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The Liver King does own shirts, first of all. Several, he claims. I haven’t personally seen them, because when he greeted me in the cavernous entryway of his Texas mansion, he wasn’t wearing one. Nor did I see any in his closet later, which—though it contains approximately 900 identical pairs of athletic shorts and enough guns and ammunition to arm the military of a smaller nation—did not seem to contain even a single t-shirt. Nonetheless, he assured me that there are a few in there, somewhere. It was a bit like when a sign at a national park tells you there are mountain lions in the woods: You believe it, but you understand that you’re unlikely to cross paths with any.
A shirt would only muffle the Liver King’s message: that the modern world has made men unconscionably soft, and that the only way to fight back is by living more like our earliest, most-jacked ancestors. The way to accomplish this, according to the Liver King, is by following his nine “ancestral tenets” (sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, bond), doing the most brutal workouts imaginable, and, above all, eating more raw liver—the nutrient-dense meat favored by, as his website puts it, “lions, great whites, and other wild alpha organisms.”
It’s a message the 45-year-old influencer, supplement-brand owner, and self-styled “CEO of the ancestral lifestyle” born Brian Johnson wants to share with the world, and one that is communicated most loudly and effectively by the Liver King’s own bulging physique. In his videos on TikTok and Instagram, he submerges himself in ice baths, drags weights down his driveway using only his teeth, and generally subjects his body to the kind of treatment prohibited under international human rights agreements. In each of these clips, his muscles glare accusingly back at you, judging you for scrolling lamely through your phone instead of doing burpees in the middle of a crowded New York City subway car, like the Liver King did back in March. His abs are a testament to the grind, his pecs a condemnation of taking the easy way out.
The Liver King says he eats about a pound of raw liver each day, a quantity that he says is “way too much” for most organ novices, who should start with three ounces, two times a week. He says can manage the massive dose of folate, iron, and vitamins A and B because he understands the science behind it. As he puts it on his website: “I’m not a hospital, I’m not a doctor, this is not medical advice. I do, however, have a degree in biochemistry.”
While the Liver King is far from the only public figure bemoaning the enfeebled state of American masculinity, he seems to be doing it with the most raw offal. And his message is apparently resonating, or at least the outrageous nature of his content is. Since joining social media just last August, the Liver King has amassed over a million followers on Instagram, and over two million followers on TikTok. In addition to his legions of followers, who he calls “primals,” he’s attracted the attention of the famous and fit. YouTuber Logan Paul had him on his podcast in April. Succession's Nicholas Braun reached out for advice on buying blood in a recent Instagram comment. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in March: “Guys, Liver King is in New York City and I’m losing my mind.” He even caught the eye of the High Priest of Yoked Dudes himself, Joe Rogan, though Rogan was less than complimentary. During an April episode of his podcast, Rogan dismissed the Liver King’s claims about the supremacy of liver as a “gimmick,” saying: “He has got an ass filled with steroids, is what that guy’s got.”
“I don’t touch the stuff,” the Liver King told me, unphased, adding that he’s “grateful to Joe Rogan for bringing me into his ecosystem” and that he’d love to go on the podcast someday. You can’t rattle a true believer, and the Liver King is nothing if not a believer in his own product. In person, he’s jovial and exuberant, but he proselytizes with the repetition and verve of a zealot. He rattles off the nine ancestral tenets like a monk reciting hail marys on a rosary. His speech is peppered liberally with both hoary locker-room wisdom (“How you do anything is how you do everything”) and some innovations of his own: “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?”
Indeed, while liver will always be his first love, the Liver King also sings the praises of other oft-ignored parts of an animal, like bone marrow, the tongue, and the balls. Eating another animal’s testicles is supposed to strengthen your own: “Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles,” he explained. “Testicles do have everything required to produce and support and strengthen them.”
The Liver King is open about the fact that his content is geared almost exclusively towards men. “People say, how come you don’t model, teach, preach, and fight for women? Listen, I can’t help you with that,” he shrugged. But even though I’m personally not really in his target audience, the Liver King did graciously have his chef prepare a large bull testicle and raw liver for me to sample, only to hurry me past the gory snack tray after confirming that I was a vegetarian. (“Your organs are ready!” the chef called after us.)
His 8,300-square foot Spanish revival-style mansion sits on a small lake, surrounded by other sprawling houses. But it’s more akin to a military headquarters than a suburban idyll—a teeming base from which to engage in a frenzied, pitched battle against the looming evils of passivity, processed foods, and excess body fat. Four equine-scale Dobermans patrol the grounds. The hot tub next to the pool has been converted into a 36-degree ice plunge. The living room is now a sparring ring where the Liver King’s sons take boxing classes, with thick blue wrestling mats on the floor. While there is a pile of twenty axes in the entryway, there are no mattresses in the house—the family sleeps on hard wooden slats to better mimic the sleeping conditions of our cave-dwelling forebearers. The lush backyard is the site of pensive, barefoot early morning strolls and the occasional psychedelic mushroom trip. When I parked, I was immediately greeted by an estate manager, Dan, who was wearing a weighted vest for no other reason than he just feels like it sometimes.
