I wrote this little piece of satire as a reflection on a certain Stanford-affiliated podcaster. Can you guess who it is?
My name is Dr. Alexander Harrison. I am a neuroscientist and PhD researcher with a degree in ophthalmology from Soapbox University* deserving of your time, attention and unquestioned trust. And I have an impressive beard. I wear tight t-shirts over my muscular shoulders so that straight women will be distracted by their desire to have sex with me and men will buy my supplements in an effort to be me.
Pay no regard to the multiple public allegations of dating-related misogyny that have been reported about me. Women should know that men like me are only as faithful as our options. And with my enormous brain and t-shirt muscles, my options are unlimited, sweetheart.
I love hearing myself talk and believe that everyone else in the world wants to spend hours of their lives listening to me talk. Why waste a moment in contemplative silence when you can listen to me drone on about my superior intellect? I love to interview other fascinating professionals about how my physician colleagues are woefully uninformed and untrustworthy. Then I pitch my supplements. I love the unregulated suppliment business! And all the delicious money they use to fill the void of my spiritual emptiness. That money also keeps me driving exotic cars and keeps straight women fawning for my attention. Gawd, I love supplements!
To be clear, I know everything there is to know about neuroscience, womanizing and supplements. And using my impressive, muscly, bearded persona to make money. Come to think of it, I probably should have been an actor. But my intelligence is far too superior to be a mere entertainer. The world needs and deserves my superior intellect.
In next week’s episode of the Harrison Podcast, sponsored by Active Collagen Brain Juice, I’ll be talking with a lady doctor about lady parts. I know, I know. We never should have let lady doctors become a thing because now they won’t shut up about perimenopause. But this is important because I need to not look like such an asshole to the women in my audience. Women are a great market for supplements. Pandering to them keeps me getting paid (and laid).
Anyway, Lady Doctor What’s-Her-Name is going to explain women’s anatomy to me because no one in the history of medicine thought it was important enough to study until 2019. Now the women folk are wanting to have orgasms. So I should probably figure out how the clitoris works. Not that any of my 200 oblivious Hinge dates ever complained about my superior sexual prowess. This lesson is for other guys.
Anyway, the legal team at Soapbox requires me to say that this podcast is separate from my Position of Intellectual Superiority at Soapbox University and none of the information contained in my hourslong tirades should be taken as a reflection on them. I want to use their Elite Reputation to make myself appear more credible but they don’t want to pay their lawyers to defend me against allegations of spreading misinformation. So don’t take any of this as medical advice because the whole point of this podcast is self-aggrandizement and a sales pitch for various products and supplements.
Today’s episode is sponsored by Grow Big Always Vitality Serum. Just rub Grow Big Always onto your earlobes twice daily and you too can have superior intellect, an impressive beard, muscles to fill out your t-shirts and women clamoring to get you in their bedrooms. But your intellect will never be as superior as mine.
Dr. Hull, thank you for this brilliant satire! I'm sorry I'm only responding to it now, a week late. The Huberman/postdoc behavior makes one wonder how much Stanford is influenced by its proximity to Silicon Valley, where as long as you keep bringing the money, your values can remain flexible while you “change the world” for a profit. I know that doesn't describe everyone or everything at the university, or at any organization, for that matter, but the lenience that many elite universities show to prevaricating social media blowhards on their staffs is discouraging. Not just to people like you and me but to a public who is absolutely starving for public integrity at a time when it's ridiculously hard to find.
Which is mabe why satire, writ large and small, Is so painfully funny.
Mike, I appreciate that and I'm glad you find this article useful and/or informative. Unfortunately, there is way too much reason to be ultra skeptical about aging science these days, and the people pushing remedies for a price.
Wow, Longevity Industrial Complex indeed! Thanks for this investigation Paul—it's heartening to know people like you are out there uncovering people like this (even if it does strengthen your Substack's integrity, which is fine!) I'm equally amazed at Stanford Medicine's blasé responses to you. Sadly, that seems to be the case with much in higher ed these days (an abhorrent, baked-in resistance to the idea they might be doing something wrong). And sadly I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Just the other day I heard a friend telling me about someone telling her mother (who is in her 80s) that she just has to hang on for a few more years, because by 2030 "they'll be able to extend your life another 20-30 years, easily." Huh?
