Behind the Bastards - The Liver King (A Live Show)

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

Robert and Dr. Kaveh Hoda perform live at SF Sketchfest. Everything you've ever wanted to know about the Liver King and a significant number of things you did not want to know.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot, the all-black security detail normally assigned to him was called off? They're the ones who would not allow him to stay at any hotel with balconies. Did you ever ask what this was all about? Yes, I probably told. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart,

Lewis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real-life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. Welcome, finally, to the 20th annual SF SketchFest, the San Francisco Comedy Festival. For tickets and show schedules, visit us at sfsketchfest.com and follow us on social media for festival news and updates. Please take a moment to locate the nearest emergency exit and please

silence your cell phones and refrain from texting during the performance. Video and photography are strictly prohibited. Enjoy the show. Would you all excuse me a minute? I need to make a phone call. Hey, Sophie. Yeah. So I'm here at the thing, you know, the award show for the sketchiest man in podcasting. Well, I'm wearing my award robe and I'm carrying my award staff, but it's become clear to me that this is not in fact an award. No, that's not what SketchFest means. Yeah, I know. I was shocked to learn it, too. I think they're expecting me to perform an episode of Behind the Bastards. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this is a real problem. This is a real problem. Thankfully,

I keep next to my heart a podcast script for emergencies at all times, but we're going to need a guest and I just don't have anyone booked. Wait a second. Sophie, I'll talk to you later. Hello, 911. Play along. 911. Yeah, we have a, I'm here at the Gateway Theater and we've had a horrible attack of airborne syphilis. Start moaning. Come on, give me some moans. Oh yeah. No, it's bad. You need to get a doctor down here immediately. Can we get a doctor sent into the theater? Dr. Kavehota. Thank you for coming on such short notice, Dr. Hoda. I heard there was an uncontrollable amount of syphilis here. That is the case, but we can ignore that. The actual reason I called 911 was because I have a script

and I need some help reading it. No, you, you, I know it's not the first time and it won't be the last time I use 911 for my own purposes, but can I take this white code off? I haven't worn this in like 20 years. It's actually quite hot up here. I'll keep the podcasting staff. I'll keep the podcasting patriotic knife that you lend me. Yeah. Now I'm in my much more normal outfit of my shoot dope, fuck the cops hoodie, which I own mainly because wearing this hoodie through the TSA checkpoint is quite a bit of fun. You have it. You have a different experience every time in every country. Kaveh, how are you doing today? Man, I am so glad to be here. There's nobody and no crowd I would rather

get airborne disease from than you. Oh no, this is of all the crowds to get an airborne disease from. This is in the top three or four. Yeah, that area over there is particularly questionable over there. I find them, they definitely have something and it's okay because it's worth it. I think this is, this is worth the risk. Speaking of people who probably have some sort of disease. Actually, you know, I say that I kind of brought you all here on false pretenses because normally this is a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, but every now and then we talk about a hero. And today we're talking about the man who might be my hero. Do you know who Brian Johnson is? Well, he might be better

known by his other name, the liver king. Oh, that son of a bitch. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We got a lot of videos. We got a lot of videos queued up for you, motherfucker. So strap in them. First of all, let me explain to the crowd who may not know me even though I am the San Francisco and then you should fucking know me by now, but it is a small town. It is a small town, but I am a liver doctor. I am a guy and hepatologists. So the fact that some guy had the gall to call himself the liver king when I was a fucking around is is appalling. It is. There's a lot that will be appalling about this episode. But Kava, we got to get into it because time is of the essence. So Brian Johnson, which is

the liver king's real name was born on April 7th, 1977 in San Antonio, Texas. Probably basically all the information we have this guy on this guy about his early life comes from interviews that he gave or comments he made on various grind set influencer podcasts. He is a professional liar. So this should all be taken with a grain of salt. Now, Brian has claimed that his father died when he was young, which left him without strong male guidance for years and contributed to feelings of insecurity that were exacerbated by the bullying of other kids at his school. Yeah, that may or may not be true. There's some speculation on Reddit that he had family money as the result of a furniture store. And there

is a prominent Texas, Louisiana furniture chain named Johnson, but that's also a pretty common name. No, he seems like he would be involved with like wood and it seems like there's what he does. He does have the skin texture of a nice piece of cured oak. So Brian himself makes two claims about his childhood. The first is that he was bullied constantly. He describes his life as a kid as a living hell, adding I was the only one of my kind at my school. I think that means short person, which doesn't seem likely. I made matters to make matters worse for myself. I was undersized. I look funny. I did. I looked funny. I didn't have a single friend and I had absolutely no concept of self worth with Che. I got bullied

too as a kid. That does sound rough. He got the you know, says that he got beat up a lot. But he also again, I don't know how much to believe this guy's claims. But the other thing that he claimed that he makes about his childhood is that he was an entrepreneur from a very young age. He recalls as one of his formative events going door to door to sell newspapers with his friends with his friend Peter. I'm going to quote from Brian here. I remember Peter's pitch. He would knock on the door and go, Excuse me, ma'am, you're currently subscribed to the San Antonio light. We would like for you to renew your subscription. All you have to do is pay for Sunday. They'd say, Oh, hey, you've caught me. This isn't going

to work out. We're not going to renew. And Peter would say, Ma'am, can we come in and get a glass of water? And then he'd say, Ma'am, we're little kids. We're just trying to make a buck. Do you think you could help us out? And almost all of the time it worked out. So there you go. Yeah, from a start, can we stop for a second? That's a lot of paper in your hand. It is a lot of paper. Are we doing all of that tonight? No, no, I printed two copies in case I lost one. Okay, good. I drink very heavily at the airport. Oh my goodness. I got it because I fly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you fly. I know. It's there's only one way to fly and that's hammered. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, if Brian is a reliable source

on his life, and he is not at some point in his adolescence, he started lifting weights. He tells a few versions of this story and one he was bullied. But the fact that he was bullied was a good thing. And this is something that he says because it acted as a catalyst that allowed him to impose his will, his words on his body by lifting weights, which is an odd way to describe getting in shape. But I guess, you know, so so he was a bully. Yeah, my guess is that maybe some of this was turned around and reality and he was like helping those other kids bullying them. You're not going to feel less like that after this quote because he's what he says about getting jacked as a teenager. That was my right of passage

and it changed me and forged me into the evolutionary hunter, the unrelenting fighter, the serial ancestral entrepreneur that I am today. Because everyone knows the cavemen were out there making deals hustling. The reason the cavemen beat the Neanderthals is they were better at getting VC funding. Everyone in San Francisco knows that, obviously. So the other more believable version of the story is that his mom started dating a guy who had a weight set and Brian started using it and got results. So this guy bought him a bench and some weights and that was it. Soon Brian was jacked and he noticed that girls at school started paying more attention to him. Instead of making fun of him, other boys were jealous. The defining

moment of his adolescence, bear with me here, was when one of his friends compared him to Mark Wahlberg, a statement that he says probably changed my life forever. Wow. You shouldn't want to be compared to Mark Wahlberg. No, I mean that's like a low bar. I'm very pro people getting fit if that's what they want to do, but don't be like Mark Wahlberg. Mark Wahlberg should be less like Mark Wahlberg. We have one photo of him from his late teens or early twenties and he is indeed quite swole. The photo shows him standing beside a swimming pool of what I guess is a fairly large house in the North Texas suburbs. Savor this last photo of him. Well, that's a normal, likely he's in good shape, but he doesn't look, that's

not like a guy who's on a shitload of gear or anything. He's not, he's clearly has no like hair on his body, which I find weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean that is a little bit odd, but I grew up in Texas too. I get it. You got to do what you got to do to stay cool down there. Okay. So, but that's, you know, he's in very good shape, but he's a pretty normal looking person, I would say, like obviously extremely fit, but not, not as he will become someone who is very clearly putting a car worth of steroids into his body every single month. So after he got swole, Brian started taking school more seriously. He got into Texas Tech, a pretty good school where he got pretty good grades. He got a

degree in biochemistry or as he said it in another interview, a degree in biology and chemistry. I think it is a bio Kim BS. So he got his bachelors. He said he was gunning for a medical degree at some point and in one interview with Buzzfeed, he claimed that he got into a medical school, but dropped out during orientation. No, no, no, no, that's not a thing. No, that's good. This is journalism. We're doing research live. You don't do that. I mean you drop out later, but you don't drop out during orientation. You stick around and you have the parties and you go through the whole thing and you tell undergrads, I'm in medical school and then later you drop out, but you don't like to do it during orientation.

