Andrew Huberman is Lying to You

This is Andrew Huberman. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. In 2021, just a few years ago, Huberman had what seemed like a definitive stance on blue light and circadian rhythms. It doesn't matter if you block the blues. Yeah.

If you're looking at bright light at night, you are going to disrupt your circadian cycle. He even made fun of companies that sold gimmicky products to block blue light. The concept of blue light being harmful led to a lot of product development. Last month, he changed his tune. Roca and I designed these glasses, which, as you can see, have red lenses that filter out the specific short wavelengths of light that activate the cells that wake you up.

Did a lucrative sponsorship opportunity change his opinion on settled science, or was this, in reality, a gift to his audience? However, part of my desire and effort is to bring zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. Maybe the sponsorship was a necessary tool to keep the lights on at Huberman HQ. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is Roka. You can thank these very special sponsors too if you enter the code HUBERMAN to get 20% off your first order. This raises an interesting question: how much money does it take to change Huberman's opinion on settled science? I can imagine that he stands to make millions, especially if he receives a significant portion of sales. Based on what I charge, I don’t think I would do any deals under half a million dollars, maybe even a million dollars, considering his audience and influence.

This is really what you would call conflicts of interest. It seems very strange that someone who professes to be providing things at zero cost is doing something like this, because you don't need glasses like this—blue filter glasses. This seems like a brilliant idea, except that studies have shown that it probably doesn't work. I have to ask, are these partnerships even legal under FDA guidelines that outlaw making specific health claims for these kinds of products?

Practically wearing red lens glasses such as these can keep what's called cortisol, a stress hormone, low. These lenses allow you to transition to a calm and sleepy state to wind down. So let's dig in and figure out what's really going on with the most popular science communicator on the internet, Andrew Huberman. A few years ago, when Huberman appeared on the podcast scene, it seemed like there was finally a voice of reason and a source of unbiased scientific information that everyone could trust. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

What could be better than a plain-speaking Stanford professor digging into a mountain of scientific literature and distilling everything down into discrete, science-based protocols for the everyman? After all, most of his recommendations were free. Get early morning sunlight to set your circadian rhythm. Do a little light yoga meditation. Welcome to this 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol.

Get cold, get hot, and work out. He brought in people whom he claimed were the top scientists in their respective fields when he ventured outside his core expertise of ophthalmology. It really did seem that his audience was receiving a great deal on a free Stanford education. He was discussing science on Rogan, and fighting back against poorly researched "bro scientists" and wellness grifters like Dave Asprey.

I have double. Hold my deep sleep by using the glasses I made for sleep. To Ben Greenfield. Hey, I'm Ben Greenfield. If you see me wearing blue light blocking glasses, nine times out of ten, I'm wearing the Raw Optics version.

And whoever this is, everyone loves the red glasses. They want to know, "Why are you wearing the red glasses?" The red glasses are designed to block the blue light coming from all the lights around me. He appears different from every other wellness influencer out there because of his credentials.

Oh, and at night, it doesn't matter if you have blue blockers on. The people who made these products failed to actually read the papers from start to finish, or if they did, they didn't comprehend a critical element. But was he really unbiased? For every free hack that he doled out, it also seemed that there was a raft of supplemental products that people could opt into. His actual sponsors were a who's who of wellness bro staples, like Athletic Greens.

Learn more at AthleticGreens.com. A company that was literally founded by a convicted criminal who fled prosecution in New Zealand for unfair business dealings. Chris Ashenden's green powder skyrocketed to success not on the merits of its spirulina research, but because of its generous marketing plan that shared 30% of revenue with influencers. Just go to AthleticGreens.com slash Huberman. I did a whole video on AG1 that you should definitely check out.

AG1 hired the most powerful defamation lawyer in the country to kill this video before it ever aired. But as you can see, it didn't work. And Huberman, well, he drove a huge number of subscriptions to AG1, even as his fellow influencers were skeptical of the endorsement. Calling, for example, Athletic Greens 1 or AG1 a high-quality greens powder is a little misleading. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens.

Yeah, that. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Huberman also has sponsorship elements with BetterHelp, Whoop, and Plunge, just to name a few. Still, if I were going to give Huberman a huge heaping benefit of the doubt and say that his endorsements for those companies were honest representations of his personal worldview, and that despite the cash he was bringing in, the deals did not influence his scientific interpretations, his partnership with Roca is different. While we can argue that he is not an expert on salts or spirulina or therapy, as a professor of neuroanatomy and ophthalmology, these glasses are at the very heart of who Huberman is as a scientific authority.

