The Stream is Up

Every day, seven days a week, for eight hours or more, Hasan Piker is live on the video game streaming platform Twitch. This is where he shares his political commentary with a dedicated community of viewers — many of whom fall into a particularly sought-after electoral demographic: young men. One of the dominant theories about the re-election of President Donald Trump in November 2024 was that it was aided by commentators like Piker: brash and bro-y. But Piker is a Socialist, considerably to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. He gets into streamer beefs, but he also talks a lot about empathy and bringing a spirit of charitability to political discourse. What kind of affect does he have on his community and their political activism? Who's tuning in 50 hours a week to get their news from one guy (spoiler: it's not just twentysomething men), and really — who's that guy? Endless Thread talks to Hasan Piker and his fans. Credits: This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was reported and produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Amory Sivertson?

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/SmallBusiness.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just about a year ago, America's extremely online fell in love with a celebrity.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  People are into this Tim Houthi-Chalamet. They say he's a Houthi fighter. He's hot. They say he looks like Chalamet.

• 1:24Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. Not incredibly skinny Bob Dylan impersonator Timothy Chalamet, Tim Houthi-Chalamet.

• 1:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  The apparent origin story video for Tim Houthi-Chalamet was pretty unremarkable on the surface.

• 1:44Amory Sivertson?

  Just a guy with curly, dark hair, steering a small boat with one hand and holding his phone in selfie mode with the other. A light blue skiff bathed in the sun. Very mindful, very demure. A much bigger ship hulking in the background with big white lettering that said, "Galaxy Leader." This was 33 seconds of, honestly...

• 2:07Amory Sivertson?

  Not that much.

• 2:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  But then, like that, this video had 13 million views. Because, I mean, look at them. Okay, I don't understand why people obsess over actor Timothy Chalamet either, but Tim Houthee Chalamet's celebrity was, in some ways, an example of a new way that people are consuming news and information. Coming at it kind of sideways. At least, that was true for me.

• 2:33Amory Sivertson?

  Tim Houthee was how we learned more about the Red Sea and the attacks on ships there.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  To the Red Sea, where the UK's Iranian-backed Houthee rebels have carried out their largest attack so far on shipping lanes. The Ministry of Defense-

• 2:46Amory Sivertson?

  That is the BBC. But we didn't first listen to that report until a few weeks ago.

• 2:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  No. My understanding of Yemeni fighters disrupting a key international shipping route in reaction to the war in Gaza started in the diffuse, crackling, digital, foamy broadcast waves of the internet, somewhere between TikTok and Twitch. Okay, Rashid, how old are you?

• 3:09Amory Sivertson?

  Where are you from originally in Yemen? Let's orient ourselves a bit here. We're talking about the southern end of the Red Sea, which flows past Yemen, Eritrea-

• 3:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Djibouti.

• 3:21Amory Sivertson?

  And Djibouti. It's this key shipping route because it brings giant ships back and forth between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the east coast of Africa and the Mediterranean Sea and Europe. It is a massive shortcut for getting goods between the east and the west.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  An age-old plan to shorten the distance between Europe and the Orient by linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean-

• 3:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes. To get from the east to the west, you have to head through the Middle East. And when these attacks started a little over a year ago, the ships under attack were traveling up and down the coastline of Yemen, which has a front seat to the Red Sea's shipping route.

• 4:02Amory Sivertson?

  The Red Sea, the Suez Canal that connects it to the Mediterranean- This is a zone that's had a ton of all kinds of commercial shipping for a long time.

• 4:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  And a lot of conflict since forever, since Moses.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  The long history of man's efforts to create a passage through the Egyptian land barrier can be traced back to 2000 B.C.

• 4:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  The Houthis are a group of fighters in Yemen that are vaguely associated with Iran, and they're in their own intense armed conflict with their neighbor Saudi Arabia.

• 4:35Amory Sivertson?

  They've driven a civil war in Yemen against the government there with a resulting intense humanitarian crisis. We are not going to try and explain this conflict further right now.

• 4:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is probably for the best, but the Houthis have been reportedly doing this because they believe Israel, the US, and its allies were doing nothing to stop the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

• 5:02Amory Sivertson?

  It seems fair to say that right now, politics and armed conflict have a much more direct and highly personal impact on daily life in Yemen, to say nothing of the larger region.