That's what a serial liar and he does. He claims that. So at age 21, he says he started working for the pharmaceutical industry as a sales rep. He says they scouted him. This is all questionable. I don't know. But you know, he says his career as a pharmaceutical sales rep quickly led to a lucrative six figure salary, which is possible. And if it's possible, there's only one product. I think he was probably pushing in those years given the time. For sure. This guy was selling dick pills. Oh, dick pills. I was going to say opiates. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. He did that too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I ask you a question real quick? Absolutely. He came from, would you

say modest means or would you say I think he came from like an upper middle class to like rich background, but it is unclear. Okay, just real. Hold on. All of the early photos of him like I wait. I'm sorry. Hold on. There's a bingo. Oh, shit. Did you guys bring your cart? Unbelievable. Oh, slackers, weak fans. The liver king would never hold on second. Someone born on third pretending they're self made. Sorry. I'm just checking that off right now because I feel like that one is going to go down. Yeah. Having come from a similar area to where this photo was taken. That's not a tiny house backyard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Go on. More common in Texas, but yeah, I'm going to guess upper middle

class at least. So Brian meets Barbara, his future wife in 2004. Maybe he's going to lie a lot about the year 2004. So keep that in your head. Now he says he was a pretty aimless guy at this point. He was snowboarding and surfing and by his own admission, refusing to flush toilets in public restrooms. I don't know why he gives that detail. I don't know why he gives that detail, but he does because there's a drought and because he fucking care. There was no one in Texas ever acted as if there's a drought. That is not something we do. I can remember the last summer I was there. It didn't rain for 80 days and had like more than 115 degree temperatures for each of those days and everyone's lawn was green. Some of

them were on fire, but they were green. So yeah, he meets this. He meets this broad Barbara in maybe around 2004 and he says that this is what convinced him to get more serious about his life. And I do think she had an influence on him. Most sources will note that she was a dentist, which is kind of true, but not all the way true because what she actually is, is a holistic dentist. Yeah, that's the good stuff. Everybody's tasting that getting that flavor in, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So they open a practice together. He's her business manager and she handled the dentistry. Now, Cobbett, I know what you're wondering right now. What is a holistic dentist? Yeah, I absolutely am. It means treating your patients

teeth and gums with a whole body approach, viewing their overall physical and psychological state rather than just keeping your eyes on their mouth. Now that could be a thing. Yeah, there might be a thing. No, there's stuff where like tooth pain like can be a sign of a heart attack or something. It can be referred, right? Like that's a thing. I learned that on Frasier. Are you going to tell me that that Niles Crane lied to me? You think like left arm pain, tooth pain, not tooth pain usually is like a cavity. That's not what that's not what season five of Frasier said. Well, I mean, I'm not going to go against Frasier. So this this might make casual sense. But no, holistic dentistry is more or less

nonsense. So here's the thing. A holistic dentist is not an actual professional medical term. It is a term any dentist can choose to call themselves without any additional formal training. Most holistic dentists oppose the use of fluoridated toothpaste, which is dumb and unscientific. They also have a tendency to urge patients to replace cavity fillings made with amalgam on the logic that that contains mercury and is unhealthy. Now, amalgam has been replaced by a lot of dentists with better options. But most all dentists will agree that if you have perfectly good fillings, it is unethical for someone to tell you to take those out and put in new ones for no reason, which is what holistic dentists do

a lot. It's not great. Now, more fucked up is the fact that holistic dentists tend to obsess over stuff like detoxification, which is not a thing and urge their patients to take up weird bespoke diets to fix their teeth. Traditionally, vegan diets were advised, which is at least probably not unhealthy. You could have a perfectly healthy vegan diet. But nowadays, a lot of them have gone for the carnivore diet, which is a little bit more problematic. Let me just real quick. Hold on. I wasn't expecting to get to this so early in the episode. Okay. Okay. Okay. What are we hitting? Unqualified medical advice. And I'm just going to just get this one out of the way now. Makes Kaveh sad. Yeah. Oh,

this next one's going to make you a lot sadder because I want to quote from an article on holistic dentistry by McGill University. You guys might remember from the CIA episodes. That's exactly right. That's where all those horrible experiments were held. Good. Whoever that was, you're getting this if I get them all today, baby. These practitioners don't believe in doing root canals, alleging serious health risk by sealing bacteria at root end while opting for ineffective therapy or extraction. Some some recommend removing perfectly functional asymptomatic teeth with root canals and replacing them with more biocompatible and costly implants. No, that's problematic. Now, I don't know precisely what kind of who shit Barbara Barbara

got into. But based on the information we have, I kind of suspect that Brian's interest in alternative medicine starts when they get married because she is professionally into it. And he's going to get increasingly into it as he grows older. Now, about five years in, Brian and Barbara owned the building that their practice was in, and they were making by Brian's claims about five million a year in revenue from this and a couple of other businesses that Brian had started. We don't know what all of those businesses were, but by the late aughts, he had started selling nutritional supplements. Now, that's an industry that never causes bastards, right? The supplement industry, it's well regulated. It's not entirely

a con run by the state of Utah. It's all good stuff. Sarcasm. That's sarcasm. I know. I've seen it. Brian's primary business was ancestral supplements. And it seems to have started in 2016, although the first way back machine capture of it's in 2017. And one sec. There we go. Can we get that picture up? There we go. So this is what they're selling. These are pills of grass fed beef organs. Now from New Zealand. Well, of course, the best cows come from New Zealand and the best organs come from the best cows and the best way to eat organs is in a pill. That's that's how I eat my organs. So this product was billed as a way to get the massive health benefits of eating organ meat without chowing down

on all of those pesky organs. Here is how the website described the benefits of eating organs. Traditional peoples, Native Americans and early ancestral healers knew that eating the organs from a healthy animal would strengthen and support the health of the corresponding organ of the individual. For instance, the traditional way of treating a person with a weak heart was to feed the person the heart of a healthy animal. Similarly, eating the kidneys of a healthy animal was believed to support urinary ailments and overall kidney health. Pancreas was fed to people with digestive problems and spleen was fed to people with immune and blood deficiencies. What? So people. I have how many organs should I be eating

every day is my question. This is what I'm going to for a moment. If I can have a real moment with you for a little education on something, whenever you hear a medical type thing, whether it's like Gwyneth Paltrow or the liver king, and they use the words ancestral or ancient and they're trying to sell you something, it is automatically known to be bullshit. It is like the top tower bullshit power. It isn't ancestral. It is not ancestral. It's not. It's not. I mean, that is a selling point that drives me fucking crazy every time I hear it. Like organ meats have a lot of valuable nutrients in them, but also eating a ton of meat has a lot of health consequences to you as well. That's correct. Yeah. In like,

well, I'm sure we're going to get into this fucking ad nauseam, but like, well, all meat diet is not what I would recommend. You say that, but I have a quote here about how all of this nourishing tradition is backed by science. And this is a very sciencey quote. No isotopic labeling studies and animals have shown conclusively that when eaten, organs and glands selectively travel to the corresponding organs and glands and concentrations. Now Kavek Kavek, this research done at the University of Scotland in Edinburgh, lends credence to the ancient practice of eating animal organs to help ensure health in one's corresponding organs. And that's from Dr. Ron Schmidt in D never heard of him. It's absolute horses.

You do not know what an indie is. I've heard of it. And you're making me so sad. So angry. And it's just, you know, I swear it's not all. I mean, I could have made so much more money. You could. You could have made a lot more. We both could have made a lot more money. It's not my retirement plan is to just say I've been canceled and start working for, I don't know, Stephen Crowder or something. So Kavek, would it help you out to know that Dr. Ron Schmidt was a naturopath and militant raw milk activist? That makes sense. I found his obituary from 2017. And it notes he covered in depth the difficult history of raw milk in the US, arguing that even though raw milk was responsible for many illnesses during

the 1800s and early 1900s, it was also unfairly savaged by the emerging pasteurized milk industry to eliminate raw milk is a competitive threat. Yes. Yes. Thousands of babies shot themselves to death. But but what about the pasteurized milk industry? What about big milk? So the first version of the ancestral supplements website doesn't make a huge deal about liver, but it does call it the body's superfood and natures. This is funny. Only meaningful source of vitamin A. You can't get it anywhere else if you're not eating liver. Now, tomatoes, kale, eggs, cantaloupe and fish oils, that's not a comprehensive list. Never heard of them. All have a lot of vitamin A in them. Carrots have beta keratin, which is a precursor to

vitamin A. More to the point, vitamin A deficiency is a serious health condition, but it pretty much doesn't exist in the United States outside of weirdos who have weird diets. Not all weird. Some people, obviously, there's actual health conditions, but it's extremely rare. It's more of a thing in like parts of the world that have less access to a good food supply and people are like legitimately starving. I don't like it when you know medicine like that. Well, I know. I know lots of medicine. I feel uncomfortable when you're like right about I'm I'm I'm I'm an expert on all sorts of medicine. I fucking hate to hate. Yes. I am a Reverend Doctor according to the state of New Jersey. I am an actual doctor who is

