There are a lot of people who don’t like Joe Rogan and one of them is Brian Johnson, a body-building influencer whose main claim to fame is that he eats raw, unprocessed animal organs to stay fit. Johnson, who is also known by his online moniker the “Liver King” (in addition to other organs, he eats a lot of livers), was arrested this week in Rogan’s hometown of Austin, Texas, after making a series of threats against the podcaster on social media.
Indeed, for the last several days, Johnson has been posting weird, threatening messages about Rogan on his Instagram page. On Tuesday, authorities released a statement about Johnson’s arrest, noting that he has been charged with making “terroristic threats” against the podcast mogul, which is a misdemeanor crime. In a statement shared with Gizmodo, Austin police said:
“On Tuesday, June 24, 2025, at approximately 9:30 a.m., Austin Police Department (APD) detectives were notified that a subject identified as Brian Johnson, known online as “Liver King”, had made threats against Joe Rogan on his Instagram profile,” Austin police said, in a statement. “Detectives reviewed the posts and observed that Johnson was traveling to Austin while continuing to make threatening statements. Detectives contacted Mr. Rogan, who stated he had never had any interaction with Johnson and considered the posts to be threatening. Based on this information, detectives obtained an arrest warrant for Johnson on a charge of Terroristic Threat.”
Johnson has been posting videos about Rogan for at least the last three days, and all of them are pretty weird. In one video, Johnson wears a wolf’s skin on his head and holds what appears to be two machine guns, while shouting: “Joe Rogan, I’m calling you out. My name’s Liver King. Man to man. I’m picking a fight with you!” A different video, posted Tuesday, shows him standing in a shower in a Four Seasons hotel and ingesting coffee into his butt through an enema and a tube from a bucket. “I’ve not threatened to kill anybody. I picked a fight,” Johnson says, while apparently flooding his anus with caffeine. “Let’s destroy each other for sport,” he continues, before repeating that he doesn’t want to “kill anybody.”
Weirdly enough, Johnson documented the moments before and during his arrest, continuing to post videos to his Instagram as he prepared to be taken into custody. One video shows him being placed in handcuffs. Police say they are still investigating Johnson’s activities.
What are these two feuding about? It’s unclear, although it’s worth pointing out that during an episode of Rogan’s podcast from 2022, Johnson was a topic of conversation. In the video, Rogan called Johnson “full of shit” and made fun of the influencer’s “ancestral tenets” program, which Johnson has referred to as the “key to unlocking a robust long life.” Rogan also threw into question many of the claims that Johnson has made about how he builds muscle. During the same video, Rogan’s guest, another fitness influencer, claimed that Johnson was “lying through his teeth” about not using steroids to build muscle.
Indeed, Johnson spent years claiming that his diet of raw meat was how he built muscle (in addition to eating livers, he once ate his own weight in cow testicles for a YouTube video) but, in 2022, he copped to steroid use, admitting: “Yes, I’ve done steroids, and yes, I am on steroids.” In the video, Johnson claimed that his persona as “Liver King” was an “experiment” designed to inspire young men and make them more manly. “I fucked up,” he said.
Johnson was also recently the subject of a Netflix documentary that chronicled his rise to fame. The documentary, which reportedly covered Johnson’s lies about steroid use, has inspired criticism of the influencer online, some of which can be seen on his Instagram, where commenters accuse him of being full of it. “Remember when you lied and got caught then fell off lmao,” reads one.
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