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He sits shirtless, muscular, and shaggy, baseball hat turned backwards (of course) as he bites into a hunk of raw liver the size of a Shih Tzu. Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King, consumes and advocates for a steady diet of raw organ meat to maintain an “ancestral lifestyle.” Johnson has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok who tune in specifically for this content. 

Johnson’s fans are not alone. As economic anxiety reshapes American masculinity, a growing subculture of young and working-class men is turning to maxxing out their bodies as a way to reclaim value in a labor market that increasingly devalues physical work. Working out isn’t enough. It’s how they eat, dress, and sculpt—especially how they eat. And their staple food isn’t expensive biohacker supplements; it’s ground beef, the cheap, protein-dense “boy kibble” endlessly promoted by fitness influencers. 

The rise of carnivore aesthetics, lifting culture, and hyper-protein diets reflects a deeper crisis of identity among men who see the traditional beacons of secure manhood—having a well-paying job, owning their own home, being a dad—dimming before their eyes. They’ve come to feel their bodies are one of the few forms of capital they still control.  And, perhaps most interestingly, this obsession is nothing new. And, like the fads that came before, they’re following a path that is certain to leave them unfulfilled. 

The history of America’s beef obsession 

The history of our obsession with beef and masculinity goes back at least 140 years. In 1886, the great novelist Henry James published his novel The Bostonians, in which the unsympathetic Southern patriarch Basil Ransom thunders: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy.”

Later, in 1909, Woods Hutchinson, a physician and health writer, wrote a bestselling book of health advice for young men, Instinct and Health, advising that men consume: “Meat!  R-r-red meat, dr-r-ripping with b-l-lood, r-r-reeking of the shambles!” 

Then, as now, economic changes, fundamental shifts in family life, and evolving domestic relations all combined to make many young white American men feel anxious about their identity, and desperate to prove their masculinity in a world they perceived as increasingly sapping their virility. 

The solution? Beef. And this isn’t the first time Americans have sought to eat their way out of an existential crisis of identity. 

These observations sound familiar because at several times in our history, observers have declared a veritable crisis among American men. The transition from farms, the open range, and artisanal workshops to offices and large, impersonal, factories was seen as sapping virility—just as our tiny cubicles and remote workstations are said to do today. Rapid immigration, alongside the entry of women and people of color into new sectors of the workforce in the early 1900s, arguably caused as much alarm as those same groups do today. 

So, as now, many men followed the adage that when the going gets tough, the tough,  well… toughen up. The first YMCA gym was built in 1869, the first dude ranch a decade later. An estimated one in five American men belonged to a fraternal order in the early 1900s, where they could relax in an all-male and all-white social space. 

The Boy Scouts of America (co-founded in 1910 by Ernest Thompson Seton), and the Boone and Crockett Club (founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt before becoming president) heralded the “strenuous life” as virtual boys’ liberation movements. Even the great psychologist and early manfluencer G. Stanley Hall, coiner of the term “adolescence” in 1904, wrote, “you cannot have a firm will without firm muscles.”

Today’s manosphere revives an old script

Old, bad ideas do not simply fade away. Sometimes they return as viral content. And that’s quite clear today, as the internet is awash with advice about what to eat, wear, pump up and slim down. 

Today’s masculinist influencers warn that masculinity is under siege and argue that modern society has made men dangerously weak. British-American social media personality Andrew Tate claims that, “Society as a whole is telling men to be weaker and weaker, saying it’s somehow the solution to everything because being a man is toxically masculine. Being a strong man is bad,” he said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. “To be a good man, you have to be a very weak one.”

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson insists that “The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious,” and, ““If you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.” Podcaster Joe Rogan echoes the familiar maxim that “Hard times create hard men. Hard men create easy times. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times,” while fitness influencers like Liver King declare bluntly, “We have a soft man problem today.”

Together, these men, alongside others including Myron Gaines, David Goggins, and Hamza Ahmed, compose the “manosphere,” a group that doles out advice online about how to toughen up and seduce women—in other words, to become “real men.”  

