Truth & Falsehood - Not Simply True & False

The Liver King, a fitness social media influencer, was revealed a few years ago as having made a few key false statements to the public.¹ Examples include his rather extraordinary steroid usage, the purpose of his social media accounts, and his behaviors and actions prior to his social media presence. At the time, there were many of his followers that rose to his defense while acknowledging the falsehood of his claims. Examples that are still visible in comment sections today (with some grammatical corrections) include:

Thanks to your diet and tenants I’m better than I was at 20. I owe many thanks to you. We all make mistakes. - tecmohero

I stand with the Liver King! He constantly encourages people to live well, we need more of that mindset! - the_real_cparr

Why would you hop on social media while the Liver King is trying to help teenagers and disclose this? We assumed the obvious, what we learned is that you’re a snitch bro. uncool. - nairj0rdan (on video exposing claims)

Jokes on you, he is going in a positive new direction. Don’t be a little kid tattling on others. - smartcounterpoint (on video exposing claims)

Say what you will, his marketing & entertainment value for better or worse give him more reach than most health influencers. This post is more about gatekeeping than public concern. - medd-typ-persson (on video exposing claims)

The above comments represent a small portion of the defense. In short: the claim is that the Liver King’s lies can be overlooked since he is trying to do good things and help people with his true “core messages” about his tenants, healthy living, and suicide prevention; especially in young men.

This response was frustrating to me, there was something wrong with it in my mind that I couldn’t quite verbalize. Much of what this man said was true, possibly even the vast majority of what he stated was at least something he genuinely believed to be accurate, but to me that did not provide an excuse and I needed a structure to analyze individual claims and the persons who make those claims so that I could put forward a clear reasoning for why some claims have much more weight than others when analyzing truthfulness and whether someone could be “given a pass.”

The result is the thesis for this article: truthfulness is not just a question of ratios, whether someone is “usually telling the truth,” but rather truthfulness has different facets. Any set of truth claims possess quantitative, qualitative, and magnitudinal measurements. Alongside that, individuals must also have facets of personal relevance and precision considered for their claims.²

Quantitative

The quantitative aspect is the simplest to apply and to grasp, if someone is simply wrong almost all the time, the rest of this method is not relevant. If a person puts forward ten opinions, thoughts, or claims and is shown by your best estimations to be correct 9/10 times, this is likely sufficient to say that the required quantity of truthfulness is met. To stick with the opening example, it is possible that the Liver King does not fail this test. Many of his claims and statements arise from his commentary on suicide prevention, exercise, and his “tenants,” those being:

Sleep - Optimizing sleep quantity and quality
Eat - Consuming whole foods (with a bit, or more than a bit, of an over fixation on specific foods)
Move - Exerting oneself physically in exercise
Shield - Minimizing exposure to toxins in our environment
Connect - Maintaining strong connection to the earth, environment, and broader community
Cold - Exposure to cold temperature to increase resilience
Sun - Getting regular sunlight
Fight - Embrace physical challenges to overcome adversity
Bond - Generate deep relationships in your family and close friends

These are… at the very least generally not much argued values. The exact steps he uses to achieve some (specifically eat in my opinion) are a bit niche, but they are, on the whole, good ideas. I will say on a quantitative sense much of what he has argued for seems to be something he believes and to some greater extent actually true.

Qualitative

It is here where things become a bit more difficult to parse. The quality of truth inspects the nature and character of a claim without respect to the actual impact the statement may have. Does the claim establish something of consequence? Does the claim possess legitimate justification for itself? Any individual claim has the capacity to be both of low or high quality based on the person who is communicating it and its core purpose, and it is here that our friend the Liver King faulters.

In truth, the Liver King’s fundamental goal was laid out in emails sent in 2021 and they are below:

As it relates to my goals, I’m the face of several brands, including A******** S**********, and I’ve hired a team to build the Liver King brand with the goal of 1 million followers. I have to stay in great shape year-round… as I’ve reached my mid-forties, it’s getting harder and the back fat kills me. - Email sent to a MorePlatesMoreDates in June of 2021

Can you reassure me that all information discussed [is] confidential? - Email sent to a MorePlatesMoreDates in May of 2021

The goals and reasonings of a truth claim are as important as the claim itself. If the purpose of saying something that is technically true is to harm another person for flawed reasons, then the quality of that claim is low by default even if it happens to be true. In the case of LK, now known as Brian Johnson, his purpose as laid out was financial gain at the scale of many millions of dollars via increased recognition of his supplement companies.

I should clarify, the desire for financial success is not bad, it is an understandable and normal action that doesn’t really have any moral quality on its own. It is this neutrality that shifts the claims quality as this effort, the products, the tenants, all his claims are lower in quality when we realize that in his private communications it was never about the deaths of young boys or fixing a broken nation, but rather about the increased recognition and sale of… the ground up dust of liver, bones, and bull testicles.

In my opinion the quality of a claim is the most difficult to analyze as it attempts to understand not just the claim itself but it’s meaning in the larger world and the purpose of the person making the claim, a purpose which is often largely opaque. The general point is that a claim may be of lesser quality and therefore less worth listening to or respecting when the claim has little to no real meaning in the world or is justified by less useful reasoning on the part of the person speaking.

Magnitudinal

Finally, individual truth claims often have varying levels of magnitude.³ Magnitude attempts to measure the actual impact or scope a truth claim has. This is often at least partially based on how obvious the claim is in the society it is being claimed within. The statement “I mowed my yard yesterday” has an extremely low magnitude, whereas the claim “Jimmy shot me in the leg” has a very high magnitude. If one is incorrect the impact is miniscule, while the other is rather staggering.

