Endless Thread - Bonus: A conversation with Hasan Piker

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Last week, we introduced you to the wildly popular, albeit controversial, streamer and self-declared socialist Hasan Piker — what he’s all about, how he’s delivering his message to millions of followers, and who he’s reaching and resonating with. When we talked to him in November, Hasan had a lot to say about the Democratic Party, about the streaming platform Twitch, and about what’s further dividing Americans right now. So here's more of our conversation with him.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. This show tells climate stories like a stubborn optimist, because hope, innovation, and nature itself are key. to solving the challenges ahead. Follow on your favorite podcast app. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

Ben. Hey, Mary. We're in the feed an extra day this week. Which, if you listened to our most recent episode, the stream is up, you may have been expecting... And if you haven't, you should definitely go listen to that episode first. It introduces you to the wildly popular and also controversial stream. and self-declared socialist Hassan Piker, what he's all about,

how he's delivering his message to millions of followers, and who he's reaching and resonating with. At the end of that episode, we mentioned we'd be sharing a longer version of our conversation with Hassan Piker because, well, he's a big deal in this space, and he has a lot to say about the Democratic Party, about the streaming platform Twitch, and about what's further dividing Americans right now.

So here's more of that conversation with Hassan. Piker. And just a little context, we spoke to him just a few weeks after the presidential election when the whole what did the Dems do wrong debate was still very fresh. But we started with the basics. Like, what does a day in the life of a serial streamer look like? I usually stream from 11 a.m. Pacific time all the way until like 8 p.m. Pacific time every single day, seven days a week. That means on the weekends as well. That means, on holidays as well. No exceptions. And I've kind of kept up with that schedule since 2020 when I went full time.

Before then I was still streaming, but my hours were different. And the reason why I don't go any earlier than that, even though it would probably be better for the East Coast audience to get their news earlier, is because I have this little window, this little pocket of time every morning where I have to do some research, figure out exactly what I want to talk about and also work out and go outside, interact with other human beings, take my dog out, I call it, you know, my grass touching hour. And I do that so that I can maintain this healthy work-life balance, which is interesting because I don't think people would consider eight hours of broadcasting every single day, seven days a week to be healthy. But

it is something that I enjoy. And, you know, I have, I guess, figured out a way to make it work for myself. Can I ask what might seem like an overly simplistic question, but why stream for eight hours a day? I really enjoy it. And also, there's a lot of news to cover. And outside of that, I think that there's also a lot of fun to be had besides talking just about the news and, you know, doing outreach to a broader community. And, you know, and trying to get them on board to at least, like, view the world from a more charitable perspective to the way I see it. So there's like a, there's like a mission for you in that, like a altruistic mission or something.

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

I don't think propaganda necessarily is a bad word, but, you know, it's, I feel like it's more so, it's considered a bad word when someone uses it in, especially the Western world. But yeah, I think that you can,

you can be honest with the things that you're talking about. I always openly recognize that I'm a biased person. And I always say that, you know, I always am upfront with what my biases are. Like when people come and yell at me, and they'll say, like, I'm like, my ulterior motive is very clear.

I want, I want health care for all. You know what I mean? I want socialized medicine in this country. Like, this is something that I'm absolutely biased on, right? Right. And so it's not ulterior. It's like out front. You're like, you're like, this is what I believe.

This is what I want, right? Yeah. And the way I see it, I think that that is more honest because everyone has biases. And I would rather be forthcoming with my biases than try to dupe people into this a false notion of neutrality that some people present. I think you recently said that your online space was one of the last spaces online that is majority men that isn't like insane politically. So do you worry ever that you're preaching to your people and not preaching beyond that? Like do you worry that the audience you have is

not the audience you need to accomplish your goals? Yes and no. I think. that there's always a larger audience that I could talk to and convince. That's something that I, you know, that's something that I'm very well aware of. And that's precisely the reason why I also collaborate with a lot of content creators that I'm friends with that have these rather apolitical or even sometimes right-wing audiences as well. But having said that, my community didn't just materialize overnight. It actually took years and years. of streaming to get to the point that it got to. And every single person in my community,

we'd be the first to tell you, like, I was transphobic or I had some racist opinions. And I, like, you convinced me that that was not necessarily the right way to look at things and right way to approach things. There's an intersectionality of privilege. Everyone on certain blind spots. I recognize that human beings are imperfect, and we're all on our journey of learning and development

and becoming better versions of ourselves. And that's a first principle that I apply in my commentary and in my community building. And I'm very understanding of people's shortcomings, especially when it comes to how they might have been victim to social conditioning, how they were duped in some ways by things that they took for granted. things that they assumed were just the truth without re-examination.

