Infrabren

About

Infrabren, also known as Brennan Hastings, is a content creator on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram known for his public pranks involving strangers in department stores like Walmart in which he utters nonsense at them while wearing sunglasses with a hidden camera. He usually offers the strangers soda cans that have humorous, fake brand names on them. He's also known for his Real Life NPC videos. He got his start on YouTube in mid-2012 before expanding to other platforms.

Online History

Infrabren's real name is Brennan Hastings. He started posting content to YouTube before any other media platform, uploading his first prank video on June 3rd, 2012. It was titled, "Public Singing," wherein, he approached strangers and sang loudly in front of them to the point of annoyance. Over the course of 10 years, the video (shown below) received roughly 40,500 views.

He continued to post content going into 2012. On September 1st of that year, one of his videos titled, "Sex Noises Prank," earned over 239,700 views in 10 years, being his first video to reach over 100,000 (shown below, left). His "Sexy Noises" theme proved to be the most fruitful going forward because on October 12th, 2012, he posted a video titled, "Sex Noises In A Library Prank," which earned roughly 2.3 million views in 10 years, being his first video to reach over 1 million (shown below, right).

Infrabren continued to post content to YouTube from 2012 to 2019, taking a break from prank videos after June 2019. He didn't post anything from mid-2019 to mid-2021, purportedly due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

After his hiatus, he started parallel posting his prank videos to TikTok, uploading his first video on July 5th, 2021.^[1] It showed him and his friend pulling a prank on a Domino's pizza delivery guy, faking that there was poop on their pie. Over the course of eight months, the video earned roughly 102,500 plays and 8,800 likes (shown below). Additionally, it's evident within TikTok's comment section that the video had early, viral success because most of the comments posted were within the five-day timeframe post-upload.

On July 8th, 2021, Infrbren posted a TikTok^[2] that earned roughly 2.8 million plays, being the first of his to reach over 1 million on the platform (shown below, left). On July 13th, 2021, Infrbren posted a TikTok^[3] that earned over 5.7 million plays and 1.3 million likes in eight months (shown below, right). In this aforementioned TikTok, Bren is a Walmart superstore, wearing sunglasses with a hidden camera as he approaches strangers. The style of pranking portrayed in this TikTok would define his style on the platform going forward.

By 2022, Infrabren had cemented a public prank style that used obtuse, colloquial diction mixed with reactions from strangers, as in them reacting to his strange catchphrases. He also started to give strangers fake soda cans with weird, obviously fake brand names on them. For instance, on December 15th, 2021, a TikTok^[4] of his received roughly 5.6 million plays in four months (shown below, left). On March 15th, 2022, he posted a TikTok^[5] where he made a stranger smell his fingers, earning roughly 432,300 plays in less than a month (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References