“When you create the kind of culture that we have, you kind of go, either I’ve got to start working out, or maybe I don’t belong here,” the Liver King explained later when I pointed out a random, bare-chested man doing squats in the garage. (His name is Ben and he’s the Liver King’s best friend.) It occured to me that mine might be the only shirt on the property.
The Liver King barely recognizes his given name anymore because, as he puts it, the Liver King “ripped open a cage and ate Brian Johnson.”
“I was in New York City and some guy said, Oh my God, it’s Brian Johnson! And I’m like, who the eff is Brian Johnson?” he said.
He told me about Brian while we were sitting in his office, a wood-paneled room covered in animal pelts, spears, and axes—and also a ring light, which the Liver King reluctantly admits does make a difference when you’re filming content.
Unlike the Liver King, Brian Johnson was weak and sad. His dad died when he was young, before Brian ever really got to know him. He lived with his mom in San Antonio, a small, shrimpy kid who got pushed around at school. Surrounded now by his pelts and his thick, protective layer of muscle, the Liver King recalled some of Brian’s most humiliating moments: There was the time he was in sixth grade, and a guy named Felix hocked a loogie in his hand and smacked Brian in the face. Then the time, a couple of years later, when he came to school with brand new shoes, feeling cool for once, someone stole them from his locker during gym class, and he had to walk home barefoot.
Everything changed when he started working out. When he was in middle school, one of his mom’s boyfriends had a weight set, and he started lifting. He liked that the gym was somewhere he could “control all outcomes,” but more than that, he liked the attention and validation he started getting from his peers. At one point, one of his classmates made a remark that the Liver King says “probably changed my life forever”: he called him Marky Mark.
Being compared to the extremely fit Mark Wahlberg—then of the Funky Bunch and Calvin Klein underwear ads—was a watershed moment for Brian. “I realized other guys wanted to be like me. And for the first time in my life, girls started to take notice of me.”
After dropping out of medical school during orientation, he went to work for a pharmaceutical company. (The irony, given his current commitment to pre-modern living and healing, is not lost on him.) He made enough money to indulge expensive outdoor hobbies, like snowboarding, which is what he was doing when he met Barbara, the future Liver Queen, in 2004.
When I first saw Barbara, she was doing kettlebell squats in the garage. Like her husband, she has abs that look like a rolling mountain range, and also like her husband, she seems to rarely wear shirts. Before Barbara, the Liver King says he was a lesser man, who would throw his gum out on the street, and who wouldn’t flush the toilets in public restrooms. “I was good at being a man before I met her, but she made me a good man,” he said.
Barbara was a dentist, and they opened a successful dental practice together before moving on to selling nutritional supplements that support the “ancestral lifestyle” to which they had become devoted. His company Ancestral Supplements offers tubs full of gnarlier stuff than you’ll find at the local GNC—“Grass Fed Dessicated Beef Liver Capsules,” of course, and grass-fed beef brain, beef tallow, bone and marrow, thyroid, and colostrum. He claims that while his businesses bring in more than $100 million a year, social media is a money-losing proposition—at least so far.
Though the Liver King is the undisputed star of the “ancestral lifestyle,” it’s really a family affair. The Liver Queen and two “Savage Liver Boys,” Rad, 13, and Stryker, 15, make frequent appearances in his videos, chowing down with him on various animal organs, and lifting massive weights. In fact, according to the Liver King, it was the kids that started all of this. When they were young, his boys were in and out of the hospital with illnesses and allergies. Desperate for a cure, he read Sally Fallon’s book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and Diet Dictocrats and decided to implement some of its findings.
“We cut out all the processed foods, we cut out all the liquid calories, the seed oils. We just went to whole foods, chiefly liver and bone marrow. Anything that made sense like, Yeah it’s ancestral,” he told me. According to the Liver King, the boys’ health improved dramatically. “Within a couple of days, the rings around their eyes went away,” he said. “They had this new vibrancy, this new energy, this new electricity. You didn’t know they were capable of living like this, with such joy and laughter.”
You can see how the family cannily took existing mainstream diet trends and turned them up to 11. After the highly processed, low-fat diet foods of the nineties, the diet industry in the 2010s swung the other way, encouraging people to return to the supposedly all-natural, whole foods of our ancestors. “A way of eating that mimics the diet of our ancestral past,” promised the Paleo diet. “Eat real food,” said Whole30. “Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” scolded Michael Pollan. And when the Liver King went to the shooting range to pump bullets into unhealthy food, he took aim at sugary sodas and margarine—not exactly fringe targets.