• 5:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  But much of the way we experience this story in the US, unless we have a personal or family connection to Yemen or the merchant mariner industry, this feels and is pretty far off.

• 5:24Amory Sivertson?

  Tim Houthis Chalamet, also known as Rashid Al-Hadad online, brought it closer somehow, especially after he did a big interview with what we might call a news delivery service.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  I'm doing journalism, chat. Calm down, okay?

• 5:41Amory Sivertson?

  Not the New York Times, or BBC, or NPR, organizations that might at least have a few reporters stationed in the region near the Red Sea.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  What platform is best to talk on? Is it Instagram? Okay, that works.

• 5:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  By the way, 19-year-old Tim Houthis Chalamet said he was not a Houthis fighter, but he did seem to have the trappings of an influencer.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  He said, "Hust not wait a few minutes until I set up the lighting." Bro, this dude is a professional dude.

• 6:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  The news service getting the big interview with the Chalamet of the moment also had good lighting, access to translators, and a huge engaged audience. Associated Press, Reuters, NBC? No. More of a dude who's a professional dude.

• 6:27Amory Sivertson?

  Hasan Piker.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  People say, "Hasan Piker, you've changed." It's like, "Motherfucker, I haven't changed." You did, bitch. I've never heard a Democrat be like, "Man, what do we gotta do about this fucking military budget?" We are literally the fucking last political space online that is a holdout, that is majority men, that isn't like insanely fucked politically.

• 6:51Amory Sivertson?

  Not insanely effed politically? Maybe. But definitely polarizing. And we're not even really talking politics yet. We're talking generations.

• 7:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whenever we ask people if they know Hasan Piker, it goes one of three ways. It's either, "No idea who you're talking about."

• 7:08Amory Sivertson?

  Or, "Oh, yeah, is that that hot guy?"

• 7:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or, "The streamer?" Yeah, definitely. And these answers divide along generational lines. Hassan also divides people on feelings about the war in Gaza. Political lines in the US, too.

• 7:25Amory Sivertson?

  Also, lines of gender. But you take all the people on one side of all those lines and put them together?

• 7:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  You get an impressive audience. 3 million followers just on the video game streaming site Twitch. Another million and a half on YouTube and his hours-long live streams. There can be 20,000 to 30,000 people watching and listening to Hassan at any given moment.

• 7:49Amory Sivertson?

  That's an audience that competes with WBUR's largest average broadcast radio listening audience in Boston. The same audience as our entire station in a major metro area. But it's one Twitch stream. One guy. Hasan Piker. 33 years old.

• 8:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's ripped. A true Chad.

• 8:09Amory Sivertson?

  And as Americans celebrate or slide into despair following the second election of President Donald J. Trump, an increasingly popular Chad, thanks to an increasingly popular, seemingly endless, stream.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  There's a couple of things that I talk about that like basically break people's brains. Peter Thiel owns-

• 8:30Speaker 05

  The country now, do you understand? You don't want solutions. You don't want to understand why this violence happens. I do.

• 8:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 8:42Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Threat.

• 8:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR news stream.

• 8:49Amory Sivertson?

  And on today's episode, a look at how the media landscape and news consumption are changing through one example. The guy people are calling, quote, "the Joe Rogan of the left," who has bad news for people who say things like, "he's the Joe Rogan of the left."

• 9:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  I just don't think that we can podcast our way out of this problem. Like, I just don't think that the Democrats-

• 9:10Speaker 05

  Oh, come on, man, come on!

• 9:16Amory Sivertson?

  Whatever you've heard of Hasan, whatever you think of him, however you've found him, or if you've never heard of him or found him, let's start with some simple facts. His parents are Turkish. His father is a political scientist and economist who has helped support the Future Party in that country in opposition to the right-wing Justice and Development Party. His mom is an architectural historian, teaching at the Institute of Technology in New Jersey.

• 9:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Piker's uncle started the Young Turks, the popular progressive news network that began on the radio, jumped to YouTube, and is now played on some television channels.

• 9:52Amory Sivertson?

  Four and a half long years of, "we're making progress, we're not making progress." You're heading off a cliff, dude, and you don't even realize it. Hasan's of an even younger generation than the Young Turks. He's on YouTube, but he's most established on the video game streaming platform Twitch, where people watch other people play video games. And in Hasan's case, people watch him talking about politics. But if you're gonna stream on Twitch, you're probably gonna do both.

