Offline with Jon Favreau - Hasan Piker Wants the Left to Persuade, Not Scold

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Hasan Piker, viral political streamer, joins Offline to talk about Tucker Carlson’s demise, the 2024 election, and what it is about wokeism that makes him twitch. Hasan has been one of Gen Z’s most influential commentators for years, and his 8-hour daily streams blend current events, leftist ideals and pop culture savvy. Hasan talks to Jon about his approach to political persuasion, how to appeal to the next generation, and what it’s like streaming your consciousness. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

I knew that the space was very diverse, but unfortunately the output from like, uh, you know, video game essayists and commentators were like incredibly right wing. Yeah. And I think that they were radicalizing a lot of people and, uh, YouTube probably played a big role in that too. Like the YouTube algorithm. But I saw that and I was like, this is not right. This is not correct. that also would understand my perspective and would probably mesh better with my worldview than these neck-bearded divorce dads that are talking about the great replacement and having Richard Spencer on. Yeah. Those guys are fucking weirdo losers, you know what I mean? And they're not real gamers either. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. My guest today is Hasan Piker, Twitch's favorite political commentator. If you know Hasan and watch his streams, you'll love this interview. We talk about everything you'd expect. Fox firing Tucker, Biden 2024, liberals versus leftists, Hassan's new puppy. But if you're not familiar with Hassan, here's what you need to know. He's one of Gen Z's most influential political commentators. He's probably most famous for a 2020 Among Us stream where he played the popular video game with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a series of other prominent Twitch personalities. At the time, the stream was one of the most popular in Twitch's history. Since then, Hasan's reach has grown rapidly. Today, he has a dedicated following of 2.5 million,

which he streams to for eight hours a day, seven days a week, often attracting more than 500,000 viewers. To put that in context, Wolf Blitzer averages around 600,000 viewers a day. Hassan is known for his casual approach to political commentary, which is to say that he says whatever he thinks and does not give much of a shit what people think. His streams often consist of him sitting in front of the computer, browsing Twitter or news sites, and offering up commentary in context in real time, live on stream. Hassan's a proud leftist, but also someone who believes it's possible and necessary to persuade people with different views. I wanted to talk to Hassan about how he does this and how he thinks about talking politics to young people,

specifically to the type of young man Laura Bates and I spoke about last week. We also had a bigger conversation about the current state of political media, why he thinks some on the left do too much scolding, what he thinks of the Biden administration and the demands of talking politics live seven days a week. Obviously, the two of us have some different views, which we could have debated for hours, but I thought it was especially useful to hear Hassan's perspective as someone with a young, politically engaged audience who's thought a lot about persuasion and media in our extremely online era. As always, if you have comments, questions,

or episode ideas, please email us at offline at cricket.com. And I should warn you now, Max Fisher will be joining us next week, and he's busy working on some big surprises we have in store for the show in the next month. Here's Hasan Piker. Hasan Piker, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me this is incredibly professional I didn't even realize like I did not realize how crazy this was didn't you guys used to like yeah shoot out of the cast studio or whatever there was that yeah we also had an office like around La Cienega that was like across from a strip club and that had one bathroom in the kitchen so that was our first yeah this is better than that i mean i have two podcasts uh and i shoot out of my living room

we did that well i shoot out of my studio i guess living room converted to a studio we like refurbished this studio right before the pandemic and then we all uh recorded out of our homes for about a year and a half yeah i want to start out with the biggest media news of the week maybe the year you adopted a puppy yeah how's your first week as a dog dad it's terrible i i completely forgot what it was like it's been a very long time since i had a puppy i'm sick i've been sleeping you know around hours. That's as much as she lets me sleep, basically. How many weeks, months? She's seven weeks old.

Oh, seven weeks. So you're like at the beginning. Yeah. Oh, that's brutal. So she sleeps all day. And then, I mean, that's what puppies do. Until she wakes up and she's like, I need playtime right now. And then she sleeps at night for you know

she she's up at night pooping and peeing everywhere when we got a puppy when we moved here in 2014 and at the time i was working out of our house in west hollywood and my my um wife uh was working at a pr place she came home i was taking care of the puppy pr for yeah you know you know emily yeah so she went back when i used to work at the young turks so emily comes home from from sunshine and i'm sitting there just covered in shit because leo was in the crate and they're like oh they don't shit in the crate that's the whole thing but he did shit in the crate as a puppy and i was just like on the phone with my mom i'm like what am i supposed to do there's shit everywhere yeah and you're like freaking out you're like is there something wrong with this dog it's like no they

