He regularly posts videos of himself in various phases of the Barbarian, looking like a human who wronged a vengeful Greek god and has been forced to perform this terrible feat as penance. During a recent visit to New York City, the Liver King did the Barbarian across the Brooklyn Bridge, and up 5th Avenue, past the Met. He has ambitions to take the Barbarian global someday, dragging his weights across international landmarks like the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal like a meathead Christo. “These would be incredible things to do to connect with people,” he said.
The Liver King has his critics. Nutritionists and fitness experts have raised eyebrows at the choice to consume meat raw, thus potentially exposing his body to bacteria. Joe Rogan isn't the only one wondering if he's juicing. The haters are quick to assert that this isn’t a lifestyle so much as a steady stream of stunts to sell more stuff. And there have been those who have questioned his decision to raise his children in the “ancestral” way. (“Liver family, blink twice if you need help!” commented one Instagram user.)
The boys adhere to the nine ancestral tenets along with their parents. They eat the liver, sleep on slats, and exercise like soldiers preparing for battle. For his fifteenth birthday, Stryker completed the Barbarian as a rite of passage, against the express wishes of both his mother and his CrossFit coach. “I was like, I can’t believe you don’t believe in him,” the Liver King fumed. “I don’t care if he has to go out and it takes him two days. I’ll bring him food. I’ll bring him his pillow. Whatever he’s gotta do, he’s gonna do this thing.” Stryker finished in two hours.
“Somebody asked me the other day, hey, what if your kids hate you when they grow up?” he told me as we sat overlooking the lake behind his house. “I said I don’t mind. I would rather they hate me than hate themselves.”
The Liver King's politics are also, well, more than a little ancestral.
“Hard times make strong men, and there’s no requirement for hard times anymore,” he said, sitting back in his office chair, framed by a wall of nutritional supplements. “Look at shelter. Today, a realtor can find you shelter. There’s no requirement for effort or hard times if you want sex, or if you want a mate. There’s apps for that.”
The Liver King is not alone. A certain cohort of American men is hugely concerned about other American men, who it worries have been constitutionally weakened by insidious forces like smartphones, European tailoring, and Title IX (“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation, in be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”). At the top of this testosterone iceberg are figures like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who recently released a trailer for a docuseries called “The End of Men.” At the bottom, in the cold, inky depths of the internet, are the forums and subreddits full of angry, disaffected men looking to take their anger out on others. When I suggest that traditional manhood comes with some baggage, the Liver King waves his hand impatiently, like he’s swatting away a politically correct fly. He’s not worried about “toxic masculinity.”
“You know what I’m concerned about? I’m concerned that we have a soft man problem today,” he says. “Now, if going from a soft man problem into toxic masculinity happens with 5 per cent of these people, I’m okay with that.”
Around 4:30 p.m., the Liver family sits down to dinner. The Liver King walks me back to my car. Dan is nowhere to be seen, and I wonder if, wherever he is, he’s still wearing the weighted vest.
This is only the beginning for the Liver King, it seems. He’s in the process of building a podcast studio on his property, and there’s talk of a possible TV deal. “I always say you’re either growing or you’re dying,” he says, before turning back to his realm: his family, his weights, his primals, and presumably that one bull testicl* that I didn’t end up eating.
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