I have no reason to defend Paul (he's not a personal friend, just an author who seems reasonable). But your post above is (at this point) 100% anecdotal and without any concrete supporting evidence (other than "There have been reported incidents..."). If you have the evidence against Paul, then please post it so we can see it. Thanks.
This sums up the pitfalls of online information. Almost anyone can post information at act as an authoritative figure. Verifying the credentials of the people posting takes time and effort. It’s still easy to hide aspects of your credentials. There is little to no way to hold people accountable,
For providing false credentials or misleading information other than hoping that someone will attempt to verify the people, and that there is an audience of people who will listen to people disputing the velocity of the content makers.
I am glad that you took the time to dig into this and I appreciate your work. Now just think of how many other false claims there might be lying out there with no one to dispute them.. For many things people don’t have to be credentialed experts if they just wanna provide information. As long as they are truthful about their background and the sources where they get their information it certainly is not criminal. But you want those people to be very transparent in every article so everyone reading it knows upfront all the information they need to decide whether the sources are valid. The minute someone goes from just gathering information and reporting on it to claiming that they have an authoritative knowledge of the subject. Everything about what they’re doing should be called in the question and there should be some verification of their credentials.
Mark, you said it very well. You don't need to be a licensed expert to have informed, helpful thoughts and opinions about any given subject. But you do need to show your audience your work and give it the respect of transparency. That's what bothers me so much about doctors who sell supplements or push products clearly for a financial motive but then pretend that the science on the products they're selling is settled, when in fact it isn't, and often the products do absolutely nothing except take money out of consumers pockets and put it into sellers' pockets.
This is great reporting. You’ve identified on so many important issues. I hope people take notice and keep this type of misrepresentation in mind. I hope Stanford takes some action to clean up misuse of their reputation.
Cheryl, thanks for reading so closely. One thing I learned in the course of reporting this piece is that there's such a thing as drinkable "longevity olive oil" and titanium cutting boards.
Thank you for this information. Because of this and other articles I’ve read about Stanford medical , I wouldn’t trust much of what comes out of there without checking it out first. Trust in medicine is pretty much gone
Lon, maybe this article and the evidence within it will make Stanford Medicine reevaluate what appears to be a very tepid response to someone misusing its credentials.
Interesting that Stanford has spun up a supplements research lab. Seems like a step in the right direction along with bright lights like yours shining on charlatans that are spreading their questionable or flat out wrong claims far and wide. Great investigative work connecting the dots.
AJ, thanks for reading and spreading the word so that other people can understand how these deliberate exploitations of public trust can so easily deceive people.
That's interesting. I use AI for research so often that sometimes it's easy to think that everyone already knows how useful it can be as a research tool. Try out your preferred AI and always be aware that what it tells you may be right, or may be slightly right, or maybe not right at all. You really have to make it show its work.
Thanks for all the legwork you did to expose the credential falsehoods behind these web experts. It seems to me that as we’ve become more and more reliant on what we read on the Internet, we need some simple means of verifying the authors bona fides. In a perfect world, there would be an app or website where we can plug in the authors/experts name and see what their CV actually entails. It shouldn’t be the exhausting process that you went through.
Mark, it's a great point. That tool you refer to is available: your friendly neighborhood free AI app. Even at the free or low-dollar subscription level, most credible AI apps like Perplexity, Claude, etc. can tell you within seconds what a research report says vs what a media article or marketing department says it says. They can also vet doctor credentials, with a little nudge here and there. But your greater point is: it's too bad we need to start with such a level of skepticism about everything nowadays.
Just incredible, Paul. I've worked with Stanford and they always seemed to have a very tight handle on how their affiliation is used outside of academic circles. Hopefully it's getting easier for people to identify these fraudulent "docs" on Substack, thanks to you.
Dr. Fenn, I appreciate your comment. Like you, I am surprised at what appears to be a fairly simplistic walkaround of university guardrails that should be in place to prevent or at least keep track of misleading claims that impact the brand. In this case, Stanford's.
Thanks for the article. It is all pretty disgusting & disgraceful …bad enough with big pharma doing everything to keep its giant profits intact at everyone’s expense and health. But false claims of training and competency truly are outrageous. Your target seems well deserving of all this scrutiny. Good job!
