The only useful piece of health advice you’re likely to hear in the Netflix documentary Untold: The Liver King comes from our flawed hero’s gentle 13-year-old son, Rad: “Eat good food. Don’t eat Oreos. Stuff like that. And sleep, get good sleep,” he says.
A simple message – but one that is unlikely to set the world on fire. And that is exactly why people like Rad are forgotten and people like the Liver King are plastered all over Instagram. You too can have a body like a fistful of bubble tea, Liver King roars, if you will only commit to gorging on bull testicles and drinking lukewarm pints of blood.
The story of Liver King is one of how branding gurus pushed an extremely unhealthy role model in order to sell health supplements. At the time of Liver King’s rise, there was no shortage of credible fitness influencers and role models offering decent advice. Liver King’s secret sauce, the documentary reveals, was turbo-charged marketing and a willingness to lie.
Brian Johnson, aka The Liver King, enjoyed a meteoric rise in the early 2020s by posting videos of himself performing bizarre feats of strength, such as dragging 4X4s, walking underwater with kettlebells, and bench-pressing his wife Liver Queen, all while hooting and hollering to his “Primal” followers about the “ancestral diet”. This seemed to consist mostly of raw liver, fertilised eggs and maple syrup (plus the occasional bull testicle).
The proof of Liver King’s superior lifestyle was his tumescent, crimson body (Primals don’t wear shirts). Followers who wanted the abs without the offal could purchase his Ancestral Supplements, which Liver King advertised frequently. The documentary reveals that this became a $100m business – until it all came crashing down spectacularly when it was leaked to YouTuber Derek Munro that Liver King was secretly consuming $11,000 of steroids per month. The Liver King was a total fraud; despite repeated denials, he had been juicing all along. The film, therefore, lays out a kind of redemption arc for Liver King, as he talks about the “self-esteem” issues that led him to steroid use. “I’ve told the truth in this movie,” says Liver King. “Well, mostly the truth.”
What this documentary is not willing to discuss – which suggests something about the conditions attached to the access agreements signed by the filmmaker – is what happened after that. Liver King experienced an even more concerning crash-out last year, in which he appeared in several videos looking physically and mentally worse for wear, rambling incoherently about cosmic experiences. The posts have since been deleted, and Liver King has never addressed them.
One way of interpreting this omission in the documentary is that it is a continued exercise in marketing, and one that is still attempting to shore up the reputation of its flawed hero. We know he has a very good marketing team around him because they’re all interviewed in the documentary (and Ancestral Supplements gets a decent plug within the first 15 minutes).
John Hyland, the head of branding agency 1DS Collective, describes exactly how Liver King came to him with a request for “one million followers”. Hyland immediately ratcheted his channel towards more and more viral content. “He was new on camera, and so we pitched a lot of different stuff. Crazy ideas, from the beginning. But he brought it back to not being comfortable doing that stuff,” says Hyland. “[Then] we saw views jump a bit on something that he wasn’t completely in line with doing. We’re like trust us, let’s go. […] He quickly got the game.”
Once Liver King was comfortable with bench-pressing underwater and aiming firearms at veggie burgers, Hyland knew he was able to produce “snackable” content perfect for social media. Liver King’s feats were, he says, a product of the “meticulous architecture” of the marketing agency.
“You have to capture, keep and then ultimately monetise people’s attention,” says Hyland. “We took this man who was very polarising with a very strong marketing message and tried to impact positively as many people as we could. And we did a damn good job of it, better than it’s ever been done.”
Obviously, not everyone would agree that Liver King has had a positive impact. If anybody took his denials about using steroids seriously, they were setting themselves up for failure, no matter how many supplements they took. It is impossible to look like Liver King without steroids. Steroid misuse can result in a catalogue of health problems, including cardiovascular risks, testicular atrophy and mood swings. At high doses for long periods, they are linked to mania and cognitive decline. It is impossible to say whether Liver King’s apparent health issues are a consequence of steroid abuse because he has failed to address them.
However, our eyeballs are always drawn to the extremes, and that is how we end up with such strange role models. There is an obvious parallel with the rise of Andrew Tate, whose cartoonish masculinity and aura of money and power is the bait for his $8,000 “War Room” programme. You can see this drift in other, newer influencers, too, like Bonnie Blue, whose increasingly hair-raising stunts and cutesy tutelage of “barely legal” apprentices paint an incomplete picture of an extreme lifestyle that is a bad proposition for most women.
On reflection, perhaps there is one other useful piece of advice in this documentary. “I don’t know s***,” says Liver King. “An extreme approach to anything probably ain’t f***ing working out. That’s probably the cautionary tale.”
‘The Liver King’ is out now on Netflix
