Yearly Trends in the Huberman Lab Podcast — Part 3

An Analytical Dive into Episode Performance in 2023+

This is the third installment ( see first & second articles) of a series analyzing the trends of the Huberman Lab Podcast, focusing on the episodes released on YouTube from January 2023 to February 1st, 2024.. The article will review general information for the “3rd Season” and any notable new trends.

A line chart, depicting the views and likes for Huberman Lab Podcast videos in 2023. Created by the author.

2023 Overview

Between January 1st, 2023, and February 1st, 2024, the Huberman Lab Podcast published 76 episodes, averaging 1.05 million views per episode (based on the data pulled in February 2024). The season’s most frequent topics were around personal development, mental health, fitness and disease, with these topics driving over 75% of the views.

A pie chart of the 2023 Huberman Lab Podcast episode count by category. Created by the author.

A pie chart of the 2023 Huberman Lab Podcast episode views by category. Created by the author.

A Few Hits

As seen in previous seasons there is a trend where only a few episodes drive the majority of views. The trend continues with 25 of the episodes above the 1 million view mark and only 6 receiving more than 3 million views.

Counts and average views by View Group. Created by author.

For this season the 6 stand out episodes are:

Personal Development

David Goggins: How to Build Immense Inner Strength

• Published Date: 2024–01–01
• View Count: 4,845,284/Like Count: 166,253/Like Ratio: 3.43
• Type: Guest

Robert Greene: A Process for Finding & Achieving Your Unique Purpose

• Published Date: 2023–12–04
• View Count: 4,058,211/Like Count: 51,036/Like Ratio: 1.26
• Assigned Category: Personal Development
• Type: Guest

Rick Rubin: How to Access Your Creativity

• Published Date: 2023–01–16
• View Count: 3,576,513/Like Count: 49,975/Like Ratio: 1.4
• Type: Guest

Mental Health

Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health | Huberman Lab Guest Series

• Published Date: 2023–09–06
• View Count: 7,168,249/Like Count: 50,877/Like Ratio: 0.71
• Type: Guest

Fitness & Exercise

Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

• Published Date: 2023–02–22
• View Count: 4,077,536/Like Count: 33,436/Like Ratio: 0.82
• Type: Guest

Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Physical Endurance & Lose Fat | Huberman Lab Guest Series

• Published Date: 2023–02–01
• View Count: 4,153,380/Like Count: 37,721/Like Ratio: 0.91
• Type: Guest

All of these hit episodes involve a guest. For the category of Personal Development the experts are celebrities and the for the topics of Mental Health and Fitness the episodes are interviews with technical experts. The most viewed episode, with over 7 millions views, is the first in a guest lecture series with Dr. Paul Conti. This is a great episode and I am glad to see his information is getting out. Also notable is David Goggins episode that had almost 5 million views and still maintained a very high like ratio.

Increase in Video Production Trend

One new trend for this season is that there was an increase in episode videos published. While the previous two years maintained a steady weekly release schedule, this period saw 76 episodes published over approximately 57 weeks! In the chart above you can see the overlap of the background lines indicating the new cadence. This may be due to an overwhelming amount of information to share or possibly looking to take advantage of the podcast popularity.

The following table breaks does the time elapsed between episodes and compares that by episode type.

A data table of time between episodes being published (since the previous episode). Table created by author.

The data also suggest that the addition of Ask Me Anything (AMA) videos could have been a factor. There had been previous AMA episodes, but the first published video I found was AMA #7: Cold Exposure, Maximizing REM Sleep & My Next Scientific Studies in late May of 2023.

Wrap Up

It’s encouraging to see the Huberman Lab Podcast thriving into its fourth year. This third season has maintained consistency with its previous seasons, but also offering more content through increased video cadence and the introduction of AMAs and live events.

Through these 3 articles I have been able to review the data and trends in more focus “seasons”, for the fourth and final article I will go back to looking at the entire 3+ year period to summarize and apply some of my favorite techniques to the entire data set. Follow me to get updates for this article and future writing (GaryGeo).

Things to Know about this Data

• My analysis is based on YouTube data as of ~February 10th 2024. I do not have historical records of how the counts appeared at a set point in time (e.g. 1 month after airing), that might give a more equivalent evaluation.
• The chart has a blue line for views, red line for the like ratio and the bars indicate the category of the episodes (I would love feedback on alternative ways to visualize this)
• “Liked Ratio” is based on the number of likes divided by the number of views. I believe a single person can view an episode multiple times, but cannot like it multiple times.
• In general “Like Percentages” seem to be a single digit number. I think that is a reflection of how often viewers take the time to like videos.
• I used ChatGPT to summarize the episodes and provide the “Assigned Category” to create a grouping.
• The data I based my analysis on is here.
• An interactive version of the chart is here.