So my goal is to expose some of the flaws in the ways that a lot of people think and take for granted what they have decided are firm truths, right, that they've learned from a very early age. And I myself have had this transformation in my own personal journey as well. It's not something that I hide. I used to have transphobic opinions. I mean, this was a decade plus ago. But it doesn't matter. Like, this was something that I definitely would joke about.

And I think that makes me, I use that experience to, to, I think, better de-radicalize people as well. And tell them, like, listen, you can have certain perspectives. it's more so about like always being charitable and admitting when you're wrong and maybe developing a better mindset around certain things with more information. And being open probably to the possibility that you're wrong, which leads to admitting when you're wrong. Yeah, absolutely. How much do you know about your audience, Hassan, who they are, how old they are,

how inclined they are to think the way that you do already, versus how much of this kind of de-radicalizing you might have to do with the people who are coming to watch you every day? I mean, I can't speak or every single individual, but like there are a lot of people in my community that are very forthcoming about this sort of thing. There are a lot of people in my community that have, you know, gotten, I guess, I wouldn't use the term radicalized, but gotten activated and motivated to go out and run for local office. office, become community organizers, become union organizers, unionize their workplaces, many, many examples of that. I think it's not necessarily a captive audience that I just tapped into, especially because I don't think my position, the way I see the world, the way I examine the world from a materialist perspective, for example, is well represented in any aspect of traditional or

mainstream media. I think it's outside of the confines of even many of the liberal institutions. So I don't think that there is necessarily this firm audience that was just like waiting. And they were like, oh, finally, you know, I finally, I already, I already read all the volumes Das Capital and I was waiting for a guy who can, you know, have a similar worldview and a similar ideological framework, but then also is shooting the shit and having fun. So it's more so that people, I think, come in and they're like, well, that's a cool guy. He seems progressive. He doesn't seem like an asshole. He looks kind of bro-y, maybe a little too broy for me, or maybe that's a beneficial for a lot of young men that they look at someone that they identify with, like a white dude who

likes to work out and play video games. And they go, hmm, like this seems like a different community than the one I'm used to. Let me, let me hear him out. He's after all collaborating with some of my favorite content creators. Like I'll just, I'll just tune in to see what this guy is all about, right? And then I think slowly but surely the process is, uh, they start maybe unlearning certain things that they took for granted. Uh, it could be about misogyny. It could be about interpersonal relationships with with the women it could be their

it could be a re-examination of the way they understood I don't know gay people, trans people and the like or even white supremacy, police brutality, any number of different things, climate change, their relationship with their bosses

because I am a firm believer that a lot of people don't have the tools to really develop class consciousness and to understand their position in society, even if they are, when given the opportunity, very progressive. I think we have a tendency to say Americans are just like automatically reactionary.

They're all racist. They're all sexist, homophobic. They want to purge all the immigrants and whatnot. And I think that many Americans are simply just not given an option of an alternative, a vision for society. and they are operating within the confines of either this like marginally less bad liberal version or this far right insane version. And they just, I think, hyper-focused on the aesthetics in that process and make up their minds that way. Whereas if you even look at the reality of this past election cycle, you see in a place like Missouri, very far right, voted for Donald Trump, voted for Josh Hawley.

Josh Hawley's a little unique because he also puts on this populist front, but he'll go to a picket line or whatever every now. And then having said that, Missouri, you know, very right-wing state. And yet they voted for increasing minimum wage, $15 an hour and also emergency leave. They voted to enshrine abortion protections in their state constitution. I mean, these are pretty progressive opinions, right? And yet they did not vote for the party that was pushing that. and I think that there is a crisis in communication for the Democratic Party there. But I think it also shows that Americans in the Rust Belt, in the Midwest, in the Sunbelt, everywhere around the country are far more progressive than the way we think about them and then the way that people present them in media. Yeah, and that's often, I feel like that's often what progressives have imagined, right?

it's like these are things that people actually, if you actually talk to people about what they care about, what they believe, they're not like, they're not going to be like, oh, if I had, you know, if I had, like, good access to health care, that's evil socialism or something. They're going to be like, oh, actually, that sounds pretty good. Or if you offer them, like, protections for the work that they do at their day job, you know, like, if you actually talk to them about the details, you know, most Americans are more progressive than they realize. I think progressives believe that, firmly believe that. And it's more of a messaging problem for the Democrats where like, you know, or maybe they're just getting outmatched by the other side.

