Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 95
In the Court of the Liver King, The Untold Story of the White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection, Real Estate Corner, Recipe Corner, and more.
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It’s Wednesday. What’s the deal?
Apologies fam. I have been down with a nasty stomach bug for the past two days. COVID negative, if you’re wondering. Back at it today. I’m a big baby when I’m sick. Big thanks to my wife for putting up with me at home. Caitlin, you are the best.
On to the read, starting with something that might make you a little ill…
In the Court of the Liver King
From the medieval trappings of his Texas mansion to his raw organ-meat diet, the TikTok star and supplement magnate promotes living like a caveman in all aspects of life.
Ok, so if you’re active on social media you’ve probably come across the man known as Liver King. He’s famous for being insanely ripped, and as his name and the image above may lead you to believe, eating a lot of liver. Raw.
Here is his GQ profile, and it’s really something. I would suggest clicking the link above just to view the pictures because words do not do this man justice.
The Liver King does own shirts, first of all. Several, he claims. I haven’t personally seen them, because when he greeted me in the cavernous entryway of his Texas mansion, he wasn’t wearing one. Nor did I see any in his closet later, which—though it contains approxily 900 identical pairs of athletic shorts and enough guns and ammunition to arm the military of a smaller nation—did not seem to contain even a single t-shirt. Nonetheless, he assured me that there are a few in there, somewhere. It was a bit like when a sign at a national park tells you there are mountain lions in the woods: You believe it, but you understand that you’re unlikely to cross paths with any.
A shirt would only muffle the Liver King’s message: that the modern world has made men unconscionably soft, and that the only way to fight back is by living more like our earliest, most-jacked ancestors. The way to accomplish this, according to the Liver King, is by following his nine “ancestral tenets” (sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, bond), doing the most brutal workouts imaginable, and, above all, eating more raw liver—the nutrient-dense meat favored by, as his website puts it, “lions, great whites, and other wild alpha organisms.”
It’s a message the 45-year-old influencer, supplement-brand owner, and self-styled “CEO of the ancestral lifestyle” born Brian Johnson wants to share with the world, and one that is communicated most loudly and effectively by the Liver King’s own bulging physique. In his videos on TikTok and Instagram, he submerges himself in ice baths, drags weights down his driveway using only his teeth, and generally subjects his body to the kind of treatment prohibited under international human rights agreements. In each of these clips, his muscles glare accusingly back at you, judging you for scrolling lamely through your phone instead of doing burpees in the middle of a crowded New York City subway car, like the Liver King did back in March. His abs are a testament to the grind, his pecs a condemnation of taking the easy way out.
The Liver King says he eats about a pound of raw liver each day, a quantity that he says is “way too much” for most organ novices, who should start with three ounces, two times a week. He says can manage the massive dose of folate, iron, and vitamins A and B because he understands the science behind it. As he puts it on his website: “I’m not a hospital, I’m not a doctor, this is not medical advice. I do, however, have a degree in biochemistry.”
Liver King has only been on social media since last August, but he’s already got millions of followers and many haters.
He even caught the eye of the High Priest of Yoked Dudes himself, Joe Rogan, though Rogan was less than complimentary. During an April episode of his podcast, Rogan dismissed the Liver King’s claims about the supremacy of liver as a “gimmick,” saying: “He has got an ass filled with steroids, is what that guy’s got.”
“I don’t touch the stuff,” the Liver King told me, unphased, adding that he’s “grateful to Joe Rogan for bringing me into his ecosystem” and that he’d love to go on the podcast someday. You can’t rattle a true believer, and the Liver King is nothing if not a believer in his own product. In person, he’s jovial and exuberant, but he proselytizes with the repetition and verve of a zealot. He rattles off the nine ancestral tenets like a monk reciting hail marys on a rosary. His speech is peppered liberally with both hoary locker-room wisdom (“How you do anything is how you do everything”) and some innovations of his own: “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?”
According to The Liver King, eating another animal’s testicles is supposed to strengthen your own:
“Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles,” he explained. “Testicles do have everything required to produce and support and strengthen them.”
So how does the Liver King?
