Endless Thread - The Stream is Up

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

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

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. Just about a year ago, America's extremely online fell in love with a celebrity. People are into this Timahuthi-Haw-Thi-Haw-May.

They say he's a Houthi, a fighter, he's hot. They say it looks like Shalame. Yes, not incredibly skinny Bob Dylan impersonator Timothy Shalame, Tim Houthy Shalame. The apparent origin story video for Tim Huthy Shalameh was pretty unremarkable on the surface. Just a guy with curly dark hair steering a small boat with one hand and holding his phone in selfie mode with the other. A light blue skiff bathed in the sun. Very mindful, very demure.

A much bigger ship hulking in the background with big white lettering that said galaxy leader. This was 33 seconds of honestly, Not that much. But then, like that, this video had 13 million views. Because, I mean, look at them. Okay, I don't understand why people obsess over actor Timothy Shalamee either, but Tim Houthi Shalameh's celebrity was in some ways an example of a new way that people are consuming news and information. Coming at it kind of sideways.

At least, that was true for me. Tim Houthi was how we learned more about the Red Sea. the attacks on ships there. To the Red Sea, where the U.K.'s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have carried out their largest attacks so far on shipping lanes. That is the BBC. But we didn't first listen to that report until a few weeks ago. No.

My understanding of Yemeni fighters disrupting a key international shipping route in reaction to the war in Gaza started in the diffuse, crackling, digital, foamy broadcast waves of the internet, somewhere between TikTok and Twitch. Okay, Rashid, how old are you, where are you from originally in Yemen? Let's orient ourselves a bit here. We're talking about the southern end of the Red Sea, which flows past Yemen, Eritrea. And Djibouti.

And Djibouti. It's this key shipping route because it brings giant ships back and forth between the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea and the East Coast of Africa and the Mediterranean Sea and Europe. It is a massive shortcut. for getting goods between the east and the west. An age-old plan to shorten the distance between Europe and the Orient by linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.

Yes. To get from the east to the west, you have to head through the Middle East. And when these attacks started a little over a year ago, the ships under attack were traveling up and down the coastline of Yemen, which has a front seat to the Red Sea's shipping route. The Red Sea, the Suez Canal that connects it to the Mediterranean, this is a zone that's had a ton of all kinds of commercial shipping for a long time. And a lot of conflict since forever, since Moses? The long history of man's efforts to create a passage through the Egyptian land barrier

can be traced back to 2000 BC. The Houthis are a group of fighters in Yemen that are vaguely associated with Iran, and they're in their own intense armed conflict with their neighbor, Saudi Arabia. They've driven a civil war in Yemen against the government there with a resulting intense humanitarian crisis. We are not going to try and explain this conflict further right now. Which is probably for the best. But the Houthis have been reportedly doing this because they believe Israel, the U.S., and its allies, were doing nothing to stop the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

It seems fair to say that right now, politics and armed conflict have a much more direct and highly personal impact on daily life in Yemen, to say nothing of the larger region. But much of the way we experience this story in the U.S., unless we have a personal or family connection to Yemen or the Merchant Mariner industry, this feels and is pretty far off. Tim Huthi Shalameh, also known as Rashid al-Hadad online, brought it closer somehow, especially after he did a big interview with what we might call a news delivery service. I'm doing journalism, chat. Calm down.

Okay? Not the New York Times or BBC or NPR, organizations that might at least have a few reporters stationed in the region near the Red Sea. What platform is best to talk on? He said Instagram. Okay, that works. By the way, 19-year-old Tim Houthi-Shallameh said he was not a Houthi fighter, but he did seem to have the trappings of an influencer.

He said, Husna, wait a few minutes until I set up the lighting. Bro, this dude is a professional, dude. The news service getting the big interview with the Shalame of the moment, also had good lighting, access to translators, and a huge engaged audience. Associated Press, Reuters, NBC, no. More of a dude who's a professional dude. Hassan Piker.