ordained in the Universal Life Church. I am a Reverend Doctor. This guy is just a fucking podcaster. Well, I will just say have Kava sign an autograph for you after the show and then just write Vicodin on that fucker and you're good to go. He found the loophole. That's probably how it works, right? Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, obviously vitamin A deficiency is serious when it exists, but it basically doesn't exist in the United States. That said, eating too much vitamin A can cause horrible health problems. This is almost impossible to do if you are a person who eats a diet that is vaguely recognizable as a normal diet. Again, if you're getting your vitamin A the place most people get it from fruits and

vegetables and like eggs and stuff. You're not going to get too much vitamin A vitamin A like overdoses occur exclusively in people who take too many supplements and symptoms can include migraines, blurred vision, nausea, dizziness and a lack of coordination because your nervous system starts to kill itself ish. That's broadly accurate. That's a board question. So despite all this, Brian's business was a huge success. He entered the supplement game just at the height of Alex Jones's business and he seems to have taken some notes. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Like I said, we're hitting them all, baby. I don't want him to see, but you guys can see. I hope you guys can see. And for people

listening at home, I'm sorry. You know what? I also want to say, normally, we'll be obviously putting this up on the podcast feed. Normally, we do ad breaks and this is where the ad break will go. But since y'all aren't going to hear an ad, I'm going to give you an ad I wasn't paid for for a product that I this is just for a thing I think people should buy. So this is called a flipper zero. Has anybody ever heard of these motherfucking things? So you're on a watch that lets you that lets you basically like scan and replicate infrared and other kind of different like signals that like remotes and stuff you. So one thing you can do with this is to say you're at CES and say you are harassing the representatives

at their booth. You can from your pocket repeatedly turn off all of their televisions. Theoretically someone could do this. Another thing you can theoretically do with the flipper zero available now on Amazon dot com. Can I tell you is open the charging ports of every on every street you walk. That's what he does. You can theoretically do with the flipper zero. That's what he uses it for. Just the fuck with my car. People have also figured out how to use them to shut off those robot dogs. So they're pretty cool and they're not going to be legal forever. Pick one up if you can. Back to the show. Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot the all black security detail normally assigned to him was called off. They're the

ones who would not allow him to stay at any hotel with balconies. That security union was reassigned. There was a man there who would just fall in and contract. Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot two black firemen stationed across the street and one black police detective who was surveilling King were all taken off the job. What was the emergency that caused you to be moved to another fire station. Did you ever ask what this was all about. Yes. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic occult murder. The man walk caves. I say the

Lord works in mysterious ways. A brand new immersive fiction podcast. He ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller. Part supernatural horror. The truth. Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden in lore. Starring West world's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Casseghi from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave. But only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies during the man to walk caves. M. A. N. T. A. W. A. U. K. A production of I heart radio Longhouse television and psychopia pictures. Every minute I remain in Manowar County. The

thicker the fog gets. Listen to the man to walk caves now on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty and on my podcast on purpose I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant. The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Hart. It's not about us as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lewis Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day being kind to yourself because I think for a long time I

wasn't kind to myself and many, many more. If you're attached to knowing you don't have a capacity to learn on this podcast you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used the books they read and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon. So Brian's business is a huge hit. And yeah, one of the key things about if you're selling these kind of health products is you have to either terrify people into believing that your products are the only thing that will stop their body from falling apart or

you have to convince them that you alone can give them the body of their dreams. Now Brian knew that if he wanted to take his business to the next level he was going to have to do one of these things. So he decided to do both. In early 2021, thereabouts, Brian contacted one DS collective, which is a social media marketing firm for influencers. Now because these are some of the worst people on planet Earth, they described their business as quote a collective of global creatives who specialize in social snackable media. Does anyone else get like a visceral gut reaction when you hear snackable media? It's unreal. Great folks. It was from this collaboration that the idea of the liver king would be born. One Buzz

Feed article explains he approached us because he wanted guidance said Sam Parham, a director at influencer marketing and management agency, one DS collective, which specializes in video production and brand management for social media. One DS began filming the brand of liver king, creating short form video content to capture Johnson's extreme lifestyle. Johnson and one DS have maintained that their primary goal in building a liver king social media brand was to spread the ancestral message rather than to sell Johnson's products. One DS called Johnson the leader of the ship and solely responsible for his likeness and brand, which is a good legal idea. Now the ancestral message here was that people needed to eat

hoof to tail. This is fine. Like look, I raise and slaughter livestock. If you're going to be doing that, you should in fact use every single part of that animal. That's a fine idea in practice. But what Brian is doing is just trying to get people to buy supplements made from ground up organs he bought cast off from cattle somewhere. The stroke of brilliance that one DS had was to convince people organ meat was good for them by having a massively jacked dude eat raw liver and guts on camera repeatedly and then credit that for his giant muscles. Now, again, organ meats perfectly healthy. There's a lot of good reasons to eat it, but it doesn't work that it doesn't just magically make you jacked. There is nothing

that is particularly healthy about it. Brian had up to this point built his physique the way most muscular men do. He had eaten huge amounts of whey protein and lean meat while working out, right? And you know, careful about his diet, not drinking all that good stuff. But one DS decided if Brian like the thing to do was to have Brian chow down on raw organs and that would make people want to copy him, right? But eating raw organs sucks. So when they couldn't do that, then they would buy his supplements. That's the business plan, right? It is unclear who came up with the name liver King. There's evidence that Brian had used the name and emails for a couple of years, so probably him. But the

folks at one DS figured out everything else, including naming his fandom before it existed as this case study from their website makes clear. Can we get the next image? Oh, yeah. Now, now I'm going to point something out. If y'all aren't real steroid heads, what you got going on there in the belly region is what they call bubble gut. And it's a mix of taking human growth hormone with usually insulin. It's a thing body builders do. It helps them like pump up and stuff, but it's not a thing that just happens normally. But those are not normal. If their abs look like they are smuggling boa constrictors under their skin. What would you call those like areas right there on the exterior of his six pack? Well,

those are normally your obliques. Okay, yeah. What else do people call those? Oh, and the other side of his abs like that area right there, that deep area in which there could pool fluid. For example, what would you call that? I don't know. What come gutters, thank you. For fuck's sake. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I'm sorry. He wasn't a guy playing a guitar in a weird like church. I only recognize come gutters if they make me want to come. Right. Right. That's obviously David Koresh. As a doctor, I'm going to tell you guys right now. I don't want you to look like that. I don't know. This is not anyway. Look, so I think it's interesting to look at the way they talk about this here. Like

they name what he's going to call his fan base is primals because he's doing this whole like back to nature caveman eating things. So that's what he's going to call his people. The way in which this is all laid out. If you want to really lose your faith or just get angry in at humanity, go to the one DS website and look at their whole plan for making the liver King a brand phenomenon because we'll talk about this more. But part of what they're doing here is everybody's agreeing to make money by having this man destroy his heart, which is, I don't feel that sympathetic for Brian, but that is what's happening here. So one DS does not brag about this on their website. But one of the things that Brian

had to set up before he became the liver King was a backstory as fraudulent as it was convincing to the kind of people who make healthcare decisions based on what a large man with a tick talk tells them. So he decided to do this by claiming his sons had suffered largely unspecified health problems. He claims that they started having allergies around 2004. Now this is odd because his oldest son, Striker with a Y. Oh, just wait. Just wait. You haven't even heard a son's name yet. His oldest son, Striker is 15 and his youngest son, Rad is 13. It would only be better if one of his kids was named like killer. Look, I got to say it right now. This is San Francisco. So it's appropriate to do it. I am taking away