But that the Liver Family’s diet runs contrary to the prevailing expert consensus almost goes without saying. “A pound [of liver] a day sounds excessive, mainly because of the risk of vitamin A toxicity,” Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University told me over email. “I doubt our ancestors ate that much.” (The smaller amounts that the Liver King suggests for lay people “are probably OK if you like eating it.”) Of the Liver King’s claim that vegetables don’t have the material required to produce a healthy set of testicles? “That’s hilarious if nutritionally suspect.”
In any case, as he and his family and friends grew stronger, a moral dilemma presented itself to the Liver King: “What kind of piece of shit would I be if I don’t model, teach, and preach this to the world?”
With the help of a social media consulting company, he started posting about his life and workouts last year. It was a “very rocky start,” he admits. He didn’t enjoy making videos at first, and it took the consultants a while to figure out the Liver King’s preferences—as in, nothing that shows him engaging in any behavior that could be seen as remotely feminine. Like, say, carrying groceries, as one early nixed video script suggested. “I don’t think that’s a man’s job,” he told me.
The team eventually figured out the magic formula: More meat! More feats of strength! More videos where the Liver King shouts “More!” and lifts increasingly large weights! And more Barbarian.
The Barbarian is a torturous exercise of the Liver King’s own design that involves holding a 70 pound kettlebell in each hand, strapping 20 pound ankle weights on each leg, carrying 70 pounds in a backpack, and then—assuming you’re still standing by that point—dragging 120 pounds of weights on a sled behind you for one mile.
He regularly posts videos of himself in various phases of the Barbarian, looking like a human who wronged a vengeful Greek god and has been forced to perform this terrible feat as penance. During a recent visit to New York City, the Liver King did the Barbarian across the Brooklyn Bridge, and up 5th Avenue, past the Met. He has ambitions to take the Barbarian global someday, dragging his weights across international landmarks like the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal like a meathead Christo. “These would be incredible things to do to connect with people,” he said,
The Liver King has his critics. Nutritionists and fitness experts have raised eyebrows at choice to consume meat raw, thus potentially exposing his body to bacteria. Joe Rogan isn't the only one wondering if he's juicing. The haters are quick to assert that this isn’t a lifestyle so much as a steady stream of stunts to sell more stuff. And there have been those who have questioned his decision to raise his children in the “ancestral” way. (“Liver family, blink twice if you need help!” commented one Instagram user.)
The boys adhere to the nine ancestral tenets along with their parents. They eat the liver, sleep on slats, and exercise like soldiers preparing for battle. For his fifteenth birthday, Stryker completed the Barbarian as a rite of passage, against the express wishes of both his mother and his CrossFit coach. “I was like, I can’t believe you don’t believe in him,” the Liver King fumed. “I don’t care if he has to go out and it takes him two days. I’ll bring him food. I’ll bring him his pillow. Whatever he’s gotta do, he’s gonna do this thing.” Stryker finished in two hours.
“Somebody asked me the other day, hey, what if your kids hate you when they grow up?” he told me as we sat overlooking the lake behind his house. “I said I don’t mind. I would rather they hate me than hate themselves.”
The Liver King's politics are also, well, more than a little ancestral.
“Hard times make strong men, and there’s no requirement for hard times anymore,” he said, sitting back in his office chair, framed by a wall of nutritional supplements. “Look at shelter. Today, a realtor can find you shelter. There’s no requirement for effort or hard times if you want sex, or if you want a mate. There’s apps for that.”
The Liver King is not alone. A certain cohort of American men are hugely concerned about other American men, who they worry have been constitutionally weakened by insidious forces like smartphones, European tailoring, and Title IX. At the top of this testosterone iceberg are figures like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who recently released a trailer for a docuseries called “The End of Men.” At the bottom, in the cold, inky depths of the internet, are the forums and subreddits full of angry, disaffected men looking to take their anger out on others. When I suggest that traditional manhood comes with some baggage, the Liver King waves his hand impatiently, like he’s swatting away a politically correct fly. He’s not worried about “toxic masculinity.”
“You know what I’m concerned about? I’m concerned that we have a soft man problem today,” he says. “Now, if going from a soft man problem into toxic masculinity happens with 5 percent of these people, I’m okay with that.”
Around 4:30 p.m., the Liver family sits down to dinner. The Liver King walks me back to my car. Dan is nowhere to be seen, and I wonder if, wherever he is, he’s still wearing the weighted vest.
This is only the beginning for the Liver King, it seems. He’s in the process of building a podcast studio on his property, and there’s talk of a possible TV deal. “I always say you’re either growing or you’re dying,” he says, before turning back to his realm: his family, his weights, his primals, and presumably that one bull testicle that I didn’t end up eating.