His 8,300-square foot Spanish revival-style mansion sits on a small lake, surrounded by other sprawling houses. But it’s more akin to a military headquarters than a suburban idyll—a teeming base from which to engage in a frenzied, pitched battle against the looming evils of passivity, processed foods, and excess body fat. Four equine-scale Dobermans patrol the grounds. The hot tub next to the pool has been converted into a 36-degree ice plunge. The living room is now a sparring ring where the Liver King’s sons take boxing classes, with thick blue wrestling mats on the floor. While there is a pile of twenty axes in the entryway, there are no mattresses in the house—the family sleeps on hard wooden slats to better mimic the sleeping conditions of our cave-dwelling forebearers. The lush backyard is the site of pensive, barefoot early morning strolls and the occasional psychedelic mushroom trip. When I parked, I was immediately greeted by an estate manager, Dan, who was wearing a weighted vest for no other reason than he just feels like it sometimes.
How did the Liver King become this way?
The Liver King barely recognizes his given name anymore because, as he puts it, the Liver King “ripped open a cage and ate Brian Johnson.”
“I was in New York City and some guy said, Oh my God, it’s Brian Johnson! And I’m like, who the eff is Brian Johnson?” he said.
Unlike the Liver King, Brian Johnson was weak and sad. His dad died when he was young, before Brian ever really got to know him. He lived with his mom in San Antonio, a small, shrimpy kid who got pushed around at school. Surrounded now by his pelts and his thick, protective layer of muscle, the Liver King recalled some of Brian’s most humiliating moments: There was the time he was in sixth grade, and a guy named Felix hocked a loogie in his hand and smacked Brian in the face. Then the time, a couple of years later, when he came to school with brand new shoes, feeling cool for once, someone stole them from his locker during gym class, and he had to walk home barefoot.
Everything changed when he started working out.
At one point, one of his classmates made a remark that the Liver King says “probably changed my life forever”: he called him Marky Mark.
Being compared to the extremely fit Mark Wahlberg—then of the Funky Bunch and Calvin Klein underwear ads—was a watershed moment for Brian. “I realized other guys wanted to be like me. And for the first time in my life, girls started to take notice of me.”
Wanna hear about the Liver Queen and the rest of the Liver Family?
Before Barbara, the Liver King says he was a lesser man, who would throw his gum out on the street, and who wouldn’t flush the toilets in public restrooms. “I was good at being a man before I met her, but she made me a good man,” he said.
Barbara was a dentist, and they opened a successful dental practice together before moving on to selling nutritional supplements that support the “ancestral lifestyle” to which they had become devoted. His company Ancestral Supplements offers tubs full of gnarlier stuff than you’ll find at the local GNC—“Grass Fed Dessicated Beef Liver Capsules,” of course, and grass-fed beef brain, beef tallow, bone and marrow, thyroid, and colostrum. He claims that while his businesses bring in more than $100 million a year, social media is a money-losing proposition—at least so far.
Though the Liver King is the undisputed star of the “ancestral lifestyle,” it’s really a family affair. The Liver Queen and two “Savage Liver Boys,” Rad, 13, and Stryker, 15, make frequent appearances in his videos, chowing down with him on various animal organs, and lifting massive weights.
So what do the experts think about the Liver King’s teachings?
“A pound [of liver] a day sounds excessive, mainly because of the risk of vitamin A toxicity,” Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University told me over email. “I doubt our ancestors ate that much.” (The smaller amounts that the Liver King suggests for lay people “are probably OK if you like eating it.”) Of the Liver King’s claim that vegetables don’t have the material required to produce a healthy set of testicles? “That’s hilarious if nutritionally suspect.”
Like I said, go check the whole article for the photos alone. What a world.
The Untold Story of the White House’s Weirdly Hip Record Collection
Jimmy Carter’s grandson is unlocking its mysteries
One of the perks of being Jimmy Carter’s grandson is that you get to attend the family’s annual trip, a gathering for the whole extended Carter clan that’s organized by the former President and First Lady. John Chuldenko—whose stepfather is Carter’s son Jack—loves to attend these events, which might involve fishing in the Gulf of Mexico or lounging on the beach in Panama. Much of the time is passed just hanging out, chatting, exchanging old stories.