People say, Hassanabi, you've changed. It's like, motherfucker, I haven't changed. You did, bitch. I've never heard a Democrat be like, man, what do we got to do about this fucking military budget? We are literally the fucking last political space online that is a holdout, that is majority man, that isn't like insanely f politically.

Not insanely effed politically, maybe, but definitely polarizing. And we're not even really talking politics yet. We're talking generations. Whenever we ask people if they know Hassan Piker, it goes one of three ways. It's either no idea who you're talking about, Or, oh yeah, is that that hot guy?

Or the streamer? Yeah, definitely. And these answers divide along generational lines. Hassan also divides people on feelings about the war in Gaza, political lines in the U.S. too. Also lines of gender. But you take all the people on one side of all those lines and put them together? You get an impressive audience.

Three million followers just on the video game streaming site. Twitch, another million and a half on YouTube and his hours-long live streams. There can be 20 to 30,000 people watching and listening to Hassan at any given moment. That's an audience that competes with WBUR's largest average broadcast radio listening audience in Boston. The same audience as our entire station in a major metro area. But it's one Twitch stream, one guy, Hassan Piker, 33 years old. He's ripped a true Chad. And as Americans celebrate or slide into despair following the second election of President Donald J. Trump, an increasingly popular Chad, thanks to an increasingly popular, seemingly endless stream. There's a couple things that I talk about that basically break people's brains.

Peter Thiel owns the country now. You understand? You don't want solutions. You don't want to understand. why this violence happens. I do. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sievertson and you're listening to endless thread. We're coming to you from WBUR Boston's NPR News stream. And on today's episode, a look at how the media landscape and news consumption are changing through one example. The guy people are calling, quote, the Joe Rogan of the left, who has bad news for people who say things like,

he's the Joe Rogan of the left. I just don't think that we can podcast. cast our way out of this problem. Like, I just don't think of the Democrats. Oh, come on, man, come on. Whatever you've heard of Hassan, whatever you think of him, however you've found him, or if you've never heard of him or found him, let's start with some simple facts. His parents are Turkish. His father is a political scientist and economist who has helped support the future party in that country in opposition to the right-wing justice and development party. His mom is an architectural historian teaching at the Institute of Technology, in New Jersey. And Piker's uncle started the Young Turks, the popular progressive news network

that began on the radio, jumped to YouTube, and is now played on some television channels. Four and a half long years of, we're making progress. We're not making progress. You're heading off a cliff, dude, and you don't even realize it. The Sons of an even younger generation than the young Turks. He's on YouTube, but he's most established on the video game streaming platform, Twitch, where people watch a other people play video games. And in Hassan's case, people watch him talking about politics.

But if you're going to stream on Twitch, you're probably going to do both. The first time I came across him was when, in the election of 2020, he streamed a get-out-the-vote game of Among Us with representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. When you watch this video, as AOC gets

onto the stream with Hassan, he seems pretty psyched. We came a long way. Here we go. From 15 people watching me play Fortnite with motherfucking Felix Biederman to playing Among Us with the top content creators and also two of my favorite politicians. The Among Us stream, just a little more than an hour-long total, netted nearly 700,000 concurrent viewers. Just to give you a sense, that competes with the prime viewing period between 8 and 11 p.m. of CNN, which, by the way, is also putting Hassan on.

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

information in 2025, especially digital natives, people who have only really been around after the internet and computers. Increasingly, they don't compartmentalize their different flavors of content. They don't go to one place for news, another place for lifestyle, information, etc. They go to the same place for all the things. And usually that same place is not a brand, per se. It's a person. We wanted to hear from some of these people.

So we reached out on Reddit and got a bunch of responses. Some Hassan fans have requested that we only use their first name because, well, Hassan takes political positions that some employers might view as extreme. I had gone through different posts, reading comments because I just basically view reading Reddit as like people watching and kind of bookmark Hassan in my head as like, I got to figure this guy out. This is Janet. She's in her early 40s, lives in Colorado, goes against a few of the larger characteristics of Hassan's audience, but she's part of a growing demographic.

