Decoding the Gurus - Hasan Piker: A swashbuckling Bromance

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Avast Ye Harties! Yar! This week be the inaugural episode of a New Streamer/Academic Guru season. Join us as we set sail with a bang and embark on an adventure with the famous and controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Formerly of the Young Turks, Hasan has carved out a niche as a popular left-wing commentator. He is sometimes described as representing a new wave of political communicators who leverage social media and live streaming to reach new audiences, particularly disengaged younger viewers.But how does he fare in these Decoding waters?We take a look at his recent interview with Rashed Al-Haddad, a dashing Yemeni teenager (nicknamed Tim Houthi Chalamet), who recently found himself streaming video on an international transport ship hijacked by Houthi militants. But fear not! Hasan addresses this sensitive topic and the complex geopolitical issues involved with due diligence and care. Moreover, Rashed reports that all of the kidnapped crew are having a grand old time in Yemen! They are simply vibing with their captors, chewing khat, and have fully embraced the honourable Houthi perspective.The Houthis' official slogan, "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam", and reports of severe human rights abuses in their territory, might still give one pause... but as Hasan explains—drawing on his deep political and psychological insights—the Houthis are just like the heroic Straw Hat pirates in the popular anime One Piece!So with that settled, we can focus on the more important questions like what videogames Rashed likes, if he has ever heard of Mr. Beast, whether he's eaten 'Western' food, what cartoons he watched growing up, and if there are KFCs in Yemen? Truly, this is a conversation for the ages, and Hasan is just the man for the job.So join us for this week's episode as we ponder whether combining influencer culture with political analysis was a wise move and if there are any possible contradictions or minor ideological skews in Hasan's content.Links- Hasan Interviews Viral 'Hot Yemeni TikTok Pirate' | Hasanabi Reacts- Atlantic article about the Houthis and the situation in Yemen- AP article on the crew of the hijacked 'Galaxy Leader' ship and their ability to contact their families- Amnesty article on Houthi sentencing of stoning and crucifixion for crimes of homosexuality- Human Rights Watch article on Houthi recruitment of child soldiers- Human Rights Watch article on the al-Ahli Hospital Explosion- Willy Mac 'drama' YouTuber collated episodes on Hasan (part 1 and part 2)

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they talk about i forgot to breathe there okay deep breath i'm matthew brown and with me is chris kavanagh g'day chris how are you hello hello you big psychologist you yep yep I am I am professor of psychology when it comes to psychology there is very little I don't know you could write what I don't know on the back of a postage stamp it would be a very large one but yes that's probably true yeah I'm your prompt Matt you know whenever you get through the introduction and I feel you've missed something important, I just, you know, give you a little nudge in the right direction

and off you speed along your track. Yeah, yeah. I forgot to, you know, mention a dynamic duo, you and I in that context. Have I done Batman and Robin? Have I done Winnie the Pooh? You've definitely done Winnie the Pooh. That was like the last episode you're going to see

now. Batman and Robin you must have done as well. Come on. That is the most obvious. How about Goku and Vegeta? That's a cut that you won't get. I don't get that. No. I'm actually topical, Matt, because

we're looking at a Twitch streamer this week, somebody who likes anime. And as we announced on the previous episode, we've got a new format. So we're diving straight in to our decoding this week. There's not that much intro waffle. No. You've had it.

It's gone. No. You've had it. It's gone. No. It'll be a targeted contextual waffle if there is one. I have a bit of contextual waffle to get us going with, Chris. Oh, yeah. You probably do too. But before we get into the man himself, tell me a little bit more about Twitch streamers.

I don't really understand what streaming is what twitching is uh yeah i know that you've you know a bit i do know a bit about it probably more substantially more than you twitch is a channel where predominantly people do live streams live streams of themselves playing games and so they stream their screen and they interact with the chat as they're playing the game. Now, it's not only that. There are also political streamers, people who are mostly covering political topics, sometimes doing debates. There are IRL streams where people go out in real life to some location

with portable filming equipment and interactive chat so there's all sorts of stuff going on there but primarily that's what it is the gaming thing was the initial and kind of primary thing with twitch and it's still part of the culture there yeah yeah yeah so even some streamers who are predominantly gamers uh i just want to check if i got this right they they may well sort of just talk about all kinds of stuff political or or otherwise social commentary whatever while they're playing the game maybe is that right it depends on the streamer some of them stick to maybe anime or pop culture kind of things as well and steer away from politics other ones are into politics in the case of like destiny i think he originally was a game streamer of some

description for example but he mostly now is associated with like political streaming but he still often plays games when he's talking to people or even in some cases debating them though it depends on the person but yeah so you know it would be rude if i were to start streaming a game in the background as i talked to you but that's actually not that odd in in twitch land and yeah in some cases kind of impressive that people can multitask in that way but you know i guess like driving the car yeah okay all right i got it so did you want to talk about the man himself first or is there something else you want to mention uh no we can get into it america deserved 9-11, dude. Fuck it. I'm saying it. Academics. Can they make a comment about canceling culture? Streamers. Yeah, please explain this to me so I

can tell you how fucking stupid you are. Academics. And when I'm talking about that anagogic in and out of the imaginal augmentation of our ontological depth perception, that's what I mean by imaginal faithfulness. Enlightening stuff. You'll provide some interesting lessons for us today. Decoding the gurus, streamers, and academic season. This is going to be really interesting. So the person that we're covering this week is Hasan Piker, also known as Hasan Abi,, a Turkish American streamer. I think the

biggest or one of the biggest left-wing streamers on Twitch or pretty much any platform. And he was actually active in Destiny's audience. I think at one point he used to collaborate with them or comment on his videos. This is one thing that happens with streamers is sometimes people emerge from their audience and then become popular and start up their own show. I think Vosh also, the horse lord

that we talked about in the previous episode, he emerged, I believe, from Destiny's audience. Yeah, no, you can. can you know there's so much lore these people have so many drama and backstories and all interpersonal stuff mixed in but we don't need to focus on that just to say that hassan was active at one point in destiny's community but he was also a figure on the Young Turks, the kind of progressive online news channel.

And that is in part because his uncle, Cenk, is one of the main dudes there. So I think that played a significant role. Yeah. I know Cenk Uyghur from the Young Turks. Yes. Yes, he's running for president. He's not going to win.

And the other thing, probably when Hassan became well-known to the broader public was he made some comments about America deserving 9-11 when he was commenting about Dan Crenshaw. This is so insane. America deserved 9-11, dude. Fuck it. I'm saying it. We want to know what's happening.

We fucking totally brought it on ourselves, dude. Holy shit. We did. We fucking did. And he ended up sort of apologizing, but not really. But the young Turks kind of they apologized, but Hasan Piker didn't really that much

and he has lots of other controversies and I will also say Matt he's quite the tanky now I think some of his fans or whatever will dispute that but I have a couple of clips that will illustrate why I think it's perfectly fine to say that and I've heard worse clips than

the ones I'm going to play so very apologetic for Russia, China, Cuba, you know, and maybe one other last point to say is he basically outgrew the Young Turks and set out on his own. And now he has his Twitch channel and he collaborates with other people, you know, raises money for charities and whatnot, because he has such a huge audience. And he also is extremely successful. He makes in a huge amount of money such that he lives in a just under $3 million mansion in LA, I believe.

So he often gets accused of being a champion socialist, which I think is an entirely legitimate criticism. And his response is, you know, that you don't have to be poor in order to advocate for socialism and all this kind of stuff. So you can expect, I'm just saying, it's the normal arguments that you would anticipate

from somebody who is apparently advocating for the destruction of capitalism but yet is benefiting mightily but from capitalist systems he is making probably one to 1.5 million dollars a year from membership revenue advertising and sponsor collaborations from his thing yeah that that's one thing that is a little bit like actually nobody will like this comparison but it is true that his pivot towards advertising in the streams is almost as jarring as like alex jones pivot you know when he's ranting about something and then he's like oh and bone broth you know or emergency supplies you're like you'll immediately pivot and then the same way hassan will often like throw two ads in a like a

sharp pivot as well hassan is a fitness roomer now no but i've i've talked about fitness dick in your mom's pussy all the goddamn time so why are you surprised especially when i'm fitting this fucking top of the hour ad break also directly after fitness dick in your mom okay and if you no longer want to avoid me fitness dick in your mom well you can't you know you can't do that i'm your dad now i'm not the stepfather but the father that stepped up but if you do want to avoid the ads at the top of the hour all you need to do is subscribe for five dollars or for free with a twitch prime or by getting gifted a sub so yeah you know it people don't like this point but i have to say that there there are a number of anti-capitalist streamers who to my eyes look remarkably capitalist like they're much

more capitalist than i would be comfortable with in making content so yeah and i'm not anti-capitalist so yeah anyway it's all this all context all context all context so let's get into uh i've got a couple of clips that are not from the content that we're going to cover. We'll introduce that in a minute, but I think these are providing relevant context. And we've done this before, like when we've covered Joe Rogan, we played some old clips of his, and here's some from Hassan that I think are worth mentioning. So this is his take on the ukraine war before it broke out this is him talking about that and this is a collated clip but i think you'll get the gist of it we did it successfully we stopped vladimir putin from invading ukraine or maybe that was never gonna fucking happen like i said