It was during one such sojourn that Chuldenko first heard about the record collection. His uncle Jeff was talking about an incident that happened during a White House party back during the Carter administration. Jeff—Jimmy Carter’s youngest son, who was in his twenties at the time—was hanging out upstairs in the residence with some friends, blasting a Rolling Stones album. Suddenly, the door flew open and there stood Rosalynn Carter and Second Lady Joan Mondale, who reacted to the music with—
“Wait, what do you mean there were records there?” Chuldenko wanted to know. “Where did you get records?”
Jeff explained that an official selection of LPs was kept in the residence. “So I’m like, ‘The White House has its own record collection?’ ” Chuldenko recalls. “ ‘Like, permanently?’ ” Jeff said he didn’t know anything more about it, and the conversation moved on. But when Chuldenko returned home to Los Angeles, he couldn’t let it go. “That started me down this rabbit hole,” he says.
Chuldenko is a creative guy with his hands in a lot of projects—a writer, director, and producer who works on everything from commercials to magazine articles to feature films. He’s also a big collector of vinyl. So when he heard about the possible existence of an official White House record library, he got excited. Maybe this could be a documentary film, he thought. But mostly, he was just eager to know more. He found a few brief articles about the collection online; otherwise, information was sparse. Did the White House ever really have such a thing? Which albums were in it? And was it still there?
So Chuldenko did what any good researcher would and contacted the library. Except in this case—another perk of being an ex-President’s grandson—the institution he reached out to was the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. An archivist there passed along info for somebody in the White House curator’s office.
“Dear John: Yes, we do have a record collection stored at a secure offsite facility. Because it’s secure, I cannot pass along the exact location of where the records are being stored.”
In a way, there are actually two White House album collections.
The first was assembled in the early ’70s by the Recording Industry Association of America, the DC trade group that represents record companies.
Johnny Mercer was tapped to oversee the pop picks. In retrospect, this was an odd choice. The idea was to build a library that reflected American tastes in the post-Woodstock era. Mercer, meanwhile, was the “Moon River” guy—one of the all-time great songwriters, to be sure, but hardly the person to capture that era’s seismic musical achievements.
Mercer and his team did their best to nod toward more modern sounds—the first Doors LP and Elton John’s US debut made the cut—but their choices leaned heavily on easy listening: Lawrence Welk, Don Ho, Perry Como. Chuldenko likes to point out that there was the same number of Pat Boone albums as entries from the Beatles.
It’s the second volume, put together at the end of that decade, that’s most intriguing.
Once again curated by the RIAA, it was intended to bring the record library up to date. This time, the selection process would be headed by John Hammond, a hugely influential figure who had signed Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen. Hammond enlisted experts to oversee each genre, including Modern Jazz Quartet pianist John Lewis, who was responsible for jazz, and Boston music critic Bob Blumenthal, who led the pop picks.
The list was hashed out during sessions in a Manhattan conference room, and true to Blumenthal’s vision, the selection was decidedly more adventurous this time around: soul, punk, salsa, gospel, funk, disco, and more. There were obvious picks representing rock-and-roll’s history, with entries from the likes of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. And popular tastes were well represented by artists such as Donna Summer, Fleetwood Mac, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Blumenthal pressed for a Latin-music section that had records from Beny Moré, Joe Bataan, and Johnny Pacheco, among others.
There were also plenty of left-field LPs—music whose inclusion, Rachlis says, offered “a certain kind of subversive joy.” Funkadelic’s Hardcore Jollies made the cut, as did Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. A Gil Scott-Heron compilation. Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia. And this time around, there were no selections from Don Ho, although Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits did lend an easy-listening note to the proceedings. (“I don’t know whether I would have included that if I were doing it today,” says Blumenthal.)
The second installment of the library was unveiled during a ceremony at the White House in early 1981, attended by the President and First Lady.
At that point, the Carters were on their way out; Blumenthal remembers seeing moving trucks outside the residence. The collection was likely taken out of the White House not long thereafter and put into storage. Chuldenko thinks the Reagans were the ones who sent it away—perhaps even before the new LPs could be unpacked and added to the library. It’s not like Ron and Nancy were ever going to be rocking out to “Teenage Lobotomy.”
Undaunted, Chuldenko put in an official request to check out the collection, explaining that he was working on a documentary film.