Elon Musk's worst at naming a baby trophy. I would rather have whatever fucking there we go. Oh, we're okay. We're on there too. I would rather be named whatever weird equation his kid is named than Striker or Rad. Unbelievable. Again, he's lying about this because he says that like they started having allergies when they were like in around 2004. Striker's 15. This would mean that like, yeah, his oldest son wasn't, yeah, none of the timeline actually like works out here. And the fact that he lies about the timeline is consistent with the fact that he lies about everything. He doesn't meet his wife until 2004. So there's no way he would have had a kid old enough that he was noticing this problem. Anyway,

as he claims, Striker spelled like the armored personnel carrier, had serious health problems as a young kid that Brian attributed to. Do you know what pandas is? P A N D A S. Oh, boy, God damn, you're making me go way back into pediatrics. I don't do pediatrics. Yeah, it's basically remember it. We're going to try not to get too much into the weeds here. It is an ailment that may or may not exist. A pediatric, the symptoms definitely exist. There's a debate as to whether or not it should be categorized in the way that some people categorize it. A pediatrician first described pandas clinically in 1998. And it was an attempt to explain that there's an there seems to be an association between strep throat, OCD

and tick disorders like Tourette syndrome. Doctors have for a very long time recognized some connection between streptococcal infection and tremors or convulsions. This is what people St. Vitus's dance was like. This is a thing that has been recognized for a while. And some parents notice it occurring alongside a rapid change in personality on behalf of the child. Doctors who are skeptical of pandas as a diagnosis will note that stuff like OCD can seem like it comes on suddenly and changes a kid's personality. And that since kids get strep throat like crazy, the fact that some of these these kids have strep diagnoses recently doesn't mean there's a causative relation. This is all heavily debated. I'm

not taking a side on this one way or the other. There's a legitimate debate here. You can find like scientists and doctors talking on both side of this. But the problem occurs because a group of activist parents have kind of latched on to pandas as a way to explain any behavior they find problematic in their kid. In various naturopathic websites and discussion forums, the list of triggers for pandas has grown from strep, which is the thing that there's some evidence for, to Lyme disease, mono and herpes. They've also added anorexia autism and ADHD to the list of illnesses it causes. And there's no scientific basis for this. These parents are well known for embracing bizarre cold remedies. Some of them

give their kids rituximab, which is an immunosuppressant mostly used for cancer patients. And you probably shouldn't give your kid just because they have like a tick. No, no, it's a whole thing to give them medicine. Yeah, probably shouldn't just be handing that to kids. This can kill children and has in the past. More often, the prescriptions are just ridiculous. One Oklahoma based company sells donkey milk as a pandas treatment. That makes sense, which is okay. I'm fine with that. Give your kids donkey milk. That's that's all right. That's like the least awful thing that these people are doing. Probably not going to do any harm. Give them some donkey

milk. They'll be okay. So Brian claims that his son's pant strikers pandas eventually got so bad that he walked up to his dad with a baseball bat and said he wanted to bash his brains in rather than deal with intrusive thoughts. Now that like that's a serious thing. I have a loved one who has intrusive thoughts as a result of OCD. And this specific anecdote is the closest to a thing Brian has said that I believe like that is a thing that occurs. That doesn't mean that it's caused by pandas or whatever. And it doesn't mean that the rest of what he says is true. But that is a thing that happens in videos made since he became the liver king. Brian claims this is what prompted him to reevaluate everything

he knew about nutrition. He was feeding his kids a normal American diet. But when he switched there in the family's diet to primal foods, mostly a mix of raw organs, bone marrow and maple syrup, all of their what? That's not what you guys eat. The maple syrup helps to go down. And this is where things get problematic for Brian. He says all of their health problems start and his children started to have a personality, which is kind of a defensive way to refer to somebody who has OCD. Like now this leaves us with one of two possibilities. The first is that striker had an actual health problem. And every time you say it's a little part of your eyes. It's rough. It hurts. The first is that this kid had an actual serious health

problem and that his dad is choosing to use it for propaganda, which is bad. The second is that he made all of this up. And that I don't know if that's worse. I guess it's better because the kid's not dealing with the thing, but also it's kind of worse morally, right? If I don't know, I actually have no idea. That's one for the philosophers. So if we assume striker had to be at least eight or nine to express something like the complex emotion he expressed to his dad and that anecdote, the earliest realistically this could have happened is 2014 or 15. The last real thing Brian Johnson had to do after coming up with this probably lie about his children was the simplest, which was to get a gigantic barbarian

warrior body. Now, as you guys saw, he's a pretty fit dude. That's a swole, swole fella right there. But normal guy muscular does not look impressive today in a world with, you know, Wayne the Rock Johnson, right? It is one of those. If you want to look at how body image standards for male action stars and movies have changed, watch this is a problematic movie in a number of ways, but watch the second Indiana Jones movie. If you look at the if you listen to the behind the scenes commentary, Harrison Ford spent months getting in shape for that and was like one of the swolest men. Are you talking about the which ones is the super racist one? Okay, good. Yeah, there was a super racist one. Okay, that is that is

the high in them. She bought that one. That one. They're supposed to be jacked in that one. Obviously, he became the sex symbol for generations of men and women. But today, if you were casting a guy with that body type in a Hollywood movie, he would be like the engineer. He'd be like the nerdy guy on the computer. I mean, like look at like seven times his body weight. Like the old Superman was a guy who had like just basically kind of a barrel like a fit. Yeah, it's things have changed over time. We'll be talking about this more later. So Brian could not simply be a fit guy and tell people to eat raw organs. That's not going to work. So he starts using the millions of dollars he has to find one

of the many friendly steroid doctors who would prescribe him a dizzying cocktail of peptides and hormones. Now, I want to note this is not an illegal process. He has a prescription for everything that he gets. And this is not a haphazard process. He's getting his blood tested. He's getting like all sorts of different like constantly. He is paying millions of dollars over time for this. You don't get this without looking going through a machine. Yeah, like there's a whole machine behind you like get this ridiculous body. Yeah. And we know exactly what he took and did because he sent a list of his workout regimen of his steroid regimen and his blood tests to several experts he didn't wind up working with. And

one of them later published it because if you're trying to okay. Yeah, my kidneys. All right. Look at this. Are you okay with this? His problem was more that he didn't think he was big enough. That's great. So obviously, this is not a HIPAA violation. Because if you just email your steroid history to a dude with a bodybuilding YouTube, HIPAA does not cover that. The dude with the YouTube is well within his rights to post that shit. Because of this, we know that the bill for his HGH alone was $11,000 a month. Now, that's a lot of HGH. He spent about $15,000 a month on total on his steroids, preparing to become the liver king. But when he and 1DS finally revealed the liver king to the world, my God,

it was glorious. And I want to roll a video for you, you beautiful people. When you realize that people are suffering and struggling and that there's a simple, elegant solution, a return to ancestral living, that's really what my purpose is now. There's this really simple way of living. It's ancestral living. It's the way that we've lived for millions of years. It's accessible. It's something you can literally do right now, today. And you can have an impact and change your life tomorrow. This is why my life's work is my mission and my purpose. It's putting back in what the modern world left out.

Now, a lot of people don't know this, but in the ruins of Gobegli Tepe, where some of the earliest human civilization was found, the largest building in the center of that town was a steroid factory. There's nothing more ancestral than spending $15,000 a month on a mix of peptides and human growth hormone, just like our ancestors. Just like our ancestors did. You know our ancestors looked nothing like that, right? No, of course not. They were tiny and thin and they were frail and they were sickly and they lived to 20. You don't want to get what our ancestors have. You want what we have. Now, you don't want what our ancestors have. It was bad. It was bad.

I don't know. I want that one plant that the Romans had that makes you not able to make babies that they then fucked to death. Oh, yeah, that's a thing. Romans had access to a perfect contraceptive. How the fuck do you all know that? What the fuck is going on? It's one of my favorite stories. It just grew in this one island and if you eat it, then you're not fertile temporarily. It was a perfect contraceptive and they fucked it to death. Holy shit. This is an educated audience. Yeah. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. I think

it's a fennel relative, actually. Don't quote me on that one, though. The fuck. So I know a lot of shit. I learned a lot of shit in medical school. I did not learn that. I did not learn that. That video does feature a man who is very obviously on a lot of steroids, unlike a used car per month of a nice used car. You could be getting like a fucking highlander with like, I don't know, 80,000 miles on it every month for that much steroids. It's so oddly specific. I love that.

I'm looking for a new... I know. I love that. But it doesn't do much to lay into the name liver king. Mostly at the start, Brian was posting workout videos and his ancestral tenants, which he claims are crucial lessons about health and wellness from ancient men. Most of them are like pretty reasonable. Like, it's good to walk around barefoot in the grass. It's nice to spend time with your family. There is a crazy one about how electromagnetic waves from your Wi-Fi are going to destroy you. We could get into that more. I think he legitimately believes it, so we won't harp

on the matter. So... Yeah, it's not fun if he believes it. It's not as much fun. Yeah. So it started out just kind of being like, yeah, here's his workouts. Here's him talking about like, yeah, you should spend time with your family. It's good to exercise. But then none of that stuff goes super viral. Like, he's not really making a big impact on social media. And then he starts posting his meals, which inevitably included weird things like raw testicles and ground-up organs. Here's the very first food