do that they they lie to you when they say you know even if you get like a small crate yeah that's the idea the idea is that like they won't shit where they sleep that's a lie it's a lie puppies don't care everyone told us when we had a puppy, like, well, it's good training for a kid. I'll just say, having a kid, it's so much harder, like, infinitely harder to have a child. Now we have our dog, and I'm like,

oh, Leo, you were so easy. Yeah. Animals are like autopilot. Once they get trained, you're like, good to go. Kids can't do anything. You put a sandwich in front of a kid, he doesn't know what's going on. And every new stage is something else you gotta worry about um all right let's get to uh media and politics here you talked about fox firing tucker carlson earlier

this week who knows if we'll ever find out the real reason uh they shit can their most profitable white nationalist but i'm curious like how much of that show's success do you think was driven by Tucker? And how much was because of the platform that a primetime Fox show provides whatever host is filming? That's a really good question because the other formerly shit-canned host also was kind of popping as well, Bill O'Reilly. Right. And it could have something to do with that slot. I think Rupert Murdoch was basically making that bet. He was like, no, this is the slot. as well bill o'reilly right and it could have something to do with that slot i think rupert murdoch was basically making that bet he was like no this is the slot it's not the person that you put in the slot i think marginally it will improve no matter what happens because tucker carlson is

a very dangerous white nationalist propagandist who is like ideologically invested in a white nationalist project unlike you know sean hannity's just like regular republican you know he's just like a hack he's like a he's like a trump lackey you know he's a regular republican bootlicker he will you know a brown nose donald trump or whoever's in power you know he's he's a guy he's a machine guy tucker is a bit like that too but he's he also i think has like consistent white nationalist ideological principles which which I find very scary, like additionally scary in comparison to your average run-of-the-mill Republican racist guy. But you do bring up a really interesting point. I think it's partially because it's primetime Fox News, but I also do you know they're probably not going to find a guy

like tucker again i i tend to agree i also don't know that tucker will be able to find that level of success somewhere else because i just don't know that there are platforms as big or influential as fox right you are so right yeah i i looked into this as a matter of fact with bill o'reilly yeah after you know the 700 000th lawsuit about bill o'reilly trying to sexually harass an intern or telling them you know to use a loofah like the phone or whatever um after he got fired um bill o'reilly's website gets like i think one million hits a month yeah whereas the fox news website gets uh and fox news website is definitely not their main revenue driver at all but it gets like 327 million a month i think so like you know bill o'reilly's podcast is number 72 on the apple charts for news

it's he was number like he got a doctor who used to perform abortions murdered you know what i mean george tiller was murdered because of bill o'reilly he used to call him tiller tiller the baby killer and then someone went to the church that he was at and shot this guy that's how popular and and and prolific and uh important bill o'reilly was and now he's got a fucking podcast that like i mean you wouldn't have him on as a guest you'd be like i don't even fucking i didn't even know he had a podcast you know he's like still writing like killing linking books or like he's every once in a while he turns out a book that like goes to the top of the uh the the charts there but other than that like glenn beck bill o'reilly megan kelly none of them have found the same yeah glenn beck uh another absolute failure of uh of a media platform that's like constantly in a state of

disarray so they're just like always looking for the new vampire billionaire donor to come in and just be like save save us, please. You know, there's an industry for it. They got like great make work programs for these fail sons. Well, you are someone who, like me and my co-hosts, started your show in part because you were worried about the reach and influence of right wing propaganda, especially among young people. When you started doing political analysis for young turks did you have a theory of the case as to how you'd reach people and persuade them not to buy into the rights bullshit yeah i mean one of the things i always thought was that the democratic party is just god awful and now i think it's by design but that's a whole different subject um but I I thought that they were just

like really bad at uh messaging to anyone really anyone other than like a very specific zip code where like of like New York Times subscribers that are like uh more invested in this notion of like you know Americans following their profoundly important civic duties and people who just care about um civility over anything else you know what i mean like the the diane feinstein shouldn't be uh forced to retire actually because she's a girl boss crowd like um yeah it could be a little clubby yeah it's just like outside of that most people are just like dude please like i'm looking at the the the state of the republican party at the state legislature level and they're literally

