A Tale of Two Johnsons
The weird, wacky, 'transformative' world of extreme pro spornos Brian & Bryan
This is the first part of a two-part examination of the dad-bod defying, perma-shirtless, extreme ‘fitness’ influencers, Brian Johnson and Bryan Johnson.
(Written before Brian was arrested last week after posting disturbing/disturbed YouTube videos threatening the podcaster and longtime Liver King critic Joe Rogan.)
AT FIRST, CARESSING glance, apart from the same first and second name with a slightly different spelling, the American social media stars Brian Johnson and Bryan Johnson - no relation - might appear to have little in common. Almost two different species, hailing from two different planets.
One is middle-aged with a massive, deep-tanned, leathery, vascular, super-hench physique, with a caveman beard, house full of guns, many of them gold-plated, who blathers from his ‘throne’ about ‘ancestral living’, espousing the benefits of a ‘primal’ carnivore diet of raw offal and testicles, preferably from a bull you’ve just shot and disembowelled on your own ranch. All somewhat over-salted with a fistful of ‘fuckings’ and ‘fucks’.
The other is an apparently ageless, mild-mannered, clean shaven, intelligent, lean, almost translucent sci-fi alien vegan nerd, a self-described ‘bio-hacker’ and ‘longevity athlete’ who has willingly surrendered his free will to an algorithm, goes to bed without fail at 8.30pm every evening, and spends most of his waking hours working out, avoiding sunlight, and deploying all the technology, treatments, supplements and experimental drugs that his tech bro fortune can buy to reduce his biological age - with the stated modest goal of abolishing death itself.
But the two Johnsons, both forty-seven, and both the subject of their own new Netflix docs – Untold: The Liver King, and Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever – have more in common than you might think. In some ways they are like two pristine peas in an extreme spornosexual influencer podcast. Albeit targeting different ends of the social media market.
The Court & Cult of the Liver Drag King
Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, became famous in the early 2020s for his entertainingly ‘polarising’ YouTube (1.2M followers), Instagram (2.9M) and Tik Tok (6.1M) videos extolling the benefits of ‘intense’ and ‘ascetic’ workouts and a so-called ‘ancestral’ or ‘primal’ lifestyle, including drinking blood and consuming buckets of raw offal.
Because this is social media, the real message – and benefit – is not so much anything Johnson himself says (or declaims at the top of his voice while jabbing his index finger in the air) but rather what his pneumatic-cinematic body says. For pro spornos – or in official-speak ‘fitness influencers’ – the visual pleasure is the lesson, the manifesto, the inspiration, as well as the product. The medium is the eyeball massage.
And visually Johnson is what you would get if you took the head of one of the hairy cavemen from Wacky Races, put a Stetson on it and grafted it to Rambo’s shaved, pumped, Vietnam War winning body. Or, more succinctly, Yosemite Sam on veterinary steroids. Perhaps not my cup of peculiar, but one eagerly slurped by millions.
It is after all a crowded pro sporno market out there nowadays and so you gotta have a gimmick. And Johnson’s gimmick is to be as cartoonish and crass and gross-out or (as his media handler puts it) ‘polarising’ as possible. Hench, hysterical, hyperbole.
But like most fitness influencers, instead of a shirt he owns a ‘transformative’ back-story which ‘includes in’ the audience out there. So, he was a wimpy, goofy, unpopular, picked on kid, whose father, a US Air Force veterinarian, died when he was a toddler.
His older, bigger brother got all the attention: “He’s tall. He’s big. He had underarm hair, y’know? The girls liked him, and the boys wanted to hang out with him," explains Johnson in Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King. "No one wanted to hang out with me. I was a runt, I was ‘Little Brian’, I would go to the mirror, just start to study what I’d need to do. How can I change...” he gestures towards himself, now a big nose and two blue eyes peeping out from under all that hair and hattery, “...to change this? And so I went to the gym and got strong.”
He launches into a reverie about his first time: “I remember the sounds. It’s fucking clanging and banging. Nonstop rattle. And you’re hearing the grunts. The smell of Bengay. Like, the most beautiful fucking playground”.
You’d be correct, dear reader, to suspect that I snickered at this point – my reflexive filthy invert insinuations working overtime. But Johnson immediately makes the sexual dimension of the hyper-masculine world of his first gym explicit himself – it was his ‘first time’ in every sense.
“Let me tell you a story you won’t fucking believe. My first fucking time I ever came in my life was on a bench press. I swear to God. Oh, I figured out what fucking masturbation was after that, man! How do I get that back?”
