The Grifted Age

Move over Gilded Age. In the 21st century, hucksters and swindlers are exploiting mass stupidity and conspiratorial thinking—and getting filthy rich in the process. Why is this happening?

Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Collection.

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I: The King Has No Clothes

There was a more innocent time, about three weeks ago, when I had never heard of “The Liver King.”

Alas, that era has ended, and I now know that a certain Brian Michael Johnson exists.¹ Or at least he used to exist.

According to his statement on a 2022 podcast, there was a moment—no particular date was given—when “The Liver King” lurking within its mediocre corporeal presence that was merely an ordinary human “broke out of that f**king cage and ate Brian Johnson.” (This was presumably a metaphor, though in the same appearance, The Liver King noted that he does indeed routinely eat animal testicles for the sake of his own, but that he wouldn’t partake in eating bits of the female anatomy within the animal kingdom, lest he develop his own unmanly sexual organs).²

Brian Michael Johnson (RIP?), devoured by The Liver King, now closely resembles a rarely-clothed modern version of Yukon Cornelius from the animated classic film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. On social media, Johnson quickly amassed millions of followers as a meatfluencer. With a pseudoscientific blend of faux manliness, bogus appeals to hunter-gatherer mumbo-jumbo, and baseless claims about the health benefits of eating raw animal organs, Johnson claimed to bring young men out of the despair of modern life and into the back-to-basics lifestyle of “ancestral living.”

As 21st century girl-men preening ourselves in offices and sipping our lattes, Johnson claimed we had lost our way. The antidote was clear: mankind needed to return to its simpler past.

(It was unexplained precisely how this hunter-gatherer past meshed with the special supplement pills he constantly hawked, the slick YouTube and Instagram videos produced for his digital self-promotion, or a personal private jet that Johnson dubbed the “Liver and Bone Marrow train.”³ I have not personally visited uncontacted tribes or modern day hunter-gatherers, but it would surprise me to learn that they had private jets or implored their friends to “like and subscribe” after blowing up a mattress with a military tank because the bed contained unnatural chemicals).⁴

Johnson repeatedly claimed that his body, unlike that mattress, did not contain unnatural chemicals. His entire shtick—complete with over-the-top animal skins, gratuitous shirtlessness, and veins that look like bulging blue zits ready to pop out from his stretched-out skin—was that his grotesquely chiseled physique was the inevitable byproduct of ditching useless fiber and instead focusing on a raw meat diet. (Johnson also once boasted that his lack of dietary fiber somehow meant that he no longer needed to use toilet paper, as though this were a widespread human malady in search of a cure).

Little matter that most studies of super high protein diets show disastrous results; as the authors of one study from 2014 put it when using mice to test various diets: “Our sexy, lean mice who ate high-protein, low-carb diets were the shortest lived of all…They made great-looking middle-aged corpses.”⁵

Whether healthy or not, Johnson insisted that his ancestral body was at least purely natural, the result of an ancient manly diet and lots of heavy weight lifting—nothing else involved.

Then, in 2022, through leaked e-mails, it became clear that Johnson was, in fact, allegedly spending $11,000 a month, or $132,000 a year for vials of high dosage steroids. It wasn’t, alas, bull testicles and gym discipline that made him jacked; it was $360 a day worth of ‘roids.

Since then, The Steroid King has amassed even more followers—6 million on TikTok, 2 million on Instagram, a million on YouTube—and continues to rake in millions of dollars from his supplement businesses. (Johnson claimed to have a net worth of over $300 million, though a slightly more rigorous analysis puts it closer to $12 million; likewise he boasts that his businesses have a net revenue of over $100 million a year, though one outside estimate suggested that annual profits more likely range from $380,000 to $3 million.) He was recently featured in a high-profile Netflix documentary, too, which presumably brought a hefty payday.

In short, Johnson is likely raking in more cash after being exposed as a lying, scammy fraud.

The Liver King is no outlier. Scams are soaring. Fraud is rampant. Social media influencers prey on the wallets of idiots. And entire industries are based on little more than grifting through hype, swindling investors or workers foolish enough to fall for it.⁶

There’s a spectrum of grifting, from deceptive practices like Johnson’s digital persona to more outright theft. An estimated one trillion dollars is lost to scammers every year—$2.7 billion every day.

Even apparently savvy consumers, such as Charlotte Cowes—the finance advice columnist for The Cut—have become victims of outlandish schemes. After an elaborate and sophisticated bit of sustained trickery—involving accurate knowledge of her social security number and apparently intimate understanding of her life—Cowes eventually “put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed,” and carried it outside. She handed it to a man in a white Mercedes SUV, whom she believed worked for the CIA. (He did not).

In the more mainstream world, politics is awash with meme coins, crypto pump-and-dump schemes, and outrage profiteers masquerading as political consultants who fleece voters for pointless donations. Corporate loan sharks are preying on those who can least afford it, convincing them to take on debt knowing that it will inevitably end in financial ruin. Heck, the global economy increasingly relies on hedge funds and private equity firms, who grow ludicrously rich—even if they make the world poorer.

What’s going on?

To understand, we need to explore the reach of YouTube scams and how they differ from historical Confidence Men; examine the cultural erosion of fair play amid an era of extortionate entitlement; and see how structural incentives for unethical profiteering have radically changed over the last two decades.

This is a tale not only of caricature-worthy fraudsters and internet scoundrels, but of global economic and political institutions that increasingly make it rational to engage in manipulation, deception, and outright lies to make a quick buck.

This is the story of why we have entered a new era: The Grifted Age.