Populist New Media is Just Old-Fashioned Big Media Now

All that's solid melts into clicks

Yesterday, I was talking to my podcast co-host about Time’s newly-published list of the The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time. If you take a gander yourself, you’ll immediately notice that a huge number of the podcasts included are either associated with established media organizations (e.g. The New York Times or NPR), have celebrities as hosts, were acquired by platforms like Spotify for jaw-dropping sums upwards of $100 million, or some combination of all three. This is certainly not “podcasting” as I understand it (though, granted, this may just be the reflexive defensiveness of a longtime DIY podcaster speaking).

In any case, what we see here is a once more independent and populist medium whose formal hallmarks have been picked up by traditional media institutions. The form itself — at least most of the time — remains completely intact, but is now widely associated with the largest newspapers and magazines in the world. The same thing happened with blogging, and I expect there are other examples as well.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking about the so-called Liver King (né Brian Michael Johnson) a wildly successful influencer who made insane money promoting the “Nine Tenets” of his “ancestral lifestyle” to millions on YouTube and other platforms. If you aren’t familiar with this guy, his schtick was that eating huge amounts of raw meat — especially liver (and, on the basis of vaguely Jordan Peterson-esque masculinist hokum, cow testicles as well) — could unlock an incredible physique unattainable through conventional fitness and nutrition. To this, he added a liberal use of wacky and outlandish lifestyle stunts and, of course, monetized the audience it helped him build by selling supplements. Don’t want to chow down on a slab of raw donkey liver? It’s primordial energy can now be yours for just $39.99/month plus shipping.

Essentially, Johnson’s ethos fused together an assortment of different trends and folk wisdoms gathered from the fitness world and various trad subcultures, and gave it the kind of abrasively eye-grabbing social media treatment that is guaranteed to generate clicks. All this is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, which chronicles both Johnson’s rise to prominence and his subsequent downfall.

Being somewhat plugged into fitness YouTube, I was somewhat familiar with the Liver King before I saw this documentary. To say the least, it’s amazing anyone believed even for a second that it’s possible to look like he does naturally. The great scandal, inevitably, was that Johnson was actually consuming $11,000 worth of nuclear-grade steroids every month — and, despite his repeated insistence he was just eating a small Balkan republic’s worth of liver every day, his leviathan physique was just a good, old-fashioned tale of what boutique performance enhancers can do.

This isn’t, however, the real scandal of the Liver King as I see it: there was never any real question Johnson’s schtick was bullshit, and the fact so many convinced themselves otherwise says more about the perverse incentive structures of digital media (and the fitness business) than anything else.