They’ve swallowed The Red Pill, and like their early 20^th-century forbears, they’re incredibly nostalgic. They look back towards a mythic time when real men roamed the earth like dinosaurs—brawny men, physically strong, emotionally stoic, effortlessly dominant—men who worked with their hands, fought in wars, sacrificed for their families and endured pain and hardship without blinking. 

The fact that such men are in short supply, and that this romanticized myth didn’t even remotely compare with the lives such men actually lived, is of little concern to today’s masculinists. Indeed, the language of conservatism is often the language of nostalgia. It’s not just to “conserve” what’s there, but to return, retrieve, reclaim, and restore what has been lost.

How beef became a symbol of masculinity

When it comes to what is perceived as the increasingly enfeebled and emasculated bodies of American men, today’s manosphere influencers hark back to the words of bodybuilder Bernarr MacFadden from 1900. 

Think of MacFadden, “America’s foremost health crusader,” as America’s first masculinist influencer. Instead of podcasts and Instagram reels, MacFadden’s popular magazine, Physical Culture, and his best-selling books like The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood: How Developed, How Lost, How Regained helped instruct men to man up through diet and exercise. He even invented a “peniscope,” a small vacuum tube that was said to enlarge the male organ and thus help men feel more manly. 

Then, as now, manfluencers seem to believe that you are what you eat. And beef is the most masculine of all foods. Enough with the vegetables! No more broccoli! No more sushi! That’s surely a diet for “soy boys.” (Many proclaim that long-debunked association of soy products, like tofu, with increased estrogen, therefore making men more feminine, and therefore, turning them gay). 

The manosphere is drenched in blood-red carnivorous encomiums. “They don’t want you strong. They want you weak. And that’s why they’re promoting this veganism garbage,” says Tate. “I eat beef and salt and water,” proclaims Peterson. “That’s it.” (A British journalist followed that regimen. It did not go well.) 

Something called “the lion diet” eschews even dairy in favor of water, salt, and meat from ruminant animals. (Monogastric chickens do not qualify.) Popular podcaster of “FreshandFit”, which boasts over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and close to 300 million views, Myron Gaines mixes raging misogyny and anti-Semitism with suggestions about a carnivorous dietary regimen.  

You can’t eat your way to manhood

Of course, masculinity is complex. Beef is no longer “what’s for dinner,” as the old Beef Industry Council ad told us. Nor the ingredient about which one was always asking its whereabouts: “Where’s the beef?” 

To be sure, you can not eat your way to manhood. But Americans have been struggling to learn this lesson for decades. 

At the turn of the century, health reformers like J.H. Kellogg, C.W. Post and Sylvester Graham (he of the cracker) promoted whole grains and unprocessed foods as a sure way to prevent the scourge of masturbation.  

One concern, of course, is the cost of such carnivorous gorging.  At a popular neighborhood restaurant on my block, a grass-fed sirloin goes for $46. At a time when prices are hurtling upwards and men’s labor force participation is falling, meat prices have been climbing steadily, from an average of around $3.55 a pound for ground beef when President Trump first took office to about $6.75 a pound in 2026, and steak prices to over $11 per pound.

Combine these carnivorous cravings with the compulsive bodybuilding and muscle-maxxing, and you have a cardiovascular nightmare. And add to that the newest craze of “looksmaxxing” by which men sculpt their physiques and faces (through cosmetic surgery, extreme diets, and even surgical altering of facial bone structures) and you can feel the desperation like anxious sweat. 

The fantasy that masculinity can be recovered through diet is as old as the United States. Every generation discovers its own version of “boy kibble.” Every generation eventually learns that strength of character cannot be bought by the pound.

Just as American men discovered a century ago, masculinity is not a diet nor a fashion accessory. It comes from within, being morally and emotionally strong enough to serve one’s family, community, and nation. That’s the meat of the issue.

I was an early medical student at the University of Miami in Florida, seeing a patient in a local primary care clinic. “Abdominal pain with constipation,” I proudly told my supervising physician. “I think it’s irritable bowel syndrome.”  