Having had a dentist who caused me great harm hiding under the holy banner of functional medicine practitioner (supposedly a superior form of practice) and me not having taken timely legal action, I think you could find a possible niche market: That is getting hired by legitimately harmed consumers whose only recourse is to publicize how misleading to horribly harmful someone claiming medical expertise & capability has been … documenting their falsehoods and the impacts .
Of course the fact the Democrats just voted to protect Fauci and deny his crimes show how politics can subvert truth and any justice. Still, putting the truth in writing might still save some other poor souls from harm and may offer some comfort to those harmed by lying to sociopathic scoundrels, and in Fauci & company’s case, murder.
I think of the people I know who died alone supposedly of covid (when it was remdesivir refusal to allow someone to try ivermectin) or suffered harm to death from that untested vaccine that still has not been adequately studied.
And all the harm his policies did to so many people from kids who missed school to businesses closed to people who suffer permanently from his narcissistic behavior. I know many good doctors have suffered from being held liable for mistakes not of their making so things can go too far, but that differs greatly from folks making false or duplicitous claims regarding their skills and training.
There is a very expensive fake naturopathic clinic in California that claims to treat kids for various neurological problems and they do a grand job of fleecing terrified but hopeful parents while they are at it.. I looked up staff licenses which turned out to ten the gamut from cosmetician to real estate agent (only one person was a naturopath) and reported this to the official regulatory agency in California … alas, nothing was done. So thanks for your efforts. Much needed!
Leslie, thanks for reading. I'd like to keep commentary free of partisan political commentary. There's enough in the article's reporting to keep everyone occupied with subject-matter debate. Cheers.
I wrote this little piece of satire as a reflection on a certain Stanford-affiliated podcaster. Can you guess who it is?
My name is Dr. Alexander Harrison. I am a neuroscientist and PhD researcher with a degree in ophthalmology from Soapbox University* deserving of your time, attention and unquestioned trust. And I have an impressive beard. I wear tight t-shirts over my muscular shoulders so that straight women will be distracted by their desire to have sex with me and men will buy my supplements in an effort to be me.
Pay no regard to the multiple public allegations of dating-related misogyny that have been reported about me. Women should know that men like me are only as faithful as our options. And with my enormous brain and t-shirt muscles, my options are unlimited, sweetheart.
I love hearing myself talk and believe that everyone else in the world wants to spend hours of their lives listening to me talk. Why waste a moment in contemplative silence when you can listen to me drone on about my superior intellect? I love to interview other fascinating professionals about how my physician colleagues are woefully uninformed and untrustworthy. Then I pitch my supplements. I love the unregulated suppliment business! And all the delicious money they use to fill the void of my spiritual emptiness. That money also keeps me driving exotic cars and keeps straight women fawning for my attention. Gawd, I love supplements!
To be clear, I know everything there is to know about neuroscience, womanizing and supplements. And using my impressive, muscly, bearded persona to make money. Come to think of it, I probably should have been an actor. But my intelligence is far too superior to be a mere entertainer. The world needs and deserves my superior intellect.
In next week’s episode of the Harrison Podcast, sponsored by Active Collagen Brain Juice, I’ll be talking with a lady doctor about lady parts. I know, I know. We never should have let lady doctors become a thing because now they won’t shut up about perimenopause. But this is important because I need to not look like such an asshole to the women in my audience. Women are a great market for supplements. Pandering to them keeps me getting paid (and laid).
Anyway, Lady Doctor What’s-Her-Name is going to explain women’s anatomy to me because no one in the history of medicine thought it was important enough to study until 2019. Now the women folk are wanting to have orgasms. So I should probably figure out how the clitoris works. Not that any of my 200 oblivious Hinge dates ever complained about my superior sexual prowess. This lesson is for other guys.
Anyway, the legal team at Soapbox requires me to say that this podcast is separate from my Position of Intellectual Superiority at Soapbox University and none of the information contained in my hourslong tirades should be taken as a reflection on them. I want to use their Elite Reputation to make myself appear more credible but they don’t want to pay their lawyers to defend me against allegations of spreading misinformation. So don’t take any of this as medical advice because the whole point of this podcast is self-aggrandizement and a sales pitch for various products and supplements.
