Joe Rogan vs Guests: Who talks more?

Be it in stand-up, UFC or on his podcast – Joe Rogan likes to talk and millions of people listen. Some have even dubbed him ‘Oprah for dudes’. Especially on his podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, he is often scrutinised for talking too much, too little, or to the wrong people.

Clearly, Joe is a champion of free speech and likes to talk to all kinds of people. But just how much does Joe Rogan talk and how much does he listen?

Here we review the latest 100 Joe Rogan Experience episodes to see who talks more, Joe or his guests. We’ll analyse the proportion of which Joe or his guests talk. Find out who’s in Joe’s friend zone, and which guest talked more than 90% of the whole episode.

Contents:

Duration of JRE episodes

Joe’s podcast is the biggest long-form discussion podcast to have ever existed. By allowing the conversations to go on for 3-4 hours without any predefined structure, his guests have the chance to fully explain their ideas and have nuanced arguments.

The first analysed episode for this article was JRE #1192 with Tony Hinchcliffe, which aired on Halloween 2018. About 6 months later and more than 100 episodes, we can see how various the length of each episode can be.

The average duration was 2:30 h with a slight tendency to decrease over time.

The shortest episode was Timothy Denevi with a meagre 1:28 h.

The longest episode was Alex Jones Returns! clocking in at 4:42 h full of entertainment. (We’ve got a full fact-check of the vampire and adrenochrome conspiracy from Alex Jones here)

Duration of individual Joe Rogan Experience episodes #1192-#1294 represented in chronological order. The duration is excluding intro and outro. Breaks of the line represent episodes, which weren’t analysed – mostly due to there being more than 1 guest.

What group of guests talks the most?

The different durations of the episodes all seem fairly random, but let’s have a look at the average duration sorted by the type of guest. For this we have divided all guests into one of 6 groups:

Comedian / Entertainer

Writer / Media

Scientist / Scholar

Sports / Fitness

Other (These are the former CIA agents, activists, etc.)

How much does Joe Rogan talk depending on the profession of his guest?

The average percentage Joe talks per episode is 43% – a reasonable number for a courteous host.

Joe gets more dominant with Comedians and might get lost in stories about the secret bar at the Comedy Club. Don’t even dare to show up, if you haven’t done 10 years of road gigs and fletching out ideas!

The most talkative of guests are scientists (who would’ve thought!?) – but who hasn’t seen Joe listen intently to the ramblings of an Academic.

The only group that can outshine Joe’s inspiration and motivation are his Fitness guests and it shows: They talk almost 10% more than your run-off-the-mill guest

Who did Joe friend-zone? Who talked the most?

But wait, it gets better! If you think we’re overanalysing this – we’re only getting started.

How much does Joe Rogan talk in relation to the overall duration of the episode. Blue areas denote special zones (explained below). Outliers are specifically named. Female guests are shown with a pink outer glow. Proportionally, Graham Hancock talked the most and Brian Redban the least.

This is a scatter plot of the relationship between the overall duration of an episode and the percentage of which Joe talks. A few things become immediately obvious:

The Scientist line:

If you want to call yourself a true scholar and scientist you will have to talk at least 50% of the total episode. Your academic standing should increase in a linear fashion with every extra % point gained.

The Friend Zone:

This is where you will find the Christina P’s, Michael Yo’s, Tom Papa’s and Andrew Santino’s . If Joe is buddies with you, he will talk long and much. Only downside: After the episode you might be wondering how you ended up talking about choking out a deer on a carnivore diet.

Big or small:

There’s only 2 reasons you’re talking a lot and the episode is short. Either you’re BIG and don’t have to care about staying very long – congratulations Bill Burr and Kevin Hart. Or you’re a rather small comedian and Joe might cut this one short – sorry Darren Brown and Steve Sweeney.

The Comedian slope

For the rest of the comedian world: here is my advice for either staying for only a short time (we get it, you’re busy and can’t stay for more than 2 hours…it’s only the biggest podcast in the world) OR staying on as long as possible – maybe indefinitely.

The comedian slope shows that the less Joe speaks with a comedian guest the longer the episode is. Basically, if you want to be kicked out as quickly as possible, don’t say anything – maybe only mime. If you want to stay longer, engage Joe in a conversation and try to get more than 50% of airtime. There might be an upper limit where this effect reverses. But theoretically, if you spoke 100% of the time the podcast might go on indefinitely.

The outliers:

Science would not be Science if there weren’t any outliers. Two masters of the two-way monologue are Graham Hancock and Johann Hari. Why not sell those two episodes on audible, it’s basically an audiobook? Alex Jones, an outlier in his own right, takes the prize for the longest episode of the bunch by a mile. Brian Redban received the longest talking to of them all. There might be some unresolved issues from their past?

Joe Rogan vs women and Brits

Let’s go one level deeper

How much does Joe talk depending of the gender and nationality of his guests.

Joe is absolutely getting spanked around by Brits on his own podcast. This is like watching a jujitsu blue belt roll with a black belt from Eddie Bravo’s 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu. The British are proving once more that they invented this language and aren’t afraid to use it. The only exception, of course, being Graham Hancock who held Joe to a record-breaking 10% of the total podcast duration. But then again, he did speak a lot about Stonehenge.

On average, women guests talk slightly less than men. However, Joe still talks less than 50% to both female and male guests.

The David Lee Roth incident

Lots to laugh about. David Lee Roth had quantifiably the most fun of any guest.

David Lee Roth, most well known for his work as an EMT and being the lead singer of Van Halen, had a jolly old time on the JRE.

Depending on your personal preference, his continuous laughter might have been a source of glee or needles in your eardrums.

The best thing about analysing this episodes was that the software picked up David’s laughter as a third person. And this person laughed a whopping 5% of the total duration.

To get this into perspective: The total duration of the episode was 2:55 h of which David already talked 72%. His additional 5% of laughter resulted in you hearing him laugh for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Joe Rogan’s podcast stamina

You probably have been wondering how Joe’s exercising and nutritional supplements is affecting his stamina on the podcast. If you were looking for positive effects of AlphaBrain look no further! (Or do look further here for the full ingredient fact-check of AlphaBrain)

While Joe is fairly slow out of the gate, he picks up speed the longer the podcast goes on for. After lulling his guests into a false sense of security in the beginning, he starts dominating them after 2 hours. If you make it past the 3 hour mark – good luck, you’re on your own…

Data generation

Big shoutout to VoxSort and audiosplitter who made this analysis possible. VoxSort, in particular, is a powerful and easy-to-use tool for speaker diarisation, aka finding out who speaks when. It has a reported error rate of 2% and I can confirm it’s amazing accuracy in picking out Jamie or David Lee Roth’s laughter.

TL;DR

So, how much does Joe Rogan talk? Joe is a courteous podcast host, who restricts his talking on average to 43% of the total duration. His most talkative guests are scientists and writers.

Proportionally, the guest who talked the most was Graham Hancock (>90%), and Brian Redban (<17%) the least.

Scientist guests always talk more than 50% and fitness guests never last longer than 3 hours (The irony!). Joe Rogan’s stamina, however, allows him to take over conversations towards the end of the podcast.

For some reason, British people can’t stop talking and limit Joe’s talking to a mere 30%.

The prize for most laughter in an episode goes to David Lee Roth with stunning 5%, or 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Who was your favourite guest? Which should have stayed longer or talked more? Let us know in the comments below!