We went to see the patient and I watched with self-satisfaction as he asked the same questions I had. When did the pain start? Where is it? I waited for him to tell her it was likely IBS. But he didn’t. He paused and looked at her face after his last question, and for the first time I noticed she wasn’t making eye contact. She was looking at the ground. “We’ve known each other for a long time,” he told her gently, “and you seem worried. Can you share what you’re thinking?”  

She didn’t say anything right away. Finally, she looked up. “My sister was just diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. I’m worried I might have it too.”

For the next 15 minutes I watched as they talked about how she was processing her sister’s diagnosis, her fears about the future, what it all meant for her future colon cancer screening, and why at this point we were most concerned about IBS. 

By the end of the visit, her expression had cleared; I realized I hadn’t noticed how frightened she was. I felt ashamed of myself. What kind of doctor was I going to be? 

My supervising physician and I talked about it. “You learn how to look,” he said. “When you care, you get a feel for it.”

You get a feel for it. 

That lesson has stayed at the forefront for me as I’ve watched artificial intelligence sweep through medicine and enter the clinical environment of our internal medicine residency program at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. AI scribes. Chatbots that tell you a differential diagnosis if you put in a patient’s symptoms. Electronic medical record tools that will summarize a patient’s hospital course for you. But they can’t feel. 

To be sure, AI can do incredible things in medicine. In this new world, I hear trainees wonder if AI will make doctors obsolete. I also hear some—usually not physicians—make this claim with confidence. They’re right about one thing: medicine is changing, and we in health care need to figure out our place in this new world.

But they’re wrong that physicians will become obsolete as AI becomes better at processing information. As I learned in medical school, truly caring for a patient begins before the first question is asked and the first test is ordered. It begins with looking. Noticing a second of hesitation before a patient responds. Seeing the pits in a nailbed. Hearing a change in heart sounds between visits. It begins when you commit to focusing entirely on the person in front of you, and to creating a relationship—that’s how you get a feel for it. 

AI excels at processing information that is presented to it, like symptoms, test results, and even human expressions. It reasons with the input it is given. But it cannot decide what deserves attention before data exist. 

Great physicians define the input. They decide which symptoms matter, observe what wasn’t said, and understand what information deserves the most attention. They are curious about the patient in front of them, and that curiosity drives them to dig deeper, discover information an algorithm couldn’t, and direct the flow of information—not just receive it.

Ironically, healthcare systems are already pushing physicians away from careful observation and curiosity toward the kind of medicine AI performs best: documenting, checking boxes, and following protocols. As a result, now many physicians don’t get the chance to experience the “feel” of medicine. Some ask questions (input) and tell the patient the plan (output)—but don’t observe or connect. They don’t have the time to practice the aspects of medicine that distinguish them from software. 

Could AI in the coming decades replace these doctors? Probably. If the input is just data, the output would probably be the same. But the patients’ experience will be the one I would have given my patient with abdominal pain: incomplete and ineffective.  

We need to embrace what AI can do to make medicine better while at the same time recognizing what it cannot do. We must see it for what it is—an adjunct to elevate physician care. A modern stethoscope. 

Healthcare workers need to inform how medical AI is developed and deployed, so it doesn’t propagate checkbox medicine and promote the creation of AI-equivalent physicians who can follow protocols but have no feel for medicine.  

We need to reimagine how we train the next generation of physicians, prioritizing the development of the skills and attributes needed to define the input—curiosity, careful observation, expert communication, and mastery of the physical exam—in the context of AI tools. 

It also means we need to focus on recruiting people to medicine who have the “soft skills” and attributes that have defined great physicians for centuries: a focus on serving others, forming connections, building trust, and empathizing. 

Years later, I remember little about the details of my patient’s abdominal pain. But I distinctly remember the moment she looked up after my supervising physician asked the question I never thought to ask. 

AI will become better at recognizing disease. Whether medicine becomes better at recognizing patients depends on whether physicians still learn to look—and learn to feel.