Part 1 of the series is here.
Part 2 is here.
Recently, a podcast health guru named Andrew Huberman was subjected to a largely irrelevant exposé on his sex life in the prestige press. I had previously encountered Huberman, associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the preftigious Stanford university, through interaction with his thousands of followers and promoted subreddit, which like most promoted subreddits I heavily trolled for anti-social fun.
During my trolling forays, I had learned that despite his impressive credentials, Huberman was no different from many of us on the right in his supplement research, which is to say, he liked to post promising abstracts about studies purporting to show, usually in mice, that such and such supplement was a miracle drug. I also learned that Huberman had transformed his supplement research posting nihilism into a lucrative business, through which he sold or promoted benign supplements like magnesium glycinate and useless gadgets like overpriced glasses with LED light strips to fix circadian rhythm imbalances.
A curious quote in the otherwise boring exposé on Huberman caused me to think about Ishmael Jones and my previous research on supplement culture. In the article, an author of a book covering Huberman recounts how he had sent Huberman portions of the book seeking confirmation:
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.”
Huberman’s bizarre statement about Navy OpSec triggered a recollection of an Ishmael Jones anecdote that initially struck me as generally irrelevant to the themes of Jones’s memoir, but which I now understand as relevant to Jones’s model of a successful cover officer.
Before recounting the anecdote, I’ll survey Jones’s model, which he sketches through descriptions of his successes and failures, as well as the training advice he gives to young officers.