And I think that there's obviously an underlying material reason for this as well. Republicans, you know, hammer on wedge issues fairly aggressively in an effort to polarize themselves from the Democratic Party. And I think the Democratic Party. and I think the Democratic Party constantly finds themselves running defense against said wedge issues that the Republicans make into this massive problem. And they dominate the media ecosystem. And liberals constantly find themselves, I think, playing defense in hostile territory where the boundaries have been set by the Republicans and the right-wing media ecosystem like Fox and the independent stations out there. So this is still entirely in the hands of the Democratic Party. I always say this, where they should be putting forth certain policies that they're running on

that the Republicans have to, in a reactionary fashion, position themselves against. But these policies have to be universal. And I think because the Democratic Party is still at the end of the day, behold into the same corporate interests that they are actively trying to raise funds from, actively trying to defend, just like the Republican Party, they end up in this unique predicament where they're trying to have this big tent, but also simultaneously hyper-focusing on key demographics, key constituencies in this very weird fashion where they don't have a broad universality message. They don't have this left populist message. And it ends up coming across as

as very smarmy, elitist, almost technocratic in their approach. I think Kamala Harris was a perfect demonstration of that, right? There was this, they saw one poll that said, you know, black people, black men specifically might actually swing to the Republican Party. I, this happens every election cycle. I immediately was like, this is ridiculous, hyper-focusing on black men in this regard is so silly, considering that, you know, white men are overreact. overwhelmingly pro-Republican party, and this swing from black men is going to be marginal at best,

and hyper-focusing on black men in this regard is silly. But they saw that poll, and their answer for that was like, we're going to protect black men and their cryptocurrency. Right. And also, we're going to yell at them in the meantime and, like, give them a hard time. Yeah, we're going to activate Barack Obama to go talk about how misogynistic black men are. And then also on the policy front, we're just going to hyper, we're going to hyper target like some black men, by saying, like, oh, we're going to protect their crypto assets.

And it's like that kind of stuff, I think, is, is, you know, means tested policies that are objectively unpopular, in my opinion. Like a more popular version of those policies would exist if you were presenting it in a universal fashion. And then it's hyper-specific. It's hyper-targeted. And I feel like that just ends up unnecessarily coming across as divisive for a lot of people where they see that and go, what is this?

I don't really understand. So they're not really addressing any of the broader issues that a lot of Americans are facing. And I think part of that is because, and I think Chris Murphy was a really interesting person to hear this from, but a lot of that is because they're afraid of disrupting the status quo and pissing off their corporate benefactors that they really care about. That is the core constituency that Democratic Party cares about. How can you do that? well, you do that by saying we're pro trans

without really doing much about it, just simply saying that you're pro trans. And it's really interesting because they didn't even do that this time around and it seems like, you know, they were, the Democratic Party was like more focused on not even saying to their pro trans and just moderating

to the right even more. And then turning around and in the aftermath of this election and autopsy going, oh, we were two pro trans. You weren't at all. You actually cut anti-trans ads. Colin Allred, cut anti-trans ads. Many Democrats cut those ads because they were responding to the Republican smears.

And I think what ends up happening in that situation for a lot of people who don't have any sort of like ideological connection to any of these marginalized groups is they look at that and they go, why are you admitting that you got caught? You just look like a hypocrite now. That's the way people see it. We want to ask you, I think, about the kind of aftermath here. You know, Kamala Harris campaign invited you to the DNC. I'm curious about your thoughts looking back at all of this. Like Donald Trump, obviously, one, wondering how that may or may not have changed the sense of urgency or responsibility that you have towards your own community that you've built. And how are you thinking about talking with them about going forward?

and how do you feel about the Kamala Harris campaign looking back at this? If anybody followed my commentary closely throughout the election cycle, they would have noticed a very significant attitude shift in opposite directions. First, in a very positive way, when Joe Biden was swapped out with Kamala Harris. and it wasn't necessarily positive because I was like, oh, I'm so stoked about Kamala Harris. Like I was very critical of Kamala's failure in the 2019 primaries. I very openly understood that she presented herself as like a Bernie style left populace

when she wasn't actually genuinely that person at all. It was a time when she was a California senator when, you know, the Democrats had no power. So they were willing to go out to bat for these like broad. populist messages and popular policies like Medicare for all, right? And she still came across as inauthentic in that primary, and that's why she had to drop out. And so I was very familiar with her track record.