TikTok he puts out. Oh, yeah. The king here. This is what the liver king eats for Tuesday dinner. We got 10 ounces of fresh ground organs, liver heart, pancreas, plain and some muscle meat. We got a couple ounces of some chicken heart, some leftover America pork sausage, and a couple ounces of raw testicle. That completes what I'm having for dinner tonight. So I've watched a lot of the liver king, and the argument he will make is that if you're trying to support your testicles, vegetables won't do it because vegetables are not made

of testicles. If you want to support your testicles, you have to eat testicles. It's all the only thing that'll do it. Yeah, I mean, the math is pretty strong. The science is hard to deny. Yeah. So this stuff starts to get traction. But you will notice that, like, that video, which is from September of 2021, that's weird, but that's not an abnormal quantity of food, especially not for a man of that size. It's a pretty normal-sized meal, right? The people at 1DS knew right away, look, people like the raw organs, but just eating an amount

of raw organs that's vaguely reasonable, that's not going to do it for us. So here's a video he posted nine months later in the summer of 2022. Primals, primals, primals. What a day it has been. I can't wait to share all about it. This may be perhaps the most important conversation that I ever have had, and it's named not after a day of the week, but if something similar, but a king has got to eat. So you already know we're going to start with liver, with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, because liver is king. We've got a couple of pieces of bone marrow right here. We're going to scoop the pure marrow right out of it, and look at these dino shanks. I said, look, look at these dino shanks. We

got some bone marrow with soda at the bottom, and why would you eat a vegetable when you could get down and devour this testicle, and we got some carbs? Why would you eat a vegetable when you could devour these testicles? That's catchy. Look. Wait, wait, hold on. Hold on. Is he doing this because he knows nobody wants to eat balls and so they'll buy his pills or is like... Put it off. They can be okay if you cook them right. It can be a little bit like bacon. Rocky Mountain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that said, yes, the idea is that people will see his body and they'll see him eating this raw meat, and they'll probably try it and then be like, you know what sucks? He's eating huge quantities of raw organs. We'll take your pill. I'll take these pills, right? That is the business plan. Okay. That's smart. Yeah. And people like share videos of him looking like a maniac eating all of this stuff.

And from this video, things start to get gradually more unhinged. The height of which is probably this video of the liver king. You know what? I'm not even going to describe it. Let's just play this motherfucker. What up, primals? Liver king always earns what he eats. This is called earning it. Wait, what? Should I explain? No, no. Wow.

Let him just take this one in. There we go. Right here. And this is a prime testicle. Hey, everybody, Robert here speaking from a couple of months after this was recorded in a live show. Obviously, we didn't need to describe this, but I feel the need to describe the video to you listening at home in the podcast version. It is video of the liver king sitting in like a pool tube type deal or a tire. I think it is and he's pulling his truck towards him. I think they've got it in neutral and he's got like a big rope pulling it towards him and hanging underneath the truck is a set of what are technically

truck nuts, but they're just the actual severed testicles of like a bull or some other kind of large mammal now look on my bingo. I'm my bingo card. I just want to cross makes Kave sad. Yeah, again, a couple times. I just want to black it all out. Hold on a second. I'm just going to draw the whole thing in. I'm a fair man. That is legitimately funny. That's not a bad bit. I'm sorry. It's not. It's gross. Yes. Unsettling bad health advice. All of those things. Not a bad bit. Those are giant balls. They're very well. They're about normal. What were they cows? I mean, just a couple of days ago, we, we, we were slaughtered a black ram over at my place and it had testicles about that big. Yeah, they

get huge. They were giant. So if you've got like a, a, a steer or you've got like a goat or a ram of any kind, all they are is a testicle delivery machine. So the balls are massive. You are a fascinating man. Like just, you just can't not notice it. They got huge. Even my little sweet little baby, a pygmy or whatever miniature. I don't know what, what goat, little bitty, little bitty guy. I forget the name of his species, but he has massive balls. He's like the size of a small dog, but his testicles are as big as a cat. Not a cat, but a cat. Goats were domesticated in Iran. Just so you know. My goats are Angoras from Angkawa. Fantastic. Sorry. Yeah. That's where the name Angora comes from is Angkawa is Iranian

in the audience. You prove that. So that was a fun little derailment there. The liver king is almost as obsessed with testicles as he is with liver. And yeah, I actually, I got to that about him fueling your balls. Nonsense or not, his following explode, exploded the more gross, weird, raw organs he eats and the more off putting workouts he filmed himself doing. His TikTok goes from basically nothing because he didn't have or yeah, he didn't have one to about 4 million followers in less than a year. His YouTube hits more than a quarter of a million subscribers, which is, you know, okay, he had like a million and a half followers on Instagram and in no time at all, he's a bona fide celebrity. That's

about a combined seven ish million followers in the space of a year, which is pretty rare. Very rarely does somebody get that big that quickly. He continued to involve the whole family in his videos, calling his wife liver queen and naming. Oh, oh, honey, you're going to change your tune on that one in a second because he calls rat and striker the liver boys. Not never princes. That's a lateral move from their original names. I will say that. Unfortunately, he also chose to have them style their hair like Hitler youth cadets and he put them in. Oh, I'm sorry. Hold on. Hold on. Oh, good. Oh, good. Oh, good. We got another one. I don't even know how to describe this video to you. I'm just going

to have them play it. Okay, hold on. Hey, everyone, Robert again, just going to describe this video for you as well. We see the liver king and the liver queen walking towards their swimming pool in the heat of the day where the liver boys have like a table thing floating over the pool filled with gigantic raw, like probably 20 pounds worth of raw organs and they're in the swimming pool in their swimming suits and nothing else just like tearing into it with their teeth. It's profoundly unsettling. Hold on. That's got to be child abuse legally, right? Like thank you deeply unsettling child abuse. Yeah. We are so close to the game bingo. You can't. It's not good for you to eat raw organs that are sitting in the he lives in

Austin. He is in a swimming pool. It's got to be like 110 right now. It's that's not hygienic. It is not okay. And like the whole of this whole concept of like how he speaks. It sounds like he's struggling when he talks normally. He's doing an Alex Jones in the same way that Alex Jones is doing a rush Limbaugh. It's actually kind of a there's a there's a fascinating story there and how all of these accents have descended from the Limbaugh. That's like the original like right wing influencer and they all just kind of yeah amazing stuff. So he starts that video if you couldn't hear it by promising to provide proof that his boys eat like the liver king. But thanks to those leaked emails, we know that the liver

king himself did not actually eat that way. As part of the intake process with one of these consultants, he gave his schedule and diet. And it is certainly not like what most people eat as a diet. But it's also not particularly weird. Nearly all of the food he consumes comes in the form of protein shakes and yogurt with some eggs and reasonable portions of cooked red meat. He does eat two to four ounces of raw liver per day and a dose of raw bone marrow every day, which is a little bit odd. But he claimed in his interviews with these influencers that he was eating a pound of raw liver every day, which is amount and amount that would make you sick. That's too much vitamin A. It's bad for you. Don't do that. Do not

eat a pound of raw liver. Don't eat two to three ounces of raw liver livers. A lovely food to eat cooked. I study liver. I love liver as an organ. I would never eat anything close to that amount of that is a shame because I did bring a pound of raw liver. Well, it's a special night. So obviously the whole liver king persona is a lie. Eating the way that this guy pretended he eats would, if not kill you, seriously injure you in a very short period of time. His entire persona was fake. And a lot of people picked up on this and from the jump, there were people in his comments suggesting that he was obviously on gear, right? Like he is on a hell of a lot of steroids. Here's just one video of him denying that

he takes performance enhancing drugs or PEDs on the, I'm so sorry, Barstool Sports Podcast. Again, very sorry. All these ridiculous accusations. People say I take PEDs. People say I have ab implants. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can we be honest? Like you, you definitely take PEDs. You know what? Fuck it. I'm going to be out for the, I'm, I'm. Here we go. I take PEDs. I prioritize, execute, and dominate every fucking morning. Every fucking morning. But I take PEDs. I pray every day. So we both fucking take PEDs. Here we go. The whole world to take PEDs. I take PEDs. I'm on Winstraw. Don't know much about that. But, but, but people say the same thing. I got ab implants, right? Or ab, I got here. You can get ab implants

looking at ab implants right now. They look, they look pretty good. I might have to get it. The third image result on ab implants is you. This is good. I love it. Wait, hold on. That's so fucking good. It's so smart. What he did was he's like, people say I did X, which is a little bit weird, but then they also say I did Y, which is super duper weird. Like that was so smart for him to throw in ab implants. Like just to throw like everyone off the scent to be like this, like it's distracting. It throws people off like the main trail. And so he's a clever guy. He's, I mean, you don't, you don't get to where the liver king got without having a little bit of cunning fucking took my title. Yeah. Yeah. He sure

did. He earned it. He earned it. Look. So, um, yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty fun. Um, now one of the first people to call him out in a major public way was actually Joe Rogan. And look, normally if we are talking about health on this show and Joe Rogan comes up, he is not a good guy. But in this case, look, I will say one thing for the man. He's an expert at knowing who's on steroids. If Joe Rogan says a dude is on fucking gear, he's probably right. I trust Joe Rogan. I didn't have Joe Rogan on this. I'm so sorry. He is not in the wrong. He called the liver king out immediately. And it's very funny because when you, when you watch videos of the liver king responding to Joe Rogan saying