As Johnson is reminiscing in an almost Proustian fashion – if Proust were super hench and from Texas – about his visceral sensations in his first gym visit as Little Brian, the smells and sounds, we see the vast, striated, bearded bulk of Big Brian in extreme sweaty close-up working out in his home gym. When his reverie about his discovery of the manly world of iron reaches the bit about his waking wet dream while doing bench press, the doc cuts to Big Brian pressing out a final heavy rep. (The doc prefers mild mockery to confrontation - which given its subject, is understandable.)
If the story about his first ejaculation sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous “a pump is like coming” from the documentary Pumping Iron (1977), but taken to another, social media level of hyperbole, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.
Johnson’s second orgasm seems to have been when he saw the Austrian bodybuilder in the ‘primal’ John Milius flick Conan the Barbarian (1982). Or rather, “Conan the fuckin’ Barbarian”. Arnie “was the most aesthetic, beautiful, perfect thing I had ever seen,” he recalls. (Which also sounds like Arnie on seeing his idol and role model, Brit bodybuilder Reg Parks in the 1959 sandals flick Hercules Unchained.)
It was however Sylvester Stallone in his Vietnam War movie First Blood (1982) who turned out to be his true love: “But Rambo’s First fuckin’ Blood… Oh fuck. Like… It reminded me a lot of myself…”
(Johnson is 5’7” tall. Stallone is also, in real as opposed to official inches, 5’7”. Arnie meanwhile is 6’11/2”.)
He goes on, spelling out the quasi-religious story of his salvation: “There was an opening of light, and it was those movies…” – cut to footage of today’s Johnson, as a bearded Rambo, running through the woods clutching the trademark hysterically phallic heavy machine gun and big knife. “Watching those movies, they were the best fucking closest thing I probably had to a dad… I made myself the exact man – the savage fucking king – that I always wanted to be. I could be my hero.”
He turned himself into, in other words, his fantasy primal muscle daddy. And you can too. If you watch enough Brian Johnson videos and buy enough of his supplements.
I have no idea how much of Johnson’s story of transformation is true – and the doc doesn’t bother to tell us – but this hardly matters since the body is real, or at least hyperreal, and is, crucially, entirely convincing to what appears to be his main social media demographic: young, possibly awkward, possibly a bit lost, possibly a bit lanky or porky, teen (American) males looking for a big butch and, like, totally hetero muscle daddy to tell them how to live and how to get buff.
In his very first YouTube video Johnson announces “Our young men are hurting the most, feeling lost, weak, and submissive. So I made it my job to model, teach, and preach a simple elegant solution called ancestral living”.
“Job” here means “business”. As the doc has him saying right at the beginning, “I used to hate my fucking life. And now I’ve made my fucking fortune.”
In a YouTube interview with Flagrant, he boasted about the way fatherless teens have adopted him: “You know how many fifteen-year-olds have messaged me saying ‘I wish you were my dad. I hate the fucking life that I’m living. I hate myself, and I wish you were my dad.’” Again, if this sounds a lot like Johnson talking about ‘Little Brian’ this is not accidental.
Brian Johnson is, in other words, a kind of Jordan Peterson plus pecs and guns – minus the Jung quotes and some of the hysteria. Clean your room - and give me fifty fucking primal press-ups! The conservative, highly-strung Canadian psychologist, podcaster, and fan of Two-Face-styled bespoke blazer suits was also a devotee of the carnivore diet for a while.
It’s worth mentioning that the clearly not insignificant homoerotic part of Johnson’s appeal to certain young straight males, like that of his topless heroes Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the 1980s, is based on the reassurance that there could be, like, nothing gay about the camply hypermasculine persona - or a dude who eats balls and dicks on camera.
Like many influencers, Johnson uses his family in his videos as both a proof of his successful daddyness and the potency of his principles – or in this case his ‘nine ancestral tenets’ (Sleep, Eat, Move, Shield, Connect, Cold, Sun, Fight, Bond). Flesh of his shredded flesh.
So along with his personal transformative story, we are also told how his two teenage sons were constantly sick when younger – or “weak” as Johnson puts it. Until he discovered so-called ‘ancestral living’, and the work of Mark Sissons, author of the 2012 book Primal Blueprint which evangelises a ‘back to basics’ approach, ‘adapting the simple practises of our early ancestors to our modern lifestyles’, supposedly in accordance with evolutionary biology.
Johnson’s wife Barbara tells us how she threw all the processed food out, and how the boys were then fed a strictly carnivore diet of “just bone broth, liver and meat”, and their lives simplified. Then, so the story goes, their childhood illnesses disappeared, and they were transformed into strong, healthy kids. Around the same time, 2016, Johnson launched ‘Ancestral Supplements’ – liver and bollock extract pills for those who don’t relish eating raw offal. Which of course is almost everyone who isn’t making wacky, gross-out YouTube videos about ‘ancestral living’. (Annual sales of AS are now c. $100M.)