Percentage of male went down. Percentage of female went up. We're up big. That's Hassan streaming his annual Hassanabi Community Census on Twitch. Hassan's subreddit lists, quote, 151,000 comrades as its follower count, which is where we found Janet. Janet started out reading Hasanabi hate on Reddit, but, she's a comrade now. She's watching his Twitch stream every day. And it's not just Janet who's taking it all in. My toddler gets a little bit of TV time in the morning. So when Hassan starts, the TV goes off for him and we throw him into lunch. He knows the Hassan is streaming song and we'll start doing sign language for food when that song comes on. So

I kind of ruined the baby. But a number of the people we talk to watch and listen to Hassan while at work or while doing school work. But Janet's home with her baby. So... It's on my 80-inch television. It's in the front of my living room. We have a really open floor plan so I can hear it while I'm cleaning, while I'm hanging out with the baby, doing flashcards and whatever. He's basically just like our talk radio during the day, except we get to look at him. We heard this a lot, actually. Hassan as replacement. for the radio.

But he's streaming video too, so it's pretty similar to cable news. And while it's not a 24-hour Hassan cycle, it is seven days a week, along with a serious regimen of weight training, which you kind of have to do if you're sitting in a gaming chair for that long every day.

He has a background team running a Discord chat, doing video graphics, and managing the community behind the scenes. This consistency has, over time, just grown his reach, which in turn, turned the heads of the people trying to run the country in the last election.

Hassan was invited to the Democratic Convention. He was looked at by many in the run-up to the election as Exhibit A that Kamala Harris and Company were talking to the right people to help them talk to the people who were going to vote. But then, the other team's podcast Reachout Game turned out to be a lot more full-on. The following is a conversation with Donald Trump on this, the Lex Friedman podcast. How long have we been talking? A long time.

Let's go. Probably like three hours. He's one of the most famous people on earth, and I'm grateful for this chance to learn more about the man behind the headlines. Today's guest is Donald Trump. The Associated Press has called the presidency for Republican Donald Trump. Ever since, Hassan has been on what almost feels like a group therapy tour, talking to a lot of legacy media organizations and helping to explain to them how they could have possible

missed this thing that the polls really bore out, that young men were breaking for Trump. I think Trump speaks to male insecurities better. It's not necessarily flooding the market with like a bunch of liberals. Like, oh, if we had like eight more Pod Save Americas that kind of look like me, for example, like more bro-y, right, then that would be fine. It's like, no, you can't podcast your way out of this problem. There it is again, you can't podcast your way out of this problem. And yet, it seems like if the Democratic Party could podcast or stream its way into the hearts of young men, Hassan could be their guy. Because he courts more than the Janets. He also courts a lot of Jadens.

Right now, Heber Springs is a population of about 7,000 people. 24-year-old Jaden didn't find Hassan Piker in his hometown of Heber Springs, Arkansas. It's a pretty close-knit community. A lot of people know each other. A lot of people will go to the same church, for example. All the beliefs of everyone are pretty much shared throughout the entire community. That shared belief system in Jaden's experience has always been church-focused. Growing up, he says a lot of the social interaction was through church or trips with church groups. One of these particular trips to some cabins in the woods he remembers in particular. It was cold, it was windy, it was so miserable. There was always a theme or topic of discussion for these trips.

For this trip, they decided to make it about homosexuality. Jaden thinks this trip happened when gay marriage got national protections in the U.S. He says that the trip turned out to be a bunch of adults telling a bunch of middle schoolers about how homosexuality and gay marriage were ruining society. I had so many experiences like that kind of around church and things like that. When Jaden started to spend more time online in high school, he discovered perspectives that didn't really match the homogeneity of Heber Springs. And when he went to the University of Arkansas and Fayetteville, his own belief structure started to shift even more. Jaden says straight up that the only reason his belief structure has changed is because college and the internet.

