Women Won't Date You if You Listen to Him (Spoiler, it's Joe Rogan)
- Feb 16
- 9 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Rj10RMukPs8
People have a big problem with a certain popular podcaster. So much so, in fact, that a new study has found that women won’t date men who listen to him. You probably saw this coming. I definitely saw this coming. People are going to be really upset when I say his name. And by people, I mean a lot of a certain subset of people. But there’s absolutely nothing surprising about any of this.
Now, before I come out and tell you who it is, I’m going to kind of wax poetic about how we get through to people who are just immediately going to be upset if they’re listeners and not stick around to hear why this is an issue for others. I’m not really sure what’s going to work, other than just appealing to the reasoning centers of their brains and hoping that they watch this video through to the end. I promise I’m going to try to be as respectful as I can while I go over some of the things about him that people may not fully realize.
On to the data. Let’s pick it apart. Let’s do it live. A Change Research Study polled Gen Z and Millennials aged 18-34 and found out that over half of women surveyed said that a big red flag for them in terms of dating partners is finding out their date listens to the Joe Rogan Experience. You might find yourself getting a little hot under the collar, but do everyone a favor and stick with me if that’s you. I’d seriously encourage people to really stick around for this one, and really think about why it is that these women are saying this. Because it really does look like men are missing something here. Further research findings tell us the fact that men were often totally wrong when it came to predicting things that women found unattractive in a dating partner, and it seems like a lot of them are really not understanding the reasons why Joe Rogan is totally unappealing.
Dudes are very precious about Joe Rogan. But what they also are is very wrong about Joe Rogan. And I’m just going to go through some numbers to show you how that is. People have said to me in the comments of this channel, something along the lines of an argument I made being completely invalidated because I included Joe Rogan in with other manosphere talking heads in a video I did about the modern history of toxic masculinity.
But the first thing I’m going to do is show you why you should care. According to research, political affiliation is now one of the strongest predictors for romantic partners in America. A big analysis of 4,000 people found that only 23% of American relationships cross ideological party lines, and even more than that, only 8% of relationships consist of a Republican and a Democrat together. Back in 1974, about half of all couples held similar political views. In 2014, the percentage jumped to about two-thirds. This is a major historical shift in the U.S. and it’s just our reality now.
And maybe you’re thinking, well that’s all fine because Joe Rogan is a centrist. He’s said it again and again, and everyone says it about him. In fact it’s one of the most pervasive arguments about Joe Rogan, and it’s often given as an explanation about why he’s so popular. But the data tells us a different story. I mean, we can also see it pretty readily just by listening in to the things he’s saying and the guests he has on, but let’s not rely on that just now, let’s look at the numbers.
The thing about his guests having a variety of backgrounds simply isn’t true. Data analyst Henry Goldkuhle did a fantastic breakdown on his substack of guests on the Joe Rogan Experience. One of the things he measured was political affiliation. A full 80% of Joe Rogan’s guests in the year 2024 were conservatives. This is up from 65% in the years between 2020-2023, when it was still the vast majority. It’s possible that Joe Rogan may have started out by being a sort of fun clown who just had lots of people on his show from a wide variety of backgrounds, or at least that’s the impression he was successful at making, and he made a name for himself by notoriously “just asking questions.” And some people argue that maybe he just had a more right-wing lean in recent years, but the numbers tell us his guests have always swayed conservative.
It’s also possible one might argue this is simply a business decision. Because Goldkuhle’s data also found that Rogan has many more viewers when his guests are conservative. And content creators make money according to the number of people tuning in. So maybe he’s leaning into that for the money even if he doesn’t fully support the right wing.
There is the whole thing where he endorsed Trump for president, though. He said he did that after being convinced by Elon Musk when he was a guest on the show. Musk, as we all know, is famously “dark MAGA.”
Joe Rogan platformed and made famous the founder of the Proud Boys paramilitary gang, Gavin McInnes. Upon platforming McInnes, Rogan introduced him as an “outrage peddler,” “a libertarian,” and a “smart and fun guy to hang out and talk to.” Rogan told his listeners that, “He gets lumped in with that whole alt-right group, he has some interesting beliefs, some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t, but I think he’s an entertaining guy.”
If you’re still with me and haven’t stormed off in a tizzy, what I really want to talk about is the underlying mechanism that shows us why Joe Rogan is such a problem, not the equivocating over his personal political views. Because that’s like a tiny detail in the overall picture of how Joe Rogan is leading us off a very steep cliff right now, and only half of the American population is noticing it.
Joe Rogan does a thing that’s very infamous in media circles. He gives every idea equal credence. And he posits this as a selling point, as a good thing. But there’s a difference between respecting people for their ideas and outright confusing factual reality to throw a wrench into established science and history. Sam Harris, who’s actually a friend of Rogan’s has publicly pushed back on this exact characteristic of the Joe Rogan Experience in recent times, and Sam himself borders on manosphere content; he’s kind of like if the manosphere went to community college, and had to do a couple of research papers before it dropped out and then stumbled onto the Q-Anon forums. Harris said this about Joe Rogan’s propensity to let his guests run free with his airtime: “He’s in over his head on so many topics of great consequence. He’ll bring someone in to shoot the shit on ‘how the Holocaust is not what you think it was’ or ‘maybe Churchill was the bad guy in world war two’ … or he’ll talk to someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, who lie as freely as they breathe, and doesn’t push back against any of their lies … It is irresponsible, and it’s directly harmful.”