• 10:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  The first time I came across him was when, in the election of 2020, he streamed a "Get Out the Vote" game of Among Us with Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. When you watch this video, as AOC gets onto the stream with Hasan, he seems pretty psyched.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  We came a long way.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Here we go. From 15 people watching me play Fortnite with motherfucking Felix Beederman, to playing Among Us with the top content creators and also two of my favorite politicians.

• 10:57Amory Sivertson?

  The Among Us stream, just a little more than an hour long total, netted nearly 700,000 concurrent viewers. Just to give you a sense, that competes with the prime viewing period between 8 and 11 p.m. of CNN, which, by the way, is also putting Hassan on.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  This is Hasan Piker.

• 11:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is my dog, Kaya. Piker was 29 back then and about to watch Biden sweep into office and topple Donald Trump's attempt at reelection in the midst of a brutal pandemic. When you watch this four-year-old stream, Hassan seems legit giddy at what's happening. And it's this odd combination of video game nerdery and progressive political energy. Or maybe it's not that odd of a combination.

• 11:41Amory Sivertson?

  Hasan Piker represents a huge change in the way people consume information in 2025, especially digital natives, people who have only really been around after the internet and computers.

• 11:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Increasingly, they don't compartmentalize their different flavors of content. They don't go to one place for news, another place for lifestyle, information, et cetera. They go to the same place for all the things. And usually that same place is not a brand, per se, it's a person.

• 12:11Amory Sivertson?

  We wanted to hear from some of these people, so we reached out on Reddit and got a bunch of responses. Some Hassan fans have requested that we only use their first name because, well, Hassan takes political positions that some employers might view as extreme. I had gone through different posts, reading comments, because I just basically...

• 12:34Amory Sivertson?

  View reading Reddit as like people watching and kind of bookmark Hasan in my head is like, I gotta figure this guy out. This is Janet. She's in her early 40s, lives in Colorado, goes against a few of the larger characteristics of Hasan's audience, but she's part of a growing demographic. Percentage of male went down, percentage of female went up. We're up big. That's Hasan streaming his annual Hasanabi community census on Twitch. Hasan's subreddit lists, quote, "151,000 comrades" as its follower count, which is where we found Janet.

• 13:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Janet started out reading Hasanabi hate on Reddit, but she's a comrade now. She's watching his Twitch stream every day. And it's not just Janet who's taking it all in.

• 13:20Amory Sivertson?

  My toddler gets a little bit of TV time in the morning, so when Hasan starts, the TV goes off for him and we throw him into lunch. He knows the Hasan is streaming song and will start doing sign language for food when that song comes on. So I've kind of ruined the baby, but.

• 13:42Amory Sivertson?

  A number of the people we talked to watch and listen to Hasan while at work or while doing schoolwork, but Janet's home with her baby, so. It's on my 80-inch television. It's in the front of my living room. We have a really open floor plan, so I can hear it while I'm cleaning, while I'm hanging out with the baby, doing flashcards and whatever. He's basically just like our talk radio during the day, except we get to look at him.

• 14:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  We heard this a lot, actually. Hasan as replacement for the radio.

• 14:13Amory Sivertson?

  But he's streaming video, too, so it's pretty similar to cable news. And while it's not a 24-hour Hasan cycle, it is seven days a week, along with a serious regimen of weight training, which you kind of have to do if you're sitting in a gaming chair for that long every day. He has a background. Team running a Discord chat, doing video graphics and managing the community behind the scenes.

• 14:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  This consistency has, over time, just grown his reach, which in turn turned the heads of the people trying to run the country in the last election. Hassan was invited to the Democratic Convention. He was looked at by many in the run up to the election as Exhibit A that Kamala Harris and company were talking to the right people to help them talk to the people who were going to vote. But then, the other team's podcast reach out game turned out to be a lot more full on. The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this, the Lex Friedman Podcast.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  How long have we been talking? A long time. Let's go. Probably like three hours. He's one of the most famous people on earth, and I'm grateful for this chance to learn more about the man behind the headlines.

• 15:22Speaker 05

  Today's guest is Donald Trump.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  The Associated Press has called the presidency for Republican Donald Trump.

• 15:34Amory Sivertson?