Johnson also emphasises, repeatedly, that turning his boys into men was his “job” – just like he says it is his “job” to be a father to his young male online followers.
We see Rad Ical and his older brother Stryker (yes, those are their real names) sit uncomfortably at the table opposite their circus act dad while he pretends to talk to them, but is of course really addressing his followers and his market: “My job was turn you into men, and I’ve succeeded… I could die tomorrow, and I’d want you to say what?”
“Good?” Stryker replies, clearly having sat through this speech many times before.
“Good. I did my job.”
I also hesitate to say this, but since they’re such an important part of the sales pitch, Johnsons sons, at the spottiest and most awkward-looking time of their lives, look, after all the hype about their diet and lifestyle, slightly sub-primal. But, in fairness, they aren’t overweight and don't seem neurotic – when they could be total basket cases given the madhouse they’re living in. (The Johnson household and the US.)
In accordance with the ‘ancestral tenets’ their beds are on the floor, and there is “shielding” for the “radiation” from their phones. Skinny, slightly sensitive Rad, 15, is shown walking, gingerly, around the ranch ancestrally barefoot: “You guys are lucky you can wear shoes!” he remarks enviously to the film crew. We also see him standing shivering in a lake up to his shoulders (the ‘Cold’ tenet); gingerly practising MMA (‘Fight’), and working out in the home gym (‘Move’). He seems enthusiastic, and mostly in awe of his dad, but the alarming way he’s trying to do sit-ups and leg-raises would make me want to alert the gym staff.
“I just like working out, really,” he says to camera, somewhat shyly, “I mean, I know it’s good for me. My dad has one of the best physiques I’ve ever seen, I would say. I definitely want to look jacked. I mean, why wouldn’t I want to?”
Stryker is a couple of years older than Rad, and perhaps already thinking about trying to escape from the Liver King's court: “I do want to be pretty built,” he says. “But not, like, always stuck here, [sticks out his chest and arms] with my arms and everything.” In other words, like dad.
Sometimes they look like slightly reluctant or at least bemused participants in the Wacky Brian Johnson Primal Show, particularly when Johnson slaughters a bull and gets his family to rummage around in the dead animal’s guts, chew on its still-warm liver and testicles – and then days later, sit barefoot in the mud where it was dissected to “give thanks to brother bull”. Which somehow seems more tasteless than eating its balls.
More than once, Stryker looks like he’s trying not to laugh. Or bork.
Much of the Netflix documentary is a build-up to the famous scandal that hit Johnson back in 2022, when leaked emails revealed that, after years of vehement denials, he was a long-term user of steroids and human growth hormone – to the impressive tune of $11,000 a month.
It was a central part of Johnson’s self-presentation that his brutally eloquent and always on-display physique, was ‘natural’ – the result of ‘primal workouts’ pulling trucks and lifting industrial chains, eating only meat and offal and adherence to his ancestral tenets.
Many of his fans – or ‘primals’ as he called them – felt deceived. Some of them launched a lawsuit against him (since dropped). His media handlers and business partners claimed he had personally assured them that he wasn’t using steroids – and that they like totally believed him – and now began to move towards the exit.
Johnson published a fuck-filled YouTube apology/damage-limitation video, in which he admitted he lied, but wheeled out poor Little Brian again:
“When I talked about the 85% of the population that suffers from self-esteem issues, that’s me… This is why I fucking work myself to death in the gym. This is why I do 12 to 15 blahhd-burning workouts a week, just to feel like I’m OK. Still, I have to absolutely crush myself to do so… and hormone replacement has helped in a profound and significant way.”
$11,000 a month on HRT is quite the 'replacement’.
He also claimed that his bogus online persona was an altruistic “experiment”:
“Liver King the public figure was an experiment to spread the message to bring awareness to the 4 000 people a day who kill themselves, the 80,000 people a day that try to kill themselves. Our people are hurting at record rates with depression, autoimmune, anxiety, infertility, low ambition in life. Our young men are hurting, feeling lost, weak and submissive…”
I’ll cut him off there as by now you know how that last one goes.
The ‘apology’ misfired and was roundly mocked. Some typical comments on YouTube: ‘This is the equivalent of "I cheated on you because I love you too much"’, ‘This apology is as natty as he is.’ ‘“I lied because people are killing themselves” is a wild take.’
Hence, he agreed to this Netflix documentary. (And because has a new product to sell – ancestral resorts, ‘which will immerse guests in his way of life, including his dietary practises and fitness routines’.)
In the doc, about two thirds of the way through, he seems to decide that the primal bollocks and the hard luck stories - including crying over his lonely, neglected childhood - aren’t cutting it anymore, announcing: “I should just say everything, and then I can tell… I can just as… Fuck it, I’ll say everything. Fuck all of it.”