it was never gonna fucking happen you guys are literally q anon i'm sorry west on caleb you are literally a liberal q anon andy okay you are doing the exact same copium that motherfucking q anon people do okay libanon libanon all the way dude blue anon it's wild they literally were just like dude dude they are going they're going to seize the treasure trove of data at the heart of kiev and actually like right now my sources are telling me vladimir putin has literally got a sniper rifle trained on every uh every like ukrainian leader and uh he's waiting for the execution codes like and then you kept saying that for months and now that it's not happening and i kept saying that's not gonna happen that's not gonna happen what did everybody say what the fuck did everybody say when i kept

saying that's not gonna happen you're crazy they kept saying you're fucking in the pocket of vladimir putin you're so fucking wrong it's definitely gonna happen it's happening already you really are the lebs rush limbaugh but i was right i was 100 right like i got fucking liberals schizo posting on the fucking timeline about an inevitable invasion okay ah yeah it didn't age well i guess um yeah that was pre pre-invasion victory lap taking yeah yeah gotta be careful with the timing of those victory laps yeah so i guess a couple of things stand out one is uh he's definitely let's call him a tanky let's just work with that he's the kind of tanky that definitely has it in for the mainstream liberals the kind of people that think

biden is okay and yeah and i guess the second thing is he's very very um combative i guess oh yeah yeah well it's certainly very confident and this is part of streamer culture again it depends on the person some of them are not so belligerent with their chat but some of them are and the way he's interacting here and there's some other clips it really really reminded me of clips I'd heard of Stefan Molyneux interacting with his listeners, where he would kind of berate them during call-ins, you know, for saying something that he disagreed with, and often in very, very disparaging terms. And it sounds exactly the same. And there's just a little bit more of that clip to play. Let's see if anything else jumps out just actual fucking land war in ukraine all of this stuff and

i was 100 right and now liberals who literally said no russia is gonna do this russia is gonna do this russia is the bloodthirsty psychos at the fucking door what happened dude now they're gonna turn around and say oh it's because of nato it's because of nato that they stopped yeah you really you've got it dude um what do you call Crimea? I call it a part of Russian territory, bitch. That's what I call Crimea. I call it Crimea River, a Russian river. Russia's historic access into the Black Sea Crimea that's like historically fucking ethnically all Russian

that is totally fine with the annexation according to Western fucking sources that conducted polls after the original referendum. referendum right so he's never heard of the the crimean tatas then i suppose you feeling bad about the crimean annexation does not change the reality of the crimean annexation being a completely justifiable f**king act by the russian government okay so that's it that's fine. And Hitler invaded countries based on Germanic ties at first? Yeah, dude. Talk to me when he's fucking throwing Ukrainians in a fucking...

What are you talking about? Talk to me when he's throwing Ukrainians at a concentration camp, okay? Hitler wasn't fucking bad because he decided to invade Austria. He was bad because he was fucking killing Jews, okay? That was the problem. He wasn't like, oh yeah, we're going to fucking annex territory with like Germanic people in it. That wasn't the main problem with Hitler.

Well, yeah, Matt. Crime River. That's what he says about it. And so, yes, after Russia invades, he did a little bit acknowledge that he was wrong, right? Because the reality is staring him in the face that he spoke so confidently and, you know, so aggressively berating anybody that was suggesting that was likely. So, of course, he had to walk it back when it actually happened.

I was wrong. I assumed that we could actually have diplomatic talks. I'm wrong. I was wrong. I did not even think that Russia would take over eastern territories wrong i i was wrong i did not even think that russia would take over eastern territories and i was wrong i think that if they actually if the reports are true because there's been a lot of information that has been wrong completely wrong and there's still a lot of information that the western state department is uh is is pumping out by way of

mainstream media about like russia is going to go and overtake Kiev and they're going to go into Ukraine. But yes, this is earlier today, Vladimir Putin said that last, a couple of days ago, the lower parliament in Russia recognized, voted to recognize Eastern Ukrainian territories that have some, not majority,

but some Russian people living in it to be independent. This is a part of Russia's strategy in expanding into areas that it believes that as historical fucking territorial claims to. But he didn't walk it back in the sense of acknowledging that he had been incredibly arrogant and insulting of people and that he had actually completely misinterpreted things, right? It was more just that, yeah, I didn't anticipate that things would go like this and that kind of thing.

Oh my Lord, dude. I've been anti-fucking Russia invading Ukraine since day one. I don't know why the fuck you dumbasses think that I'm like pro-Russia invading Ukraine. I'm vindicating your points of view, you fucking dumb little babies okay it would be easier if you just uh say outright that putin is bad you know me i famously have not uh i famously have not fucking ever said vladimir putin is bad people have been actually calling you a russian imperialist has been very weird yeah i don't know ah i wonder where they got that fucking point of view from and they'll say it's because of me it's because of uh like what i've said so far but it's literally because these fucking douchebags that make videos saying i'm a

russian imperialist or whatever the fuck and clip chimp shit that of course don't show my take about like fucking how i feel about how i feel about putin uh escalating tensions so he will argue that you know he admitted that he made a mistake but it's a very very tame acknowledgement of error and and you can hear in that that you know even before the war he had basically completely accepted the russian justification for annexing crimea from ukraine right yeah re a re-annexation yeah they've annexed it the first time or the last time between just before 1800 yes it actually is a part of russia anyways and and in regards to nato matt which you heard him mention there and it was actually it's interesting

to hear though because he was saying you know people are going to credit the lack of an invasion to NATO, but NATO shouldn't get the credit. And of course, that's not completely flipped, where he would be saying that actually the invasion is in response to like NATO aggression. And it's kind of a proxy war between Russia and the encouraging forces of NATO. russia and the encouraging forces of nato yeah yeah yeah but it's just funny how that's switched like you know because there he was gonna say the nato ability to deter attacks that doesn't explain it at all it would be russian reluctance to attack a neighbor or whatever the case might be but now that is completely gone right like now the whole justification for the attack is around nato so yeah you can't give credit for deterring that but you have to blame nato if it happens yeah i know wildly inconsistent so i mean you know politics and tankies and whatnot aside i mean

this is a common red flag when it comes to conspiratorial thinking, which is that great willingness to completely reimagine a narrative to suit whatever data comes along that's still kind of in line with your original fundamental premise. Yeah, and if you think we're drawing too much from this specific clip talking about the situation in Ukraine before the invasion invasion here's a little bit of him talking about nato in general and his views of that i'm a bit of a truther uh like janice varafakis that the european union could be reformed inevitably to like uh not turn out neoliberal capitalism but instead i guess uh some semblance of socialism but no nato is not a thing that it's like reforming the police like no you can't that's not happening that doesn't mean that like there there isn't a necessity well nato

is a little bit different than the police as well because there's indeed for you know some semblance of law and order nato on the other hand no no it is one use and one use only you can't reform it like it guys guys guys just don't google western german involvement in nato if you want to understand what i have to say or google i don't know operation gladio or something yeah reforming nato is like reforming the third reich which is a good take actually because lo and behold a lot of the third right guys they have made their way into nato just saying nato nazi arming and training organization yeah i guess what we did with nato was we reformed the nazis and turned them into like nazi plus so actually matt when you think about it nato are worse than the nazis they're the nazis plus right all the nazi scientists they just

ended up in the u.s or working with the allies so in a way aren't nato just a modern incarnation of the nazis astute political analysis yeah yeah yeah great great analysis basically the third reich that's nato what what was he alluding to when he said that you know you could reform the police because but you can't reform nato because it's got one. And I assume it's a nefarious purpose. But what does he think the one purpose of NATO is? As a progressive leftist person, he's kind of abolished the police in support of that position. Or, you know, the corollary of actually, I mean, just reform it in certain ways. But with NATO, I believe he's saying it's a tool of neoliberal imperialism designed to spread rest and hegemony across the the globe so its only function is to economically

and militarily dominate all those right the alternative system so yeah that's it you can't you cannot reform it matt because it is just the modern incarnation of the third reich so yeah yep okay so yeah we can call him a tanki i think that's okay yeah i i think so and again you know people might say well hold on but you know that doesn't mean that he's gonna to give communist regimes an easy ride. Maybe maybe specifically on Russia. He just thinks, you know, their invasion is justified. Here's him talking about China. Because I don't think that I do not think that China is fascist.