he's definitely, I think Joe's exact words where he has an ass full of steroids. Um, when, when someone interviewed the liver king about it, his response was almost unrestrained glee. He didn't care that Rogan said he was a fraud. What mattered was that Joe had mentioned him and that's sensible because right? His entire business is I want to get in as many people as possible, right? I want everyone looking at my shit and some number of them are going to buy my weird organ supplements. And that's what actually matters. So through late 2022, the liver king escalated his stunts, traveling to a series of exotic locations to hunt with native tribes. This is always what he calls them. This is, if you want to appropriate

some culture, the liver king is the, is the king of cultural. I've never seen it done this well. And by well, I mean very badly. Um, so he posts these little 20 minute YouTube videos and I think he was hoping they were going to be like a backdoor pilot to getting a TV show deal, right? And he was going to go travel the world eating with native tribes as he calls it. The problem is I don't think the liver king actually knows how to hunt and all of these videos are supposed to be him hunting with people. Now I'm basing the fact that I don't think he knows on the hunt, how to hunt on the video sacred hunt, which the liver king filmed on his own 500 acre ranch in Texas. The video shows him hunting a deer

with rad or striker. I forget which one, but the kind of hunting they're doing is the kind that you can do when you have five. So if you have a bunch of land, right in the large parts of the country, including Texas where he lives, whitetail deer in particular overpopulated. And so you can kind of just hunt as many deer as you want on your own land. And one way that people particularly, I knew a lot of folks who were poor, but they had like family land or something and a big way they would supplement their diet is by hunting deer. And you just like leave out some apples or something like that and you shoot them. It's not particularly sporting, but they are a species. We've killed their native predators and whatnot.

You know, it's the thing that said it is not what most people would call hunting, right? What he does is even less hunting than that because he is on his own land and he has three guides who are there to help him find the deer and flush it out so he can shoot it at long range with a rifle. Now look, that's not really hunting, but okay. To make things grosser, the guide that he hired is I actually don't know if the guide is an indigenous person. They don't make that claim. I don't know much about this person. I wasn't able to find much, but I'm already getting uncomfortable. I'm going to play this clip. It is rough. This is bad. If you're hunting to the point where you have to like stalk an animal, you

don't want to smell like stuff. For example, burning sage. First of all, I like that the dude looked like he was Middle Eastern. I'm not going to make it clear. He was one of my people just out there just being like, here's some falafel. He's making money. You're ready to go. Put the Baba Ganoush on you. Now go hunt the deer. The way they hunt, they're just like walking through the woods, and then the guy stops him, and he says, I'm going to send one of my guys to flush the deer out, and you shoot it when the deer runs out. Look, that's a perfectly reasonable way to get meat. It's not necessarily hunting. It's not a sacred hunt. Bear grills would do better than that. That's the bare minimum. I agree. Obviously,

this is all very, very fun. Now, it's also kind of worth noting that guide. You could see it in some of the clips is a lot taller than him. The liver king usually doesn't let himself be filmed next to other men who are taller. But the truth is he's five foot seven, which is fine. But it's really funny that he's he he puts it when you watch 30 hours of his videos like I have. There's like two or three times where he's next to a dude because he doesn't want people to see that this really highlights how much I worry about you. Sometimes if you really want to be the liver king, then be a short liver king. Yeah, be a short king. There's nothing wrong with that. Perfectly honorable. Short Kings. Anyway, there's some

out of you out there. I know it. So after this video, he goes all over Africa and South America to film himself watching other people hunt and then eating organ meat, often meat that like they don't have enough of because they're like, yeah, it's kind of it's grody. In one interview with Buzzfeed, here's how he described the experience. When you hang out with primitive culture tribes, that's his words. Look, that's his words. I know it's bad who don't know how to open a bottle of water or even know what a phone is. You are I know it's rough. You are seeing people laugh more than you ever have in your life. In the Amazon, my cameraman was hit with an arrow at his chest during a hunt. He wasn't injured. But you know how

hard those hunters laughed. They laughed at everything. Everything is so hilarious to them. They were trying to kill you, Brian, because you're a dick. Also, they know how to open bottles of water. And I'm going to guess most of them have smartphones. I've been doing like every refugee camp I have. People have phones. It's not uncommon. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. Johnson remained evasive when asked how he was able to enter indigenous communities. It takes some finessing to let us come in. But you know how it is. So I don't, Brian. Yeah, tell us. Well, I'm going to tell you. So this is all very racist. It's also untrue. All of the tribes that liver King visited have access

to water bottles and again smartphones. Buzzfeed seemed mystified at how he arranged these embeds. But like 30 seconds of Googling made it obvious. It turns out that a lot of people who are members of like hunter gather tribes in these parts of the world are desperately poor in modern terms. And you can sometimes pay money to go hunt with them because they need money to survive. And so this is a thing that you can just kind of buy your way into doing. This is the case with the Hadza tribe who he visited last year. I want to play you a segment from that video first. The Hadza, the wild Bushman. They don't cultivate anything. So this is what we're doing now is we are going to hang out with the Hudson.

No, he does not wear shirts. Never had a shirt. Notice how many times he puts his hand on a fucking tree. There's like four in this video. I'm going to do it again in just a second. There he goes. So much tree touching. So for several minutes, Google, that is rough. Several minutes Googling found two different companies that offer travel experiences with the Hadza, starting at $2,000 to $3,000 per person to go out and hunt with them. And again, they're trying to survive in a world that is incredibly difficult and that has made their lives a lot harder and is consistently encroaching on the land that they used to hunt on, that's polluting it, that's making

it a lot harder for them to live the way that they used to live. Get what you can out of guys like the liver king. I'm just trying to say there's nothing mysterious about how he arranged these embeds. This is a thing that tourists do actually all the time. I found a 2020 account from a guy named Max Waugh who paid for the same experience as the liver king. Here's what he wrote afterwards. In the moments following our departure from the Hadza Bay camp and in the subsequent months and years, I've reexamined our experience with the tribe and sometimes questioned what we saw. How much of it was a genuine experience? How much was staged? Before we left, they tried to sell us their bows, arrows and bead

trinkets, tempting, but I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get a bow and arrow set through customs. The next day as we drove through a nearby town, we saw two of the boys walking around in t-shirts. The day before, the men had all been decked out in ragged shorts and little else. Maybe some beads and animal hides, but no shirts. Had they dressed down for our visit? Even today, I wonder if we were getting a genuine look at the Hadza way of life or if most traces of Western influence were carefully tucked away when tourists were around. And like, yeah, man, that's why you paid $3,000 to hang out with them for a day. It's like it's a business. They put on a show for you. That's what they're supposed to do. That's

how they're making a living right now. And the liver king is pretending that they're living the way, the ancestral way that he did. And one of the things you might notice is that, because he goes and he hunts with them and then they all eat organ meat together. And if the thing that he was doing worked the way he says it is, there would not be a gigantic size discrepancy between all of them and him, you might notice none of them look like the liver king because they do not have $15,000 a month to spend shooting HGH into their ass. They look healthy because they have like a normal diet. They look like people who eat like humans, vegetables. They know they're not not their body weight in

human growth hormones. Yes. So yeah, despite being clearly fraudulent, the liver Kings PR blitz worked by some reports. His ancestral supplements business soared to nearly a hundred million dollars a year. He continued to escalate the weird stunts, doing stuff like showing up shirtless outside the Queen's funeral to do bicep curls, which I actually I'm entirely supportive of that. That's based as hell. I'm just gonna say that's pretty rad. I got nothing against him for that one. Yeah, until in September of 2022, a bodybuilding influencer called more plates, more dates published an expose on. I fucking hate all these people. They're all the worst. When you have to spend hours watching the because you have part of

like a lot of the reporting on the liver King was done by bodybuilding and they're all they're all terrible, but some of them are honest. Like the guy who exposed him as a guy who's like, yeah, if you want to be a professional bodybuilder, you have to do steroids. I'm just so worried about you for the amount of time you spent watching bodybuilding videos like there's a part of me that I am I spending $11,000 a month on HGH. Now, of course, half that I know. So this guy, more plates, more dates publishes an expose on YouTube in December 2022 that reveals the King's steroid abuse. The liver King had sent him an email being like, here's all of the steroids I'm on. What else should I be taking? And this guy eventually

after months of the liver King saying, I'm not on steroids at all was like, well, this guy's a liar. I'm going to expose any other steroids. I could fit into this myth. That's that is what he's doing. It's actually if you watch the video, it's interesting because this guy is a steroid influencer, but he knows his shit. And he talks about like why he's doing what he's doing. It is kind of I did find it kind of interesting. But yeah, right after this comes out, everybody's making fun of the liver King, he goes viral for being a gigantic fraud. And immediately thereafter, the liver King puts out a video confessing that he'd lied about taking PEDs. And he had a justification that I might call peculiar.

