How to Keep Hope Warm (and Avoid Snake Oil)
When people say "snake oil" they mean "fake solutions": A good that does not do what it says, that breaks its promise to the consumer. The term refers to the late 19th-century traveling medicine shows, where showmen hawked snake oil as a cure-all for everything from rheumatism to toothaches. Think Music Man, but medical.
The needs were real, but the solution was fake. When you have real problems creating deep demand, snake oil answers the call. Since its salespeople can't deliver actual results, what they are really selling is hope, since humans have an infinite capacity to hope and resurrect that hope after disillusionment. That’s probably because hope is central to life. It's how we maintain forward motion. It pushes us to act.
So the hope market is huge, and as a result, people are awash in snake oil. Fake ways to become rich, healthy, loved. These are promised by your common YouTube shills, your podcasters switching over to their native ad voice, your psychics advertising a palm reading in small neon letters through a dark window.
For what it's worth, businesses are fooled by snake oil just like people are. A lot of PR is snake oil -- most public relations firms sell meetings with reporters that result in no coverage. Likewise, a great deal of business consulting touts solutions that never really take effect. For example, digital twins, a sector I attempted to build in myself, turns out to be a dead end (reality is surprisingly complicated, which makes it hard to perfectly reconstruct in bits!). A lot of AI is snake oil, even in our LLM-shaped world.
(This is actually part of another interesting trend: Every deeply transformative technology and trend will be overhyped. All the real things are both real and fake at once. Even snake oil, in its original version, was a Chinese herbal remedy for joint pain that may well have worked, until people learned to put other oils in the bottle and keep on selling. The inverse, to be clear, is not true: Not all overhyped things are real.)
And of course all these snake-oil solutions target real needs, even if they do not satisfy them. Most businesses want more visibility than they have, and can't rely on ads to create it. Most businesses face systemic problems with growth and operational efficiency -- shouldn't there exist an expert who can solve it? Most businesses lack the data and models to plan for contingencies and predict what would happen if... digital twins and simulations are attempts (usually failed) to solve that.
Religion is a hope machine, and most religions are put together in ways that make them hard to disprove. I'm not saying religions are snake oil (there's plenty of evidence that some religions make people happier and more connected, which is a pretty strong argument for them). They also address a deep human need. Just like consumer demand for illegal substances in the US stimulates those drugs' perennial supply, all these deep and unmet needs and the hopes that spring from them stimulate the snake-oil supply chain.
Social Media’s Hope Vendors
I've been thinking about hope and snake oil a lot this week because a prominent manfluencer fell from grace, and one of the men he manfluenced was me. I’m currently mourning a parasocial relationship with a famous podcaster who convinced me to get healthy after years of startup burnout.
Andrew Huberman started a podcast in 2021, the depths of COVID, to explain neuroscience to his listeners based on courses he taught at Stanford. It was great stuff. After he exhausted his introductory syllabus, Huberman began interviewing guests who shared their expertise in other areas of biology and health. Lots of these folks are at the top of their fields, doing interesting work, and they gave great podcast. So far, so good.
But then something funny happened. The science and evidence began to fade, and the guests who appeared started making claims that they didn't have the evidence to back up. Sometimes, the guests had no relation to wellness at all — they were just famous, interesting people. Other times, they were Dr. Oz-like hucksters trafficking in feel-good anecdata.
Month by month, Huberman edged closer to popular podcasters like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan, rising in the podcast ranking as he did so. I have nothing against either Fridman or Rogan, but fame, philosophizing and gossip weren’t what I listened to Huberman for, and the shift from science-based advice to mere opinion cheapened his interviews.
What started out as extremely credible information shared by a Stanford professor and PhD with several bylines in Nature became puff sessions with whoever was on a book tour. (Fwiw, I’m grateful for many things I learned from Huberman. I’m a hoper who wants to learn new ways to live. But I also think that lies are like cockroaches — if you see one there are always others hiding in the walls.)
Other things happened to make Huberman lose credibility, but that's actually not the most interesting part of this story. The interesting thing is how the incentives baked into modern media steered him on a collision course with snake oil. Slowly, the claims and audience got larger and the evidence and vetting got weaker. His interview with Susanna Soberg is a great example, since her research and claims about ice plunges for weight loss don't stand up. (I say that as someone who gets a plunger’s high twice a week!)
Fame on social media creates perverse incentives to make exaggerated claims, to cast the broadest net possible, because the audience’s demand for such claims is deep and unquenchable. This puts these fresh celebrities on a path to mix with the famous, to mutually shill for other influencers, and to embark on grueling travel schedules that lead to other vices until they are finally destroyed by the Chautauqua from hell.
Most people want guidance on how to live a good and healthy life. I certainly do, and I don't blame anyone for that. I'm not against hope, but I am against snake oil, and I’m sad when I see smart podcasters who trade on their credibility as curators of complex information, and who later transform to become purveyors of trashy supplements, flimsy research and woo-woo psychology. That’s where Huberman landed after a yearslong bait and switch. The incentives ate him up.
(Another interesting inversion: While startups fake it til they make it, a certain kind of influencer bootstraps off their narrow expertise until they can pronounce on everything. They make it til they fake it. It’s the rare health-focused podcaster, Dr. Peter Attia comes to mind, who remain consistent in their skepticism. That's their first foot forward, and they manage to curate with a finer net. Unlike Huberman, Attia is a medical doctor holding a license he can lose; i.e. he comes from a separate professional culture.)
We all hope. We should keep our hope warm. We are all tempted to believe in solutions that do not in fact exist. It's on everyone seeking a good life to be skeptical of gurus, because fame is such a powerful drug that maintaining it becomes their primary goal, undermining their incentive to share the truth. Telling the truth is its own discipline, and it takes effort not to cover up our all-too-human weaknesses. But it you can hold to it, you get the benefits of the Hawthorne effect: Just by knowing you’re going to tell the truth about your own behavior, you behave better.
One of the best ways to keep hope warm is to stay healthy: sleep, eat right, exercise, and you will be surprised to find how much your mental health improves. Another method is to surround yourself with people working for something larger than themselves, going beyond transactional exchanges, acting instead for the good of their friends, and admitting their mistakes. Believe people when they show you who they are, as Maya Angelou said, and focus on the ones who step up in adversity. Being “in it together” with great friends or teammates will amplify your hope many times.
We need to feel hope and recognize its necessity, while making sure that the curators of our hope, the folks giving advice and making promises, are worthy of that trust. Otherwise, you’re in a cult. You’re being steered into a dark woods where the right path is lost, all for the sake of a few clicks.
* Image credit: Illustration by Gustave Doré of “Inferno” by Dante Alighieri, Canto Xviii, Lines 116 and 117.