Which is where he found Hassan. I thought that the way he broke down certain topics was just really easy to understand. easy to digest. Digest what exactly? Hassan's worldview. 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. Jaden says that Hassan Piker's point of view on a bulletin, bunch of different topics felt logical and approachable, and that they were ultimately compassionate towards America's most underprivileged people, unhoused people, veterans, racial minorities, working class Americans, et cetera. It was definitely sort of a gradual realization that a lot of these things that the church and conservative-minded people were saying were concepts and ideas that actually went against the Bible in some ways.

I think that was kind of the biggest contradiction that I sort of realized was when they talk about politics, it's pretty clear to realize that these people are not 100% for loving my neighbor and looking out for those less fortunate than you. Back in Heber Springs, Jaden's parents and his brothers are not watching one of Hassan Piker's streams three days a week, like Jaden is. His parents are watching Fox News. His little brother? He's definitely sort of that Joe Rogan, Tillcony, or Kill Tony, Andrew Schultz kind of audience member.

So family conversations, even though Jaden gets along well with his parents and siblings, can be a little tricky. But Jaden has a new vocabulary. Definitely one benefit of turning into Hassan and all these other left-leaning political commentators is that you're able to have discussions with these people and introduce new perspectives on looking at things that they have definitely not been exposed to before. Maybe one of the reasons Hassan resonates with people like Jaden who identifies as a cis white male

is that in a lot of ways, he looks the part. Hassan has said he was teased as a younger kid for being, as people in the 1950s might say, kind of a shrimp. And like many young young, young people before him, Hassan channeled that teasing into time at the gym. Which, in turn, feeds a persona that on the surface might feel like it's part of the manosphere that many of us have heard about.

The online spaces where men prioritize alpha masculine behavior and ideals above all else. He does look and a little bit sound the part. Bro. Dude. Oh, dude. Holy, dude. It's like, dude. It's like, bitch.

Bitch. What do you mean? But this is another case where you have to look closely and look closely and enough to see the differences between streamers, who definitely don't line up along the same clear, bright lines between, say, Fox and MSNBC, or even NPR in the Wall Street Journal. And yet, the streamer world is drawing more and more of the audience that used to go to big broadcast news organizations away from that and into things like a video game streaming platform that might have a bunch of political thought mixed up with a game of Among Us or Counterstrike.

Hassan Piker has drawn a lot of controversy for his positions and his statements. And I'm not talking about bitch. I'm talking more about... If you look at the civilian deaths versus the deaths of soldiers, Hamas's percentages are infinitely better than Israel. That's just facts. So, no, Hamas is the lesser evil. If you're on for eight hours a day, seven days a week,

speaking to a large audience of young people, and your general topic is political thought, you're going to eventually say some things that stir the people. pot. Hassan has opted into the Battle Royale and Ted-a-Tet world of streamers. Like this face-off with a famous streamer called Destiny. I'm almost positive that you said that you wouldn't vote for Joe Biden, that you said you would like go shack up and live in the woods somewhere, which is cool because you have the privilege to do so.

But I said, I'm considering not voting for Joe Biden and living up in the woods and living in an anarcho primitivist lifestyle, which is like the second. It's a meme, dude. Okay. Destiny, a streamer known for being pugnacious, had a falling out with Hassan. that was seismic in the streaming world. And Ethan Klein, an American-Israeli YouTuber and podcaster who used to collaborate with Hassan on a podcast, has since worn off that partnership. Mostly because of the duo's inability to have a measured debate on what has been happening in Gaza. Just a few weeks ago, Ethan released a two-hour-long takedown attack on Hassan, much of which seemed focused on Hassan's support of Palestinians.

Hassan's chat had been calling me a Zionist baby-killing genocider. Maybe it is unreasonable that I'm asking him to moderate his chat for a friend. Hassan responded in kind while on vacation in Japan. Yeah, dude, I am pro-Palestine. That's it. If that's not news to you, you are the dumbest baby on the planet. This, we can say, is giving streamer, big time. Though big news organizations do it too.