It took some time, but eventually the White House offered to dig the records out and give him access. So in December 2010, Chuldenko showed up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a film crew and a small group that included Blumenthal and Rachlis. He also brought a turntable and speakers.
After the group arrived, they were ushered into the White House screening room. And there, finally, was the collection: record-filled boxes stacked up in front of the movie screen. The LPs had been kept in their original sleeves, which were inserted into color-coded binders (light blue for pop, yellow for classical, etc.). Each was adorned with the presidential seal and a foil stamp that read WHITE HOUSE RECORD LIBRARY. The whole thing reeked of gravitas and respectability—except that inside a binder, rather than some speech delivered by FDR in the ’40s, you might find a mint-condition copy of Macho Man by the Village People.
What to play first? They agreed on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, a profound and meditative record that has a way of transforming any listening session into a spiritual experience. As those extraordinary opening Richard Davis bass notes floated from the speakers, President Obama was upstairs, busy running the country.
It was a surreal scene, but there were thousands of records to explore and documentary footage to shoot, so they just kept digging. “With every box, there was this new treasure inside,” Chuldenko recalls. “I knew what was in there on paper, but it’s different when you actually hold these records. They had never been played. It was like walking into a record store in 1979. They were absolutely pristine.”
At one point, they decided to listen to a politically charged punk-rock landmark: the Clash’s self-titled 1977 debut. “I’m so bo-o-ored with the U-S-A!” Joe Strummer snarled—a chorus that had almost certainly never rattled the walls of the presidential residence prior to that moment. “We put that on,” Chuldenko says, “and it was just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m playing the Clash . . . in the White House!’ I mean, what an incredible protest record. And it’s not like I brought it myself. I am playing the White House’s copy.”
Unfortunately, Chuldenko never did make the film; 12 years later, the footage remains unseen by the public.
Real Estate Corner
Check the chart below.
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I want to help. Visit micahwiener.com to get started.
Recipe Corner
Smoked Strawberry Aperitif
This week, let’s combine two of my favorite things, grilling and weak cocktails.
8 ripe strawberries
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
Crushed ice and ice cubes
12 ounces white vermouth
8 ounces tonic water
About 1 hour ahead of grilling, set the wooden skewers in water to soak. At the same time, wash the strawberries. Slice off the crowns and refrigerate them for use when serving. Set the berries in a bowl, then top them with balsamic vinegar and stir to coat. Marinate for 1 hour.
Skewer the berries and set the skewers toward the edges, or cooler part, of the grill. Grill until softened but not falling apart, 5 to 10 minutes. Transfer the skewers to a platter and let cool, about 5 minutes.
For each drink, fill a highball glass with the crushed ice and set aside. Add 2 grilled strawberries and 3 ounces of white vermouth to a cocktail shaker, and vigorously muddle the berries in the wine. Add ice cubes to the shaker, shake hard to combine, and double-strain into the glass. Top with the tonic water, stir gently and garnish with a strawberry crown.
Mango-Lime Marinated Chicken Thighs
Chicken thighs are good. Grill some.
1 cup (about 4 ounces) mango chunks (defrosted if from frozen)
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice (from 3 to 4 limes)
1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce
2 tablespoons canola oil, or other neutral-tasting oil
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
2 teaspoons sriracha
3 large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Fresh cilantro leaves, for serving
Lime wedges, for serving
In the pitcher of a blender, combine the mango, lime juice, 1 1/2 tablespoons of the fish sauce, the oil, sugar, sriracha, garlic and salt and puree to form a smooth marinade. Taste and add more fish sauce, if desired. Transfer the marinade to a resealable container and add the chicken, turning the pieces over several times to coat them. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours and up to overnight.
Preheat your grill.
Grill for about 8 minutes, then use tongs to turn the chicken over and spoon more marinade on the second side. Grill for about 9 minutes, until lightly charred around the edges and the chicken is cooked through to an internal temperature of 160 degrees.
Serve warm, with cilantro and lime wedges.
Did Micah practice yoga this weekend?
Yes, twice. 60 minutes Saturday at Black Swan with Kaylee, and 60 Sunday at Fairground with Kayla.
That’s 20 in-person weekend classes in 20 weeks this year. Namaste.
More Micah
Podcasts: Mind of Micah, Back Door Cover, Too Much Dip
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