So, let's look at what Huberman is specifically claiming, particularly since he has substantially changed his opinions on blue-blocking glasses since he first started talking about them. Here he is in 2021, talking to Samer Hattar, the section chief on circadian rhythms at the National Institutes of Health. "I personally have tried blue blockers, and I couldn't even wear them. I thought they were just really horrendous, to be honest. Along the lines of blue blockers, I think a lot of people mistakenly wear them all day long." "Oh my God, that would be a lot of people!" "A lot of people do that. They think that blue light is bad. I think that the concept of blue light being bad led to a lot of product development, and a lot of people are just assuming that viewing blue light is what was giving them headaches when, in fact, it might have just been looking at screens at close distances." So, here is the problem, right?

Here it is again, a year later, in 2020. In his episode called "Sleep Toolkit," first of all, you're going to want to avoid bright artificial lights of any color. Yes, of any color. We haven't talked much about blue blockers, you know, lenses that block blue wavelengths or short wavelengths of light. You don't need them.

And even if you do wear them, you will find that if the lights are very bright, it doesn't matter if it's a blue light, a yellow light, or a red light; those bright lights will wake up your brain and body. They activate the same mechanisms that were activated earlier in the day by sunlight. There are many other clips where he generally makes the same point. Huberman has been actively critical of companies selling useless blue-blocking solutions and has repeatedly stated that blue blockers don't really do very much. He explicitly blamed normal ambient electric lighting for interfering with sleep.

That was the cause, not screens. But you can't really make that much money from telling people to turn down the glasses, though? Well, that's something else entirely. Roka and I designed these glasses, which is to say that not only has he changed his mind on blue blockers, but he has devised a way to sell his own branded version. Roka's website advertises wind-down glasses along with some very specific claims about their benefits.

They write that their glasses will "lower stress levels, synchronize the circadian rhythm, and help protect your mood." Further stating that even minimal artificial light exposure can interfere with your natural rhythm and suppress melatonin production. What do you say to that claim? Short story: it's bullshit. Well, partly bullshit.

Right after I learned about Huberman's partnership with Roca, sleep scientists and wellness debunkers started pointing to a recent review article that directly studied how light from our screens can affect our sleep. So, I reached out to the lead author. My name's Michael Gratisar. I'm a clinical psychologist, and my specialty has just been in sleep and circadian rhythm disorders. Gratisar's 2024 paper, titled "A Bidirectional Model of Sleep and Technology Use," published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, examined all of the available research on how technology affects sleep and came to a surprising conclusion.

The blue light from our screens isn't generally bright enough to affect our circadian rhythms at all. Before we started collecting data, we had to take some measurements of the amount of lux coming from that iPad screen. While I was taking those measurements, I was in one of the sleep lab bedrooms, where all the lights were off. I had the lux meter and the screen, and I had fully upright white content in the background, but I was only getting about 50 lux, which was very low. When we try to change someone's circadian rhythms therapeutically, we're aiming to use around 500 or 1,000 lux from an artificial source. So, I actually had to sort of bend my knees while sitting upright on the bed and bring the iPad closer to my face. Obviously, the closer you bring it, the higher the lux reading. Ultimately, we could only get it to about 80 lux.

In other words, even if you're in bed with a screen right up against your nose, that light is five to ten times dimmer than what you can scientifically prove would affect your sleep. Lo and behold, when we compared a bright screen to a dim screen, it only took an average of three and a half minutes longer to fall asleep if you had a bright screen compared to a dim screen. Nothing significant. It wasn't just Gratzar's own research that indicated this; almost every other study that directly examined the effects of screens on human sleep reached similar conclusions.

If you look overall at the 11 studies that tested this effect of how much longer it takes to fall asleep if you're exposed to a bright screen, it's only a few minutes. So why would you spend a hundred dollars trying to gain such a minor benefit? It just doesn't make sense to me. It seems very strange that someone who claims to be providing things at no cost is promoting something like this when you don't actually need glasses for it. You already have something built into your phones.

If you've got control of your light and lighting environment, just dim your lights down or turn them off. At the bottom of the page on Roka's website, Huberman links to a handful of studies that are meant to support his health claims. However, as is the case with references in most of his podcasts, they don't really hold up to scrutiny. I went over them with Gratazar, and the research generally didn't control luminosity, which is the key factor. As for the tests that did, well, they were conducted on mice, not humans.