I think that they are authoritarian. I don't think China is closer to fascism than America. Tibet was literally a fucking feudal slave mandate, like autonomous autonomous zone china did them a favor that was one i mean in america when i say something like this people get very upset you know we talk about the dalai lama saying suck my tongue or whatever but like that's not far from the norm in fucking normal tibetan existence before the communist party came in and and china unilaterally took over tibet like these are their culture they basically are trying to you know homogenize the culture if your culture they're trying to swell the religion and the part identity the part of the part of warlords and slavery

abolishing that yes i do think that that is good. No, China did them a favor. I think that, yes, I will be on the record to say that while the Chinese... That's him talking with Ethan, somebody that he used to do a podcast with, which ended not long after this discussion, I believe. But yeah, so there you can hear Hassan arguing that, you know, China was essentially engaged in anti-imperial anti-feudal efforts to liberate the tibetan people from the oppressive traditional structures he says the same things about taiwan right so i probably don't want to know his opinions about the the ogres and in uh we go sorry we go yeah to be, I'm not sure how he squares that,

but I'd imagine that he has some specific justification for it or that it's been exaggerated by Western media or whatever the case might be. So yeah, I think those are illustrative. And the last two clips, Matt, specifically relate to the conflict in Gaza, which he has been covering and which you might anticipate from his particular political background that he will be extremely sympathetic to the

Palestinians and hostile towards Israel. That makes sense ideologically and also the various ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza would justify having a lot of sympathy for Palestinians, if in general, you are sympathetic to people suffering from militarily more powerful countries, right, or in conflicts. So you may or may not remember there was a hospital, the Al Ali Arab Hospital, which was bombed or there was an explosion. And there was some confusion about where the bomb came from, right? It was initially reported that Israel, it was an Israel rocket, but subsequent reporting indicated that actually the evidence did not seem to support that and it seemed more likely to be a misfired rocket from islamic jihad that's where a lot of the independent analysts came down to that

and also the original reporting was also very clear in most cases that it is not yet able to be established what the source is right even when it was reported and hassan piker like many streamers reacts in real time often you know on their stream to seeing videos or clips or headlines just responding and here is him responding to somebody urging caution around the attributing the source of that attack idf didn't bomb the hospital change title idf didn't bomb the hospital yes it did yes it did yes it fucking did you fucking piece of yes it absolutely did you fuck you you genocidal scumbag you have no fucking dignity you do not have an ounce of dignity

inside of your soul but it doesn't matter terrible that the people died but i encourage you to look into where hamas was firing you fucking piece of shit you garbage monstrous scumbag you garbage monstrous scumbag you said idf didn't bomb the hospital and then you said it did but hamas was firing rockets from it in the same two minute time frame so why did you fucking lie at first huh why did you fucking lie how can you live with yourself you genocidal piece of shit how why did you do that why did you say idf didn't bomb the hospital and then immediately retaliated to well i guess they did but because hamas was firing rockets yeah that's that's him responding to his chat again you know somebody saying something that he didn't like and yeah you you get a good sense of his style of engaging with criticism or interacting with people that he disagrees with yeah or just somebody who suggests a different point of view about something yeah it's um it's

very the emotional effect is heightened it's very it's very strong the version i found was censored they removed it so he didn't say effing. He was just, you know. As we've heard in the other clips, he doesn't mind cursing. And he didn't actually stop there, Matt. You might have thought that's enough of that, but no. They did not. Oh, back to they did not? Really? No, I didn't.

They did not. You just said it. I'm losing my mind. Oh, you're saying IDF didn't bomb it because hamas was firing rockets from right next to the hospital and it actually misfired and fell into the hospital oh okay i thought that he was uh okay never mind yeah you're still a piece of genocide uh denier 100 but no it is not a fucking misfire and guess why it's not a fucking misfire he goes on to analyze to show the video and say look it doesn't look like you know the kind of munitions

explosion that you would expect and like of course he has no fucking idea about that but but also you heard them out that he misunderstood what the person was saying but he still launched into this invective and then somebody else corrected him in the chat. And then he, he moves to say, okay, well, fine. You weren't saying that, but you're still a terrible genocide denier. And he will do this very often. You know, you're racist, you're a Nazi, if you disagree. And usually it will be on his audience. So, you know, he might have a six hour stream or a five hour stream or whatever and there are just sometimes things like this that happens and it's it is kind of like disciplining the audience you know like showing what happens if you go against the line that he considers legitimate

he's gonna embarrass you and tear you down in front of everyone right on the stream and these are like i presume the people who are demurring like they're listening to the stream right they're not they're probably not haters they're people that are generally fans of his i suppose yeah i think there's a little bit yeah i'm sure you sometimes get people who are contrarians or disagree with your analysis or whatnot but the vast majority of people are going to be fans of his in some degree like if you're sitting on someone's stream for hours you typically have to have at least some interest in in them so yeah regard for them yeah i don't think i would be sitting on his stream for two hours and then raising butt points with him.

No, no. And so that was surrounding context, Matt, right? That's the intro. I'm sure now you're really looking forward to the material that we're going to cover. I did listen to the material. A lot of it, I think I may have tuned out at some points, Chris, but you're going to reorient us to some of the key points. Yes, I am. appeared in video and images from ships that had been boarded by Houthi rebels off the coast of

Yemen right so there was a particularly photogenic young Houthi or a young person appearing with the whatever way you want to take it who gained the nickname hot hoofy right because he was noted to look like timothy chalamet the actor from dune so the title of the video we watched was hassan interviews viral hot yemeni tiktok pirate okay i've seen the photos he's very good looking um so is timothy chalamet yeah yeah the. The young guy is handsome, is a Yemeni guy. And so the interview that they conducted on his stream is done via a translator. So you have Hassan pose the question, the translator put it to the hot hoofie, and then the response come, right?

So it's a kind of simultaneous translation interview. And here's Hassan framing that. And it will give you a kind of sense about the way that he frames, you know, the questions throughout the interview. Okay, Rashid, how old are you? Where are you from originally in yemen uh he's 19 and he's from ib governor okay nice nice nice okay so uh what happened you were uh how was he how was he taking everything how is he taking in everything so far كيف حدث؟ كيف حصلت على كل شيء؟ كيف حصلت على كل شيء حتى الآن؟ لأنك رأيت المقالات كيف الأوضاع معك؟ كيف عم يعني شو إحساسك هل شفت تغطية الأخبار؟ هل قرأت المقالات عنك؟ What do you feel now? Have you seen the coverage of the news? Have you read the articles about you?

It's normal. There's no impact. The most important thing is that we stand with the Palestinian cause. He says he's fine and everything is normal. And the most important thing is that they stand with Palestine. Yeah, absolutely. they stand with Palestine. Yeah, absolutely. So you got to hear the translator, the young rebel responding and Hassan's kind of style

of questions. You'll see this come up a lot. But yeah, so maybe for people who don't have the context, Matt, Houthis, why were they in the news? And who are they? What's the deal? What's going on? Okay, I may not have all the facts in the front of my are they what's the deal what's going on okay i may not have all the facts in the front of my mind but in a nutshell uh yeah the houthis have been fighting a civil war

in yemen trying to oust the yemeni government that is aligned with saudi arabia i believe correct me if i'm wrong but the houthis well, the Shias and they are aligned with Iran. But since the Israel-Gaza conflict, they have upped their activities in the Gulf in particular, targeting shipping, just international shipping that is going through there. I think firing missiles at ships, also hijacking some ships, or at least attempting to. And what am I missing? Is that the gist of it? Yeah, that's the general gist. I think it is relatively complicated over in Yemen, the civil conflict there. But although they're aligned with Iran and they get support from them, they are actually from a minority sect, the Zaidi sect. And within that sect, like the name suggests,

their founder is a guy called Hussein al-Hufi. And it's currently his brother, Mohammed al-Hufi, who is the leader. So the Hufi movement is very much focused on that guy's interpretation of the Zaidi sect of Shia Islam. And it has various parallels, but it's in other ways idiosyncratic and a bit of a personality cult, you could say. And it has also ambitions for statehood, which I think amongst mainstream Shia would be considered heretical. In any case, there's a civil conflict going on there. The Houthis control a lot of northern Yemen, and it looks likely that they might be able to take control, if not entirely, through some power sharing agreement that's currently

being tried to work out. It's a complex situation. But one thing that isn't that complex is that their model is God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, victory to Islam. They are a group that has a lot of factions and kind of pinning down the specific ideology is difficult because even though there is a clear leadership and whatever, you know, there are different regional power centers and that kind of thing. So you will find things like them in certain places that they control, implementing extremely repressive social or legal policies, you know, stoning people for homosexuality or banning women from doing various activities.

They've been accused of, not just accused, I believe, credibly documented of using child soldiers and of engaging in slavery. So these are not the good guys in any normal calculus, but it is more complicated than they're just, you know, in Yemen, there are a lot of different kind of factions vying for power and the sovereign government which is the internationally recognized one is as you said generally regarded as largely being a proxy for saudi arabia and the uae right and i'm sure they're not particularly nice either yeah but yeah yeah that from what i know it does they do not seem

like the good guys by any means just looking at the abuse of women and girls alone would make me conclude that so even if you were going to you know interview somebody that is a member of that group and you wanted to highlight the complexity of the situation and not present them as just you know some homogenous evil group i think it would behove you to still ask some challenging questions when there's so many documented human rights abuses and they are currently engaging in the kidnapping of commercial crews right like just not not military people just people who are on boats that are transporting commercial goods like so and and the way of course that commercial shipping works is that it's very much a globalized industry where you it's very much not clear which country uh or what is the

nationality of a ship right so you can have a ship that can be owned by some holding company in the Cayman Islands, but it could be transporting goods on behalf of this other company and the crew could be from China or Indonesia or somewhere. It's that kind of industry. Yeah. So now you might, if you were going to weave into this, you would want somebody to have done preparation

and to treat the topic like with some seriousness, because it's, yes, the people in Yemen are just normal people, right? They're going to have interests and hobbies and so on. But where you have a situation which appears to be strongly anti-Semitic and which has documented human rights abuses. If you were going to interview someone from that group, like you would want at least some level of challenging questions, right? That's what you would hope that even somebody sympathetic to their plight would maybe, you know, strive to be a little bit balanced in approaching such a sensitive topic. So let's see how Hassan does in this interview. So after, you know, the kind of introductory things and that question that you saw him asking, you know, how are things in Yemen?

And the young guy responds basically saying, you know, how are things in Yemen? And the young guy responds basically saying, you know, normal. And one thing to note here is the young guy is 19, right? He is a young guy from Yemen that was foisted into public awareness. Yes, he had a TikTok channel and whatnot, but it's primarily because he was a photogenic 19 year old that is what's led him to have this big public profile and so expecting him to have deeply well thought out political points of view or you know to be able to answer on behalf of the hoofies or the yemeni people it's not really appropriate because you wouldn't expect like a 19 year old in the UK to be able to do that either. Okay.