  Ever since, Hassan has been on what almost feels like a group therapy tour, talking to a lot of legacy media organizations and helping to explain to them how they could have possibly missed this thing that the polls really bore out, that young men were breaking for Trump.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  I think Trump speaks to male insecurities better. It's not necessarily flooding the market with like a bunch of liberals like, oh, if we had like eight more Pod Save Americas that kind of look like me, for example, like more bro-y, right, then that would be fine. It's like, no, you can't podcast your way out of this problem.

• 16:07Amory Sivertson?

  There it is again. You can't podcast your way out of this problem. And yet, it seems like if the Democratic Party could podcast or stream its way into the hearts of young men, Hassan could be their guy. Because he courts more than the Janets. He also courts a lot of Jaden's.

• 16:27Speaker 06

  Right now, Heber Springs has a population of about 7,000 people.

• 16:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  24-year-old Jaden didn't find Hasan Piker in his hometown of Heber Springs, Arkansas.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  It's a pretty close-knit community. A lot of people know each other. A lot of people will go to the same church, for example. All the beliefs of everyone are pretty much shared throughout the entire community.

• 16:52Amory Sivertson?

  That shared belief system, in Jaden's experience, has always been church-focused. Growing up, he says a lot of the social interaction was through church. Or trips with church groups. One of these particular trips to some cabins in the woods, he remembers in particular.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  It was cold, it was windy, it was so miserable.

• 17:13Amory Sivertson?

  There was always a theme or topic of discussion for these trips.

• 17:16Speaker 06

  For this trip, they decided to make it about homosexuality.

• 17:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jayden thinks this trip happened when gay marriage got national protections in the US. He says that the trip turned out to be a bunch of adults telling a bunch of middle schoolers about how homosexuality and gay marriage were ruining society.

• 17:36Speaker 06

  I had so many experiences like that, kind of around church and things like that.

• 17:40Amory Sivertson?

  When Jayden started to spend more time online in high school, he discovered perspectives that didn't really match the homogeneity of Heber Springs.

• 17:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  And when he went to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, his own belief structure started to shift even more. Jayden says straight up that the only reason his belief structure has changed is because college and the internet.

• 18:02Amory Sivertson?

  Which is where he found Hassan.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  I thought that the way he broke down certain topics was just really easy to understand, easy to digest.

• 18:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  Digest what exactly? Hassan's worldview.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Whether it's, you know, American foreign policy being ultimately damaging to the world, or whether it be an advocacy for enshrining abortion rights in the Constitution, gun control, like reasonable gun safety measures that must be implemented, focusing on universal healthcare and free college education. All of these things have not improved at all.

• 18:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jayden says that Hasan Piker's point of view on a bunch of different topics felt logical and approachable, and that they were ultimately compassionate towards America's most underprivileged people. Unhoused people, veterans, racial minorities, working-class Americans, et cetera.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  It was definitely sort of a gradual realization that a lot of these things that the church and conservative-minded people were saying were concepts and ideas that actually went against the Bible in some ways. I think that was kind of the biggest contradiction that I sort of realized was when they talk about politics, it's pretty clear to realize that these people are not 100% for loving thy neighbor and...

• 19:24Speaker 06

  Looking out for those less fortunate than you.

• 19:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  Back in Heber Springs, Jaden's parents and his brothers are not watching one of Hasan Piker's streams three days a week like Jaden is. His parents are watching Fox News. His little brother?

• 19:39Speaker 06

  He's definitely sort of that Joe Rogan, Tilkoney, or Kill Tony, Andrew Schultz kind of audience member.

• 19:48Amory Sivertson?

  So, family conversations, even though Jaden gets along well with his parents and siblings, can be a little tricky. But Jaden has a new vocabulary.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  Definitely one benefit of tuning into Hasan and all these other left-leaning political commentators is that you're able to have discussions with these people and introduce new perspectives on looking at things that they have definitely not been exposed to before.

• 20:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Maybe one of the reasons Hasan resonates with people like Jaden, who identifies as a cis white male, is that in a lot of ways, he looks the part.

• 20:27Amory Sivertson?

  Hasan has said he was teased as a younger kid for being, as people in the 1950s might say, kind of a shrimp. And like many young people before him, Hasan channeled that teasing into Time at the Gym.