So you don't get much benefit. You don't get much return on investment by using these glasses. I don't understand why we have a mouse study when we already have human studies on the very topic that these glasses are supposed to address. For a layperson, maybe this mistake wouldn't be so objectionable. We've all heard how blue light from our screens can disrupt our sleep, but it is worth emphasizing that Huberman is a Stanford professor with specific expertise in neuroanatomy and ophthalmology.

This is literally what he is known for. He, of all people, knows the science on this. He simply has no excuse for this error. His ROCA partnership is a pure and unadulterated grift from beginning to end. And this is really what I want to talk to you about for the remainder of this video.

In general, I don't particularly care about any single specific product or business plan that people pursue to monetize their podcasts. What I care about is the much larger problem of trusting the information we learn online. I am concerned about how the business of influence has changed the way people learn about science and health information and how that, in turn, affects the general public's trust in information at large. But before I dig into that, and because it just feels wildly appropriate right now, I want to take a moment for a word from our sponsors, which is you. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can monetize this channel, and I'm extremely cautious about whom I'm willing to take money from.

I can see the slippery slope of how sponsorships change the message, and that's why crowdfunding is so important to the future of online journalism. I've gone toe-to-toe with some of the biggest scammers on the internet. They've threatened me with lawsuits, which makes putting these videos together not only technically difficult but also expensive to produce. From a pure business perspective, what I do is madness. If you like the journalism that I produce and want to help me keep holding truth to power, I would love for you to subscribe to my Substack newsletter so we can keep in touch and consider upgrading to a premium membership, where you can get early access to my videos before anyone else sees them.

You'll also be part of an amazing community that supports the future of journalism in a world where the future of journalism is in question. And remember, hit that like and subscribe button, and we'll go back to the video right now. The problem with celebrity scientists is not exactly new. We have always had celebrity doctors, right? We had all of these famous doctors working for Marlboro back in the day, marketing cigarettes.

In a nationwide survey, doctors in all branches of medicine were asked, "What cigarette do you smoke?" They responded with statements like, "This is the doctor's number one favorite." One doctor mentioned, "I smoke Marlboro Lights every day." This isn't new; it's just that with the internet, this type of marketing is scaling to a level we haven't seen before.

And people are developing these very sorts of parasocial bonds with the science and medical influencers they are following. I reached out to Taylor Lorenz, a former Washington Post reporter and author of the book *Extremely Online*, to ask her how much she thinks sponsorship deals alter the way the public understands science. One thing that I think is really dangerous is that we see many of these science and medical influencers engaging with increasingly extreme sections of the internet. It’s not so much of a problem if, for example, Huberman is endorsing a product, but it becomes an issue if he goes on a platform like Joe Rogan's to endorse the product or starts partnering with other disinformation podcasters and influencers.

On this point, I did a video a few months back about what I call the "Yes and Effect." It's about how top members of this griftoverse support each other's increasingly extreme statements in order to expand their own reach. Joe Rogan currently sits at the top of that ecosystem, which is where, incidentally, Andrew Huberman appeared to break into the mainstream. Those influencers also end up working with the same brands, like AG1, and securing similar affiliate marketing deals. It is a whole ecosystem of grift.

And unlike the sort of journalism that I do, well, there's real money in it. I asked Taylor what she thought Huberman was making on his Roka deal. It's so hard to know how much somebody is making. I don't know that he's getting millions, but I could imagine that he stands to make millions, especially if he's getting a significant portion of sales. I imagine he's able to drive a huge amount of sales by promoting this product as part of his expertise and brand. So I think this just goes back to why we need more transparency in this industry generally.

We just don't know what someone stands to gain. That's why it makes it very hard to trust this type of information. The complete lack of transparency in financial terms for influencers is incredibly frustrating. It's one thing to know that a company sponsors a particular product, but there is a significant difference between earning a few hundred dollars and a few million dollars for a spot. The academic literature doesn't provide much clarity on the matter either.

The best I found was a 2023 article by two professors of communication at Stanford, Anjali Kristen and Yingdeng Liu. They examined 1,082 posts on Instagram by influencers discussing their business models. At the top end, these researchers discovered that influencers with around a million followers were making $100,000 for a single post along with a few related stories. Now, with his 6 million followers on YouTube and 7 million on Instagram, Huberman stands to make considerably more than that. As an aside, it's also relevant to remember that Huberman also makes money with generic YouTube ads.