What led him to go to one of the ships personally? Like what were some experiences that he had that caused him to want to go and film it. Hassan wants to know what pushed you to visit these ships and what experiences you had that made you care about this thing and that made you want to visit these ships. I love adventures, and of course, this is all for Palestine. And I hope there will be new and exciting things. He says he likes adventures, and he is a big supporter of Palestine, new things and bigger things will happen. blame, but I'm just making it clear that a 19-year-old Yemeni guy who's joined or at least has sympathy for a rebel movement, it's not really him that I want to focus on in this conversation.

Yeah, yeah, sure. But just, Chris, just to clarify, the incident that brought the hot Houthi, what's his name again? Rashid Al-Hadid, but also known as Tim Houthi Chalamet. Yes. So the incident that brought him to fame was this hijacking of the Galaxy Leader, which is like an automotive roll-on, roll-off type transport vessel. So it's a good example of one of these international boats. The registered owner is Galaxy Maritime,

which is registered in the Isle of Man, but it's flag state. It's registered in the Bahamas. And at the time of its seizure, it was chartered by the Japanese shipping company, Nippon Yusen. But Galaxy Maritime is owned by ray car carriers which is co-owned by an israeli businessman abraham ungar so yeah it just shows how you can't really identify the nationality of the actual owners of the of the boat really so so what happened is like about 10 hooty hijackers used a military helicopter to board the vessel.

They seized the vessel. They brought it back to Yemen. And along with the boat, they took 25 crew members, which included 17 from the Philippines, some other crew from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Mexico, and Romania. So, yeah, they video recorded their attack, released the footage. Some of it went viral. So, yeah, as far as we know, those 25 crew are still being kept hostage.

Nothing is known about their whereabouts. Yeah, they're not. I mean, the specific details there as well. So a helicopter, a military helicopter, this is not people approaching the ship on rubber dinghies, right? Or makeshift wooden craft. They boarded a ship with a military helicopter and took hostages, the majority of whom are from the Philippines. So 70 people from the Philippines, what a blow against the anti-imperialists that, you know, yes, you stole the cargo,

but you would imagine that maybe you could have released the innocent crew if it was really about sending a message to the people, just like a blow for Palestine and against the anti-imperialists. Why do you need to keep all of the crew members hostages? That seems a question that Hassan might ask. So I'm sure he will inquire about the well-being of the crew. So let's see how he gets on. So yes, and just to say, I'm not saying that we have to ascribe no blame to the

young Rashid guy, but just that I don't really fault him for delivering, as you'll see, fairly stock, uninformative answers, because that's exactly what I would expect from a 19-year-old rebel who's falling in with the hufis to deliver right so here we go anyway this is just after the introduction here's what hasan leads with how does uh what is the mood in in yemen overall since america started uh uh bombing uh positions in sanaa and other places. He's saying that it's pretty usual.'ve been used to this um for 11 years now and they're not uh scared okay that's that's crazy does he okay this is a stupid question okay you can preface it with that does he want does he know what one piece is

one piece like is that an organization no one piece is the anime oh okay um uh so the the hard turner like one an absolutely anodyne question maybe he's just getting to set things up right but you know just how is yemen responding to the american attacks and then like a kind of huh okay does he does he watch one piece the anime and you hear the the translator guy being like is that you know is that some sort of military you know what is that and he's yeah it's an anime a popular popular anime i like one piece by the way it's the most popular Japanese manga and anime at the minute. I don't like One Piece, but my understanding is that it's about, like it's pirate-themed, right?

It is pirate-themed, but like pirate-themed in the sense of Jolly Rogers and a crew sealing the seven seas with cutlasses and special powers, not military aircraft seizing the cargo containers and taking hostages, right? So it's a slight difference. So raising that was quite a hard turn, but he hits gold or what Hassan considers gold because he gets a kind of positive response uh lofi yeah he said he's he's been

watching it since he was a kid no way yeah that's sick yes yes that's fire that's that's so fire oh my god dude we we think um we think uh the houthis Ansar Allah, is doing what Luffy would do. You should tell him that. Hassan says that the Houthis are doing the same as Luffy. Who is Luffy, Chris? Luffy is the protagonist, the kind of hero. Hassan is very proud of this take, which he offered. I heard him outline it on another podcast called

trash taste which is an anime kind of focused podcast from three guys who are living in japan but not japanese and they're in the you know anime and that kind of culture anyway his hot take was that the protagonist and that because the story has a kind of evil world government which is kind of oppressing the people on behalf of these elites and luffy is the pirate hero who is he's not even an anti-hero he's just the hero but he's a pirate fighting against the world government hassan is arguing you know that that the one piece is a anti-anti-imperialist work of art, which in some sense is not that much of a leap, but I don't think the author would be making parallels

with the Yemeni pirates, like the Houthi pirates. Would Luffy hijack a container ship and take 17 Filipino people hostage? That's the question. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it would be the opposite in the story. So I think the way Hassan sees this is that he's humanizing the guy, right?

He's showing, you know, he's just like us. Look, he watches anime and this kind of thing. But on the other hand, it's just such a shallow, vapid approach. But on the other hand, it's just such a shallow, vapid approach. And now, if this was the only time it came up, you might forgive him, right? Like for just, you know, raising the issue about anime and a pirate-themed anime, just to build rapport. But also, you can see that the guy, Rashid,

is a little bit confused about what the point here is. So listen to this. He's saying that the only motivation that they have is their solidarity with Palestine and to stop the attack on Palestine. And it's not for any kind of... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, i'm saying it's a good thing i i understand so that's like that's what he's um he's saying that the the reasons as to why uh there have been any sort of uh interceptions on vessels is from uh is due to uh the ongoing genocide in gaza it's not for loot no tell them it's not for loot i know it's not for loot

oh okay so yeah they're not like storytale pirates because storytale pirates whether it's captain hook or pirates of the caribbean people they sometimes hijack things for loot people they sometimes hijack things for loot but um yeah but um so hassan unequivocally supports the hijacking and kidnapping he's sort of made that quite clear yeah yeah yeah he he sees it as rebels fighting back against imperialist capitalist forces right it's it's quite clear that for him it is a bit like one piece in his mind, right? There's an evil globalist government and this is just the oppressed striking back against it. But also there, Matt, you get to hear that bit where Hassan provides the answer, right? He doesn't say, you know, what are the motives or that he's like, tell him, tell him we know that it's not about loot, right?

Yeah, people are saying that, but it's not about that, right? And you can see in the follow-up for this that Hassan has a desperate need to be recognized by the guy as like an ally, right? Despite him being the multi-million pound streamer right like he he needs this guy to consider him credible and you know a supporter as a comrade yeah yeah so this is the rashid responded to that loot point and then has had interacting with his chat so that's what the typing and stuff is you can hear him you kind of, because he's talking to his chat at the same time as he's doing the interview.

Yeah, he acknowledges that. Okay. Dude, I'm at a loss, basically. This guy doesn't know your politics. I know, exactly. So first of all, Matt, that's at the start of the interview where you can hear Hassan being like, what am I going to ask? Now, he's obviously done a ton of preparation. so first of all matt that's at the start of the interview where you can hear us i'm being like uh

what what am i gonna ask now he's obviously done a ton of preparation so he's right out of questions he asked yeah how's everyone in yemen to yeah do you watch one piece there's like okay i love it yeah but but also his chatter saying, hey, maybe he's responding a bit wary because he doesn't know your politics. And that sounds like, yeah, yeah, he doesn't. So you will see in various clips that are coming that he tries to make his politics clear to head that off. So one thing he does ask, this is perhaps a responsible journalistic style question he doesn't ask it very well but uh listen to this so as far as the as far as the unsurla militancy goes like as far as the standing military goes like i don't know if he is uh allowed to speak on this i don't

know if he's like actually a part of uh the the groups at all or just like simply a tiktoker you know what i mean i don't know how to ask that in the best way possible though. Yeah, I feel like you can ask it pretty directly. Rashid, Hassan wants to ask you, do you consider yourself one of the Ansarullahs or do you consider yourself just a person on TikTok? He wants to know what is the link between you and Ansarullah. his answer is uh he's a yemeni who stands with palestine okay um yeah so there matt the young guy's response i also understand because he doesn't want to claim to be a spokesperson

for the hoofies right probably because that would get him in trouble in both directions depending on what he says but just hassan's response is just like you uh yeah i'm just the yemeni guy that happened to be on board a uh aborted vessel yeah hijacked so yeah just a normal guy there is some issue though like because you know it's very likely that he is a supporter but he might not actually have a position right he might just have just taken the tiktok thing well yeah he's a 19 year old young man he may well not have very clear or well thought out ideological convictions. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, anyway, that's fine.

It wouldn't be surprising. So anyway, you can hear a bit more about Hassan's desperate need for him to understand that he's, you know, he's one of the good guys. He's on side. you know, he's one of the good guys. He's on side. Well, one, tell him that this community, this community of mostly Americans raised more than a million dollars for Palestinian charities.