• 20:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which in turn feeds a persona that, on the surface, might feel like it's part of the manosphere that many of us have heard about. The online spaces where men prioritize alpha masculine behavior and ideals above all else. He does look and a little bit sound the part.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Bruh, dude, oh dude, holy dude. It's like, dude, bitch, bitch, bitch, what do you mean?

• 21:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  But this is another case where you have to look closely enough to see the differences between streamers, who definitely don't line up along the same clear, bright lines between, say, Fox and MSNBC, or even NPR and the Wall Street Journal.

• 21:16Amory Sivertson?

  And yet, the streamer world is drawing more and more of the audience that used to go to big broadcast news organizations away from that and into things like a video game streaming platform that might have a bunch of political thought mixed up. With a game of Among Us or Counter-Strike.

• 21:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hasan Piker has drawn a lot of controversy for his positions and his statements. And I'm not talking about bitch, I'm talking more about.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  If you look at the civilian deaths versus the deaths of soldiers, Hamas's percentages are infinitely better than Israel. That's just facts. So no, Hamas is the lesser evil.

• 21:53Amory Sivertson?

  If you're on for eight hours a day, seven days a week, speaking to a large audience of young people and your general topic is political thought, you're gonna eventually say some things that stir the pot. Hassan has opted into the battle royale and tete-a-tete world of streamers.

• 22:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like this face-off with a famous streamer called Destiny.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  I'm almost positive that you said that you wouldn't vote for Joe Biden, that you said you would like go shack up and live in the woods somewhere, which is cool because you have the privilege to do so, but.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  But I said, I'm, I'm, I'm considering not voting for Joe Biden and then living up in the woods and living in an anarcho-primitivist lifestyle, which is like the second, it's a meme, dude.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 22:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Destiny, a streamer known for being pugnacious, had a falling out with Hassan that was seismic in the streaming world.

• 22:37Amory Sivertson?

  And Ethan Klein, an American Israeli YouTuber and podcaster who used to collaborate with Hassan on a podcast, has since worn off that partnership.

• 22:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mostly because of the duo's inability to have a measured debate on what has been happening in Gaza. Just a few weeks ago, Ethan released a two-hour-long takedown attack on Hassan, much of which seemed focused on Hassan's support of Palestinians.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Hassan's chat had been calling me a Zionist, baby-killing genocider. Maybe it is unreasonable that I'm asking him to moderate his chat for a friend.

• 23:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hassan responded in kind while on vacation in Japan.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, I am pro-Palestine. That's it. If that's fucking news to you, you are the dumbest baby on the planet.

• 23:30Amory Sivertson?

  This, we can say, is giving streamer big time. Though big news organizations do it too. Newspapers throwing shade at each other through competitive reporting and op-eds, even presidential endorsements.

• 23:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, remember when newspapers did presidential endorsements?

• 23:46Amory Sivertson?

  Somebody check the Jeff Bezos Twitch stream.

• 23:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  A slap fight is a slap fight. But underneath the bros and the bitches, the bluster, the muscles, Hasan's pushing political thought too.

• 23:57Amory Sivertson?

  So it's time for us to add him in the chat. And we will when we come right back.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 25:01Amory Sivertson?

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness. So as we said at the beginning, some people have characterized Hasan Piker as "the Joe Rogan of the left." His audience is a fraction of Rogan's, but people do see the resemblance. Muscles, manhood, what many people see as a political agenda delivered via

• 25:47Amory Sivertson?

  Newer platforms.

• 25:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Though instead of a brand of, hey, I'm just a guy who used to host Fear Factor asking questions. Hassan's brand is more, dare we say, earnest? Let's find out.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  I'm Hassan Piker, also known as Hassan Abi on Twitch, or Hassan Khan on Twitter, or Hassan D. Piker on TikTok and many other social medias. I'm 33 years old, so I have all of these different usernames in every single website. It's a, it's a big mess.

• 26:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you remember your first screen name?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  My first screen name was actually Hellboy Hassan.

• 26:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  That was way back in the day.

• 26:27Amory Sivertson?

  Can I ask what might seem like an overly simplistic question, but why stream for eight hours a day?

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Um, I really enjoy it, and also there's a lot of news to cover. Outside of that, I think that there's also a lot of fun to be had besides talking just about the news and, and, you know, doing outreach to a broader community and trying to get them on board to at least like view the world from a more charitable perspective to the way I see it.