Today’s episode is sponsored by Grow Big Always Vitality Serum. Just rub Grow Big Always onto your earlobes twice daily and you too can have superior intellect, an impressive beard, muscles to fill out your t-shirts and women clamoring to get you in their bedrooms. But your intellect will never be as superior as mine.
Dr. Hull, thank you for this brilliant satire! I'm sorry I'm only responding to it now, a week late. The Huberman/postdoc behavior makes one wonder how much Stanford is influenced by its proximity to Silicon Valley, where as long as you keep bringing the money, your values can remain flexible while you “change the world” for a profit. I know that doesn't describe everyone or everything at the university, or at any organization, for that matter, but the lenience that many elite universities show to prevaricating social media blowhards on their staffs is discouraging. Not just to people like you and me but to a public who is absolutely starving for public integrity at a time when it's ridiculously hard to find.
Which is mabe why satire, writ large and small, Is so painfully funny.
Well done! Very impressive research and a great reminder not to take claims at face value.
Mike, I appreciate that and I'm glad you find this article useful and/or informative. Unfortunately, there is way too much reason to be ultra skeptical about aging science these days, and the people pushing remedies for a price.
Wow, Longevity Industrial Complex indeed! Thanks for this investigation Paul—it's heartening to know people like you are out there uncovering people like this (even if it does strengthen your Substack's integrity, which is fine!) I'm equally amazed at Stanford Medicine's blasé responses to you. Sadly, that seems to be the case with much in higher ed these days (an abhorrent, baked-in resistance to the idea they might be doing something wrong). And sadly I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Just the other day I heard a friend telling me about someone telling her mother (who is in her 80s) that she just has to hang on for a few more years, because by 2030 "they'll be able to extend your life another 20-30 years, easily." Huh?
I have no reason to defend Paul (he's not a personal friend, just an author who seems reasonable). But your post above is (at this point) 100% anecdotal and without any concrete supporting evidence (other than "There have been reported incidents..."). If you have the evidence against Paul, then please post it so we can see it. Thanks.
Scott, unfortunately this person is spamming people with a lot of nonsense. I was forced to block that account.
This sums up the pitfalls of online information. Almost anyone can post information at act as an authoritative figure. Verifying the credentials of the people posting takes time and effort. It’s still easy to hide aspects of your credentials. There is little to no way to hold people accountable,
For providing false credentials or misleading information other than hoping that someone will attempt to verify the people, and that there is an audience of people who will listen to people disputing the velocity of the content makers.
I am glad that you took the time to dig into this and I appreciate your work. Now just think of how many other false claims there might be lying out there with no one to dispute them.. For many things people don’t have to be credentialed experts if they just wanna provide information. As long as they are truthful about their background and the sources where they get their information it certainly is not criminal. But you want those people to be very transparent in every article so everyone reading it knows upfront all the information they need to decide whether the sources are valid. The minute someone goes from just gathering information and reporting on it to claiming that they have an authoritative knowledge of the subject. Everything about what they’re doing should be called in the question and there should be some verification of their credentials.
Mark, you said it very well. You don't need to be a licensed expert to have informed, helpful thoughts and opinions about any given subject. But you do need to show your audience your work and give it the respect of transparency. That's what bothers me so much about doctors who sell supplements or push products clearly for a financial motive but then pretend that the science on the products they're selling is settled, when in fact it isn't, and often the products do absolutely nothing except take money out of consumers pockets and put it into sellers' pockets.
This is great reporting. You’ve identified on so many important issues. I hope people take notice and keep this type of misrepresentation in mind. I hope Stanford takes some action to clean up misuse of their reputation.
Wow. Great reporting, Paul (I am sad that this genre of investigation has to exist and yet I also can’t get enough of it??? Root them out!)
Cheryl, thanks for reading so closely. One thing I learned in the course of reporting this piece is that there's such a thing as drinkable "longevity olive oil" and titanium cutting boards.
Obviously I immediately went and googled those things. Bryan Johnson sells one called “Snake Oil” which I have to admit is clever
Agreed
Thank you for this information. Because of this and other articles I’ve read about Stanford medical , I wouldn’t trust much of what comes out of there without checking it out first. Trust in medicine is pretty much gone
Lon, maybe this article and the evidence within it will make Stanford Medicine reevaluate what appears to be a very tepid response to someone misusing its credentials.