So like, so he knows that I'm not, you know, some Fed or some shit. It's so pathetic. Like such, you know, just, yeah. So he doesn't think I'm a Fed. Tell him I've raised money for charities. Like, I don't know that I have much analysis there except to say, Jesus Christ. It's, yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. All right. So he's super keen. He wants to ingratiate himself. He really seems to like this young man and loves what he's doing and wants him to know

that he is shoulder to shoulder and on the right side of the course yeah and the young guy said you know he's out for adventure yeah that's that's his motivation uh apparently which hassan is is fine with and when he asked him a little bit more about motivations uh he gets this like he's just reiterating that the cause is to uh cause disruption to the um like the shipments that americans have interest in until until they stop bombing and and um if they weren't affected by it then they wouldn't retaliate on Yemen. But I asked twice about the media and he's just not like... Okay. So the young man just doesn't know the answers to some of these questions.

But he understands the general line. It's against Israel and it's, I guess, obliquely causing harm to the United States in as much as the United States has an interest in international shipments going through the Persian Gulf, and that's why they're doing it. Yeah. And Hassan Piker's interview style should be coming through quite clearly, but I really think he did less preparation for this interview than we did for decoding him i i genuinely believe he will have looked at less information about the hoofies like i listened to a couple of historical and contemporary podcasts about the situation and read some stuff i don't i don't think hasan

does that he just kind of vibes to headlines and if you want to know why it's stuff like this okay um what has the what has the um what has the the the uh response from yemen been since uh the bombing um and do you mean like the government or the okay i'm still i'm still here i'm still here you mean like what's the response um like from the people or from the government or what's the response of the people the government um like both i, is the people separate from the government? Yeah. So, Hassan almost certainly doesn't understand that there are two governments, essentially, at least in Yemen, that there's a civil war going on

and that the Houthis do not control, by any means, all of the country. No, or that reference, is the people different from the government i mean what kind of absolute nonsense is that like in which country is the people just the one in the same as the government that is not the case almost anywhere and you'll note there that he asked the question and he got up and walked away and then that's why they you know they asked for clarification and then they came back and was like oh you know sorry yeah so he was going off to do something after asking the question presumably had headphones

on so he could still hear the answer but that's just yeah that level of preparation but it's hard to oversteer and just just to drill down on this a little bit more whenever he was talking about religion and he wants to ask some questions about the topic and where this young man, where he falls. And listen to the way that he presents it. Okay. Wait, is this appropriate? I don't know if this is appropriate or not. Is he Shia or Sunni?

He's Shia, I assume, right? I'm asking you if you're Shia or Sunni. I'm sorry for the question. Is that normal? I'm not Shia or Sunni. I'm Yemeni Muslim. I mean, we have the same religion. I'm the same. I liked your answer. Honestly, the question didn't come to me. he asked he says that he's he's uh not shiite or sunni he's just a yemeni muslim oh okay that's interesting i mean i don't know i feel like he's very media trained surprisingly but um okay

that's cool what else i, I have so many... I'll ask him stuff from the chat if there's any questions in the chat. I don't think Hasan knows that there is a Zaidi sect that is the dominant form in the Hufi control party. I also don't think that he like whenever he asks that question, I don't know Matt, like I just get the impression that he doesn't know anything about the situation, but he knows there's Shia and Sunni are two divisions in Islam. So which one are you on and when he says the guy seems mediatorian no he doesn't

like he's given very generic answers and in this case asking somebody that belongs to a particular sect you know and he they're the answer is basically saying well i'm just a i'm muslim right you know because that sect is the correct interpretation or he's not he's not giving a very strong answer but it's it's not like a super complex dodging answer he's giving just the like generic response to just say yeah i'm a ordinary muslim in yemen yeah i guess it's also obvious that hasan has totally run out of questions, but I guess he can go to the chat. At that point, he has, and Hassan comes from Turkey, or at least he has a background, some family from Turkey. So he does have some understanding more than I think is usual about countries which have more of an Islamic representation,

but not that much because listen to this. What kind of, I mean, what kind of role religion plays in his life? Does he, does he, can I ask, I don't know if I can ask this. Does he pray five times a day? No, you don't want me to ask him about religion. I feel like that's just not like interesting. I don't know. I mean, I can ask him. No, no, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. Right. Right. Right. I mean, I can ask him a few questions. No, no, no, it's fine. You're right, you're right, you're right. I mean, I don't know. I don't do any of that stuff. I don't either. I'm not going to ask you.

I know, I'm just wondering what dudes in Yemen are doing. Are they going to Juma prayer or are they not? You know what I mean? Are they pulling up? Yeah. Ooh, well, I have a question about what is it that there are so many Yemeni music videos? Right. So he's got this guy.

He's got the hot Yemeni young militant, I suppose, who is part of a hijacking operation. And he wants to talk about music videos. Yeah, this does come towards the end of it. But if you think that that's because he's ran out of penetrating political questions that he's been digging down on, you would be wrong, right? You would be wrong. This is very much what it is like throughout the whole interview.

And to show how much Hassan layers on his particular ideological interpretation to things. Here's him asking what Rashid thinks about the presentation of the conflict in the US. He's saying that, yeah, he just wants a victory for Palestine and he acknowledges our solidarity as well. Yeah um what does he think about the fact that american media in general keeps claiming that the the reasons as to why the yemeni uh militias are are intercepting vessels is for completely oblivious reasons like belligerent reasons and and not for Palestine. They don't talk about that at all here.

How does he feel about that? Okay. So you heard him there, layer on to the top of that. What does he think about the US media misrepresenting what the Houthis are about? And he responds... He's just reiterating that the cause is to cause disruption to the shipments that Americans have interest in

until they stop bombing Gaza, and if they weren't affected by it, then they wouldn't retaliate on Yemen. But I asked twice about the media, and he's just not like okay he doesn't know so not surprisingly he doesn't have an opinion about how american media is reporting on houthi motivations for their thing because he doesn't know of course he doesn't know yeah and and all throughout it you get this sense that hassan isn't really able to see beyond his own myopic perspective like he takes a very u.s centric perspective oh yeah i mean you'd have to be able to read and understand english to be able to consume any amount of u.s news in order to have an opinion about that so he he seems to lack any kind of you know model of mind to understand that this young guy almost certainly would not know the answer to that

yeah yeah and you hear him reference his political picks we'll see this come up quite a lot like his ideological perspective layering that on top but also also just his references, like his world, which is streamers and America and culture war topics and popular YouTubers. Like he kind of takes that as the baseline references that everybody shares and are interested in. And it's amazingly biopic. That's the only way I can put it. So here's I'm talking about the issues pertaining to Saudi Arabia and UAE and Yemen. What does he think about,

like, I want to ask him questions about Saudi Arabia and UAE. Like, do the people of Yemen recognize like Saudi involvement or uae involvement in yemen as it's uh as it's an extension of uh american involvement or american proxies or do they do they uh separate that at all so there you had the kind of presentation that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, are just proxies of the American imperialist system. So does he recognize that perspective?

So what he wants them to give back is an answer that basically acknowledges that, yes, they're fighting back against the hegemony of the U.S. and the Saudi Arabian alliance. But the answer doesn't really satisfy and illustrates, Matt, the complexity of the ever-shifting geopolitical landscape there. So listen to the guy's answer. Okay, Hassan, I want to know, do you think that the Saudi intervention حسن أريد أن أعرف هل تعتبر التدخل السعودي أو الإماراتي في اليمن

هل تعتبر تدخل السعودية والإمارات امتداد للتدخل الأمريكي أم هل تعتبرهم إشياء مختلفين؟ ما فهمت السؤال لكن السعودية إحنا معها والسعودين أخواننا كلهم وحتى اللي انتشر عبر التواصل الاجتماعي ما فيه مننا والسعوديين والأماراتين أخوتنا ما شفنا منهم أي شيء صح أنه كان حرب ضدهم

لكن إحنا الآن أخوان وما فيه أي حرب بيننا وبينهم كل شيء تمام حتى أني دخلت السعودية عمرة وإحترموني السعوديين وضيفوني كل شيء والله تمام I mean, everything is fine. Even when I entered Saudi Arabia, they respected me and treated me well. Everything is fine. Okay, thank you. Now I will translate for you. Hassan, oh sorry, sorry, I keep saying Hassan. He's saying that right now there's no animosity between, like to him there's no animosity between Saudis and Yemenis

and Emiratis. He's saying he acknowledges that there was a war, but right now he's saying that there's nothing but brotherhood. And he even says that he went to Amra recently in Saudi Arabia and that he was treated normally. So he himself doesn't, I mean, he doesn't I guess, I don't know, he's not

tying the American and Saudi involvement together okay that's interesting yeah probably why um okay that's that's good that's probably why it's like more um oh what has happened to uh so he completely rejects the the premise and contradicts it by saying you know well actually we don't have an issue with Saudi Arabia. I've been there recently. And so, of course, that is not completely true when you look at the geopolitical stakes

and who Saudi Arabia are supporting or not. But it just shows that he didn't pick up what Hassan wanted them to get, which is like, just blame it on the US. Yeah, there's an amazing disconnect there between these two people. wanted them to get which is like you know just just blame it on the u.s right yeah yeah yeah there's an amazing disconnect there between these two people i'd like you to expect between a 19 year old yemeni man the kind of person that takes up a gun and goes on a helicopter to take over ships and this multi-millionaire streamer you know anime enthusiast in the united states somewhere in his mansion like they come from completely different worlds hassan would very much like it

to be that they are really vibing together and that they they have this big shared connection because they share a common uh you know anti-us hegemony socialist something or other a revolutionary worldview but of course they don't they don't have anything in common at all apart from maybe one thing yeah and actually hassan wants to constantly try and invoke that that they're basically just the same and so you you do hear him repeatedly throughout the interview try to bring up those kind of questions so for example like who are his favorite what does he watch other than one piece because he watches one piece what else this is like a normal 19 year old right um so ask him ask him what other stuff that he watches

like does he play video games does he like fifa so um does he play fifa you know what's he doing playing video games right and uh the answer from the guy matt illustrates the divergence here despite what hassan will go on to say. So here is the response. No, I'm not working now. I'm working with Fadha. I mean, I'm watching. You're working now? Yes. He says that he used to like watching Turkish and American TV shows. And he also used to love anime a lot. But he says that he's been very busy recently, so he hasn't been watching or doing anything else. Yeah, what does he watch Turkish? Muhteşem Yüzyıl.

