Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back.”

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man.

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

these reactions seem to signal that our understanding of virality is evolving. When people first started going viral online, there was a real curiosity about what to do with these people. For a while they were basically just a new kind of America’s Funniest Home Videos contestant. In fact, Tay Zonday and Rebecca Black actually performed on America’s Got Talent in 2011. But about five years ago, right around when TikTok was first taking off in the US, we started to view virality with assumption that you could make money on it — if you went viral in a good way. And, now, I think it’s possible that as users continue to learn how to attention-hack on TikTok, we’re going to see more creators who just don’t care what kind of attention they’re getting as long as people are watching. Which makes sense. These newest creators have never known a non-viral world. And the algorithms that put this content in front of us don’t care how it makes us feel, as long as we feel something. So why should we, right?