If only . I won’t hold my breath .
Well done! The industry needs insighters like you are.
Samuel, thank you for your comment. I'm glad this article was enlightening and/or useful. Please pass it on!
Interesting that Stanford has spun up a supplements research lab. Seems like a step in the right direction along with bright lights like yours shining on charlatans that are spreading their questionable or flat out wrong claims far and wide. Great investigative work connecting the dots.
I appreciate your comment. Let's see where the supplement initiative goes, and who takes it there.
This is so good. An impressive take down. Well done!
AJ, thanks for reading and spreading the word so that other people can understand how these deliberate exploitations of public trust can so easily deceive people.
Thanks Paul… it never would’ve occurred to me to use the AI apps for the vetting process. Brilliant.
That's interesting. I use AI for research so often that sometimes it's easy to think that everyone already knows how useful it can be as a research tool. Try out your preferred AI and always be aware that what it tells you may be right, or may be slightly right, or maybe not right at all. You really have to make it show its work.
Thanks for all the legwork you did to expose the credential falsehoods behind these web experts. It seems to me that as we’ve become more and more reliant on what we read on the Internet, we need some simple means of verifying the authors bona fides. In a perfect world, there would be an app or website where we can plug in the authors/experts name and see what their CV actually entails. It shouldn’t be the exhausting process that you went through.
Mark, it's a great point. That tool you refer to is available: your friendly neighborhood free AI app. Even at the free or low-dollar subscription level, most credible AI apps like Perplexity, Claude, etc. can tell you within seconds what a research report says vs what a media article or marketing department says it says. They can also vet doctor credentials, with a little nudge here and there. But your greater point is: it's too bad we need to start with such a level of skepticism about everything nowadays.
Just incredible, Paul. I've worked with Stanford and they always seemed to have a very tight handle on how their affiliation is used outside of academic circles. Hopefully it's getting easier for people to identify these fraudulent "docs" on Substack, thanks to you.
Dr. Fenn, I appreciate your comment. Like you, I am surprised at what appears to be a fairly simplistic walkaround of university guardrails that should be in place to prevent or at least keep track of misleading claims that impact the brand. In this case, Stanford's.
Thank you for so fully researching this through the lens of ethics.
Sheldon, I appreciate the focus you put on ethics. An important subject that isn't getting its due these days.
ICK
A not unreasonable response, given the evidence.
Thanks for the article. It is all pretty disgusting & disgraceful …bad enough with big pharma doing everything to keep its giant profits intact at everyone’s expense and health. But false claims of training and competency truly are outrageous. Your target seems well deserving of all this scrutiny. Good job!
Having had a dentist who caused me great harm hiding under the holy banner of functional medicine practitioner (supposedly a superior form of practice) and me not having taken timely legal action, I think you could find a possible niche market: That is getting hired by legitimately harmed consumers whose only recourse is to publicize how misleading to horribly harmful someone claiming medical expertise & capability has been … documenting their falsehoods and the impacts .
Of course the fact the Democrats just voted to protect Fauci and deny his crimes show how politics can subvert truth and any justice. Still, putting the truth in writing might still save some other poor souls from harm and may offer some comfort to those harmed by lying to sociopathic scoundrels, and in Fauci & company’s case, murder.
I think of the people I know who died alone supposedly of covid (when it was remdesivir refusal to allow someone to try ivermectin) or suffered harm to death from that untested vaccine that still has not been adequately studied.
And all the harm his policies did to so many people from kids who missed school to businesses closed to people who suffer permanently from his narcissistic behavior. I know many good doctors have suffered from being held liable for mistakes not of their making so things can go too far, but that differs greatly from folks making false or duplicitous claims regarding their skills and training.
There is a very expensive fake naturopathic clinic in California that claims to treat kids for various neurological problems and they do a grand job of fleecing terrified but hopeful parents while they are at it.. I looked up staff licenses which turned out to ten the gamut from cosmetician to real estate agent (only one person was a naturopath) and reported this to the official regulatory agency in California … alas, nothing was done. So thanks for your efforts. Much needed!
Leslie, thanks for reading. I'd like to keep commentary free of partisan political commentary. There's enough in the article's reporting to keep everyone occupied with subject-matter debate. Cheers.