A good ballpark estimate for his niche, which I'm basing on data from my own Huberman-related videos on my channel, is that he is making roughly $5.50 for every 1,000 views on his videos or about $5,500 per million views. With 361 million views on his channel, this means that since he began uploading three years ago, he has brought in about $20 million through AdSense alone. So, think about that when Huberman begins his sponsor segments by repeating some iteration of this. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to provide zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

By his definition, everything on YouTube is zero-cost information about science and science-related tools to the general public. By his definition, everything on YouTube is zero-cost, right? And it's not. You would think that he would be able to survive on that cool $7 million a year just from YouTube ads without bringing on sponsors, especially considering that Glassdoor reports that the average Stanford professor earns between $139,000 and $251,000 per year. Why isn't Huberman content with 28 times the normal salary for his position as an associate professor?

Maybe it's just me, but I have never really been able to wrap my mind around what motivates people to amass endless wealth. I make around $5,000 a month from YouTube ads and through my Substack and Patreon. Overall, I'm pretty okay with where I am. My goal has never been to get rich, but instead just wealthy enough to have the freedom to do what I love, which, as you can see, is what I'm doing.

But I guess in order to keep his valuable science free for the average listener, Huberman needs to wet his beak with a little more than what he pulls in through AdSense. Enter his specially curated list of 17 sponsors that he's featuring on his channel right now. I reached out to the team at Roca to inquire about how much the sponsorship deal was worth with Huberman, but they never got back to me. Huberman himself didn't respond to a similar request that I made on Threads. However, I was able to talk to an influencer who knows people in Huberman's orbit and has a good idea of what people make in this space.

He asked not to be identified specifically because, well, he wouldn't mind similar deals himself. But here he is with some tasteful blurring and voice modulation. It's probably a licensing deal where he's getting, you know, maybe 20% of the revenue brought in by the glasses. I mean, my guess would be he's only doing deals where he can make upwards of $500,000 a year, $50,000 a month—that would be a guess. I can't imagine he's doing many deals that are under that unless there's an equity play where it could be sold down the road and he's getting equity in the company. But, yeah, I mean, if I were Huberman, just based on what I charge, I don't think I would do any deals if they were under half a million dollars, maybe even a million dollars, given his audience and his influence.

So yeah, that would be a guesstimate. And again, I highly doubt that this is just a compensation play. My guess would be that he is either getting equity in the company or it's a licensing deal where he receives 20% of the revenue, let's say, that is brought in from this specific line of classes that he's doing. They actually look pretty cool, which is basically the same ballpark that Taylor Lorenz guessed as well.

It also aligns with what one of Huberman's ex-girlfriends told me when she said that Huberman cleared at least $20 million in the first year of his show. Maybe you're okay with it. Maybe you think that greed is good. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right.

Greed works. So let's ask a different question: Are these sorts of sponsorships legal? The Food and Drug Administration has some very stringent rules for communicating about the health benefits of specific products, supplements, and devices. While they very rarely enforce their own mandates, it's worth noting that Roca's wind-down glasses are registered as Class 1 medical devices, which requires the company to stick to extremely limited claims about what they can or cannot do.

Huberman and Roca both claim a number of things on their various platforms, including that the glasses lower cortisol, help you fall asleep more efficiently, and will, quote, "sync your circadian rhythm." Since these are specific health claims, they fall outside the purview of how these glasses are actually registered. According to the FDA's guidelines on sunglasses, the manufacturer cannot make quote, "unsubstantiated claims of therapeutic value, ambiguity, half-truths, and trade puffery, or fail to reveal material facts." Considering the state of the scientific literature that I presented here and Huberman's own mercurial opinions and protocols, regulatory authorities should take a second look at the Wind Down glasses, at least in my opinion.

But even if the glasses actually do something, which I think there's good reason to doubt, we should also ask whether or not they are worth the inflated price that Roka is selling them at. While Roka has a few pairs of $95 glasses, the vast majority of their selection of non-prescription glasses retail at $165. That is, unless you have a way to get them a little cheaper. If you'd like to try Roka glasses, you can go to Roka, that's r-o-k-a dot com, and enter the code HUBERMAN to get 20% off your first order. Meanwhile, you can get an almost identical pair of blue-blocking glasses on the Chinese version of Amazon called Timu for just $8.91.