they just signed like another murder trans teenager bill and they're passing it through the state legislature people are protesting it doesn't matter they're like you know beating the shit out of the protest with the cops meanwhile you know you're you're over here talking about civility like what the fuck's going on like most people in the democratic party are assuming defensive posture and voting anyway i i went into this like grand theory but my point is in spite of all of that they are still very bad at messaging and i thought you know one of the main ways to communicate to people my personal desires and my personal politics is just by being a normal guy, you know, instead of being this like kind of pedantic, academia focused, uptight person who is like doing way too much cultural analysis in a similar vein to like what republicans do but at least republicans are doing it in a funny way yeah well that i mean yeah has your theory of the case sort of changed at all over the years since you've been doing this as the

media landscape and the political environment has changed quite a bit over the last several years i mean not really yeah i think in many ways the the basics are still there for me i've only become more pessimistic and about politics democracy all of those things for sure. And I think the fundamentals that I originally started off with, whether it be like media being an arm of capital and reinforcing and communicating and normalizing the oppression that people feel under unjustifiable hierarchies or, you know, anything that Noam Chomsky's written about the media manufacturing consent that was my starting point that was the the fundamentals that was the bare bones of what i believed in but i was like maybe there's some people out there that are you know doughy eyed and and they have a different perspective and it's not like that and no i went back to square one and i am more of a firm believer in that now than i was before so So I think that's what happened. Last week, I talked to Laura Bates, who spent a lot of time researching and writing about how the internet is radicalizing young men. They start with, you know, these lightly misogynistic

videos and memes, and then they end up Jordan Peterson fans or incels or even worse. How do you think about what's required to prevent that kind of radicalization? And like, do you think about that while you do your show yeah no for sure i do that all the time i mean it's it's something that i'm trying to explain to people quite frequently a lot of people on the left on the hyper online uh side of things will look to someone like myself and go that guy's too bro-y like he seems like he's gonna say something that's like a microaggression or whatever and i'm like no that's like the point that's me like that's how i am if you are here and if you've

been following me for the past 10 years you know what i believe you know what my perspective is you know what i've been advocating for it's all online like it's not something that i hide i've been getting death threats over for the fucking past decade so you can look to that and see if i am those things yeah or you could just continue hyper focusing on the aesthetics the aesthetics are important though because i think that um you know we are primal lizard brain idiots for the most part and we look to someone that that we can identify with and um i think that for a lot of people online they just look to someone like myself and they're like oh this guy is is you know he's not uh super uptight super academic

he calls himself a dumbass which i am and i think that that is something that they vibe with they mesh with whereas obviously i don't think i can deconstruct the systems themselves and there is a reason why a guy like andrew tate can like basically have this torpedo effect where um he just blows up he takes off like a rocket ship out of nowhere because he's like writing for misogyny yeah and there's always going to be much larger fans or people who are socially conditioned and have these biases baked in and want to have those biases reinforced. So there's a lot more fans of misogyny. So therefore there are a lot of people who can take advantage of that rather than vice versa, like deconstruct those components

and, and try to reeducate people. But yeah, ultimately I do my very best to just be a normal person and explain to people where they're at are you constantly weighing it all in your head as you're speaking like okay i want to be real i want to be myself but i also don't want to say something too offensive or that people might i think that's offensive what i just said but i don't really give a shit i feel like you are not worried about being canceled. No. Because it's bullshit. It's not a real thing.

It's like something that podcasts talk about all the fucking time. But like the reality is, it's not a real thing. It's just like, you know what cancel culture is? You know who cancel culture is real for? The dude that works at fucking Jiffy Lube. Okay. Yeah. You can get, if you're like a regular guy listening to this podcast you can get quote-unquote canceled why because you know you have no labor protections

so your boss could just be like i don't like you you're fucking fired you know what i mean yeah that's cancellation that's like what a cancellation would be ostensibly um podcasters don't have those problems so i think that in a way it's a very fun way for podcasters to make it seem like i'm just like you what's happening to me can happen to you you know how like trump is like if i am convicted of a crime you can be too and it's like yeah that's a very weirdly specific you know i don't think the manhattan da is going to fucking charge anyone else for paying hush money to a porn star, possibly through campaign donations. And your lawyer went to fucking jail for it already.

That's like an insanely specific thing. To the average Joe, the average Joe would have been in jail 10 steps before you. Yeah. Right? It's the same concept. It's the same principle. Having said that, it's really fucking annoying. It is profoundly annoying.

Cancel culture. People misconstrue what you're saying all the time. I speak for eight to ten hours every day. My mind rushes in a million different directions. I have ADHD, as you can probably tell. It's very difficult for me to coherently describe exactly what I believe. Sometimes people misconstrue it. Sometimes people weaponize it.

