates of platforming women are abysmally low—in his podcast’s history, he had interviewed 12 women (8%); since I published the piece, that number climbed to 13*. It also went on to explore the way these men platform and build each other up (“The Perception [and Reality] of Scarcity”), the way they presume expertise in all things “Science” in a way that women are not allowed to do (“Who Gets to Be an Expert?”), and finally, why reputational harm is so dangerous for women (we assassinate women for “bad” behavior) while we don’t care how depraved men are so long as we perceive them as powerful (“The Achilles Heel of Women”).

*In my comments I’m hearing from women—who probably don’t know this stat—that he’s had “many,” “plenty of,” and “women,” citing a woman that they remember hearing on his show. Our sense that this is normal is deep.