It is here where many people fail to analyze appropriately and it is here where my analysis of Brian Johnson ends and why his defenders were so frustrating to me. The magnitude of the truth claims he made that were actually true is so low as to be useless, while the magnitude of the false claims was immense. If someone tells you that you should sleep better, eat better, connect with your family, and exercise… while all these statements are true, they have no magnitude. Specific strategies for achievement of these goals may be useful, but they are not in any way unique, disagreed with, or difficult to understand. Meanwhile, the claims of his physique being achieved simply via following of generic tenants and some expensive bone powders, of his sworn purpose being to mitigate suicide in boys, and his promise of absolute honesty while living a lie as an acted character are not just poorly justified, they are of significant magnitude. No number of claims that an audience should get some sun, go for a walk, or talk to their family overcomes that.

Putting it Together

Taken together, we can apply these factors to any set of claims and see why it isn’t enough to say someone is “Usually correct” or “Often says good things.” Imagine an image of Adolf Hitler exiting a building to look out upon a field, surrounded by a crowd waiting to hear his opinions. If he gazes out and says the following:

The sky is beautiful

The grass is green

The extermination of the disabled ought to be a priority for our country

The crowd cannot reasonably respond with a shrug and “Well, he’s 2 for 3 right now, that’s not bad.” The people there must understand that the ratio of truth is irrelevant when the quality and magnitude of these claims are so wildly disproportionate. The first two have a quality that is likely reasonable enough, the quality requirements of such an observation would usually be extremely low, largely because the magnitude of them is, in short, zero. The final claim’s magnitude is of such significance that no quantity of well-reasoned and highly justified claims made before or after can overcome the magnificent error made.⁴

But, all people lie, and all people make incorrect statements, and one person’s tolerance for that in another person may not be identical mine. Why might this be acceptable? My belief is that each person individually must also analyze the speaker and make an assessment based on the speaker’s relevance to the listener and what level of precision is actually required.

Relevance

One Youtube channel that I’ve enjoyed recently is “MiniMinuteMan” or Milo Rossi. Milo is a specialist in archeology and I’ve found his educational videos to be highly entertaining and unique. I appreciate his hard work, high degree of knowledge, and personal dedication to ethical practices in his specialty.

Milo, like many of us, also has numerous opinions on food, religion, and politics that for lack of a better term I find simply incorrect. He occasionally discusses such positions and I find such comments entertaining and not off-putting as he is generally polite; but they are still wrong by my estimation. Why would I still listen to someone who I think is aggressively wrong on multiple very serious topics? Well… Milo’s opinions on such things just aren’t relevant to me outside of an interest in the final position of his soul, I don’t come to him for thoughts on nutrition or God, I come to him for education on archeology.

This is not to say you should fail to scrutinize someone simply because they make statements about things you didn’t come to them for, what I’m saying is that your tolerance for someone’s claims may change based on whether an individual claim is related to what you actually came to that person for. Someone who is a friend or family member may have a more overarching relevance, while you often should likely be more flexible with people who you interact with for more specialized reasons. To explain it in another way, it doesn’t really matter whether the surgeon completing your appendectomy has what you view as an incorrect opinion on the war between Russia and Ukraine, nor is there a reason to put up a fight when your mechanic has an unreasonable view of vaccines.

Precision

Finally, individuals may often be incorrect on the margins as opposed to the falsehood being more central to their claims, and such inconsistencies are normal among flawed people. Recalling the exact memory of how an event occurred is not as important when it is clear the speaker is getting the general realities completely correct for a purpose that is still being met regardless of the precision. A scientific description of exactly how we understand quantum mechanics to work may require an almost perfect recollection in a conversation between two physicists, but in a discussion between two English majors the truth can often be framed in generalities, with large gaps or incomplete reasoning. Just like you personally having to apply your own understanding of relevance to a person’s claims, you must also ask yourself what level of precision is really required.

Precision is one place where I often struggle, as precision is something I can get a bit anal about, despite most circumstance requiring far less precision than I would really like. Does the person giving exercise or nutrition advice to a newcomer in the gym have to be exactly in line with scientific literature or the top experts in the field? Certainly not, the needs to the newcomer can be adequately fulfilled by numerous different answers with benefits being lost often only at the margins, if even that.

Conclusion

Taken all together, this is my attempt to take the various facets of one or more truth claims and analyze them based on their objective and subjective values, so that anyone can provide a reasoned justification for why they may give someone like the Liver King, you, or me a pass when the time comes that we say something incorrect or untrue.

This is alongside numerous statements that I do think he believes, but are fairly clearly incorrect. These statements are well outside of the scope of this article though. ↩
There is clearly more complexity than what this set of qualities can represent for truth as a whole. I am skipping some of those complexities intentionally, key among which is that I am not going to be differentiating in this article in any meaningful sense between “false” and “wrong” or “true” and “right”. In many ways I think that what structure a person can use to analyze a human and the claims they make can be framed in a way that does not differentiate between these in any meaningful sense. If someone is constantly lying, that certainly has deeper moral results for that individual than if they were simply always wrong, but in terms of impact on you I think that it is less relevant. It is possible that opinion will change drastically over the years… which is I will have revisions viewable if they occur. ↩
There is very possibly a significant amount of discussion to be had on the relationships between quality and magnitude which a truth claim demands. In short, it is my opinion that as the magnitude of the claim increases the quality of it must also grow in proportion. ↩
People often will permit errors of staggering degree when they believe the specific person making the claim is vital in some other way. One might accept horrific behavior from a leader if they were to think that the person committing such an error is incredibly important to their lifestyle, political beliefs, or religious positions. This cannot be allowed, nor does it have to be, but that is a point for another article. ↩