It's a very normal part of this media landscape that we live in. Ultimately, you can only be quote unquote canceled by in the podcast world, at least, or in the media world by your own fan base. you've said that the um the left can be very successfully turned into a cartoonish depiction of a hysterical person someone who doesn't see any joy in life i want to show people that you can be a progressive and not be a total fucking scold i think about this constantly especially over the last couple years what is it about the left do you think that lends itself to that caricature i think people are well-intentioned uh overall i want to believe that they're well-intentioned overall and if you're like a very empathetic person

and um then you don't understand the context or nuance behind like you know a piece of comedy or something and you feel like the only place that you have any kind of power in an otherwise cruel world where you feel completely powerless because you can't do anything about like actual racism like systemic failures you can't do anything about reforming the criminal justice system you hyper focus on you know cultural analysis and you hyper focus on like what tv show you can kind of or you hyper focus on like language and changing language and and i think that one of the major components of the left behaving this way sometimes especially online is that it's the only thing they

know and it's the only thing that they've gotten like positive reinforcement out of and by positive reinforcement i mean like a corporation actually reacting and saying sorry we fucked up we're gonna change it because you know no matter how much you yell at the democratic party like they are still gonna give extra armored personnel carriers of the police force you know what i mean like they're not fixing the fucking potholes sorry the the cops need extra kevlar vests and and you know apcs but at least like i can get a tv show to change someone that worked there like change uh uh the cast of a tv show and then all of a sudden i feel like i've done something so that's one component the other uh thing that i have experienced a lot on twitch where i'm live every day and I talk to people nonstop constantly. I have an arena full of people listening,

but they can also say something back to me and I will read it in real time. One of the things I've actually noticed is that people are very narcissistic. I know it's ironic of me to say this because I'm a fucking Twitch drummer. I'm just a regular dude who thinks everyone has to hear what I have to say.

We're podcasters. White guys doing podcasts, you know, wow, crazy, very unique, but one thing I have noticed is that people, a lot of people will utilize, or rather weaponize, like, the empathetic state that leftists have, because, like, their politics are one of compassion, usually, right yeah to center the conversation around themselves one immediate uh example of this that comes to mind from twitter at least is like when the kellogg's workers were on strike and they were demanding that you you know don't cross the line and you don't actually buy something from kellogg's during that duration and there was someone being like no one is ready for that conversation but I have like a food sensory issue and I have to eat frosted flakes sweetie and it's like dude you didn't have to fucking tweet that at all you just did that because you are a fucking

narcissist you want to be like no center the conversation about workers rights around me a person uh you know who was not even revolved in the in the production process in this regard but is a worker elsewhere who probably would want solidarity if they were also in a similar predicament but it's just like we're very and when i say that person's like someone yells at you for not expressing solidarity the workers then explain your situation but there is a sort of an impulse to just go ahead that's what i mean yeah like you could have literally just shut the fuck up and ate all the frost flakes on the planet like no one would know but you chose to like make this a conversation point because you were like oh people are blindsided like it's utilizing or rather weaponizing the intersectionality of leftist movements to

just say look at me look at what i have to say i have something to say and i need everybody to hear it and i think that um the dsa for example uh even though they do great work in many respects will oftentimes fall uh uh prey to this will fall victim to this where i'm just like my big principle always is like i don't give a fuck you're here to listen uh if you come in here and and you know start chirping about some random shit like i'm gonna ban you um i think we need to yeah we need more of a stalinist approach to uh to start yeah to start purging the counter-revolutionaries and the anarchists no i'm just kidding your your point about all of this happening in the absence of larger structural change that would help marginalized communities i think is is really the key of this because there's like obviously like passing a bunch of

policies protecting rights for all people who have been marginalized and have been for years and years and years, like that is the right way to go. That's not happening. And so then only being able to exert your power on social media. I mean, how much I feel like a lot of this is social media driven in a way that it like we didn't have this kind of thing about the left being very scoldy five six seven eight years ago yeah well it's like no it's definitely longer than that i think like i like the the earlier versions of this probably go back to like what uh rainbow coalition jesse jackson and then like maybe uh uh it was howard dean yeah like the blogosphere that started propping up around the howard dean era but like those og podcasters and og radio hosts were like you know dudes like sam cedar you know what i mean or even fucking mark maron yeah um at the time

