During the peak of his popularity you would find Huberman protocols or Huberman factoids repeated everywhere on the internet, including HN. There was a sharp drop off after the revelations. I can’t recall the last time I saw someone someone repeat a Huberman podcast factoid here, which is remarkable after he was so popular.
In the Huberman case it was compounded by how much he was embracing and repeating non-scientific ideas that sounded good on social media, like reducing everything to being about dopamine or making crazy claims about how you could do things to “raise your dopamine” that were not actually supported by research. When his personal dramas were exposed it became an opening to discuss how bad his podcast had become and I think many listeners woke up to that fact when shaken by the realization that not everything about Huberman was as it seemed.
He has been able to continue podcasting to an audience of die-hard fans, though. These people never totally disappear because a core audience worships them and will ignore everything inconvenient to their worship.
Peter Attia went through a similar downfall after several increasingly bad scandals were revealed, culminating in him getting caught associating deeply with Epstein. He tried to make a public statement about distancing himself from Epstein after discovering Epstein’s crimes, but there are public emails between Attia and Epstein where Attia asks Epstein about how he’s doing after Epstein became national news. That backfired everywhere except the core audience of Attia worshippers who now just get angry whenever anyone brings up the Attia-Epstein connection. It’s wild that Attia was one of the few Epstein associates who continued contacting Epstein so much (which went into court records and became public) after he became publicly known as a trafficker. And yet there are hardcore Attia fans to this day.
I’m not aware of such revelations, maybe I haven’t kept up on all, I recall a piece where women he was dating would get together and talk about dating him while continuing to choose to date him. But I don’t remember any story that revealed something negative about him.
The bigger revelations in the story were that the “Huberman Lab” existed largely in name only and he wasn't living or working near the University. His career had pivoted to influencer celebrity long ago but he’s been capitalizing on the neuroscientist title and claiming lab associations anyway. They also interviewed associates who revealed his history of leading people on, manipulating them, and being dishonest wherever it might help his career. Then they found that he was cheating on multiple women at the same time, including someone he led to believe he wanted a long term relationship and children with. He was injecting one partner with fertility drugs while cheating.
What’s fascinating is how his fanbase stripped the story of all of the important details (chronic pattern of misleading everyone in his life where it can help his popularity, which extends into his podcast reporting where he misleads listeners) and instead tried to transform it into personal dating drama that was overblown.
Then the second pass of rationalizing it away was to take the relationship drama and transform that into something that could be blamed on the women involved while letting Huberman off the hook. After that final transformation they were free to ignore anything negative about him because the story had been rewritten, in the retelling, to be completely the fault of women. There were even efforts to make it look like a good thing that he was dating multiple women.
In case it wasn’t clear: In the reporting the women did not “continue to choose to date him” as you heard. The reported group discussion was about former partners had been lied to who were discovering each other because the number of them had grown so high that he couldn’t escape it.
And generally other wrongdoing by powerful.