Joe Rogan Refused to Host Liver King After Steroid Scandal: ‘Caught Lying Through His Teeth’
Joe Rogan has no interest in hosting Liver King on his podcast.
Just two short years ago, Brian Johnson — best known by his online alias as Liver King — was all the rage on social media. Preaching his ‘ancestral lifestyle’ Johnson claimed that his absurdly jacked physique was the result of eating large amounts of raw unprocessed organs and meat that focused on a daily intake of liver.
But as fast as his rise came, so too did his downfall.
In 2022, a series of private emails were leaked, revealing that Johnson had been spending more than $11,000 per month on anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs to try and keep up with the facade. Once he was busted, Johnson released a video on YouTube and offered a half-hearted apology for misleading his millions of followers.
“I’m here now to set the record straight,” Johnson said. “Yes, I’ve done steroids, and yes, I’m on steroids, monitored and managed by a trained hormone clinician. Liver King, the public figure, was an experiment to spread the message” (h/t SportBible).
Of course, that did little to mitigate the damage, which included a $25 million class-action lawsuit filed in New York alleging that Johnson deceptively touted a primal lifestyle to promote his ancestral supplements.
During an episode of his JRE podcast with guest Derek Munro of the YouTube channel More Plates More Dates, Rogan roasted Johnson over his preposterous claims.
“There is no way you can look like that, in your 40s… he’s preposterously jacked,” Rogan said. “Now that we know he is full of s***… we are talking about the Liver King, by the way. If you don’t know who the Liver King is, he’s a guy who walks around everywhere with no shirt on. I’ve seen him in Vegas with no shirt on. Big bushy beard. He is super jacked.
“He was telling people that he gets that away by sunning his balls… he literally lays down with his a*****e staring at the sun and eats raw liver and just lifts like a maniac, and that’s how he’s so jacked. It’s preposterous.”
Munro went on to accuse Johnson of “lying through his teeth” as they continued to discuss the topic.
“There’s too many polar extremes to have just have a unique marketing spin that was highly viral, in my opinion,” Munro added. “Most people could see through it but at the same time, lots of big names even reached out to me after that video came out. This guy, literally to my face, would say, ‘I am natural’.
“A lot of people will take a guy’s word when it’s a private conversation and when he’s straight up telling you in person…he was just lying through his teeth seemingly.”
Joe Rogan bumped into liver king at a canelo alvarez fight
Rogan later revealed that he bumped into Johnson while attending a Canelo Alvarez fight.
“He was front row at one of my shows in Vegas at the MGM,” Rogan said. “Then I saw him again at the [Saul] Canelo [Alvarez] fight. He was trying real hard to get on the podcast and he’s been trying really hard to get on now. He contacted a few friends of mine and some of them, like Bert Kreischer, had him on their show. For what? Say that [apology] more? Like come on, this is dumb, man. This is a f*cking — you ran a con game and you got busted.
“It’s unfortunate that you feel terrible, I’m sorry you feel bad cause that’s just what happens when you get caught lying. But you didn’t have to lie.”
Despite being exposed as a fraud, Johnson still has 2.8 million followers on Instagram, 6.1 million followers on TikTok, and more than 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube.