you know air america guys like they they didn't give a shit about any of that stuff this is like um it's not new necessarily but it's certainly become way more prominent on social media i think like uh it's basically like the tumblr uh contamination when tumblr eliminated pornography on their on their platform everyone that was in tumblr doing exactly these kind of kinds of conversations where they were like hyper medicalizing every condition and like constantly utilizing clinical psychology terms in their daily lives like uh super easily and and oftentimes in the wrong ways uh all of those people breached uh you know the the containment zone and then they went to twitter they went to tiktok and now they're everywhere and and they just you know everyone talks like

this republicans talk like this yeah well it's funny but that's that's telling right like i think that social media has helped accelerate this trend and you point out it's about narcissism in a way yeah but that's what social media does it puts you at the center of point out it's about narcissism in a way yeah but that's what social media does it puts you at the center of everything right it's your likes your follows your opinions and i think that like you know that's sort of in line with a conservative philosophy which is just you know about extreme individualism but on our side like the progressive movement succeeds when there is solidarity when you realize like i have, someone else has issues and I have to care about their issues and their rights as well as mine. And you have to have that like true intersectionality.

And I don't know that social media really allows for that. No, the unfortunate reality is that like I can't believe I'm using like a right-wing terminology almost for this but like identity politics in the way that it's understood in america through the american exceptionalist american individualist lens is like literally reactionary so much so that i believe it was a part of the cia handbook to very clearly infiltrate like any kind of anti-capitalist uh space and and anti-capitalist organizing and disrupted by utilizing specific talking points like uh you know bring up random irrelevant differences all the time and make them the main point of the focal point of conversation as a means to hold up any kind of organizing is literally written in the cia handbook for leftist infiltration i mean it's certainly what russia tried to do with its

propaganda i mean like other countries know that's our weakness too yeah it's it's very successful because it's a it's a major security threat in in many respects that like americans personally think i'm an american citizen i believe that i have very unique thoughts that no one has ever thought before and by virtue of me having come up with this very unique thought because i'm fucking awesome like everyone needs to hear me out no matter how fucking stupid it is and i just i'm always like no man that's really fucking stupid like you you don't know anything about vaccine science like shut the fuck up you just just because you're like you know you thought you cooked this up doesn't make you have to have a platform.

Like you don't have to say these things. Yeah, but everyone deserves a platform today. Yeah, and it's very stupid. The other big issue I think with social media as it relates to politics is I feel like it has led people, and cable news started this trend, but it's led a lot of people to believe that it's no longer worth trying to persuade people who don't share all of your political views. Yeah, I disagree with that. Yeah, I was gonna say, you're a leftist who very much believes in doing the work of persuasion. And I always wonder when I come across someone like this, like, how'd you end up like that? I'm just an annoying, stubborn guy. I think I've also had changes in my own personal politics,

where, you know, in some ways i've become i guess more radicalized throughout the years but in when in many ways like way more tolerant like i um i talk about transphobia a lot right i'm a cishet white guy i had transphobic opinions uh 10 years ago gender is like a very rigid thing that we associate with ourselves. Even though it's socially learned, even though it's an expression, we reinforce that through every facet of society. You can't play with Barbies. You got to play with G.I. Joe's for a boy, right? Like you got to wear blue. Even though if you look at like FDR, when he was a baby, he just looks like a little girl. He's got a dress dress on his hair is long

like those concepts have changed throughout time but they become infinitely more rigid in contemporary society and it's very personal to a lot of people like what their gender is so when they see someone break that uh that that false notion that gender is actually biological and it's very rigid and it is very important to me, what the fuck, it breaks their brain. So that's the reason why, and trans activists say this all the time, like the overwhelming majority of Americans and the way that they receive trans people or the way that they think about trans people is they don't really think about trans people at all. They just have apathy. So you can go either in either direction after that.

You meet a trans person, they're chill chill you start learning and developing empathy for them or you become this like insanely transphobic person like matt walsh and luckily most americans are not like matt walsh right but uh why did i describe all of this it's because i personally went through that journey of like understanding and developing empathy for trans people and became an advocate for trans rights and um and i think that everyone is capable of of becoming more open-minded and reforming and you know learning new things and uh it's it's it certainly is one aspect of i guess the overall left is that there is this uh there is this false notion of justice that comes from uh thinking that like people are infallible people are supposed to be perfect they're not supposed to like have uh any sort of bad opinions if you have any sort of bad opinions in the past

you have to hide it if you have any sort of bad opinions now we can't have disagreements that means you're a bad person yeah it's a bit of a cartoon because most people don't actually behave like that in the real world right you would never fucking sit across uh someone and be like oh wow you have a disagreement about like i don't know fucking the criminal justice you're a fascist and also i'm gonna call like 30 people over to the table and have them all start screaming at you. everyone has the capability of changing their opinion on a particular matter i don't think it happens through like contentious debate in the way that like a lot of people uh claim it does i think that's just more for uh solidifying your positioning and and there is always a 20 in the middle that you could you know bring to your side but like debates are not really about the truth they're just about whose rhetoric is better overall but i i try to do that through just overall being a chill guy who talks about these issues, but is like an influencer otherwise.