But I was still excited because, one, Kamala Harris has always been a bit of a blank slate. Like, she has certain opinions. but it's very obvious that she's like a machine politician. She is the generic Democrat in many ways that the New York Times poll showed was beating Joe Biden by 25 points, right? So I was excited at this new blank slate almost. And more so, I was excited at the fact that the Democratic Party had responded to public pressure. This was unique. This was a truly unique moment where the establishment Democrats and the,

the Democratic Party's base of support and the donors in the Democratic Party were aligned, right? All the plan is aligned. Nancy Pelosi came in. Joe Biden dropped out. Kamala Harris gets swapped in. And then they went with Tim Walts. Out of all of the choices that they had, Tim Walts was one of the most earnest and one of the most progressive choices that they could have gone with. And I thought at the time, this is also good. It didn't go with Josh Shapiro, who was conservative and is conservative. I mean, he's worked with the Republicans in his own state of Pennsylvania to push for incredibly right-wing bills, like the school voucher program bill that undermines teachers' unions in his own state. That was a non-starter for me.

A lot of people focused on Josh Shapiro's, you know, I don't know, high school essays about how he wanted to go and do community. service with the IDF or how Arabs are genetically violent or something. I don't care. Most Democrats already are pro-Israel and that wasn't that different from any of the other

Democrats up there. But I think with Tim Walz, his own personal policies in the state of Minnesota, like what his legislative agenda, his Democratic Party legislative agenda was was something that the Kamala Harris campaign was going to have to

address. something that they had actually tied themselves to, paid family leave, paid, you know, emergency leave, feeding children in schools, like school lunch programs, things of like, things of that nature. And the fact that this guy was also a school teacher, I really liked all of those things. So I was very excited at what things might look like. And having said that, given my, you know, coverage of the Democratic Party for the past 10 years, I was still, I was still very careful in my commentary kept repeating the position over and over again. If Democrats go back to their old ways, they will tack to the right and they will end up losing. And I said this over and over again.

But at the time, I was like, you know, I'm going to stand back. I'm going to see if Kamala Harris separates herself from Joe Biden on key issues, Gaza, maybe even immigration in some ways and communicate a different way about immigration in this country that goes against the Biden agenda from the year prior. But you were ultimately disappointed. DNC was my turning point. Okay. Why? What made, what made you turn in that moment? So I got invited to the DNC, shout out to the Kamala Harris campaign. I think that they were already, like, at odds. They were butting heads with the DNC to begin with.

Yeah. Like the Democratic Party to begin with for that choice. And when I got invited to the DNC, I saw a couple things. One, Kamala Harris was coming to the DNC with a tremendous amount of fundraising because the base of support actually was like, the basis support was actually excited, right? And they wanted to reward the party. So they came in with this massive war chest. Fundraising was out of control. They almost raised like a billion dollars, right, leading up to the DNC. And I saw a couple things. One, I was shocked at how not tapped into the real world I was when I was at the, the heart of where things are happening. I was genuinely shocked at how out of touch I was with

everything else that was going on in the world. Because when you're there, when you're in that bubble, when the DC bubble comes to Chicago, right, you're still in that DC bubble. And I, I, I now understand why so many people, so many staffers, so many analysts, so many of these guys that, you know, write these think pieces and whatnot are so unimaginably out of touch with the needs and opinions of regular old, you know, American working class people. Because the D.C. bubble travels. Yeah. Another thing that I was truly shocked by was how excited, like the air of excitement and enthusiasm that I saw at the DNC. I was like, guys, you know, Kamala Harris made up around 10 points from Joe Biden, but like it's not like she's 10 points

above Donald Trump right now. And yet everyone was celebrating. You know, it's Brad Summer. It's happening, baby. Brad Summer is here. Everyone was going crazy. Like they were putting up LeBron numbers. All of a sudden, like she was going to do a Reagan-style sweep or something.

Like, I couldn't comprehend it. I was like, why are they so excited? I kept, I felt like I was in a different planet. These guys were living in a different planet. And then slowly but surely I also started noticing certain things like, you know, I first day of the DNC, I obviously attended the pro-Palestinian protests that were happening right outside of the DNC. The city was entirely locked down surrounding the DNC to begin with because, you know, they were very worried about a mass protest like disrupting the event.