Oh boy, y'all aren't ready for this shit. Primal. I'm making this video to apologize. Because I'm embarrassed and ashamed. Because I lied. And I misled a lot of people. I've stated that this is a complicated as fuck topic. At least to me it is because before social media, I was rich and anonymous. And after social media, I'm still rich, but no longer anonymous. And I never expected this kind of exposure in the public eye. It's been tricky as fuck to navigate. Well, clearly I did it wrong. And I'm here now to set the record straight. Yes, I've done steroids. And yes, I am on steroids monitored and managed by a trained hormone clinician. Liver King, the public figure, was an experiment to spread

the message, to bring awareness to the 4,000 people a day who killed themselves. The 80,000 people a day that try to kill themselves are people are hurting at record rates with depression, autoimmune, anxiety, infertility, low ambition in life. Fuck you, man. So that's pretty bad, right? Fuck you for bringing him into my life. That's why he's a bastard. The whole, I had to spend $15,000 a month on steroids because people are killing themselves. I had to teach you. He's Jesus. Hold on. Hold on. Would you call that persecution complex? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I do love his argument that like, if only if only all of those suicide victims were eating more raw organ meat. Oh, I was trying to save lives. So upset. It's

pretty offensive, right? So that's pretty evil. Like that's actual evil. That's the first thing he's done. That's really upset me. Yeah, really, really. We have to build to it, but that's legitimately evil. Yeah. Damn him. He's he's a pretty bad person. So this is why I've declared him a bastard. The other stuff is gross and weird and kind of funny. But the reality and obviously I don't I don't actually have like an issue with people using steroids. Again, I think that performance enhancing and drugs, drugs should be completely legal in sports because it's more fun to watch. Look, they're already mortgaging their bodies for money. It's already fucked up on an ethical level. Just not lying about it isn't any

worse. Anyway, people checking my medical record right now. I don't agree with you above statements. I do. I do. I mean, look, there's two kinds of world class professional athletes. There's the ones who are on steroids and the ones who are on steroids. We don't know how to catch with your analysis tests. Yeah, Russians. Yeah. But yeah, this is what's actually evil, right is the whole thing that he is. He's trying to claim that like I am doing this because I think that the health advice I have will stop people from killing themselves when as we're about to talk about the reality is he is contributing to the suicide epidemic and everything that he's doing. And this is where we have to get kind of serious

for a minute because suicidal ideation is hugely correlated with body dysmorphia disorder, something I've dealt with, something that a lot of men and a lot of women deal with. The rate of completed suicide among sufferers of BDD is what one clinical journal that I read described as markedly high. And guess what? The percentage of American men dissatisfied with their own appearance has tripled in the last 25 years. By some accounts, BDD is as common now among men as it is among women. One 2022 study showed that 54% of men in the United States have signs of BDD compared with 49% of women. The soaring rates of body dysmorphia disorder among young men have a body count and it has a lot to do with why male suicide

rates in the United States are at an all-time high. The explosion of BDD among men is not solely caused by the fact that every single male movie action star and influencer seems to take steroids and spend millions on personal training to look inhumanly jacked. But it is not a non-factor in that. It does play a part in those deaths and in this problem. In 2013, one expert estimated 20% of Hollywood leading men used PEDs like the liver king and today the number is substantially higher. Some male actors have spoken up about this. Channing Tatum on an episode of the Kelly Clarkson show rejected praise for a topless picture of himself in the Magic Mike movies saying the routine that had given them him that body

had been made possible because it was unhealthy. Zach Efron, who got into movie star shape for the 2017 Baywatch movie, has admitted to suffering from severe depression due to body image issues afterwards. Those guys played their role in the problem too, but they've also clearly made an effort to grapple with what is happening to them and what happens to young men as a result of Hollywood's relentless need to serve us male role models who are not muscular in a way that human beings can become naturally. The liver king, knowing all of this, made inspiring a generation of eating disorder victims his business and so did the sick fucks at the OneDS Collective. Now, I could go on a lot more of a rant here,

but this is a nice time night and we don't need to do that. So, instead, I'm going to close from a clip from last year's liver king Christmas video and I need to explain what's happening in this video to you because it's going to look like unhinged nonsense otherwise. So the liver king has a chef and since he mostly eats raw organs, I don't know how much sheffing is involved, but he does have a chef who seems to live on his compound in Austin with him. And for the holiday one year, the chef created a Christmas tree of raw organ meats and other raw meats, which it's very funny. It was set up that he's going to have friends over. We're doing this dinner. I'm going to heat the center of this Christmas

tree of raw organs and cook it for everybody, but it becomes grosser and grosser over time. And without saying so, they give up and it makes, like, after the point that we watch, you guys are going to see this fucking thing. It disappears from the video and they just pretend it was never there. He serves them a normal meal and just watch and keep an eye on this fucking chef's face. To our Christmas tree. You want to make sure not to overcrowd your Christmas tree whenever you're putting on ornaments. So you want to kind of spread these out evenly. Also use the ornaments as an opportunity to hide any bot spots that may or may not be on your tree.

Look at his fucking face! Look at his fucking face! That man is dead inside. Oh, that's the liver king. That's fucking horrible, man. It's so good. It's so good. Except for all of the bad stuff. It's pretty good. Is he still like a thing? Yeah, he's doing videos. I've watched his most recent. He's claiming now that he's like two weeks clean from steroids and is like posting his body. No, of course not. He's lying. But it also, one of the things that's really funny, because he got exposed by like these grind set influencer bodybuilding YouTube channels. And they all were really critical of him, but they all are critical of him because they're like, well, his message is really good. And it's like, well, no, it's

not. No, his message is nonsense. His message is like, you should eat raw meat and work out five hours a day, which is like not a thing that people can do. So I'm sorry, just but what is so his connection was to those pills that he made? Clearly, that's where he makes his money. He makes his money. Yeah, like if he is he from from what we know, like wealthy because of it. Yes, he's made a shitload of money. This guy's made so much more money than than I don't know, let's say any ER doctor you'll ever meet. Oh, God, that's not saying much. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking ER. Are there any ER doctors in here? Good, because they suck. Fuck. I'm just kidding. I love ER doctors. But it does frustrate

me on such a deep level that like, I could use this. We could listen. We could make a lot of money. We just talk right now for real business. This sidebar sidebar real quick. Even my GI hepatology background, your understanding of how bastards work, we can make a shit ton of money with some sort of supplement. So like like it would be like a ram dick or something. Yeah, we have to use something that's like cheap because it gets thrown away and we just convince people to take horse piss. Horse piss. Horses are pissing all the time and nobody's monetizing that. Have you seen how strong horses are? Do you want to run faster? Do you want to be faster than you? I'm sorry they do. But that power can be yours if you

drink their piss. Fucking horse piss. Yeah, or Gatorade. We'll just call it Gatorade. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck. It's beautiful. I'll go hunt with somebody and then pretend that it's I killed the animal because I drank enough piss. It'll be great for for fun just before we close up. If you like music, right? I like music. You like music. No, no, like like like Andrew Tate and and the Amazon guy. I've never understood the power of the Amazon guy. Okay, I forgot his name briefly. Sorry. You like you like but you like different genres of music. If you were to make this like epic into like a musical song, what kind of musical would it be? Would it be well? There's actually

only one genre. I think it's really music. It's God, but thank you. Fuck yeah. Oh, did I did I get one? There we go. What's it now? Listen, I hope that you stab anyone in when I threw that. Is everyone okay? Okay. Thank you. We got a couple of minutes left. We got a couple of minutes left and this is our first live show since I don't know a couple of things went wrong since the start of 2020 when I was last in here. This is our first live show in a while. We're not live in the studio anymore. And so there's a couple of bits that that are beloved among the fans that we haven't gotten to do for a while. But we have that opportunity. Could somebody please bring their bagels up to here? Oh,

wow. Yes, please. Oh, thank you. Perfect. Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot, the all black security detail normally assigned to him was called off. They're the ones who would not allow him to stay at any hotel with balconies. That security union was reassigned. There was a man there who had just blown in and a contract on my life. Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot, two black firemen stationed across the street and one black police detective who was surveilling King were all taken off the job. What was the emergency that caused you to be moved to another fire station? Sure, there was no emergency. Did you ever ask what this was all about? Yes. And then what were you told? Told that I didn't

dread. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This case has all the markings of a ritualistic, a cult murder. The Menowar Caves. I say the Lord works in mysterious ways. A new immersive fiction podcast. Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil. Part psychological thriller, part supernatural horror. The truth? Sometimes it's revealed in the intersection of facts. Sometimes it's hidden to the lore. Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Kithegge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one

returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Menowar Caves. MANTAWUK. A production of iHeart Radio, Blumhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Menowar County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Menowar Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty, and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah. Everything that has happened to you can also be a strength builder for you if you allow it. Kobe Bryant. The results don't really matter. It's the figuring out that matters. Kevin Hart. It's not about us

as a generation at this point. It's about us trying our best to create change. Lewis Hamilton. That's for me been taking that moment for yourself each day, being kind to yourself, because I think for a long time I wasn't kind to myself. And many, many more. If you're attached to knowing, you don't have a capacity to learn. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon.

