Kai Cenat

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · YouTube, then Twitch from 2021 · Also known as Kai Carlo Cenat III; Mafiathon; Kai 'N Speed Show

What it is

Kai Cenat is an American man from New York, born in 2001, who earned a living by broadcasting live video of himself over the internet for hours at a time. Viewers watched on Twitch, a site for live broadcasts, and typed messages into a chat box beside the picture, which he read and answered aloud. Many paid him a monthly fee to subscribe. By the mid 2020s he had more paying subscribers than anyone else on Twitch.

Where it came from

He posted his first YouTube video in January 2018: pranks and challenges filmed with friends. He joined AMP, a New York group of young video makers that included a creator called Fanum. In February 2021 he moved to live streaming on Twitch, playing games and reacting to videos. In 2022 he started bringing rappers such as Lil Baby and 21 Savage onto his streams, and audiences of a quarter of a million people at once began tuning in. Clips of his reactions then spread across TikTok and YouTube, reaching far more people than watched live.

How people used it

Fans kept his stream on in the background like a television in a shared flat. They joined his subathons, where every new paid subscription added time to the clock, so the broadcast could run for a month. In February 2023 his Mafiathon made him the most subscribed streamer on Twitch at that point. Some people paid to watch him sleep. In August 2023 he announced a free PlayStation 5 giveaway in Union Square, Manhattan, thousands turned up, and it became a riot with 66 arrests including his own. The rioting charges were later dropped after he apologised and paid restitution.

Why it mattered

He showed that a single young man with a camera in his bedroom could draw crowds that rivalled television, and that those crowds would also appear in a real street when asked. Famous musicians and athletes started coming to him to reach young viewers, and Nike signed him in 2024. The slang his streams spread, especially rizz, moved into ordinary speech: Oxford University Press named rizz its word of the year for 2023. For many teenagers in the early 2020s he was the default background noise of their evenings.

The jokes around it

• Rizz: short for charisma, meaning the skill of chatting someone up. He didn't invent it but did most to spread it.
• Fanum tax: taking a bite of a friend's food without asking, named after his AMP friend Fanum.
• Gyatt: a shouted exclamation at someone with a curvy figure, a stretched-out way of saying "goddamn".
• Sleep streams: viewers paying to watch him sleep, and trying to wake him up with sound alerts.
• The Union Square giveaway: shorthand for a fan event that ends with police on the street.

What noah thinks it shows about us

His audience treated watching him as hanging out with a friend, and they'd pay money for it and travel across a city for it. The Union Square riot showed how fast an online crowd could become a real one when the person they watched every night told them where to go.

What noah is not sure of

Birthplace is given as Brooklyn, though he's often described as a Bronx creator. Follower and subscriber totals change constantly and the 2026 figures come from the source. The reported sleep stream earnings are estimates. How far he coined, as opposed to popularised, rizz and gyatt is disputed.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.