Democrats inside, with the exception of the uncommitted movement and like a lot of these delegates and whatnot and like younger, younger staffers, like the, the, the, establishment was was completely oblivious or was purposely avoiding even talking about Gaza. And besides that, obviously by the last day, all this drama occurred where the Democrats chose to have multiple police officers, Republicans speak at the DNC, and yet no Palestinian American, like Rua, for example, who is a Georgia Democrat, right? And the uncommitted movement was there. entire time and and and they were you know treated in some ways as like pariahs almost and

i was very frustrated by that i thought that they are actively communicating that uh arab americans muslim americans and not just and this is just as a sectarian issue either like young americans in general college students and americans who are upset about uh what is going on in Gaza and what Joe Biden is allowing to continue in Gaza with all the endless amounts of power and influence we have over Israel. They were frustrated with this. This is a broad coalition of people. And yet their needs were not being addressed. It was very obvious that the Democratic Party was basically doing what I feared the most that they would end up doing, which is tacked to the right and like, you know, communicate. We're good with fracking. We're good with fracking. Yeah, pro fracking. I have a gun.

Yeah, muscular border policy. And also something that she said that I could not, I could not believe was when she said she wants to oversee, she wants to have the most lethal military. You're a Democrat. I can't, like, I don't understand why a Democrat would ever present themselves as that. Like, that's, I don't even hear the Republicans often say it in those terms, right? Like, we're going to have the most lethal military on the planet.

like the lethality is the purpose of the military. I understand that, but you're not supposed to say that in a positive way. You're not supposed to own it. It's like there's a reason why we call it the Defense Department now and not the war department, right? Because the optics of that are almost icky when you think about it. I don't know.

It's kind of silly to say it like that. But all of that showed me that the Democrats were not interested in running a 2008-style Obama coalition focus campaign, you know, people back to movement. And instead, they were going further to the right of even Joe Biden in 2020. And in many respects, they did do just that. They went to the right of Joe Biden in 2020 on immigration, for example. Joe Biden himself went to the right of Joe Biden in 2020 on immigration by the end of his tenure.

But still, like, Kamala Harris had a fantastic opportunity to, to address the economic anxieties that people were experiencing as a direct consequence of, of, you know, the price of goods outpacing wage growth. They didn't really do that. They had one solid policy on that front that they just backpocketed, right? Kamalares came out of the gay swinging with this, with the combating price gouging. I immediately gave her her flowers for that. I said, that's a great way to communicate this to Americans.

And it was profoundly popular, right? at a time when this is something that is a major problem, it was addressing their needs saying, I'm going to go after price gougers. I'm going to lower forcibly the price of your groceries by going after the grocers. And it was universally condemned by the media apparatus. It was condemned by the Republicans who said it's Venezuela.

It's Venezuela. And yet its popularity actually never diminished in that process. It actually went up. When she first suggested the policy, I think it was sitting around 79%. after a month of attacks from the Republicans, it went up to 83%. And yet, they stopped pushing it.

Why did they stop pushing it? I guess somewhere along the way, Tony West came in and was like, don't do this anti-billionaire, anti-corporatist agenda. I think that that's a bad way to message. We have to show the billionaires that we're on, you know, we're on their side.

And of course, Tony West is, you know, I think legal counsel for Uber or something. So, you know, understandable that he would have, that position, Kamala Harris's brother-in-law. And we saw what happened. They brought forward Mark Cuban as a surrogate, and he started talking about, you know, he started talking about how like Kamala was going to be great for corporations and the wealthy, but subtly, right? Well, we also heard a lot of people in the wake of Donald Trump winning the election pointing

to podcasts like Joe Rogan, streamers that are thought of as more right-wing or in the, quote-un-un-un- quote, mannosphere as being a reason that, you know, a lot of younger male voters were mobilized to go to the polls. And I'm curious what you make of that. And if you feel like, I have heard you referred to before, and you may bristle at this, but I've heard you referred to before as like the left Joe Rogan. And I'm curious what you make of that, how you think about how things might have gone differently. Were there not enough of you, people like you? Could you have streamed for more hours? You know, like what more could have been done to kind of counteract the Manosphere, streamer influence that people seem to be pointing to? I just don't think that we can podcast our

way out of this problem. Like, I just don't think of the Democrats. Oh, come on, man. Come on. There's no, There's no way that the Democratic Party can have, you know, a thousand Joe Rogans. Let a thousand Joe Rogans bloom. And then all of a sudden, you know, people are going to be blue-pilled and become firmly committed to the third way neoliberalism that the Democratic Party represents, like this technocratic approach. Like, you're failing to comprehend. There are already people that do this. There are plenty of people who are pro-democratic party in the independent space.