So first off, we have this is just one of my favorite machetes. It's a CRKT machete. One of the best batoning machetes you're ever going to have really good for splitting wood, good for waving when you're drunk. It's not even that sharp, so it'll just make a rough gas. Come on. Okay. And then this is my so I have a story with this knife. It's amazing. Look at that American flag, fake gyms, perfect, perfect knife. So I got this. This is a Bud K original. Some of you know how special that is. Who the fucking knew what a Bud K original was? A hero. I'm watching you, man. I get I get packages from fans from time to time. And about a year or two years ago, I got a package that was like 30 of the worst knives

you've ever seen in your life and a note where someone was like, Hey, Robert, big fan of the pod liked you for years. My dad started to lose his mind a couple of years ago. And I don't know why, but the thing he did was repeatedly order knives from the Bud K There was a huge room full of these terrible knives when he died. And we, you know, we sold the ones that we could help pay for the funeral. I have given you all of the ones we couldn't sell. Now, my favorite knife in this bunch is, you know, like a normal folding pocket knife. Everyone's familiar with the broad shape. It's that, but it's a foot long and it weighs four pounds. And it is my friends and I, we call it the big titted angel knife because there's a drawing

of an angel with very large breasts on it. Now I would have taken it here, but it cannot fly because you can't really close it. It is terribly dangerous. The blades are just swinging around. But this knife was reasonably safe to fly with. So Kave, why don't you take the good machete and I'll take the too sharp for safety. Jesus Christ. American knife. Again, Bud K original everybody. All right. Kave, are you familiar with the rules? Remind me. It's like normal tennis, which I don't know.

All right. Love serving zero. Wow, that was, that went better than I thought. All right, hit me. Okay. That's one though for me. Terrible, terrible, unbelievable. Okay. That one did some damage. All right. All right. One for you. All right. Okay. We'll get one more of these and then we won't do any more because I don't want to cause too many problems.

If you fucking stab me with this knife, I'm going to be so obsessed. Stab someone with a knife. All right. Love serving knife. I got you right in the sternum. Good. All right. All right. All right. I think I won. All right.

Let's all, let's all get a round of applause for the cleanup crew. We'll try to deal with as much of this as possible. Thank you. I'm so sorry. All right. Now we've got four minutes, so I think we have time to answer one or two questions. You want me to do my Boston accent? Could you put it in the form of a question though? Oh, what is my Boston accent sound like? Is that the question I heard? Well,

Sophie loves this accent. I send all of my work messages to her. Hey, Sophie, we're getting sued by the liver king. Wait, wait. Can you do, did you ever watch the leprechaun when you were younger? Of course. Can you do the leprechaun? No. Please.

That's cultural appropriation. All right. I will not be a part of it. Specifically leprechaun. What's that? He owns a child sex island. Who owns a child sex island? Oh, the child sex island. Can you really own blue aprons child sex?

Well, it's not even, it's not even, it's, it's for eating. Yeah. Hunting, which is ethical. I mean, there are a couple of child sex islands, but you know, you know, look, if you are hunting children for sport and you don't, it's again, it's nose to tail, right? Like that's the ethical thing to do. So you want to get, especially since Kave, as I understand it, stem cells have medical properties and kids are full of stem cells.

I'm mostly focused on how different your crowd is than my crowd. Well, my crowd's really interested in good healthcare advice. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good point. That's fair. So what it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's blue apron. I don't know. I think that's going to be deeped out in the pretty soon. We're going to find there.

There's got, there's got to be at least like one or two other Epstein islands out there. Oh my God. There's like a whole arpeggio. Well, what's it called? Archipelago. Every time I say Archipelago, people yell at me. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.

Which you're all being pedants, but I think you're correct. Yeah. It's from heroin mart. So this is, it's a good hoodie. This is like a drug users collective somewhere in Canada. And this was as part of a fundraiser. And I got it because it's fun to wear in the TSA line,

but also I'm broadly supportive of the message after everything going on in Atlanta right now in particular. Speaking of which, our own Garrison Davis has been on the ground and it's pretty fucked up night in Atlanta. So if you, if you've got cash to burn their bail fund, I'm sure is going to be looking for some of it because all of those people are getting charged with domestic terrorism, which is, yeah, it's a real problem.

It's ugly as shit. Nothing says terrorism like breaking a bank window. For those listening, for those ISIS guys were shooting at me thinking boy, this is almost as scary as seeing a bank window get broken. For those listening at home, his hoodie is a bright yellow hoodie and there's a smiley face on it and that's there. That's all there is to it. So I don't know that's in case incredible bit.

Okay. One more question, but make it a really crude one. We only have like 30 seconds. Oh boy. I'm more worried about his heart. Although he does take NAC. So hopefully his liver is fine. That's probably good, right?

No, his liver is a fucking mess. His actual liver is a fucking wreck. His kidneys too are probably a wreck. Yeah. Cock is fine. Well, no, I don't know about that, Cobbett. I'm just saying it's probably fine. Rad Johnson and Striker Johnson.

Which of those is sillier? Seriously. Which is a sillier name? Striker? All right. You know what? Show of hands. Everybody hands up is Rad the sillier name?

I'm seeing a lot of Rads. I'm seeing a lot of Rads. Now let's see Striker. The Strikers have it. I agree. Rad is a cool name. Rad is a good name for a kid. Team Striker, very proud of you all for showing up.

Team Rad, you got to get out the vote. You got to register more people next time. All right. This has more or less been a podcast. Thank you all for showing up. And yeah, have a liver king full night. Remember his teachings, you know? Eat Christmas trees, buy organ meat,

take $15,000 of steroids every month. Or hear me out, eat mostly a plant-based diet with some meat and cheese and stuff to ornament it and enjoy your life. I have a fucking machete. Who the fuck said that? Who booed me? I know, it's the guy over there who,

that guy, I fucking, I got you. Like, I'm going to say $3,500 a month. That's a normal amount of steroids. That's healthy. Yeah, that's healthy, right? That's what most doctors will advise. No, I'm actually going to guess Lance was in. Speaking of which, Lance and I actually have a lot in common.

He's another Plano boy. One of the things I always appreciated about Lance Armstrong, outside of the problematic aspects of his career, is that he called my hometown a soulless pit, which is true. Not in an accurate way. And it's one of those things. There's basically three famous people from Plano. There's on the lower level, me, and then on the higher level,

there's Lance Armstrong and Alan Tudyk, aka Washed from Firefly. One of us was not a monster. Not a great record for Plano. Canine from Rogue One. That's fucking, that's the guy. That's it. That's it.

That's less of a touchstone. That's a lot to live up to, man. I hope he didn't wash from Firefly, but I assume he did other things in his career. No, that's it. Okay. Yeah, just those two. All right, well, you can't stay here,

but you got to go home, something like that. Thank you all for coming. This has actually been a really nice experience. I have missed being able to do the live shows, so it's lovely that we got to all get back together. And it's nice every time we hear that a show has sold out that always makes everybody feel better. It is kind of a weird job, like just reading about terrible people

and then damaging someone's mental health over a Zoom call. So getting to see that I'm also harming all of your health is what makes it all worthwhile. So please continue having whatever problem leads you to listen to this podcast every single week. But seriously, thank you all so much. You've been a lovely audience. And yeah, all I can say is eat as much raw liver as humanly possible.

Don't do that. Kava and I are now going to try to clean up some of the bagel shrapnel so that we cause as little of a problem as possible for the nice people at this theater. Thank you all. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com.

Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that on the day Dr. King was shot, the all-black security detail normally assigned to him was called off? They're the ones who would not allow him to stay at any hotel with balconies. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jay Shetty, and on my podcast On Purpose, I've had the honor to sit down with some of the most incredible hearts and minds on the planet. Oprah, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Hart, Lewis Hamilton, and many, many more. On this podcast, you get to hear the raw real life stories behind their journeys and the tools they used, the books they read, and the people that made a difference in their lives so that they can make a difference in hours.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Join the journey soon.