Now, I can't tell the functional difference between these two different pairs of glasses at all, other than the fact that Huberman endorsed Rocha's version. But just maybe Huberman has some special American sauce that makes his glasses even better than what comes out of China. To figure out if that's true, I did a little digging into shipping manifests on the website Import Yeti and found that Roka imports quite a bit of eyewear from Chinese suppliers. My guess here is that the inflated price for Roka's Wind Down glasses doesn't stem from a particularly stringent manufacturing process, but rather comes from paying for Huberman's endorsement. The premium you're paying goes right into his pocket in the same way that for every $89 that someone spends on AG1's mostly spirulina powder, $30 goes right into the pocket of the influencer whose discount code you used.

This was $99. It was 90 pounds. It was $180 Australian dollars for this tiny pouch. Now that we have a couple more relevant data points, let's put it all together and figure out what this means.

Can you trust Andrew Huberman? I first met Andrew back in 2018, which was about two years before he became famous. Here I am with Scott Carney. I have to say that my personal experience with him raised some major red flags.

I've done a few videos about how I was really impressed with him at first and how I began to reassess who he really was over time. While I'm not an expert on neuroscience by any stretch, I am an expert on cold water immersion after I wrote two books on the topic. Andrew's scientific explanations of cold water protocols have always been off. If you want to dig into that, check out this deep dive I did on Huberman and Susanna Soberg. I'm glad that I was able to spend a little bit more time doing traditional reporting on Huberman for this video than I did on Huberman and Susanna Soberg.

I'm glad that I was able to spend a little bit more time doing traditional reporting on Huberman for this video than I did in some of those previous videos. In some of those, a lot of commenters have said that they could see that I was struggling with my personal relationship with him versus what my professional duties were. To some degree, that's true. I have been very close to Huberman over the years, which is why I feel so strongly about correcting the record. I think the most powerful evidence on whether or not Huberman is a force for good or not on the internet comes down to how he changes his protocols and teachings based on the input he gets from sponsors.

And what he has done with blue-blocking glasses in the last two years is direct evidence that he is bought and paid for. He started out as a skeptic but changed his mind once a lucrative sponsorship opportunity crossed his path. This doesn't change the fact that the world needs credible scientific authorities whom the general public can trust. When he first came online and started to gain popularity, it really did seem like Andrew Hewitt Huberman could be the one to organize complex health information for the masses. Unfortunately, even if his intentions were once pure, it's clear to me that the money and fame are more important to him now than scientific integrity.

And once you lose your integrity, I don't know how you get it back. Maybe you have an opinion on that; I'd like to hear it in the comments below. Is there any way that Huberman can regain his credibility, or perhaps you don't think it was lost simply because he's taking these sponsorship deals? Regardless of all of that, we should all collectively try to remember that when you get something for free, you're not the customer anymore.

You're the product. And Huberman has sold you down the river to a whole host of affiliate marketing wellness grifters whose primary goal is to convince you that their scammy products are based on real science. As the internet's most prominent science influencer, Huberman has a duty to uphold the highest standards of integrity. Otherwise, he undermines the way people trust scientific information in general. To me, that is an unforgivable sin.

Thank you so much for staying with me on this deep dive into internet science, grift, and influence. If you like this sort of fiercely independent journalism, I would love for you to hit that like and subscribe button and consider supporting this channel with a premium membership on Substack. I have no desire to infinitely sell you out to sponsors by lying to you about some product's effectiveness. I'm going to back up what I'm saying with a level of transparency that you very rarely see from a talking head online. Let me show you how much money I actually make.

Over the last two years, this channel has brought in about $35,000 from YouTube ads. You can see for yourself. So ask yourself, who do you trust more? The man making at a minimum $7 million a year slinging an ever-changing version of for-profit science communication, or someone who is so passionate about the truth that the money is secondary? If you liked this video, you can find others like it on my playlist, "The Liars, Cheats, and Charlatans of the Griftoverse," and I think you're going to find some really interesting information there.

From Pokebear LLC in Denver, Colorado, this is Scott Carney Investigates. Thank you so much to all of my supporters on Patreon and Substack who make this work possible. If you want early access and to get your name on the honor roll, please check out the links down below. It truly means the world to me that you're here. From Pokebear LLC in Denver, Colorado, this is Scott Carney Investigates.