They just don't represent a real constituent. There are the likes of Harry Sassan, for example. He's wonderful. He's a very smart kid. I like him a lot. But he is functionally a Democratic Party mouthpiece, right? He's on TikTok. I think he plays a very important role of making the Democrats feel like people

that look like Harry Sassan are on board with their agenda when in fact his entire audience is probably Democratic Party people that are looking at that, like older Democrats looking at that and going, see? this cheeky rose kid is, is saying the exact same things that I hear from MSNBC. So the youth must like all of this, right? And, and, and it's not, it's not real, right? It's not a real audience.

It's not a real audience of, like, young men in particular. And, well, if we can't podcast our way out of it, then, do you see your, um, potential impact as being limited? Well, my potential impact will always be limited. Unless the Democratic Party, from the top down, gets together and decides, like, we have to do left-wing economic populism. Like, my, I can only do so much. I can do, I can do a whole bit about, you know, de-radicalizing people or actively getting them to understand unionization is important. Right.

And, and maybe even get them to successfully unionize their workplaces and whatnot. But, like, that is marginal. the Democratic Party as an institution has to re-examine its relationship with wealthy corporate benefactors and not be afraid to identify them as enemies. I think Donald Trump does this very well all the time. He doesn't care. He will tell you exactly who his enemies are. And I think that the Democrats are scared of putting up a fight.

They're notoriously scared of putting up a fight and being even remotely disturbing, right? They're worried about preserving the institutions at a time when even all the way back in 2016. People very clearly did not care about the institutions. They did not think that they were worthy of preserving. That's why they vote over the sledgehammer that was going to destroy it, right? I guess my point is someone like myself can only be impactful, I guess, or maybe most impactful if the Democrats actually listened to what I was saying and maybe. change their strategies, changed their attitudes a little bit, and stopped running away from their

base and instead ran towards their base a little bit. More of our conversation with Hassam Piker in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science,

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at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. We're back with more of our conversation with Hassan Piker from last November. We want to talk about another topic here that I think you're passionate about, which is, you know, which is effectively Palestine.

Of course. So earlier in November, Twitch banned certain uses of the word Zionist. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I think it's silly. And I think that they were worried about a bad faith smear campaign that was actually started and pushed by a group of content critters that were not on Twitch that were on a platform that was actually, ironically enough,

significantly more reactionary. And they went to advertisers and they like did this mass emailing campaign, very similar to Gamergate. Yeah. For those of you who don't know, it was just basically like a bad faith, um, clipped out of context compilation that they were sending to be like,

see this guy, Hassani's bad. He's an anti-Semi. He's a lover of terrorism. And he's, uh, one of the top content creators on this platform. And, you know, you don't want your ads running against this. And, like, of course, advertisers, they don't like any, any sort of controversy, even if there is no real controversy there whatsoever.

Very worried about brand safety, for sure. And I think Twitch responded to that pressure campaign by just kind of capitulating. First, they put forth a CCL content classification label for politics, sensitive issues. And then they were like, no more ads running on that, right? So we, you know, we isolate political commentary on the platform. Now, it doesn't impact me as much because I don't like running ads anyway. I have always negotiated my contracts to make sure that I run the minimum amount of ads allotted or in that in that timeframe in comparison to people who are running like 22 minutes of ads an hour.

I was running four. and my contract was already up regardless, so I was not going to run ads anyway. So it didn't really impact me, but it impacted a lot of smaller content creators, Jewish content creators as well that do political commentary on the platform. It hurt their bottom line. It hurt their revenue opportunities. There were a lot of people who also got caught in the crosshairs, like Faye's Kayson, who had Iran as a tag.

He's Iranian. and he wanted to he wanted to get the attention of like Iranian Twitch Watchers and there was another content creator who was Venezuelan who also reported the same. It's like if you had Iran as a tag on your on your SEO, if you had Venezuela

as a tag on your SEO because these are like State Department designated funders of terror or whatever which is like a very political designation is not you know they they had noticed a direct revenue decline, like complete revenue decline from advertising.

And all of that happened because of this pressure campaign, but Twitch I think sometimes gets things wrong and is too beholden and too fearful of saying no to outside pressure campaigns. But overall, I think that they have a very rigid, rigorous, application of its terms of service in comparison to any of these other platforms. I'm on every single one of these platforms. I'm a content creator on TikTok.

