Social media influencer Brian Johnson, better known as the “Liver King,” was arrested at his hotel in Austin on Tuesday night after posting dozens of bizarre, rambling videos “picking a fight” with famous podcaster Joe Rogan, KXAN first reported.
He is facing a misdemeanor charge of making a terrorist threat, according to records from the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. His bail is set at $20,000.
“Man-to-man, I’m picking a fight with you,” said Johnson — swaying, bare-chested, dressed in a sweeping wolf pelt — in a June 23 Instagram reel uploaded to his account.“You’re a liar, Netflix. Joe Pearlman, who directed the movie, you’re a liar too, you scumbag. Joe Rogan, you’re not a liar.”
“You’re good and true, and I’m picking a fight with you,” Johnson continues. “I bet you a million dollars, whoever fucking wins the fight between you and me, whoever wins, donates–” the video cuts off before he finishes.
“I challenge you, man-to-man, to a fight. Honorable,” Johnson said in another video, uploaded a day later. He posted 29 videos over the span of three days, in which he documents his travel to Austin (where Rogan lives) and his ultimate arrest. The last video on his account shows an Austin Police officer loading Johnson into a car.
“Detectives reviewed the posts and observed that Johnson was traveling to Austin while continuing to make threatening statements,” APD wrote in a statement to The Barbed Wire. “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 was the subject of a 2025 Netflix documentary about his primitive, self-described “ancestral” habits to achieve peak masculinity: eating raw animal organs, including liver, but also many genitals (“Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?” Johnson has often said) — and, yes, injecting steroids.
For years, Johnson denied any supplement or steroid use, claiming his aggressive musculature was all-natural (“natty,” as many fitness influencers prefer to say). His deception was revealed in 2022 after a series of leaked emails revealed that Johnson was paying up to $11,000 a month for performance-enhancing drugs. The 2025 documentary, Untold: The Liver King, unpacked the aftermath of Johnson’s steroid scandal.
Rogan has yet to comment publicly. Besides briefly mocking Johnson’s “ancestral tenets” in late 2022, not much else of a relationship seems to exist between the two.