Newspapers throwing shade at each other through competitive reporting and op-eds, even presidential endorsements. Hey, remember when newspapers did presidential endorsements? Somebody checked the Jeff Bezos Twitch stream. A slap fight is a slap fight. But underneath the bros and the bitches, the bluster, the muscles, Hassan's pushing political thought, too. So it's time for us to add him in the chat. And we will when we come right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

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So as we said at the beginning, some people have characterized Hassan Piker as the Joe Rogan of the left. His audience is a fraction of Rogan's, but people do see the resemblance. Muscles, manhood, what many people see as a political agenda delivered via newer platforms. Though instead of a brand of, hey, I'm just a guy who used to host Fear Factor asking questions, Hassan's brand is more, dare we say, earnest? Let's find out. I'm Asan Piker, also known as Hassanavi on Twitch, or Hassan Khan on Twitter, or Hassan D. Piker on TikTok and many other social medias. I'm 33 years old, so I have all of these different usernames in every single website.

It's a big mess. Do you remember your first screen name? My first screen name was actually Hellboy Hassan. Nice. Yeah. Nice. That was way back in the day. 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. Outside of that, I think that there's also a lot of fun to be had besides talking just about the news and doing outreach to a broader community. and trying to get them on board to at least, like, view the world from a more charitable

perspective to the way I see it. So there's like a mission for you in that altruistic mission. 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 necessarily, I don't think propaganda necessarily is a bad word. you know, it's considered a bad word when someone uses it in especially the Western world. But yeah, I think that you can be honest with the things that you're talking about. Now, Hassan told us he's a political commentator, not a journalist. But what gives some journalists indigestion about Hassan is that some people do get their news primarily, or in some cases exclusively, from Hassan. as if he really is the news. As you've heard from Hassan already,

depending upon when you jump into the stream and how long you listen, it could be both? I mean, there's definitely something different. Megan is a 37-year-old from Connecticut. If something happens and I'm not there for it, it's like I missed that moment where, like, the chat tells him, like, Trump just got shot.

And then, like, immediately he's switching over to the live feed. And then right away, chatters are sending him links. Like, this is what we know so far. It's addictive. It makes me not want to miss it. In a way, Hassan is really a new filter for the news. When it happens, he's reading articles of real news outlets and commenting in front of his audience and his live chat is feeding those articles to him in real time. It's almost like a live, updating discussion feedback loop where Hassan and his audience are talking to each other about what is happening.

Megan didn't find Hassan looking for news, though. I think it was actually his Chad Vice segment that I saw first. Can you still not nut? Oh, oh, yeah, yes. Oh, no. Yeah, ended dog. What are you doing? Yes, Chad Vice, where Hassan Piker gives advice to dudes about how to be a Chad.

In Internet parlance, a desirable, successful with the ladies kind of guy. And Hassan's goal seems to be to do this Chad Vice segment without all the misogyny and toxicity. Again, a perfect example of the Gen Z and millennial audiences' habits. Less about the network, more about a person they trust and the community. 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 very. video games, and they go, hmm, like this seems like a different community than the one I'm used to. If the manosphere is what insecure young men are discovering and pouring into as they search for a way to navigate masculinity and what some might call a boring dystopia, Hassan can represent a different set of solutions for the same problems.

Specifically, like he always says, you know, if you put in the hard work, if you focus on bettering yourself, like everybody can be a seven. Alex is another Hasanabe fan we talked to. His journey, going to the gym, losing weight, and how it, like, changed his mindset. He was also, like, a big inspiration for me in that regard. I started going to the gym. I ended up losing, like, 60 pounds, I think. And now, like, today, like, years later, I'm in the best shape I've ever been in.

Alex hasn't just transformed physically because of Hassan. He's also changed his politics. And even what he's studying in college so that he's... he can be a lawyer who works on labor rights. You know, had I not found Hassan's community, I like to think that I maybe still have these views, but there's no guarantee, you know. I'm lucky that I found this community as opposed to, you know, something else. Granted, like Alex, Hassan's had his own awakenings and political evolutions, too.