I started off on Facebook, Instagram. I'm on YouTube. I have a channel everywhere, right? I'm on Twitter. Twitch is, and I will always say this as someone who's been banned for something I consider to be ridiculous. They banned me for anti-white racism because I said Cracker, right, back in the day, which was another one of these, like, silly pressure campaigns that actually worked.

even though sometimes they can be heavy-handed and sometimes they can be inconsistent, I think they do their very best to ensure that it's a safe a platform as possible in comparison to many of these other platforms. How important is it for you in terms of what you're trying to do to speak off the cuff? Because I feel like there was this thing with Fox News last week, I think that you had to respond to or that you decided to respond to, this like super cut thing. You know, obviously people are going to, whatever, we live in, this is like the media ecosystem now, right?

Things get taken out of context and that's like very normal and sort of part of the playbook. But, you know, what do you think about as you're speaking to your audience and how your eight hours of streaming a day like is going to sort of get digested and recut by the media machine that exists? outside of that and how it will be used against you and how do you talk to your audience in a way or your prospective audience if you're going on another content creator's channel and that audience is maybe right wing how do you think about making sure people understand where you're actually coming from um i just try to do my very best to the best of my ability i am human at the end of days. It was very difficult to make sure that, like, things won't be cut out of context and an eight-hour conversation, especially when this eight-hour conversation is supposed to be somewhat more palatable,

and it's on these incredibly complex issues, geopolitical issues that deserve a lot of nuance, and in many instances, even like dense academic literature backing the positions. And I'm trying to repackage that to the best of my ability for eight to ten hours every single day in a way that is like funny and appealing and in a way that like the layman can understand

in a way that young people can understand and in that process I think of course I mean there are fan made Hassanabi clips out of context compilations out there with millions of views you know like it's a you can

over the course of eight hours you can make me come across like I am the exact opposite person, the affirm and committed believer in right-wing attitudes and ideologies, right? And people sometimes do that. And I think a lot of people understand that this is just a part of the media ecosystem. So it's just noise. But I'm sure that there are plenty of people who get duped by stuff like that because I always am as charitable as I'm.

possibly can be to to like, you know, everyday people that don't have the time to go and watch someone talk about these issues for hours and hours. And, you know, they're just, they just see something. They just see a compilation or an article or, you know, there's, there's a lot of people on YouTube that do this as well. It's a slop content. It's like drama content. And they just watch that and they're like, well, I know everything I need to know about this person. And I'm moving on. I don't like that guy anymore. And it's okay. Like there's not much I can do. about that at this point. So I just go about my day, you know, and I hope that people will come in with a level of intellectual curiosity and a level of charitability that they're like, let me,

let me see what this guy is about. And I think in that process, they will very quickly come to a very different conclusion. They'll be like, oh, maybe he wasn't the way that he was presented, right? One of the challenges for you has to be. be how you're presented to these folks by folks who maybe you used to collaborate with and don't anymore. Can you talk a little bit about Ethan and where you guys met and how you met and how that relationship has become challenged? Yeah, of course. Ethan Klein is a very famous YouTuber. He's a massive content creator on YouTube, millions of followers. He has a very successful podcast. originally he had reached out to me many years ago to do an episode of his podcast

H-Dracian productions during COVID and we really really kicked it off and I think like leading up like he I think Ethan just wanted to build like some kind of a political branch within his podcast ecosystem and he decided he wanted to do this thing called leftover with me where we would just talk about politics. And he, and, you know, I think he went on his own personal journey as well, uh, from, from his past positions. He was, he was a little bit edgier, I think, back in the day. And, and, uh, to describe edgier.

What do you mean? I mean, there's a lot of stuff that, uh, I think old YouTubers engaged in that, uh, now we look back at and cringe, right? things like that. I don't want to get too far into it. I'm not that invested in that. But I think he had like a moment of self-reflection that was genuine. And in that process, he decided like he was going to go on a journey of learning

and try to promote more progressive attitudes and ideals. And in that process, I think also with the success of the Frenemones podcast that he had with Trisha Paitis, he developed this very progressive. majority female audience. And, and, you know, and then October 7 happened. And we, I guess we had some disagreements. The disagreements weren't as severe at first, at least the way I saw it,

because I knew that he had in the past been extremely critical of Israel. Ethan had gone on birthright and met his wife Heela there. And I think that, he has a lot of, like, familial connections to Israel that he doesn't personally have or didn't personally have originally. I can't speak on his own internal convictions or the, what's going on in his own mind. But there were definitely some disagreements that we had very publicly early on in the leftovers podcast.