What does he watch turkish what is he what is he watching turkish um no he hasn't watched that one but i watched that one no you watched that one yeah yeah so the response was he doesn't have time to watch animes because he's busy, you know, fighting for Palestine. But Hasan heard that, oh, he said that he used to watch Turkish TV. Maybe there's some connection there. TV shows. And he goes down trying to reference TV shows that, you know,

maybe he's seen and you can hear some of this okay uh um so he he doesn't have time to watch uh stuff now but what did he watch uh when he was younger what is he like uh like laklamakuntazgid Tom and Jerry, Spongebob, Smurfs nice, nice, okay hell yeah, that's good okay, so you watched Spongebob and whatnot, does he go to school or how does that work, I don't know

do you think Hassan's into the Smurfs he didn't pick up on that one Smurfs, cool man, Tom and Jerry awesome, yeah that's, I mean it's painful, right the smurfs he didn't pick up on that one but uh smurfs cool matt and tom and jerry uh awesome yeah that's i mean it's painful right it's actually painful because he's so grasping to say oh yeah like we're just to see him and the best that he can do is you watch spongebob when you were uh a kid. Oh, that's great. That's excellent.

But he's no follow-up, right? Because where do you go from there? And also, Hassan's general thing is, is he at school? Does he go to school? Now, first of all, Matt, he's 19. Second of all, he's a goofy pirate, right? So I wonder what his response will be about going to school.

And you can also hear Hassan say, like, I don't know, you know, what do people do over there? I don't know. Here's the response. He says he's done with school. He's 19. So, what does he want to do? What are his aspirations other than go on adventures? What do you have for your dreams? other than go on adventures.

He's saying that he just lives every day as it comes. He doesn't really have any long-term goals. This guy's a himbo, bro. Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah. It's incredibly vapid, isn't it? So, I guess the best model that Hassan has of this young guy is that he's a pirate in the same vein as a pirate on One Piece. He likes going on adventures

and they share a common interest in cartoons. This is his. I think there he actually got a little bit frustrated because the guy, you know, we was asking long-term plans and he's just saying, you know, I live every day as it comes, which is a normal thing for a 19-year-old to say, but especially one that lives in a precarious situation, right? but hassan is like oh he's a himbo like a you know emile bimbo because he's just out having fun partying or whatever like he doesn't have yeah what what are his long-term

plans going to be hassan in a country stricken with civil war when he's part of a rebel group that is currently engaged in like uh at ceasefire yes but they're certainly in danger from the conflict so just it's just such a gap right like he's kind of like well you know what do you want to study at university or you know you want to be a streamer this kind of thing and if you've ever been around uh like hostels or bars at university this will be a very familiar conversation that you end up when people meet people from a different country what's that what's that tell them to teach us a like a not a bad word in yemen but like how to say like fuck you like in turkey we have this right what do you have that in yemen as well like something like that that's unique um okay middle finger do these you

know that well i mean in in like in like arabs do this like have you seen this yeah yeah i have yeah this right yeah so they've they've got to the stage at that point of you know just get him to teach me bad words in yemen and he also asks some various questions about like for example uh this one he's saying that um once palestine is free then he can rest and he would like to visit palestine and he would like palestinians to visit yemen as well me too brother me too um okay asking his thoughts on sean king okay chatters fucking so stupid um wait what the fuck he smiled at that does he know who that is oh my god i'm not going to be sean king oh my god i was that was okay jesus christ um does he know who Donald Trump is? So does he know who Sean King is? You know, the online leftist figure.

That's from Hassan's chat. And he's like, that's a stupid question. But when he sees some reaction, he's like, well, maybe he does know who Sean King is. And what about Donald Trump? It's just like naming people that he might have heard of. And another one, Matt. You know, like like does he know who

mr beast is asking that do you know who mr beast is? who? mr beast of course of course mr beast I only ate when I saw him no no he thinks you're talking about mr bean mr bean no no mr beast on youtube Bean? No, no, MrBeast on YouTube. So it seems like the young Yemeni hijacker is not up to date with

millennial culture. No, yeah. He doesn't know all the popular American YouTubers. That's weird. And he does know MrBean, which if Hassan had any shred of a non-American perspective, we'd know that Mr. Bean is very well known and popular.

So we actually could have established a connection if he'd started talking about Mr. Bean. But of course, Hassan is just like, no, no, not Mr. Bean. That's not someone I'm interested in. So like Mr. Bean is actually very well known around uh non-english speaking countries because he doesn't you don't have to speak english to understand that it's physical humor and it's it's kind of universal and then i'll be very good but i mean it's okay but it is universal yeah the appeal to it so yeah there's just that there's the cultural divide, which Hassan is trying to pretend isn't there. But there's also the constant, like, I don't know how to put it.

It's just like it's sycophantic from a millionaire, TikToker, American leftist needing to get recognition in a very teenage boy like lex friedman style way so listen to him uh this question for example uh he doesn't play any video games he said right uh no video games um okay um i already asked about the anti-zionist jews he said he loves it anyone who is uh anti-zionist uh and and with the palestinian people he's happy with i mean i want to ask him about the knife the knives are sick what's up with the knives you know the curved knives you know what's up with the curved knives matt they're sick they're yeah they're cool they are cool they are cool so i can it makes sense to me that he would seek recognition and validation because I guess someone like

Hassan knows that he's a performance artist from his streaming and he calls himself a propagandist for socialist revolution. But I think that's in response to being constantly labeled a propagandist and at some point being unable to deny it. Yeah. Yeah. unenviable a propagandist at some point being unable to deny it yeah yeah but he you know like a lot of people online they talk the talk but they don't walk the walk obviously their real life is making a lot of money he's a millionaire living in a mansion hanging out with youtube and living in a mansion playing computer games and um so an actual person who's actually hijacking ships and knows how to shoot a gun and is doing revolutionary things in his mind, he's everything he isn't in terms of having the socialist cred or the revolutionary cred. So it makes sense that he would want to ingratiate himself.

he would want to ingratiate himself yeah and you can see alongside his kind of very grasping sycophantic responses like this one he says if if if one of those knives comes out in front of you it's not going back until it has blood on it oh shit okay my bad well i mean i think it's cool though um um okay maybe explain why you're trying to get this type of humanizing information. Okay, shut up, chatter. Come on. It's not like that's crazy. We're not going to explain that. What is he?

Does he watch TikTok or YouTube? It just goes on, doesn't it? He won't stop. Oh, I think this is a good time to mention that if you thought that Hassan was kind of banging a drum where he's not getting much bites, right, about YouTuber culture, anime, this kind of stuff. I think he got cocky because he got Luffy at the start. And then he was like, oh, you know, we can just draw all the parallels. And like he responded to his chat there, his stated goal is to humanize him right to show that he's just the same as as us and it's one of those things matt which i consider just an absolutely fucking mundane point that every alternative

influencer seems to regard as this hugely insightful thing putin is just a man nazis are people people in the muslim world they're just people that I know. Like, I know, everyone in the world is a person. Hitler was a person. Everybody is a person. It's presented as this huge insight. And you're just like, no, anybody with any common sense should understand that that basic point. And it's usually not the point you need to focus on. Because that's not why they're being criticized it's usually for specific actions yeah well i think if someone like a son had any ability to actually empathize and actually understand the person he's talking to he'd understand that they are living in

and grew up in an extraordinarily different environment both social and material and step one in humanizing or empathizing whatever is to understand those incredible differences and not to be asking about the stuff that you're into tiktok and gaming and you know millennial american things no i think i've criticized the leftist and anti-imperialist perspective for being fixated on the West. It seems in some respect that it isn't because it's trying to focus on other countries and what has occurred there. But it almost always is reframing things around Western powers, the U.S. in particular, right? U.S. in particular, right? And kind of robbing the agency or the notion that these other countries might have their own regional interests and perspectives that don't revolve around the U.S. And just to illustrate this, here's Hassan. He thinks basically that the guy must have some

opinion about Americans and interests about Americans.icans i mean the slogan of his uh group suggests that but listen to the response when he tries to ask this okay so what is he what does he think about uh americans because there's a lot of people in america that also are showing solidarity to the palestinian people what does he what does he what does how does he feel about that is that shocking to him so he he asks about you know know, what the guy thinks about America and the response is relatively muted. I saw a lot of foreigners who are active with him in his posts. They are all from Palestine. I saw a lot of people. I love them. to them okay um that's cool yeah we love you too man big big time yeah um do they uh okay so does he feel like uh you know he says he appreciates that there are people that show

support but he doesn't really get into what he thinks about america right so hasan tries again later i don't know i mean he's I asked him about like uh is American media consumption and whatnot um overall what does he what does he think about America not just Americans but what does he think about America when you think about America what is the first thing that comes to his mind Hassan is like right well you know he didn't have much to say about American media but what about just america like what's his what is his opinion about america and let's let's hear the answer he's saying he doesn't think about america

i like that okay fair um does he have any questions for me or for americans in general if there's anything that he wants to know as well like we can you know yeah i mean it's just striking to me like like apart from anything else he he's actually just absolutely totally uninterested in in the person he's interviewing like i find it at least a little bit interesting now this this interview made me think about it like here is this young man you know where'd he go to school what's his background what's his family what was it like where he grew up were they very poor did they have money when did he join the militia what what made him want to go and go on the boat i mean there's a bunch of interesting things that you could find out right he he's not interested he doesn't care he's He's looking for a connection, sure, by asking him about stuff, whether he likes stuff that he likes, bloody cartoons and computer games. And like most Americans, he wants to know what he thinks of Americans and America either.