I think that people who are intensely online, who pay super close attention to politics, they are exposed to a lot of people with the polar opposite view and they're not exposed to most people in this country who first of all don't really have a lot of political opinions uh or at least don't have strong ones don't really pay close attention to the news and when they do have political opinions a lot of times they're complicated and they have different positions on different issues and i'm not saying that like we should just say okay well because we got a compromise we shouldn't go after those people we should just let them i think we should persuade them but what i'm saying is like most people are gettable if you can sit down persuade them because like you said we've all gone through these sort of changes and you have to think oh what persuaded me was it

someone screaming at me or was it someone trying to like reason with me and talk through it and point out evidence and talk about values like there's just there's a way that people can be persuaded still i just think it's hidden all the time for the record i totally understand why people are angry all the time oh yeah especially online like i get it especially if you're trans if you're like uh you know if you're like a queer black teenager you see much, you see so much violence against black people, you see so much violence against queer people. And you know, that frustrates you, you feel like you constantly are on the defense, you got your guard up. And there's very valid reasons for you to, you know, for you to behave like that. So when you're always on the defensive,

you pop off on people. So I'm not saying like all matter of like vitriolic or angry sentiment expressed by leftists online is is completely stupid i just mean that like um you know there are components of charitability that that have been absolutely lost when a compassionate movement surrounding solidarity does start with foundational principles of taking on emotional labor every now and then or at least relegating those responsibilities of someone who can if they are coming from a prudent privilege um i'm of course talking about myself here but these are things you can do and not constantly trying to center yourself in uh in every conversation like and and you know figuring

out that there is a a larger in order for there to be a larger systemic change like you know some of these conversations are going to uh be softened some of these some of these talking boys are going to be softened um and i also think that that work of showing generosity and grace and empathy, that is different than people calling for civility. I think sometimes people get those things mixed up. Yeah, I mean, I'm a very uncivil person. I'm a fucking caveman. I'm a barbarian. I say, you know, awful things. do try to be as compassionate as possible to those who aren't there uh to to basically uh exhaust my

charitability and take up space and take up time away from other people who are genuinely there to learn i sometimes happen to make mistakes as well when i just like pop off on someone from a misunderstanding but overall my main goal is just like you know make educational content that's entertaining and uh i try to do that and i want the most egalitarian open way uh to do that as possible which is you come into the chat you follow for 10 minutes you can say whatever you want very likely i'm going to read it yeah every leftist's favorite president joe biden uh just announced he's running for re-election yeah you feeling about a Biden-Trump rematch? I mean, at this point, like, I've been so super checked out.

Like, Bernie Sanders came out and was like, I'm not running. I'm endorsing him. And I was like, yeah, that's not surprising. Yeah. Like, you got the incumbent's advantage. If I put my, like, Democratic Party thinking hat on, you know what I mean? Like, anytime I talk about, like, electoral politics, politics like i have to do that um it does make sense like because i mean kamala harris is awful you're not a fan not a no she's so uncharismatic like and and they also cooked her like not only

is she so supremely uncharismatic they also put her on like the worst assignments possible for a vp like it almost felt like the joe biden team i don't even think biden was doing this personally we're just like yeah get fucked you know that's your that because like i mean that does happen to vps a lot i know but like if you're 800 years old like you should probably be like oh this is the next president potentially like you should groom that that person to be the next president not like put them on toxic hazardous waste duty um here's what i was worried about kamala harris though is that like this goes back to our earlier conversation which is like to become the first woman vice president first uh black south asian like to get to achieve where she has to get to the heights that she has in politics.

She has probably had to walk such a tightrope over the years. Right. Because of sexism, racism, a whole bunch. And I wonder if as a politician that makes you a little more cautious, a little more buttoned up. And it's like one of the reasons that she does seem so. I don't know. There's a term that the youth call Riz. Do you know what this is? No.