• 27:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  So there's like a mission for you in that altruistic mission?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I, I don't know if it's altruistic. Some people might consider it to be, you know, propagandistic, I guess, or is that even a word? They would say it's propaganda and, um,

• 27:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Would you say it's propaganda?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  I do, yeah. I don't think it's necessarily, I don't think propaganda necessarily is a bad word, but, you know, it's considered a bad word when someone uses it in especially the Western world. But, yeah, I think that you can, you can be honest with the things that you're talking about.

• 27:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  Now, Hasan told us he's a political commentator, not a journalist. But what gives some journalists indigestion about Hasan is that some people do get their news primarily, or in some cases exclusively, from Hasan, as if he really is the news.

• 27:58Amory Sivertson?

  As you've heard from Hasan already, depending upon when you jump into the stream and how long you listen, it could be both. I mean, there's definitely something different. Meghan is a 37-year-old from Connecticut. If something happens and I'm not there for it, it's like I missed that moment where like the chat tells him like, Trump just got shot. And then like immediately, he's switching over to the live feed. And then right away, chatters are sending him links. Like, this is what we know so far. It's addictive. It makes me not want to miss it.

• 28:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  In a way, Hasan is really a new filter for the news. When it happens, he's reading articles of real news outlets and commenting in front of his audience. And his live chat is feeding those articles to him in real time. It's almost like a live updating discussion feedback loop where Hasan and his audience are talking to each other about what is happening.

• 28:52Amory Sivertson?

  Meghan didn't find Hasan looking for news, though. I think it was actually his Chadvice segment that I saw first.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Can you still not nut? Oh, oh, yeah. Yes. Oh, no. Yeah. And the dog, what are you doing?

• 29:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes, Chadvice, where Hasan Piker gives advice to dudes about how to be a Chad, an internet parlance, a desirable, successful, with-the-ladies kind of guy. And Hasan's goal seems to be to do this Chadvice segment without all the misogyny and toxicity.

• 29:26Amory Sivertson?

  Again, a perfect example of the Gen Z and millennial audiences' habits. Less about the network, more about a person they trust and the community.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  People, I think, come in and they're like, well, that's a cool guy. He seems progressive. He doesn't seem like an asshole. He looks kind of bro-y, maybe a little too bro-y for me. Or maybe that's beneficial for a lot of young men, that they look at someone that they identify with, like a white dude who likes to work out and play video games. And they go, hmm, like, this seems like a different community than the one I'm used to.

• 30:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  If the manosphere is what insecure young men are discovering and pouring into as they search for a way to navigate masculinity in what some might call a boring dystopia, Hasan can represent a different set of solutions for the same problems.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Specifically, like he always says, you know, if you put in the hard work, if you focus on bettering yourself, like, everybody can be a seven.

• 30:24Amory Sivertson?

  Alex is another Hasanabi fan we talked to.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  His journey going to the gym, losing weight, and how it like changed his mindset. He was also like a big inspiration for me in that regard. I started going to the gym. I ended up losing like 60 pounds, I think. And now like today, like years later, I'm in the best shape I've ever been in.

• 30:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Alex hasn't just transformed physically because of Hasan. He's also changed his politics and even what he's studying in college so that he can be a lawyer who works on labor rights.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  You know, had I not found Hasan's community, I like to think that I'd maybe still have these views, but there's no guarantee, you know? I'm lucky that I found this community as opposed to, you know, something else.

• 31:13Amory Sivertson?

  Granted, like Alex, Hasan's had his own awakenings and political evolutions, too. Trans rights is an example.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  It's not something that I hide. I used to have transphobic opinions. I mean, this was a decade plus ago, but it doesn't matter. Like, it's more so about like always being charitable and admitting when you're wrong and, and maybe developing a better mindset around certain things with more information.

• 31:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  One of the biggest criticisms leveraged at Hasan is not that he's doing irresponsible journalism, sourcing stories as they happen during a stream from online users who are dropping links and rumors into a stew of a live chat log next to his video stream that moves so fast fellow kids lurkers like myself can barely comprehend it.

• 32:01Amory Sivertson?