And obviously, he wants to draw him out and hopefully get him to talk politics and talk about the evil global hegemony and things like that but he also would like to him to be aware also that there are there are good americans like him who are trying to fight the system from within by taking huge amounts of sponsorships and living in mansions and playing computer games yeah so like you mean he does ask him details about his life and stuff but it's it's very clear that he's not really engaged. His only interest in that is for its rhetorical value to show that the guy is a normal person. That's what he wants to say.

Look, he's just like us. He likes the same kind of cartoons. So he's explicitly trying to humanize in the way that you are talking about that. A person would be humanized if they were interviewed, but it's not an interest in that person. It's an interest in what that person can do for your ideological purposes. So that's why Hassan is constantly, like he's not really engaging. That's why Hasan is constantly, like, he's not really engaging. He could adjust his approach to focus on the kind of things that the guy seems to express an interest in.

But he doesn't, right? He just is constantly coming back to his narrative. And it gets really bad. This is one of the points where he's having difficulty, you know, coming up with questions. What does he know about Turkey? He tells you what you know about Turkey. About Turkey? Nothing. Istanbul.

Inshallah, we'll go to Istanbul soon. Inshallah. He wants to visit Istanbul. Nice. One day. Inshallah. Inshallah. Okay.

So, ask him what made him record the video. Yeah. I mean, he already said it though he already responded to it um ask him if he knows western women are comparing him to a very famous actor oh yeah does he know who uh timothy chalamet is like he he also went to turkey you know because he knows something about turkey like what's his what's his opinion of turkey and then he doesn't get much purchase there so then this chat suggests like maybe ask him about like timothy chalamet but he doesn't have much of an opinion about timothy chalamet

very famous actor. No. Say, people in the West are comparing him to a very famous actor. He says, he's American and I'm yemeni that's it okay all right fair fair fair fair fair doesn't know who he is no no it's it's fine it's fine he also asks him this question he's saying nothing is more important than palestine right now so that's like what he's spending his time on okay he He just graduated high school, Chad. What does he think about China? Does he know anything about China?

What do you think about China? China? China? To be honest, China has Muslims. Of course, everywhere there are Muslims. Most of them are Muslims. In every corner of the world. I haven spent much time with Chinese people, but one of the captains, the captain was Chinese,

and he did Qat with them chinese and he uh he he did with them and he uh danced to music with them and he was vibing so he he he he likes him yeah so what i mean what that's so crazy so they're just fucking chilling with the captains like i don't understand america's like bomb so america's like blowing them up while they're just like doing cat and and fucking chilling with the captain's like how does he feel about that isn't that fucking crazy like i don't know how to describe it it's like he seems it's normal but it's not normal to have your ship blown up you know yeah yeah i wonder if the chinese captain wants to go home no no he's just vibing matt he's just hanging out and you you can hear hassan's framing there

very strongly that you know these guys are just hanging out they're relaxing with the captains and stuff and the u.s is just blowing them up it's yeah they're nice guys and the u.s is like the evil people blowing them up. And that point about doing cat, you know, a chewing drug that is popular in Kenya. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So that's something, again, in like a teenage boy way that Hassan gets fixated on about people taking cat and you know doing cat and everybody having a nice time he's saying they've all tried caught including the captain of the of the ship that he went on he's saying that the vibes are immaculate no fucking way he's saying he wants us to visit. Oh, dude, I would love to one day.

I am afraid of America bombs, though. That's what I'm afraid of. He says he wants to visit the ship, but he's afraid of the American bombing. No, no, he can come. We'll let him visit the ship. And he'll live his life like a one-piece. Imagine that there's a one-piece. he says if you go visit there you'll feel like you're in one piece and you can visit all the boats that's good yeah that would be that would be an interesting scenario wouldn't it

this uh yeah millionaires visiting the boats everybody's just having fun it's like one piece matt they can all two cat and hang out what's the problem why are people complaining matt it sounds like it's you know a barrel of laughs over there yeah if it wasn't for the american airstrikes on those launch sites, then Yemen would be fine. Everyone would be happy and just chilling out. Yeah, and actually Rashid does explain that actually all of the hostages, they all are fine with the situation. He's saying that they win over the crews on these ships and they win them over with their charm and they make them hate America and the U.S. government. That's funny.

OK, that doesn't probably take much to be fair. I mean, what what is he what does he plan on doing once Palestine is free? You know what I mean? does he what does he plan on doing once palestine is free you know what i mean yeah so you know mike you said does he support the taking the hostages but you didn't factor in that actually the hostages have kind of been talked around they've been went over by the charm uh yeah i'm sure there's no pressure on them to endorse the the view of their captors. Like, that's not it, right? They just realize that the U.S. is actually the one that is threatening them. And they're fine. They're just hanging out, taking a cat.

They can enjoy themselves. Hassan eats all of this up totally uncritically. He's completely... Not just uncritically, Matt. You said that he's a propagandist, and I think that is putting it mildly okay uh what does he what does he have to say to dumbasses uh that uh consider him to be a terrorist what does he what does he think about that that's a question i just banned one of those

stupid fuckers in the chat just now he says who are they just fucking dumbasses he's like dismissing them yeah oh okay nice okay respect so that's that that's that solved you you thought, Matt, what about people who say that they're terrorists or that they have human rights abuses? No, they're dumbasses. And who says that? Yeah, great point. Done.

Well, that's good. Yeah, that's all cleared up now. So before we get to just the very end, right? I think most people will have got the general gist of it, but the absolute inanity of it cannot be overstated, right? You've already heard comparisons to One Piece. You've had questions about Mr. Beast. What does he think about Timothee Chalamet?

What does he think about Sean King? Whatever the case might be. FIFA? Now, what about this one? Okay, what else do I want to ask? What else do I want to ask? So, like, I mean, he's asking me if he would stop going on Bozo Israel stops the genocide.

I mean, yeah, he's going to say yes, chat. What are you talking about? Those are, like, dumbass questions. Has he ever had, like, Western food? So, you know, the dumbass question suggested by his chat related to the situation of motivations. Hasan, has he had Western food? Unclear here what that actually means.

And actually the response of the guy by kind of highlighting that. He's not really like answering any specific like foods. He's just saying like he, yeah, I mean, he's just saying it's the same food that he eats is the same food that we eat. Okay. Is there a kfc there they're everywhere i don't think there's a kfc in yemen dog um no you might have thought the you know this chat asking about kfc that was a bit flippant but actually they get into it because he he sees that he recognizes kfc and they go back and forth a bit of like kentucky fried chicken of what it is and then this is the follow-up oh they do have

kfc i wonder if it's like i feel like it's off-brand oh yeah it's gotta be right like that's crazy okay that's sick um that's wild they fucking have kfc in yemen there you go um what does he do what does he do for a day-to-day in yemen like tell him to walk us through a day like a normal day in his life does he have a girlfriend what does his parents think about this like i got a bunch of questions like that a bunch of questions like that and by the way man i'm not going to play them all for you but but the answer is it just does normal stuff he's trying to free palestine you know they repeat that point and hassan asks him about girlfriends and about his parents and he's saying that he doesn't talk to any girls he doesn't dm any girls he's not talking to any girls at all uh-huh sure

yeah he says they're like his parents reaction was normal. There is no big reaction. His parents are just chilling? Why are they so chill about everything? Everything is chill. Everything is chill, apparently. We're overreacting, it seems like. Being a 19-year-old Muslim boy in a conservative

country, he says he's never talked to any girls. His parents are nice people and that sounds like kind of all right not giving him that's right like again just an absolute failure to consider that you know the context would be different in a conservative country and not to say that they won't be interested in girls or that kind of thing but just like yeah they're not going on dates they're down at the mall right to get a burger but at least finally at the end hassan made some attempt to i guess even if it was pretty gormless to ask some questions about this young guy's life motivations that kind of thing yeah yeah they

don't go very far but but yes he does ask them that's where the bit came about like him being a himbo because you know he doesn't have these big plans or motivations uh so that that was the kind of the land of that but so you've you've heard hasan you've heard what he actually did now here's the way that he characterizes what just occurred this is crazy what do you mean i'm just fucking chilling we're just having a we're just we're just vibing dude no i know this is this is the dream blunt rotation right here yeah we're just we're just vibing we're vibing big time okay this is the this is the international language that everybody understands uh cursing fucking football and and all this shit but he did but they don't have any they don't have any like

uh you know he doesn't have any time to watch fucking anime and shit so i don't know i don't know what else to ask about um so he doesn't he doesn't play any video games uh he already said he watches one piece chat he already said that um you need to understand overseas mentality bitch i'm overseas myself originally shut the fuck up uh okay hassan does not understand like i i can feel quite confident whatever his mixed background he is absolutely trapped in a american-centric perspective like he's just yeah it's it's painful listening to it especially him being like yeah we're really vibing you know we're getting we're getting on gree it's yeah they are no they are not vibing the yaguti man is giving like he said completely anodyne you know

