Joe Rogan named among TIME's 100 most influential people alongside Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping

UFC color commentator and world-renowned podcaster Joe Rogan has been named in the 2022 TIME 100 – an annual list of the 100 most influential individuals in politics, business, entertainment, and sports, among other industries.

Alongside Rogan are world leaders including United States President Joe Biden, Russian head-of-state Vladimir Putin, and China's Xi Jinping.

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The comedian is a pioneer in the podcasting industry. His wildly-popular video podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, reportedly has an average of 11 million listeners, making it the most popular show of its kind.

In May 2020, Spotify announced a licensing deal with Rogan, seeing his top-rated podcast become exclusive to the streaming platform. The deal reportedly earned the comic a whopping $200 million. Summing up Rogan's success, journalist Kara Swisher wrote:

"He certainly delivers with big interviews from Elon Musk to Dave Chappelle, ranging across the ideological spectrum, which is a critical talent in these partisan times. But he’s also gotten into a lot of trouble this year for resurfaced racial slurs he made—and apologized for—and being a place where COVID deniers get a very easy ride. It’s complicated, of course, but there’s no question that Rogan’s success is pretty simple: the former Fear Factor host has become the nation’s earworm."

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Author discusses Joe Rogan's influence

The co-author of the new book That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, weighed in on Joe Rogan's influence, specifically on the young male demographic of the United States.

During an interview with Vulture, writer Matt Sienkiewicz gave a preview of his book's chapter about the comedian:

"The argument we make is that Rogan doesn’t have politics, he has demographics. He has a set of ideas and empathies that tend to attract a certain audience. It’s very male, it’s very young, and it’s very interested in, I guess, buying pubic-hair shavers and boxes of raw meat and the kinds of things that he sells. To be clear, the way that social media works is you can be part of the right-wing comedy complex and also part of a liberal space, because you can hack up an episode. You have these four-hour shows that can be broken up into pieces, and each can appeal to different people. It need not be exclusive."