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Notes -
Who benefits from the truth?
When The Rock - who is promoting his new movie specifically on being huge - will the studio tell him to stop saying he only tried steroids as a kid once and then stopped? Do they want him being honest with their teenage audience about the huge amounts he must be taking combined with the inherent potential health risks, and how their entire business model is essentially an arms race of "unrealistic male body standards"?
When health magazines put these liars on the cover do they benefit from telling their audience "but you'll never actually look like this. Ever. It's laughable to even imagine and they're lying to your face"?
Will Jimmy Kimmel when he and all of the other actors are lying their asses off by omission about how they got their physique (lots of "chicken, rice, broccoli*" but no mention of TRT and the rest)? Not if he wants access. Which is why all these people allow actors to come on and talk about "miraculous" transformations and their diets and almost never ask them about steroids. It's not a coincidence: you would assume that a naive person would ask this question more than they do, just out of curiosity. They just know better.
If you want to sell your liver products (since you can't sell the steroids) you need to sell something aspirational - which is what Liver King was doing with his idea that his "Ancestral Truths" could fix people's deep problems. You need that hook.
The only people who don't profit are pedants on the internet who want to take aim at "fake nattys". In fact: they profit from exposing people. Which is why they're the ones making noise.
* TBH this is said so much that I honestly think some people are doing the actor's equivalent of winking to the "smarks" since "'it's just chicken, rice and broccoli bro" is a common sarcastic meme whenever some actor suddenly gains a ton of muscle in an unrealistically short timeframe.
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