It may be another act, but it’s more convincing than his other one. Partly because he is speaking in what is obviously his normal, slightly nerdy voice. Not his bizarre, fake ‘primal’ ‘alpha’ drag king voice he usually uses on camera.
And it is quite the confession. ‘Little Brian’ lied about his age to get his first job at the supplement store GNC, aged 16, using his brother’s ID. He then defrauded GNC by returning empty supplement bottles to a different GNC store for cash. Then he moved onto printing money “a lot of it. And it all worked.” He also made drugs “because I knew how to.” And that quickly escalated into “International drug trading, higher stakes, higher rewards. My perception of risk is becoming distorted. I just never got caught.”
He doesn’t admit that the ‘ancestral living’ and noshing bull’s testicles was the latest and most successful racket in a long line of rackets, but the doc leaves us to draw our own conclusions.
His business partners and some other commentators are quoted as saying that what Johnson was communicating was worthy but “It’s really unfortunate that the messenger has killed the message.”
I disagree. I think the message was bullshit too – and as some commentators point out, potentially harmful in various ways. Eating less processed food does not entail eating buckets of raw meat and offal, which is amongst other things a recipe for intestinal disaster.
Which may be part of the reason why I am almost inclined to defend Johnson. Slightly. I think it fortunate that the messenger has killed the message. Even without the steroid scandal, Johnson could hardly have done a better job of parodying and mocking the snake oil – sorry, bollocks – of ‘ancestral tenets’, ‘primal living’ and related ‘paleo’ poop, by taking it to its most absurd, cultish extreme.
A fundamentalism for post-religious people, making a fetish out of an imagined perfect prehistoric past - a lost Eden of hunting and no gathering. Hence the 'ancestors' of 'ancestral living' seem to be all Adams and no Eves.
Yes, he is a con artist. But isn’t that how you get ahead in America? And given he was such a terrible actor, and that his whole appeal was based around his SFX body, those adults who believed him, or pretended to, when he said it was all down to the raw balls he scoffed, are not entirely innocent victims. His exploitation of youngsters is difficult to forgive, however. Hopefully, most of them regarded him as more of an entertainer than the concerned online dream daddy he posed as being.
He certainly isn’t the only “fitness” influencer who centres his business around his PED-saturated physique but denies using them and instead puts their astonishing aesthetics entirely down to their diet plan, supplements, or workout routine – he just got found out. (There are zillions of videos on Insta and YouTube devoted to whether various famous pro spornos are ‘natty’ or not.) Granted, some of Johnson’s claims were especially and extremely bogus – but as I say, theatrically so.
Nor is this an invention of evils social media. When the world was still a mostly analogue one, before YouTube, Insta, and TikTok, when men’s fitness mags were the main disseminators of spornosexuality, they would arouse young men’s attention, desire and envy with their muscular, shredded, often airbrushed male cover models in order to sell them a magazine full of adverts and advertorial for supplements that were not what the guy on the cover was taking. At least, not the ones that worked.
Now thanks to smartphones and Insta, those cover models are their own ‘magazine’ – both content, publisher, and advertiser. They are there to sell you stuff as well as themselves. Spornosexuality is about the survival - and thrival - of the fittest. Mostly in the sense of ‘hottest’.
Which reminds me. Beyond PEDs and ‘TRT’ there is another 'con' – one that the whole business of lusting over perfect bodies on social media is based upon.
Most of the biggest fitness influencers are big social media brands not just because they are ‘super focussed’ and ‘disciplined’, eat lots of spinach, drink cider vinegar and go to bed early, or even because they have a really relatable transformative backstory, but because they have really rare, freaky genes and sky-high metabolisms that separate them from ordinary mortals like you and me. Even $11K a month on testosterone and growth hormones is not going to make most of us look anything like them. It would just kill us.
At the end of Untold: The Liver King, we see Johnson six months after his confession about his dodgy past. He’s as massive and vascular as ever – and still apparently without a shirt to his name – but Johnson, standing barefoot in his new vegetable garden, claims he’s no longer on anything but ‘nature’. He’s no longer on a carnivore diet, either: “Vegetables and testicles – I can have all of it!”
“I was so convinced, all of the carnivore stuff, that’s what you need to really kick ass in life,” he explains, perhaps touching on the real appeal of the carnivore diet – wanting to be a predator rather than neoliberal prey. Alpha rather than beta.
“I’m convinced now that I was starving myself,” he says. To which I would add: and your wife and kids.
Eating his home-grown fruit as if it were manna from heaven, he holds it up to the sun to “reveal its structure” and intones “thank you, strawberry. Thank you, melon.”