Drew Afualo, Hasan Piker Join The Hollywood Reporter to Toast the Creators A-List

Get the phones out — timed to the release of The Hollywood Reporter‘s 50 Hottest Influencers on the Planet list, THR hosted its Creators A-List Dinner on Wednesday to celebrate the viral stars making waves both online and in the real world.

The event, presented by Facebook and sponsored by Gersh and Blacklane, took over Beverly Hills hotspot Matsuhisa for a seated dinner of sushi staples, as creators including Drew Afualo, Hasan Piker, Boman Martinez-Reid, Michael Blaustein, Connor Wood, Noah Beck, David Dobrik, Zane Hijazi, Adam Waheed, Emma Brooks and Dhar Mann mixed, mingled and captured plenty of content.

THR editor-in-chief Maer Roshan, THR publisher Lori O’Connor and Gersh senior partner and head of digital Jade Sherman kicked off the night’s programming with welcome remarks, followed by THR writer-at-large Peter Kiefer sitting down for a fireside chat with Meta’s vp of product, Ime Archibong.

With Archibong being introduced as Mark Zuckerberg’s one-time jogging partner — a boss he later described as “intensely curious” — the exec pitched why, in a sea full of social media platforms, influencers should give some priority to their Facebook content. On top of Meta’s global audience reaching 3 billion people a month, he told the room, “When they come to Facebook, there’s an engagement that they have with real, authentic people that I think that anyone who is a community leader, for lack of better word, in addition to a creator, is really finding value in.”

Archibong also emphasized the fact that “y’all are getting paid” on the platform and “if how you actually want to monetize is through text or even video or photos, Facebook I think is probably one of the places right now where you can get paid for all those different formats and media types.”

The conversation later touched on A.I. — with Meta heavily investing in the space — as the exec declared, “It’s an exciting time to be a builder” and they are currently being guided by “this spirit of fun and play.” One example of that came as Archibong explained, “A.I. is allowing you to upload content as of, what, two weeks ago, on both Facebook and Instagram and automatically translate those videos from English into Spanish, and because of A.I., it’ll look like your mouth is saying the right pronunciations and everything along those lines. So when you talk about connecting and really reaching your audience, that is one of the most powerful things I’m hoping that creators will see from this brand new capability.”

He also took a more positive outlook on the future of such technologies, noting, “I do think that with this particular wave, there has been enough of a conversation and attention around A.I. right now that you are seeing whether it’s the biggest of big companies — the Metas, Microsofts, the Amazons, the Googles out there in the world — all the way to the smallest of the small entrepreneurs who are trying to tinker with this technology, who are thinking and designing with safety at the center of it.” He added, “I think that we’ll continue in the same way, like when we discovered fire, to put it to the best use.”

Roshan then returned to the stage to lead a panel on “The New Fame” with influencer-turned-podcaster Afualo, comedian Blaustein, Kardashian spoofer Martinez-Reid (A.K.A. Bomanizer) and political commentator Piker, that began with how to cut through the online noise.  

“I think my ‘secret to success’ is probably being very stubborn and being very consistent, both in my political commentary but also in my day-to-day activities,” Piker explained. “I have a very regimented work-life balance that mostly leans on the side of doing work more than anything else, but I’m live seven days a week and for eight hours every single day on Twitch” — in the same breath warning, “It’s not something that I think others should also follow through on because it’s not very healthy.”

Blaustein, meanwhile, teased that his secret sauce is “dick jokes,” as he regularly posts crowd work sets from his stand-up shows online to “give people watching a little taste of what I’m going to do on stage and so if they can’t afford the live show, they can at least nibble on a little portion of my show, and I think people are satiated by that.”

When it comes to what they consider a mark for success, Blaustein said that as a mental health advocate he gets “a lot of DMs saying, ‘Your clips are the reason that I kept going’ and I think that is like a big marker for me for happiness, honestly.”

Afualo responded that for her it has been “uplifting and encouraging, empowering marginalized people who have been forced to live within the confines of what the straight man loves or desires or finds cool and funny. So I think their kind of validation in terms of how much my content has helped them is really a measure of success. Also taking care of my family — it’s been a dream of mine to retire my parents and retire a lot of my other family members and take care of everyone so now I can do that, thankfully.”

The group also discussed how they draw lines between their content and their personal lives, as Piker noted that despite streaming so much of his day, “I feel like keeping some things private in your life is good for your own mental sanity because that’s a place that you can go to at any moment to feel comfortable and to feel secure and to feel like a human being again, and not like a zoo animal that’s trapped in this room and being being watched at every given moment.”

After mentioning his experience with cyber stalkers, Piker revealed that he doesn’t usually have security — though he tried to secure it for this weekend’s No Kings protest “because of the Charlie Kirk stuff, but then we go to the security teams and they’re like, ‘Well, we’re cops, and you’re going to an anti-cop rally. We can’t secure you at an anti-cop rally.’” He also commented that with “new designations for what constitutes terrorism on U.S. soil” being a checklist of things he regularly says, he expects “I’m going to get it worse than Jimmy Kimmel.”

Continuing on the topic of safety, Afualo added, “You can put as many barriers as you can in place and just protect yourself as best you can. But at the end of the day, no man’s gonna scare me into not saying what the fuck I want to say.”

In how he approaches his platform, Martinez-Reid mused, “One time somebody said that virality is fun but engagement pays the bills. … I blew up during the pandemic when I thought it was fake and I thought my mom was buying me followers, so engaging and interacting with the people that follow me is really, really fun, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it.”

Piker closer out the conversation in offering his take on the current lifestyle of these online stars, saying, “Creators nowadays are on 24/7. In the past, you could be like an eccentric Hollywood actor guy — you can be Daniel Day-Lewis and just like literally become the character and become a method actor for like a year and just be that dude. Creators, on the other hand, are brands, they’re a business, so they have to be multifaceted and they are constantly presenting themselves as a brand in everything that they do, whether they’re in public or not. And that’s, I think, the reason why a lot of people, just don’t have any time to themselves.”

Also in attendance at the second-annual event were reporter Taylor Lorenz, Gersh’s Rebecca Rusheen, Jenny Kaplan, Annabel Garcia Eller, Sydnie Rowland and Delsey Attardi, and Meta’s Andriana Ricchiuti, Frank Spada, Maria Cubeta, Jagjit Singh Chawla and Dhigha Sekaran.