- Donald Trump courted Joe Rogan and other right-leaning/right-curious podcasts last year.
- After last fall's election, Democrats started wondering where their version of Joe Rogan might be.
- One answer that comes up a lot: Hasan Piker, a 33-year-old streamer who hangs out for hours a day on Twitch.
Hasan Piker is no Joe Rogan.
For starters, you have heard of Joe Rogan. Even if you never saw him on TV sitcoms and reality shows, or hosting UFC fights, or watched/listened to his very popular podcasts. You could probably identify him if you saw his picture.
Hasan Piker? Maybe you have heard of him — especially if you are a Very Online young man. But if you're a normie, you probably have no idea that Piker is a unique and surprisingly popular mix of Gamer Guy and Alpha Bro and AOC-style lefty.
But the young men who like Piker really like him, and they'll spend hours a day watching him livestream on Twitch. An even bigger audience inhales clips of those streams when they make their way to Instagram and TikTok.
So after last fall's election, and the realization that Donald Trump had used podcasters like Rogan to reach young men, Democrats started casting about for The Joe Rogan of the Left. And Piker's name started coming up.
The best way to experience Piker is to simply watch him on Twitch, where he hosts a long, daily stream-of-consciousness talk show that flits from video gaming to brawls with other Twitch stars to doses of democratic socialism.
But if you want his backstory, check out this lengthy profile of streamer in The New Yorker, which highlights the Zyn-meets-Howard-Zinn thing he has going on. Andrew Marantz writes:
"He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now he's thirty-three—so old, in streamer years, that his fans call him "unc"... At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who's as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots."
That doesn't mean Piker is going to be Rogan. (No one knew Rogan would be Joe Rogan 20 years ago, when he was watching people eat live slugs on Fear Factor.) But it does explain why people trying to fix the Democrats' Young Man Problem have become very interested in him.
My introduction to Piker, by the way, came during the pandemic, when I knew that streaming and Twitch were important but didn't really understand them. So when I interviewed him in 2021, I definitely wasn't ready for Piker's bristling affect.
And yeah, there's a little bit of meta going on here, since I mentioned Piker in my recent interview of Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, and that got back to Piker, who ended up talking about my interview on his show, where he ends up calling me an "adult" in a way that I'm pretty sure is a compliment.
Anyway. Lots of people have ideas about Joe Rogan who have never listened to Joe Rogan. There's a decent chance that Hasan Piker is going to end up in the same boat — very important to an important group of consumers/voters, and hard for most people to actually get their head around. But you can start here.
