Andrew Huberman is Lying to You

A few weeks ago Andrew Huberman announced that he had partnered with the sports and eyewear company Roka. Together they’ve put out a specially branded blue-blocking glasses that are designed to help you wind down and get better sleep at night. If that sounds weird to you, you’re not alone. Over the years Huberman, who a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, has repeatedly said that that he didn’t believe that blue blocking classes did all that much.

Was it possible that a giant financial windfall could have changed his mind on settled science?

It’s not totally surprising that leading influencers might themselves be influenced by tidal wave amounts of cash. As @TaylorLorenz mentions, we’ve always doctors on industry payrolls shilling everything from sugar to cigarettes. What’s new is that social media engenders para-social relationships with specific influencers whose own opinions, protocols and prognostications tend towards cult-like power over their followers. With more than 15 million combined followers across his social media accounts, Andrew Huberman is likely the most powerful scientific voice on the planet. So when he says something is settled science and then changes his mind for a cash grab, it undermines the public faith in information writ-large.

It’s just one small step from trusting to untrusting Huberman to someone trusting and then untrusting scientific explanations from anyone. (Incidentally, Benn Jordan just did a great piece on misinformation and explicit propaganda that shows how global powers capitalize on the general distrust of authorities).

The thing that I find hardest to understand about Huberman’s most recent grift is now that it happened, but why he would need money at all. What motivates his endless greed when it comes at the expense of his integrity?

Stanford professors of his caliber make about $250,000 according to Glassdoor.com. That’s a pretty solid amount of money all on its own. YouTube ads run automatically and pay about $5.50 per thousand views with what amounts to a strict firewall between his editorial content and the sponsor’s demands. (THIS NEXT SENTENCE CONTAINS AN ERROR, PLEASE SEE THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH) Given that he has 365 million views on his channel, it’s a simple calculation to figure out that he is bringing in about $7M a year from adsense alone. That means he’s already making 28 times his ordinary salary without the need for any ethical compromises on his part. All told, the Huberman Lab podcast has generated at least $20 million over the course of its three year run to date.

(CORRECTION THIS PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS AN ERROR: @hubermanlab I calculated that Huberman made $20M on YouTube ads based on his 365M combined views which make around $5.50 CPM. My math was seriously off. The true total would have been only $2M from ad sense. So instead of making 28x the standard Stanford salary, he only was making 3x. I regret the error and will issue a video correction)

That’s an unfathomable, wasteful and frankly obscene, amount of money from my perspective. Even so, Huberman didn’t think that it was enough.

The Roka deal will likely give Huberman a sizable payment of $1-2 million over its lifetime. Meanwhile, He has a further 13 paid sponsors on his show which, we can guess net him another $6 million (actually, just $600,000) or so a year.

That mindset is what’s fundamentally broken with the information universe we live in. Instead of being an upstanding credible vehicle for science, Huberman made the, probably unconscious, decision that money was the most important metric for success.

The only silver lining here is that at least we can document exactly when and where he changed his mind on science.

I hope that you enjoy the video.

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