Riz. It's like shortened for charisma. If you go on TikTok, you'll probably see it. Some people have Riz and some people don't have Riz. Ron DeSantis, no Riz. No Riz. He's got no Riz. He's got no juice uh he goes on television

he says it's sugar man and everyone's like oh that's gross stop please never fucking talk ever again or he's like oh maybe if i run you know like you see the fucking thing he said in japan it looks like a bobblehead why are you in japan you're the governor of fucking florida what are you like i don't understand what he was there for he He's there to re-assassinate Shinzo Abe. He was like, I'm with the Moonies on this one. We got to, or he's going to go kill the guy who killed Shinzo Abe to defend the Moonies honor. Anyway, very weird that he's in Japan in general.

I guess he's trying to get his like foreign policy bona fides. Yeah. I don't think that like the Republican Party gives a fuck about that dumbass. And also like a trip to Japan is not really going to do that. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I really re-evaluated the relationship between Tallahassee and the Kobe Prefecture. Thank you. So, he doesn't have that charisma.

Donald Trump does. Donald Trump is petty. He's a sassy bitch. But goddamn, does he make for good TV. Kamala Harris doesn't have that charisma. Donald Trump does. Donald Trump is petty. He's a sassy bitch. But God damn, does he make for good TV? Kamala Harris doesn't have that. You know, in spite of all these flaws, I think ultimately people do overlook that sort of thing. Barack Obama had it. Barack Obama was, you know, Donald, I say this all the time.

Donald Trump is the Barack Obama for white people like where barack obama it ran on like a very progressive platform didn't follow through on a lot of those uh you know progressive platform uh uh promises and you know i'm i'm very critical of him i mean i know you worked for the guy i did i did uh but like he was profoundly charismatic like he was on the campaign trail oh my god when he was profoundly charismatic. Like, he was on the campaign trail. Oh, my God, when he was fucking daggering Hillary Clinton on, like, the Iraq War stuff. Like, saying she's just, like, this, you know, corrupt institutionalist. Like, he was a once-in-a-lifetime charismatic figure that really popped off for that reason. And you can't build a strategy around, like, hoping that you're going to have a freak like that. What do you think about Biden?

I mean, that's someone who I would not say is the most charismatic. No, that's what I mean. But he's president of the United States right now. I know, because at that point like donald trump literally got covid before the election which like re-emerged the fears that the american population had about how fucking terrible of a job he had done with covid the economy was tanking you know what i mean yeah it was like the worst possible storm for donald trump look i've always liked joe biden as a person I was in the White House, I worked with him. He's just a kind, generous soul, right? He was not

my choice in the primary. Not only was he not my choice, I didn't think he would win. He did. And I actually think sometimes I do the experiment, okay, if it was Bernie Sanders in office over the last couple of years, if I really look through every single decision point, what would he have done differently or what would he have been able to achieve differently? And I don't know. I actually think... I can tell you.

What's that? I think one of the most important... First of all, make no mistake. Bernie Sanders would be getting called, perhaps justifiably even, a fascist American imperialist by the very same left as they ended up voting for him including maybe even myself at certain points any like there is zero

percent chance that bernie sanders would like legitimately i don't know um take away resources from like israel until they stop the apartheid you know what i mean like that was never gonna happen like you know i think that's a good point that that probably foreign policy where the president has the most power to do what they want is probably where bernie might have been the most look eisenhower was right that he was wrong on a lot of things but he was right on this one where he said you know the the military industrial complex is going to destroy this country is the most powerful force the most powerful institution absolutely correct it is it is a it is the most viable industry that we have.

It is profoundly important. We're going to do their bidding no matter what happens because it's like creating new opportunities for foreign capital to come in and seize. We're extracting natural resources as a consequence of that. We're constantly keeping prices down as a consequence of that.

That volatility, that instability is good for other Western capitalists that, you know, can cut into the market and like sell their own liquid petroleum or whatever the fuck. Right. So there's all of that. Bernie Sanders was not going to change that. But what could he have done? One thing that he said that I truly believe in is something thatama kind of said and then didn't do when he became president which was outside forces that uh our work would only begin once bernie sanders was in office and he would do everything in his power to ensure that like labor unions could truly form

and have more power in the country and become more dominant once again in the political arena and that uh it wasn't going to be the singular individual from the top turning around and being like we're going to purge the the non-believers in the democratic party and you know i'm going to start kicking out republicans uh from from senate or anything like that the president doesn't have that kind of power anyway unless they're republican then they can do whatever the fuck they want right but but none of those things were going to happen like but i think the only it feels like the next step would be passing the pro act and like he couldn't get that through congress i think even if he couldn't get that through congress i think he would have

