It Started Out with a Kiss (Reported by New York Mag); How Did it End up Like This?

Grab your tinfoil hat and indulge me for the next few hundred words if you will.

I don’t actually care if Andrew Huberman is a slut.

By now you may have heard some buzz surrounding Huberman - triggered by a recent New York Magazine exposé chronicling some… ahem… shall we say… indiscretions and manipulations in his romantic life.

At first, I was inclined to chalk this up as another casualty of our society’s hobbyistic schadenfreude: we sure love a downfall.

But then I read a Thread on Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter by Australian physician and speaker Dr. Vyom Sharma, giving me a mental double take.

It’s in this insistence that the average person is fundamentally incapable of understanding their own body and biology that we find perhaps the key driving factor behind the New York Magazine piece.

Does the scientific community have a responsibility to take the utmost care in their communications to the general public regarding health and wellbeing? Yes, certainly.

And is it reasonable to question whether the assertions of popular voices are backed by research or merely pseudoscience noise? Absolutely.

However, who stands the most to gain from discrediting a message of mental and emotional control that’s birthed unmedicated guides on improving your focus with ADHD and reversing signs of aging?

Probably someone with a vested interest in pharmaceuticals - an industry dependent on continued societal demand for a cure.

Enter BlackRock Inc. - the world’s largest asset manager with a portfolio of ~$10 trillion (if it were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest by GDP) and major shareholder interests in nearly every corporation on the NYSE.

And here’s where I’ll ask you to readjust your tinfoil hat. We’re about to follow some money.

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A Brief History of Corporate Ownership Structures

So New York Magazine publishes their piece on Huberman, but who owns the publication? As with many broad-reaching organizations, there’s a bit of a corporate family tree.

In 2019, Vox Media purchased the magazine.

Vox Media’s largest investor by dollar value is NBCUniversal (however, it’s worth noting that last year the largest shareholder became Penske Media Corporation - parent company to Variety, Rolling Stone, and other big-name publications).

Since 2012, NBCUniversal has been a subsidiary of Comcast. And the second-biggest shareholder in Comcast?

You guessed it.

BlackRock.

Interestingly, BlackRock is also a major shareholder in many media companies responsible for Huberman’s podcasting peers’ work. Huberman Lab is, however, produced via a private corporation Huberman owns and controls.

BlackRock also has an active neuroscience and healthcare ETF via which it controls the majority of the world’s high-profile pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporations.

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Fear, Hope, and Mattress Money

In his recent letter to investors, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink posits that younger generations are moving away from the American value of hope and into a deeply ingrained sense of fear. This concerns him on several levels, he writes.

In many ways, Huberman’s work addresses this uptick in fear head-on by demystifying the scientific principles that govern our lives (including fear itself).

Knowledge is, of course, an antidote to fear.

Given Fink’s declaration, shouldn’t this be something BlackRock would support?

Not necessarily, because Huberman’s work centers the individual as the master of their own ability to move from fear toward hope.

On the other hand, Fink’s aversion to cultural fear is intrinsically tied to financial trust in his firm and its ability to access Americans’ funds:

If future generations don’t feel hopeful about this country and their future in it, then the U.S. doesn’t only lose the force that makes people want to invest. America will lose what makes it America. Without hope, we risk becoming just another place where people look at the incentive structure before them and decide that the safe choice is the only choice. We risk becoming a country where people keep their money under the mattress and their dreams bottled up in their bedroom. - Larry Fink, 2024 Annual Chairman’s Letter to Investors

And what better way to get the public to trust BlackRock with that bottle of dreams (read: dollars) than to present the firm itself as a primary source of hope?

And wouldn’t someone like Huberman, who preaches that each individual can become that source for themselves, be a bit of a nuisance to that endeavor?

Does any of this mean that BlackRock is on an intricate crusade to discredit Huberman? Honestly, who can say?

What we can say, however, is that we’d all be far better served by considering the hidden motivations and corporate influences behind the things we see, read, and hear.

The bigger the downfall, the bigger *someone* stands to gain.