To anyone who thought that raw liver and goat testes could be reliable substitutes for anabolic steroids, these have been disappointing years. From 2022, influencer Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King, built a three million-strong Instagram following on the back of a gospel of eating organ meat, sunbathing, and hardcore calisthenics. But the truth of the balloon muscles he sold to others as his “Nine Ancestral Tenets” bodybuilding plan rested on the unspoken tenth tenet: “inject testosterone intra-muscularly”.

It took a keen analyst of steroid use — Derek Munro, who runs a YouTube channel called More Plates More Dates — to finally knock the Liver King out of the ring, by forensically running through the many signs in his physique that pointed to its chemical composition. Most notable was his “Palumboism” — the characteristic distended abdomen that comes with chronic use of human growth hormone. Famously, Joe Rogan then invited Munro on his interview show, and the pair of them chuckled as they live-reviewed Johnson’s hammy, disingenuous apology video.

Now, the Liver King is back. Or, at least, he would like to be. In a series of deranged Instagram posts, Johnson has turned up in Austin, Texas, where Rogan now lives, and offered to fight him. “I have no training in jiu-jitsu; you’re a black belt, you should dismantle me. But I’m picking a fight with you. Your rules, I’ll come to you, whenever you’re ready,” he said in a video. This climaxed with Johnson’s wife capturing on camera the moment of his arrest by Austin police, on charges of “making terroristic threats”. He then released a video of himself crawling on all fours with a visible ankle tag.

The King is not in a good way. Still only in his mid-40s, in the new videos his skin is vellum, his pupils are different sizes, and his mouth bears a blue tincture which could be a result of methylene blue use. Methylene blue is a voguish “nootropic”, promoted by alt-health influencers such as Ray Peat, which at high doses acts as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, potentially disrupting vital brain chemistry.

Why pick on Rogan? After all, the podcast king and the Liver King have never met. And Rogan was certainly not the only one laughing at him in 2022. The enmity is entirely one-sided, and the Liver King has now taken as real what was always just kayfabe for the crowds. He exists in a WWE world of call-outs and smack downs. He has minced his brain through prodigious use of the juice, certainly, but also by staring into the abyss of social media for too long. In his cosmology, he and Rogan are in some way bound together in a great online circus. Rogan, sitting at the apex of that manosphere world, becomes the natural adversary.

It’s perhaps a fitting epilogue. The Liver King was the most totemic and ruthless of a generation of post-Covid health influencers, from Sol Brah — salesman of filtering your shower water — to Mikhaila Peterson’s meat-only “Lion Diet”.

From the start, the Liver King set about enacting his path to fame with an eye on the clock. A former businessman, he built an entire video team to grow his brand, methodically setting follower targets by the quarter. One of his videographers lived at his house. A live-in social media and marketing team is, naturally, what our ancestors would have been used to.

But at some point he seems to have forgotten that it was all built on a central lie. He maintained that his physique was all natural. His Method-level belief in the character lost sight of the fact that it was only ever a character. Rogan — MMA enthusiast, comedian, podcaster — is in a sense a character, or a composite of many characters. To play the online fame game, these people give society what it cheers for — but somewhere they must also know it isn’t real. This has always been true of fame.

And so the Liver King seems to have forgotten that, as with a WWE Raw pantomime, that character would have its turn on the dunking stool. His fall was the equal of his rise. The Rogan “beef” appears to be the last stand of a drama channel that now has only drama to sell. The deeper sadness is that the drama is one-sided; its only conflict is internal. It is the drama of cataloguing your own psychological breakdown, even as your Instagram followers tick ever upwards.

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Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes

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