Markdown Content - Selling Information Has Always Been a Strange Business

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# Selling Information Has Always Been a Strange Business

**URL:** https://educatedconfusion.com/selling-information-has-always-been-a-strange-business/
Date: 2026-04-11
Author: fatherlinux
Post Type: post
Summary: When YouTube creators scale to millions, information drifts from education into entertainment. The business model reveals what's really happening.Continue Reading "Selling Information Has Always Been a Strange Business" →
Categories: Culture
Tags: Economics, Philosophy
Featured Image: https://educatedconfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/gemini_edit_20260411_155724_89d38c54.png
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I've been thinking about Remi Gaillard and Andrew Huberman lately, which is a strange pairing, I'll admit. Gaillard is a French comedian with 7.39 million YouTube subscribers who dresses up as Pac-Man and runs through a grocery store, or pretends to be a kangaroo on a soccer field, or does other absurd physical comedy bits that have no deeper meaning beyond making you laugh. Huberman, on the other hand, has 7.45 million subscribers and talks about neuroscience, health optimization, protocols for better sleep, dopamine management, and the molecular mechanisms of human performance. They have roughly the same audience size, but their businesses are fundamentally different in ways that make me uncomfortable.

When I look at a guy like Gaillard, the whole transaction seems pretty straightforward, because he's just there to entertain people and make them laugh, and we all understand what we're getting. You watch, you laugh, you move on, and that's it. The value capture is equally clear: ad revenue, sponsorships, maybe some merch. Huberman's business, though, is murky in a way that feels structurally problematic, and I think it's because selling information has always been weird. Lexis Nexis, Bloomberg terminals, proprietary databases, even academic journals operate in this strange zone where the value creation is questionable and the value capture is highly questionable. Much of the important data we really need is publicly available, captured by government organizations, published in open research. But someone aggregates it, repackages it, charges for access, and we accept that as a legitimate business.

Entertainment has an unlimited appetite. People will always want to be entertained, and there's always room for more comedy, more music, more drama. Manufacturing is the same way: people need things, companies make things, the loop is endless. But information? Real information? The amount of genuinely new, useful knowledge about your neurological system or your health is actually quite constrained. There's only so much peer-reviewed, clinically validated insight that emerges each year. When Huberman was small and underground, he was probably creating real value, synthesizing dense research for people who couldn't access or parse it themselves. It was a side project. He didn't have the incentive to push content we didn't need.

But at 7.45 million subscribers, putting out 2-3 videos per week, the math doesn't work anymore, because there isn't enough real information to sustain that cadence for that many people. I think once you get to that scale, you're not just sharing interesting research anymore, because you're also fighting the audience's demand for constant content, the algorithm that rewards that cadence, and a business model that probably requires it to stay afloat. The demand outstrips the supply. It has to bleed into entertainment at some point, has to drift from science into performance.

And, AI makes it trivially easy to access this dense research now, which compounds my skepticism.

Do I really need some gatekeeper telling me how it works? I can ask an LLM to synthesize the latest papers on sleep architecture or dopamine receptor dynamics, and it'll do it without the incentive to manufacture life hacks. I think the bias is lower, ironically, and the variance is lower too, because LLMs just follow the data, or they hallucinate, but if you run the same query three to five times and cross-check, they don't hallucinate every time. You can statistically find truth that way. I trust that more than a guy on YouTube with clear financial incentives to find more protocols, more hacks, more reasons for you to keep watching.

Maybe that's the real difference between Gaillard and Huberman. Gaillard knows he's entertaining you. He's not pretending it's anything else. Huberman might believe he's educating you, and you might believe you're being educated, but the structure of the business makes me doubt that's what's actually happening. I've always thought the business of selling information was a strange one, and while the scale of internet virality certainly made it stranger, I'm starting to wonder if AI is going to be the thing that finally makes the whole business model obsolete.

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