low information scripted type answers no i don't have any plans yes you know i i'm working towards freeing palestine my parents are good people i respect them very much you know i'm a yemeni muslim but you know he's he's naturally not going to be just like you know opening his he's not the representative for them so despite what hassan said he's not media trained so he's just giving like fairly stock answers and he's just a normal guy in yeah that's right and but it is uh you know at a relatively extreme ultra conservative social milieu in which he is you do not just speak freely on a public recording right like you don't just like speak free and just give your opinions about all kinds of things even if he had

them um yeah anyway hassan has no yeah has no uh understanding of that yeah yeah and one thing to note matt that you know i've we've talked about him crawling to get recognition. But he, like that time when he wanted to say about making the donations, he also does want to emphasize that he's bringing attention to things. So this is very much like influencer currency. He just says their life is full of adventures. Okay, that's a positive way to look at it. Tell him there's 25 000 people watching

him live right now by the way i don't know if he knows that he says he loves all of them and he wishes they could all try caught soon and on his on and he's and he's uh treating them to it okay yeah i can't wait we're going to yemen and we're getting caught um so god damn it like the fact that he is the most popular leftist streamer, this is a searing indictment of leftism. I'm sorry. If people take Hassan seriously and he is popular, this is just absolute fucking juvenile nonsense.

And I don't think that this interview is an outlier in his output i think this is quite illustrative of how he approaches things and it's ideology is the overriding thing alongside all this influencer bullshit which is it's just like it's such a terrible combination it's but even the even the ideology as far as i can tell it's like it's cookie cutter two-dimensional ideology it's not sophisticated you know even if you if you did have quite radical left-wing politics then you surely like this is not a good you could do so much better yeah come on come on i'm i'm serious and the very end the last clip to play matt after this brilliant thing is hassan then characterizing what what has occurred you know at the interview is done so what value was there to that i bet you

didn't think that that was going to happen today okay that was incredible you should ask him about mr bean yeah that that was a wild wild turn of events this was genuinely incredible this is more than anything i've seen in corporate media and it's incredible to see this community support and learn from their point of view love you haas yeah instead of screeching endlessly about how bad uh the yemeni people. You know, sometimes you just got to go directly to the source, baby. That's how it works. Okay, that was fire. That was fire. I hate that phrase.

Where are these? This is me just being in grumpy old culture. I hate that. I hate that. I hate that. I remember, I want to be Richard Dawkins complaining about them taking away his pot of honey at the airport at custom but i hate like calling things fire that's so fire but there's a reason matt that you don't hear this kind of thing in the mainstream media and

it isn't because it's so subversive it's because it's so fucking self-indulgent and insubstantial. It's nothing. You just did a sycophantic pandering interview where you tried to layer your political perspective on almost everything that was said. And you wanted to use the person for your particular political interpretation. That's it and the level of insight again maybe people in hassan's audience do need to learn that people in yemen are actual people people right that they they've seen things on tv they had childhoods they they can make jokes that's not insight to me it's not insight to me it doesn't make the hoofies any less an organization

that has been responsible for terrible humanitarian abuses and ongoing hostage taking stoning of people you know like they're also not a cartoon villain that's true you know they're in a part of the world there is civil conflicts the people they're fighting are not all good people either but it's hassan's view is absolutely cartoonish and it's kind of fitting that they spent most of it trying to find cartoons that he could you know reference because yeah his politics is not really any deeper than that no i'd say his politics are about as deep as, what's that cartoon called?

Sorry, anime. SpongeBob. I'm going to keep calling them cartoons. No, Feeney, One Piece is much deeper. Much deeper. I bet it is. Much stronger critique than this. So, yeah.

No, you're right. I mean, the thing is, even his objective was stupid, which was to use this kid as a prop for this thing his stated objective would be okay like if he did a louis ferrou style interview to humanize somebody from a group that is you know presented as villainous in the media you could do that but you need to do it responsibly and be willing to raise some challenging questions. And as you've seen, Hasan can't do that. He is not capable or doesn't want to.

It seems to be an indulgent, self-obsessed man-child who lives in a mansion and plays computer games. That's beautiful. That's absolutely exactly. And that applies to so many of the streamer world right indulgent grown-ass children who are just like narcissistic obsessed with whatever their particular takes are and very very unhealthily cultivating abusive parasocial relationships like you heard at the start yeah this this is all in the context of that you know ongoing audience interaction yeah and i feel like the sort of cartoonish ultra simplified stupid politics is just really

window dressing for what's going on here and and for me the main thing is is because of his i guess personal failings he completely fails in what he was attempting to achieve which is to you know get to know this young man really understand what's going on in his head and what motivates him in his background it was just so superficial kfc and one piece so yeah i mean i don't like the guru stuff is interesting i mean on one hand he definitely falls into the category of like too useless to be a guru but we definitely saw the cultish dynamics there didn't we yeah i i mean i don't think hasan is the best example of politics streamers and their ability to channel the kind of eloquent monologues that we've seen in the secular gurus but i i think in a lot of other ways in terms of

encouraging cultish ingrid bark group dynamics in terms of being conspiracy prone grievance mongering being narcissistic he's lighting up a whole bunch of it. So yeah, I do think that there's at least a lot of strong parallels with the streamer, influencer types and secular gurus, particularly when they're pushing a political line. Now, yeah, they might fall a little bit more towards like pundits or activists in this respect, but because of the super strong audience interaction and the conflating of daily

life with their stream because people are interested in who hassan is dating who he's collaborating with you know what new things he's bought or these kind of things so it mixes it all in it's not like a journalist or a pundit who just shows up on the political talk shows yeah that's right so it's a it's an odd mix it sort of weaves in the the geopolitical takes yeah and the the ideological stuff but it's woven into you know him and his life and computer games and other random interests yeah i mean we haven mentioned, but he's like a buff, very handsome young guy. So that definitely plays into his popularity. I saw a bunch of photos of him

like flexing his muscles with his shirt off and stuff on pictures. It's, you know, whatever. So that's all context, context, context. Well, anyway, thanks, Chris. That was absolutely fucking interminable. I'm thanking you ironically. I hope you have picked up.

I did pick up. I did pick up. Was this my punishment? You know, I got to listen to Sean Carroll. You know, we got to have that nice chat about, you know, free agents. And now you had to punish me with more of this. This is Red S scare all over again um yeah yeah that's a good comparison a completely different ideology but the exact same in terms of

level of depth so yeah and i i will say matt that it is your punishment because we're entering the season of streamers but we're going to balance it out by having academic gurus to kind of keep things going. And some of the other streamers are more substantial in different ways. So there we go. But yeah, this is a very stupid piece of content. But I think... People need to be aware, I think, is your point.

I mean, he is a super popular. He's not just like a random... No, he's not a random person, not a random person at all. So yeah. Okay, Matt. Well, the last thing before we go and disappear is just to say thanks to a couple of patrons, the people that support Decoding the Gurus. And if you want to join them, it's just $2. You can get access to the

supplementary material for the episodes you can get decoding academia you can live stream with us and we promise we promise we won't abuse you like hassan piker does you know we'll be nice to you at first at first yeah yeah so yeah anyway we we have a patreon it's two dollars at the lowest tier and various people join and we say thank you to them and that would include at the conspiracy hypothesizer level alexander tronstand vaughn jensen dan Daniel Shopee, Alex A., Matthew, Michael Davey, Botanical Experiences, Julia Street, Go North Japan, Iza Sandwich, Chris Broodrick, Nick Wiebe, Jerry Fuji, Victor Ivanov, Daz, Gingy, Austin Holland, Amelia Dispan, and Kuldad420. Yay, thank you very much.

These people are the only thing standing between us and AG1 sponsorship, Athletic Green. That's true, that's true. Thank you. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list

of correct answers i wasn't at this conference this kind of shit makes me think man it's almost like someone is being paid like when when you hear these george soros stories well he's trying to destroy the country from within we are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Okay. And the revolutionary, if you're smart, the people that get access to the Decoding Academia episodes, they include Beagle Savant, Al Hall, Generalized Linear Supermodel, Chuck Boy, Sophia fossard captain princess god damn it freak out andrew verhulst jonas bergy david moore richard david morgan tom doyle will sherrit and roof towel i like that i like that uh I like that. Especially, I liked a generalized linear supermodel.

Do you know what I was doing when you interrupted me to listen to this trash, Chris? I was running a generalized linear model. It was actually Gaussian but with a log link. So, yeah.

That's what I was doing. As you know, I was very concerned about my residuals. That's right. Well, keep them on your what I was doing. Yeah. As you know, I was very concerned about my residuals. That's right. Well, keep them on your mind while you listen to this. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.

I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess. And it could easily be wrong. But it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. So there we go, Matt. That's it. We'll leave people with that note and make better choices than listening to Hassan Piker. That's what I would say to people.

I mean, listen to him if you want, but just take him for what he is. Yeah, if there is any overlap between the people who listen to us and the people who listen to Hassan Piker, take a good hard look at yourselves. I'm not going to use The intersection between those two sets. Choose one. We're making it in group I, group I, G.

That's fine. You can listen to them. Just know that we judge you for it. Yeah, that's all. We're just judging you for it. Well, that's it, Matt. I'll see you soon enough. See you soon enough see you soon enough ciao Thank you.