This is something I’ve been yelling about for years, and so have many others in the more skeptical communities of the internet where science and reason still hold strong. Some of Rogan’s guests are scientists, and some of his guests are anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, ancient alien believers, and other conspiracy theorists. And Joe is simply awed and giggly and happy to hear what every one of them has to say, and spread it all out to his bajillion listeners.
Not only does he do that, but the only times he decides to show some interest in skepticism and incredulity, well, he only does that when his guest happens to lean to the left, and are established experts in their fields. This is a false dichotomy and a contradiction of his and others’ description of him as a centrist, as someone who just wants to know things and is just asking questions. The people who claim to be just asking questions and then platform conspiracy theorists completely straight-faced and uncritically, and then continually attack the body of human scientific knowledge are just flat out anti-intellectuals. This is Joe Rogan in a nutshell.
The one key thing to know about anti-intellectuals is that they’re generally regular people with no specialization who are very angry at what they perceive as gatekeeping from the actual knowledgeable people in a certain field. They look at the years of training, dedicated learning, experimenting and owning new innovations after one has developed a real expertise in a subject, and anti-intellectuals see all that work and achievement as instead a kind of artificial wall to keep regular people like them out of the conversation. Their rallying cry is that they know stuff too, and they should be allowed to participate in discussions with experts, even without any of the required information or qualifications. They’re just asking questions. And when they ask completely juvenile and ridiculous questions like why can’t we inject bleach into the body, they get really mad when we try to gently guide them away from positions of influence.
And like a bazillion of us have said over and over again, if anti-intellectual provocateurs really want to debate, like they incessantly tell us they do, many experts have already told them that they’re more than free to go to school and learn about the thing they want to solve, and publish research to further that goal that will then be peer-reviewed and officially critiqued in an academic setting. Because that’s how we actually debate in the world of functioning adults. It’s not even reasonable to call it debate, and I know that if you’ve seen my channel before you’ve heard me say this, but debate is a tool of the losers. It’s a last-ditch effort to bring experts down to their level and pummel them with meaningless talking points that have nothing to do with facts or reality. Debate is what you want to do if the facts aren’t on your side. If you have the facts, you don’t debate, you just post citations. And as always, the citations for this video are down in the didgeridoo.
Joe Rogan isn’t just asking questions. He’s muddying the waters of established reality. Rogan doesn’t have the slightest idea what questions to even ask. He doesn’t have a grasp on any of the things. He doesn’t know what questions have already been answered a thousand times over, what questions are outright ridiculous and physically impossible in the actual world, or what questions are still truly open and the research around them absolutely fascinating. Most of which exist at a much higher level and greater plane of understanding than regular people have access to, and it’s just really hard to some people to admit they aren’t realistically able to participate in something. There’s definitely a way to have really cool and productive conversations by asking questions, but he doesn’t know how to do that. He has no science training, not even any journalistic training. He was the host of Fear Factor and was punched in the head for a great number of years. How is this the guy with the top consumed podcast in the world? It really is so upsetting to think about.
Anyway.
So from the data we have that Joe Rogan platforms conservative guests 80% of the time, and the fact that he’s very critical of left-wing positions, it’s reasonable to say that Joe Rogan is a right-wing podcaster. It’s a manosphere podcast. Even if you somehow still don’t believe this and resist the label, it doesn’t really matter because it’s what everyone else thinks. And that’s actually another reason you should care about this. According to independent research done by a neuroscientist and PhD candidate in psychology who runs the YouTube channel Date Psychology, manosphere content is the absolute most frowned upon red flag for women above all other possible red flags. Manosphere content was ranked the top most unattractive male hobby by women. 96.9% of women rated it negatively. On the list of top fifteen most unattractive male hobbies it beat out were cigar smoking, magic the gathering, and funko pop collecting.
Joe Rogan is an anti-intellectual. He’s a right-wing manosphere podcast host. He is not a person that anyone with above a fifth-grade education should ever take seriously. And, you know, if you’re a man who ever wants to meet a nice lady someday, the data says you’re going to have a problem if you take Joe Rogan seriously.
If you’ve fallen into the trap of Joe Rogan, it’s not your fault. Even major media outlets still get him wrong. Despite all the data, this is what one reporter from the Guardian had to say about him: “He spent much of his career being mislabeled as ideologically rightwing or misogynistic when in fact he’s more of a simpleton who agrees with almost everyone who comes on his show, even when the things they’re saying are contradictory. He has been a staunch believer “in just asking questions” but not so much in listening to or processing the answers. He has supported both Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr, and has taken conflicting views on everything from trans rights to Ye, sometimes hilariously so.”
Translation: he’s just a big idiot, you guys. Totally harmless. Nothing to see here. The data tells us that’s just not true. Sure, he may be an idiot, but he’s certainly politically right wing, and certainly politically polarizing, and incredibly anti-intellectual and anti-learning.
One more quote from Sam Harris about his friend Joe Rogan to end things out here: “Our society is as politically shattered as it is in part because of how Joe [Rogan] has interacted with information.”
Listen, I like you guys, and I hope you stuck around for the full portrait of Joe Rogan and the data behind his podcast. If you want to know things, don’t listen to Joe Rogan. Go to the source. Go read studies. And if you can’t do that, read coverage of the studies. That’s what this channel is all about, providing coverage of real research and laying out the facts without blowing smoke up your bootyhole. Joe Rogan, no substance, just bootyhole smoke.
I’ll see you next time. Remember to do some f*cking good wherever you personally can in the world.
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