Is Andrew Huberman suggesting a medical-community conspiracy?

The Stanford professor and podcaster extraordinaire recently revealed on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” that a good friend who’s “perhaps one of the greatest neurosurgeons who has ever lived” told him “at least half of the information in the medical school textbooks in the United States is inaccurate” and that the damage being done to our health as a result is “incalculable.”

But Huberman’s intention in divulging this information was not to suggest a conspiracy, only explain an infancy.

In fact, he only shared it when Maher asked him to estimate how much is known about “everything we could possibly know about medicine and how the body works.” Maher asked because he thinks it’s 20 percent, but “a lot of people think we’re at 90 percent.”

To which Huberman said, “Oh no, no ... I think we’re at 10 [percent] at best.”

Only then and to support his estimate did Huberman mention what his friend told him. As well as to support Huberman’s estimate, it’s mentioned here today to support something I’ve written more than once that Huberman also told Maher.

That when it comes to exactly how the body and the mind work, “We are still in our infancy of understanding.”

Which is why I’ve ended many a column with “experiment, experiment, experiment.” It’s what you need to do, albeit intelligently, if you want to optimize your health and fitness.

But you’ll only be able to experiment intelligently if you read, read, read all you possibly can. And sometimes you just might find that all that reading serves an equally important purpose.

That it substantiates something you’ve already been doing actually is what’s best, even though you have had misgivings about it.

What comes next is one of those times, a time when something I read substantiated I had already gone from infancy to adulthood, in a manner of speaking, in understanding failure as it applies to my preferred form of exercise, bicycle riding.

What I read, “The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure,” can be found in the July 2024 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology and questions a commonly held view in our culture promulgated by “commencement speakers, business leaders, and the popular press.”

That if it happens to come your way, failure’s more than okay. As a matter of fact, it should be warmly embraced.

For it’s the “steppingstone of success.”

While the paper grants “many failures are so important that they command attention and some degree of learning,” it cites 11 studies where people in all sorts of professional, educational, and real-time situations overestimated the rate at which failure lead to success. Moreover, it highlights two studies that found failure to be “ego-threatening” and “demotivating.”

Is that what you want your exercise to be?

Of course not. For we both know what happens if it is. You’ll exercise less and less and then, perchance, not at all.

Which means you want to be like Goldilocks going through the bears’ house every time you exercise. You need to assess how you’re feeling physically and mentally; establish an objective for that single session that’s simpatico with your long-term goals; and then, during the workout itself, give an effort you find to be just like Baby Bear’s bed, chair, and porridge: just right.

But all this can be (pun intended) a real bear.

Which is why I’m about to tell you something I foolishly thought would never happen to me, but if it somehow did that I’d certainly be too ashamed to write about. That I no longer do the race segment of the Sunday ride I’ve done since I seriously started cycling about 35 years ago.

In part, it’s because I’m stubborn and refuse to do anything but a long and hard effort on Saturdays. But the much larger part is that it’s becoming harder and harder, as I approach 65, to ride hard on back-to-back days.

So now when the group turns left and the pace gets hot on Sundays, I turn right and find a pace that’s just right to get me home in an hour or so.

Initially, I felt shame about doing this, for I saw it as cowardly. But soon I saw it made sense.

That a rider soon to be 65 can’t expect to do he what he did at 35, 45, and on rare occasion even 55, which is in this case finish at the front of a ride that becomes a race and includes top-tier guys who are 35 and 45. Yet when that expectation wasn’t met, which eventually became about 95 percent of the time, I’d feel — foolishly enough, I know — like a failure every time I thought about the ride.

And feeling like a failure repeatedly is surely not a steppingstone for success.

But going relatively easy on a Sunday has turned into one for me. It allows me to be fully recovered by Tuesday, which is when I usually do a portion of a ride at an effort that’s just about all-out with the help of the indoor cycling app, Rouvy.

Last Tuesday, for example, that portion was an 8.6-mile climb that’s used in a professional European stage race. My time of 58 minutes and 23 seconds is the fastest posted so far by any rider over the age of 60 who’s attempted the climb.