  And not even that he is, as he says, also making propaganda, often pro-Palestine propaganda, which he admits fully upfront. No. The biggest criticism of Hassan from the right is that he's extreme, which is also the criticism from other people on the left, or at least the center of the left. Because Hassan is an avowed socialist. Not exactly the messaging a lot of powerful Democrats are going for. And that goes both ways. Hassan's support of the Democrats seems to be somewhere between tenuous and fully in the rearview mirror.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  DNC was my turning point.

• 32:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I'd like to welcome you all to the Democratic National Convention roll call. Why? What made you turn in that moment?

• 32:50Speaker 02

  I was shocked at how not tapped into the real world I was when I was at the heart of where things are happening. I was genuinely shocked at how out of touch I was with everything else that was going on in the world. Because when you're there, when you're in that bubble, when the DC bubble comes to Chicago, right? You're still in that DC bubble. And I now understand why so many people, so many staffers, so many analysts, so many of these guys that write these think pieces and whatnot are so unimaginably out of touch with the needs and opinions of regular old American working-class people.

• 33:35Amory Sivertson?

  And when you talk to regular working-class people who listen to Hassan, like Meghan, you do get the sense that he's having a real impact on their opinions and their feelings about the world, whatever their lived experience.

• 33:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  For Meghan, that lived experience includes a period of homelessness. After she failed at her second college attempt, feelings of shame kept her from going home.

• 33:57Amory Sivertson?

  Despite that home life being one that Meghan describes as privileged and supportive, she's back on her feet now. She works as a court reporter, doing transcriptions of court recordings. And in her spare time, she volunteers helping expunge minor marijuana. Infractions from people's records. But. It's so much closer to all of us than we know. And Hassan does a really good job of helping people to remember that these people are just like them.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  The person that you see on the street that has like leathery skin at this point from being under the sun, from sun damage, sun exposure for many, many years, who clearly is not mentally well, right? That is the last tier of homelessness.

• 34:41Amory Sivertson?

  Hassan has definitely helped me to feel like that's something that I can share with people because previously it was like shameful. I was ashamed of that. Now, if I do share that with someone, I will follow it up with the tears of homelessness and, you know, try to leave people with like a little bit more empathy for people that they see panhandling or whatever.

• 35:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Empathy and charity. Feisty as he may be on the screen, these are words you hear a lot from Hassan and his fans.

• 35:21Speaker 06

  More charitable to those ideas.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  A more charitable perspective.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  It was that charitable ability. A lot of charitable ability.

• 35:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  To put a finer point on it, while Hassan lives in this disembodied world of Twitch and YouTube streams interviewing people who know suspected domestic terrorists at home or abroad.

• 35:42Amory Sivertson?

  He does seem to push this common theme of get involved in your local community and just help get things you believe in done, which again, whatever your political stripes, is probably good advice if you are not a billionaire, but you want to make meaningful impact.

• 36:06Amory Sivertson?

  More than a year after Tim Houthishaleme had his moment in the sun, driving a skiff next to that big merchant ship Galaxy Leader and becoming a special guest in Hassan's Twitch stream, the online world has moved on.

• 36:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  But the world world hasn't. According to the latest reports from News and Information Services, New and Old, that large ship remains under Houthish control. Its final destination, a question mark.

• 36:35Amory Sivertson?

  And in a way, we're all there too, unsure of what the future holds. For journalists, propagandists, billionaires, streamers, our goldfish attention spans in hyperdrive.

• 36:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Somewhere in the back of our minds, trying to hold on to North Stars of how we should act towards our fellow humans, listening and watching and wondering what to do. Whatever the case, the stream is up.

• 37:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  This episode was reported and produced by Grace Tatter. It was also reported and written by me, Ben Brock Johnson.

• 37:28Amory Sivertson?

  It was co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson, and sound design by production manager Paul Vikes.

• 37:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest of our team is Franny Monahan, Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, Caitlin Harrop, and our managing producer, Sumit Ajoshi.

• 37:41Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and problems major political parties may or may not be able to podcast themselves out of.

• 37:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  By the way, we did have a much longer conversation with Hassan Piker, and we're going to be dropping a version of that conversation into the feed in the coming days. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, [email protected].

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education. I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to explain why you're excited about it. Oh my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example,

• 39:09Speaker 00

  speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 39:44Amory Sivertson?

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/SmallBusiness. Now streaming on Paramount+.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  He's back.

• 40:26Speaker 05

  I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  And sharper than ever.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Dexter Resurrection, new season now streaming on the Paramount+ Premium Plan.