Grindr's Who's The Asshole Podcast Returns: Katya's Season 5

Season five has the biggest guest lineup yet

The gays have their verdict back. Grindr's Who's The Asshole podcast returned on September 17, 2026, with Katya Zamolodchikova back in the judge's seat for a fifth season of ruling on the dating app's most unhinged user submissions. According to the announcement published via Business Wire, the new season features what the company calls its biggest lineup yet of comedians, creators and certified gay icons.

The format stays beautifully simple. Each week, Katya teams up with a new guest to read real, user-submitted stories from the Grindr community and answer one deceptively simple question: who's the asshole? The topics on the docket are the classics of modern gay dating. Expect hookup etiquette debates, relationship red flags, bedroom mishaps and the questionable decisions that blur the line between bad judgment and genuine asshole behavior. New episodes land every Thursday at 10am PST, and anyone who wants the raw, uncensored version can watch the video in Grindr Presents inside the Grindr app or on YouTube.

Season five kicked off with a bang. The premiere episode, a 43-minute conversation with Matt Rogers that is already streaming on YouTube, had the Las Culturistas co-host and self-styled Pop Prince of Christmas getting flirty with Katya and refusing to keep it to the cards. From there, the schedule reads like a who's who of comedy podcast regulars. Mary Beth Barone arrives on September 24, fresh off her Netflix debut special Galaxy Brain, and Jaboukie Young-White follows on October 1 as he gears up for a new comedy tour. Evan Mulrooney takes the guest chair on October 8, George Civeris on October 15, and Alaska is also slated to appear this season. Rogers, who co-hosts Las Culturistas with Bowen Yang, brings a built-in podcast audience, since TIME named their show one of the best 100 of all time. Barone co-hosts Ride with Benito Skinner alongside her stand-up and writing work. The mix of seasoned podcast hosts and touring comedians gives each episode a different energy while keeping the verdict format intact.

Grindr is betting big on podcasting

Season three of Who's The Asshole took home the 2026 Shorty Award for Best Branded Podcast, so this is no vanity project the app is quietly funding. It is one of the few corporate podcasts to earn genuine industry recognition. Tristan Pineiro, chief marketing officer at Grindr, said in the announcement that the community keeps supplying more stories, more chaos and more reasons to keep asking the question, and that Katya turns those submissions into hilarious, revealing conversations about how people date, hook up, connect and occasionally behave terribly. His closing line said it best: at this point, Grindr would be assholes not to keep going.

The show is also part of a bigger pattern of apps and platforms investing in audio. Podcasts have become the place where fandoms form and internet culture gets its talking points, and the money is following. Just look at the reported $140M bidding war over the Giggly Squad podcast earlier this year, or the way YouTube has been courting podcasters with big-money deals. Grindr's approach is different from those plays. Instead of licensing a popular show, it built one around its own community's stories, with the app itself as the distribution channel for the uncensored video version.

That strategy seems to be paying off with the exact audience the app wants. The show stays sex-positive and genuinely funny, and it treats listener stories as comedy material with a real human pulse. For a brand that lives in the messy reality of queer dating culture, a podcast where a drag legend and her comedian friends litigate the community's worst decisions is about as on-brand as it gets.

For listeners who missed the premiere, the Matt Rogers episode is available wherever podcasts are found, and the video version is up now. New episodes of Who's The Asshole drop every Thursday at 10am PST through the rest of the season.