Trans rights is an example. 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. It's more so about always being charitable and admitting when you're wrong and maybe developing a better mindset around certain things with more information. One of the biggest criticisms leveraged at Hassan is not that he's doing irresponsible journalism, sourcing stories as they happen during his stream from online users who are dropping links and

rumors into a stew of a live chat log next to his video stream that moves. so fast fellow kids' lurkers like myself can barely comprehend it. And not even that he is, as he says, also making propaganda, often pro-Palestine propaganda, which he admits fully up front. No, the biggest criticism of Hassan from the right is that he's extreme, which is also the criticism from other people on the left, or at least the center of the left, because Hassan is an avowed socialist. not exactly the messaging a lot of powerful Democrats are going for.

And that goes both ways. Hassan's support of the Democrats seems to be somewhere between tenuous and fully in the rearview mirror. DNC was my turning point. And I'd like to welcome you all to the Democratic National Convention Road call. Why? What made you turn in that moment? I was shocked at how, uh, not tapped into the real world I was when I was at the heart of where things are happening.

I was genuinely shocked at how out of touch I was with everything else that was going on in the world. Because when you're there, when you're in that bubble, when the DC bubble comes to Chicago, right? You're still in that DC bubble. And I now understand why so many people, so many staffers, so many analysts, So many of these guys that, 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. And when you talk to regular working class people who listen to Hassan, like Megan, you do get the sense that he's having a real impact on their opinions and their feelings about the world, whatever their lived experience. For Megan, that lived experience includes a period of homelessness. After she failed at her second college attempt, feelings of shame kept her from going home.

Despite that home life being one that Megan describes as privileged and supportive, she's back on her feet now. She works as a court reporter doing transcriptions of court recordings. And in her spare time, she volunteers helping expunge minor marijuana infractions from people's records. But... It's so much closer to all of us than we know. and Hassan does a really good job of helping people to remember that these people are just like them. The person that you see on the street that has like leathery skin at this point from being under the sun, from sun damage, sun exposure for many, many years, who clearly is not mentally well, right?

That is the last tier of homelessness. Hassan has definitely helped me to feel like that's something that I can share with people because previously, It was, like, shameful. I was ashamed of that. Now, if I do share that with someone, I will follow it up with the tears of homelessness and, you know, try to leave people with, like, a little bit more empathy for people that they see panhandling or whatever. Empathy and charity. Feisty as he may be on the screen, these are words you hear a lot from Hassan and his fans. charitable to those ideas. A more charitable perspective.

It was that charitability. A lot of charitability. To put a finer point on it, while Hassan lives in this disembodied world of Twitch and YouTube streams, interviewing people who know suspected domestic terrorists at home or abroad. He does seem to push this common theme of get involved in your local community and just help get things you believe in done, which again, whatever your political stripes,

is probably good advice if you are not a billionaire, but you want to make meaningful impact. More than a year after Tim Huthi-Shalameh had his moment in the sun, driving a skiff next to that big merchant ship galaxy leader, and becoming a special guest in Hassan's Twitch stream, the online world has moved on. But the world world hasn't. According to the latest reports from news and information services new and old, that large ship remains under-fetched,

Houthi control. Its final destination, a question mark. And in a way, we're all there too, unsure of what the future holds. For journalists, propagandists, billionaires, streamers, our goldfish attention spans in hyperdrive. Somewhere, in the back of our minds, trying to hold on to North Stars of how we should act towards our fellow humans, listening and watching and wondering what to do. Whatever the case, the stream is up. This episode was reported and produced by Grace Tatter. It was also reported and written by me, Ben Brock Johnson.

It was co-hosted by me, Amory Siebertsin, and sound designed by production manager Paul Vikis. The rest of our team is Frannie Monaghan, Dean Russell, Emily Jankowski, Caitlin Harup, and our managing producer, Sumitajushi. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and problems, major political parties may or may not be able to podcast themselves out of.

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