“Liver is king.”
This statement is the central belief that took 47-year-old Brian Johnson from an awkward father of two to a social media superstar, 6 million followers deep. Johnson, better known online by the moniker Liver King, built a digital empire, lifestyle brand, and supplement company based on living an “ancestral lifestyle,” a return to a caveman style of eating with ancient grains, minimal cooking, and a reliance on raw protein. Johnson preached following nine key ancestral tenets in order to achieve maximum health: sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, and bond.
Johnson’s horde of social media followers tuned in to watch the bodybuilder and ancestral-protein connoisseur live out these mandates with a professional camera crew documenting him and his family consuming raw fertilized eggs, meat, organs, and testicles on their ranch land near Houston. But in the latest addition of Netflix’s popular sports documentary series Untold, friends, family, close collaborators, and the star behind the Liver King empire himself talk through how Johnson created a digital empire with a few bloody slabs of liver. Untold: The Liver King takes a firsthand approach to Johnson’s journey, including several sit-down interviews with the influencer as he charts his path from a scrawny kid desperate to gain muscle to a rich lifestyle guru taking large amounts of steroids and human-growth hormone — and lying to his audience.
When announcing the film, director Joe Pearlman said he was desperate to find out more about Johnson, but the truth was “even crazier” than he thought — and brought up deep questions about authenticity and following. “We live in a time when someone can reach hundreds of millions of people without going through any kind of traditional gatekeeping. No background checks. Just a phone and a guy,” Pearlman said. “And when shock and outrage get views, what are you willing, or even able, to keep doing to stay at the top of the algorithm?”
Here are five things we learned from Untold: The Liver King.
Johnson says his desire to get ripped comes from never knowing his father
Johnson says he can trace his need to exercise and gain muscle from the early loss of his father. The influencer says in the Netflix documentary that his dad, Phillip Johnson, a veterinarian who joined the Air Force, died when he was around two years old.
Johnson says this lack of a parent made him unsure about how to be a man. “You’re not gonna have that model of a man to be able to connect you to what it is that a fucking man is to begin with,” he says in the documentary,
Watching his older brother go through puberty, developing muscles and armpit hair, Johnson says he looked in the mirror and decided he needed to change his body in order to connect with his manhood.
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian and Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood became his ideal combination of what he wanted his physique and personality to be. “Watching those movies, they were the best fucking closest thing I probably had to a dad,” he says. “I made the exact man, the savage fucking king that I always wanted to be. I could be my hero.”
Johnson had his first orgasm on a bench press
In the film, Johnson says he has visceral memories about the sights and sounds he experienced when he first began his fitness journey. At the gym, he says, he was surrounded by grunts, sweat, and the smell of Bengay.
According to Johnson, the gym was where he found his first true friendships, from other fitness lovers who not only spotted him exercising, but also showed him around and instructed him on the best way to do different workouts and build specific muscles. “It was like the most beautiful playground,” Johnson says. “I felt like part of the club.”
He apparently had such revolutionary experiences at the gym that he even remembers having his first orgasm while using a bench press. “I swear to God,” he says. “Probably turns out that I probably needed to come a long time ago, but I’m fucking benching, man, and I felt it coming on, and I couldn’t fucking believe it. I figured out what masturbation was after that.”
Johnson first turned to liver because of his sons’ poor health
While Johnson says he became interested in fitness as a young teenger, in the documentary he says that he only sought out the ancestral diet and lifestyle after his two sons, Rad Ical and Stryker, began experiencing severe allergy and health problems.
“We’d be in Starbucks, and Stryker would stop breathing. [I would think,] my kids are dying,” Johnson says onscreen. “I’m not even thinking, ‘How am I gonna raise good kids that love their lives?’ I’m just thinking, ‘How do we keep our kids alive, period?’”
After doing research on alternative lifestyles, Johnson says, he learned about Mike Sisson’s Primal Blueprint diet, which is a spin on paleo, and became incredibly interested. After switching his entire family from processed food to raw organs, meat, bone broth, and supplements, Johnson says, the food changed his sons’ health for the better.
“That’s when I decided, ‘Holy shit. Organs are really fucking awesome,’” he says.
The Liver King considered his steroid use unimportant
Johnson built his social media empire by filming increasingly outrageous videos about his lifestyle and diet. What started as simple Instagram reels about getting sunshine, wearing shoes less, and turning off your Wi-Fi at night quickly devolved into clip after clip of a shirtless Johnson doing everything from tearing the testicles off of a bull carcass to eat them to shooting packages of the vegan Beyond Burgers with semiautomatic weapons.
According to Johnson, his social media presence was a way to spread the message of ancestral living. So even though he was also taking steroids, he lied and disavoid their use in order to convince more people to change their eating habits. According to interviews in the doc with his frequent collaborators, Ben Johnson (CEO of a holding company for lifestyle brands) and John Hyland (CEO of a digital marketing company) both tell Netflix that Johnson denied taking steroids to them as well.
“He told all of us, ‘No.’ It was very much like, ‘No, steroids are not even a question.’ So much so that we’re creating parodies and content,” Hyland says.
“I think he thought that the broader message he was putting out there was more important than steroids,” Ben adds. “And if steroids were a lever to amplify the reach and impact of the message, that was a price he was willing to pay.”
After admitting the lies, Johnson says he’s left some of the Liver King lifestyle behind
While Johnson spent 2021 building his online brand and telling major influencers like Logan Paul and Joe Rogan that he did not “touch” steroids at all, he was finally exposed in 2022 after fitness YouTuber Derek — he’s never released his last name, but runs the “More Plates More Dates” channel — revealed leaked emails confirming that Johnson regularly took a steroid regimen that cost close to $11,000 per month.
In the documentary, Johnson says that he initially thought he could deny the rumors, but realized that they had to say something when Derek’s video continued to gain traction.
Johnson considers the exposé a turning point in his life, and says that he has since realized that his reliance on a primal diet was just a way to gain control. In the documentary, he says he now eats fruits and vegetables — demonstrating by eating a strawberry in the same garden where he has his morning bowel movements.
“I’m convinced now that I was starving myself. I guess I want the world to know I was wrong. I got it wrong. I got all of it wrong. I think as each passing day goes by I realize I don’t know shit,” he says. “An extreme approach to anything probably ain’t fucking working out. That’s probably the cautionary tale.”
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