And there were a lot of moments of grace where he gave me and I. opportunity to to speak on Palestinian emancipation side by side. I remember Middle East I actually did this very viral post about Ethan who at the time was crying about Palestinian children and how he was a father and how emotional that was for him, seeing that. but we, I guess, put the podcast on hold because of some of these discreetremings. Some of them were very public in terms of like how much I wanted to focus on the Palestinian side of things

and how much he also came at it with with charitability saying, like, I understand the Palestinian side of things. I'm talking about this, but like, why can't you hear out my positions? And I think like one of the major points of disagreement famously was over from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. He considered this to be an anti-Semitic phrase. I did not. I thought, you know, I likened it to someone saying black lives matter means, you know, white lives don't matter. Like it's not, there's no instance where like an emancipatory slogan is going to be reframed by by people who are sympathetic.

to the group that is actually enforcing sovereignty over this group of people, right? And, you know, we had these conversations, but I think, I guess, over the course of the year after we put the podcast on hold, his opinions may have shifted a little bit. And I don't know. I mean, I think he still says he's, you know, pro-Palestinian,

but a lot of people, this is very tense situation, right? it's very polarizing situation. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. And if you see that and you feel like people are, you know, falsely saying that you're a Zionist over and over again, I think that your attitude changes over. You become more negatively polarized. And I suspect that that's what happened. I'm not, I haven't kept in touch with him.

And I think that process led him down. assuming that a lot of these people that were extremely critical of Israel were actually simply doing it for an anti-Semitic position. And he even went so far as to say that, I believe he didn't say that I was anti-Semitic, but he said that I was fostering anti-Semitism in my community.

And I think that's a ridiculous and very damaging smear, but also a very ridiculous one because my commentary, has always been against anti-Semitism. I always make the distinction that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. I'm understanding that there are people who are anti-Israel and also anti-Semitic at the same time, but these are not progressive people, and I never give them any space to present this false reality,

because I also don't agree with it. I don't think that Israel's actions have anything to do with Judaism whatsoever. So, in spite of all that, I think Ethan went on this crusade over the past month leading up to the election where he falsely claimed that Twitch was anti-Semitic. He said that the CEO was like a Klansman and a whole bunch of other stuff. And he became a part of this bad faith smear campaign that I was talking about. Well, you're speaking to the fact that the idea of a United States feels pretty distant,

but in terms of unifying the Democratic Party enough behind a platform that can actually win campaigns, how are you thinking about that? And are you thinking about ways that you might need to change strategy in order to accomplish that given what happened in this election? Yeah, I mean, the things that I've been advocating for for the past decade have not changed, which is why I can always go back to my commentary from like 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, like YouTube videos that I made and the things that I wrote way back then. And unfortunately, the problem still persist, whether it's, you know,

American foreign policy being ultimately damaging to the world, or whether it be an advocacy for enshrining abortion rights in the Constitution, gun control, like reasonable gun safety measures that must be implemented, focusing on universal health care and free college education. All of these things have not improved at all, which is why I don't think I need to change much in terms of my commentary, but I guess as far as my methods as well, I need to, I think, focus a little bit more on broadening my outreach to the best of my ability.

Now that it's not, now that I'm not super focused on doing eight full hours of political commentary, I'll try to do more of that and collaborate with content creators that I am not directly aligned with politically even. and try to present my worldview to them in a palatable fashion and to their audiences as well. But that's something that I've already been doing. So I'm just going to continue doing that a little bit more, I guess. But like I said, I'm one person. I have a relatively sizable community. From what I understand, it's actually, as far as like the key demo goes,

it's closer to the Fox News audience than any of the other, you know, liberal. Outlaws like CNN or MSNBC that have been hemorrhaging their, their viewers from the 25 to 54 category. And I do have a much larger audience in the 18 to 35 demographic than all of those news networks combined. But still, I'm one person. And the media ecosystem is vast. And there is a lot of different opinions. And I will just try to continue navigating. this base to the best of my ability and try to convince people that, you know, you can be just a cool person, a chill person that isn't constantly thinking about, you know, undocumented immigrants doing crimes when the data shows the exact opposite of the reality that the Republicans

are presented, which is that undocumented immigrants actually are responsible for less crime per capita than natural-born U.S. citizens are, and that they're not killing 100,000 Americans a year in the way that Trump presented, and that these are all simple distractions. And hyper-focusing on people like trans people or undocumented immigrants is not a successful way to address the problem. That was streamer and political commentator Hassan Piker. Our interview with Hassan was produced by Grace Tatter, mix and sound design for this episode by Paul Vicus.

We'll be back in the feed on Friday, y'all. See you then.