weaponized the bully pulpit like think about how donald trump utilized the bully pulpit to really beef up white supremacy so much so that you thought like these but he didn't need legislation for that no i know but my point is this um he was able to get these otherwise incredibly fringe groups that were like super decentralized to come together and like demonstrate in a country that like killed nazis not that fucking long ago you know what i mean yeah like they got so confident that they could do that so my point is the president does have a very powerful weapon it's called the bully pulpit as you know and i think bernie sanders would have been able to effectively utilize that to push for more

organizing outside of the political sphere so that you could have more, you know, the constant rotating villain inside of the Democratic Party would have been able to, like, at the very least, make incremental change in the positive direction, in the right direction. I was never thinking that, like, you know, Bernie's going to bring about the Green New Deal like that. You know, he's not going to be able to do the new deal there was a lot of concessions that he made still that we look uh not so fondly on uh and that's understandable like carving out black people from a lot of these you know a lot of these amenities but there was outside pressures that forced fdr's hand you had both the you know the the business plot fascist uh capitalists that were like let's kill this guy this guy fucking sucks and then you also had like a viable coalitions of trade unionists communists social democrats socialists in this country like eugene debs uh uh got you know two million votes or something like that from fucking prison yeah like i mean i think with biden it's interesting because like i

i would argue that it we wouldn't have the i mean, he prioritized, you know, Joe Manchin wrote the Inflation Reduction Act, obviously. But they basically basically gave Biden a choice like which policies do you want to prioritize here? I don't think he would have prioritized climate had it not been for the outside pressure from young people and climate activists to really care about climate. I don't think he would have tried to cancel student loan had it not been for a lot of outside pressure i do so i do think some that's that's wild though think about that you yo that's like that's like such a gimme the student loan thing is such a easy that's so easy that's easy politics look i think it's i'm very much for it i think that the politics of it is still like you look at the polling it's not as popular as i would think no i don't believe that you look at some of the people are because people think like because the media is constantly fucking up the assholes of like uh even nancy pelosi is like

they have big donors that are in student loan refinancing that literally juice up all of these fucking programs you got like people who did literal corporate pr for debt refinancing companies that go on cnn and msnbc and be like is it really fair that people are you know getting some of their uh student loan debt relief here no one's asking the question why the fuck are people you also get you also get like working class people who will say that too and they'll be like i fucking paid for college. Why some rich kid in a city somewhere? Because they're stupid. I'm sorry.

You're fucking, that's all I'm saying. There's a lot of people. You're a mean person and you're a stupid person. There's a lot of that out there. It's the counter to that is so simple. It's like, oh wow.

Like if there was a fucking cancer vaccine tomorrow, you'd be like, oh, well, sorry. I went through chemotherapy. You shouldn't get a cancer vaccine. I paid for my chemo. Yeah. like what are you fucking insane it's crazy so i do think that like it is a huge frustration of mine always has been that democrats do not break through on economic

messaging even when they try and oftentimes they don't try and i think like even if you just go strictly from polling like economic populism is very popular. And yet, it also doesn't break through because the media doesn't. The media is bored by economic issues, unless it's a crisis. They don't need to be, but I think the media is, again, too invested in the other side. That's part of the reason why whenever they talk about economic economic policy they take an insanely anti-populist stance and they oftentimes have like these you know big-brained uh econ guys come in and talk about these issues and then you find out that like you know if they were wearing like a nascar jacket of their fucking corporate sponsors like you'd be like oh i get why this guy

is saying you know that we can't have health care in this country you work for signa like shut the fuck up but it's also you know like brock obama said fat cats once uh about the fucking ceos at the banks after the financial crisis and we dealt with it for like a month but we've been like is he some crazy populist now because he called them fat cats yeah that's that's not a bad thing and that kind of populism literally also played a role in donald trump coming across like unique and genuine despite the fact that he was a fucking spoiled fail son whose daddy carried him to financial prosperity even though he kept fucking it up over and over again yeah so like it's mind-boggling that this dude uh born in new york with a silver spoon in his mouth was was was able to come across like he was this populist

leader. And he did that because he was saying things that other people were not saying. Yeah. And I think that that gets lost a lot, or maybe even some people are fearful of that kind of narrative because it goes against their corporate benefactors' best interests. Going back to Joe Biden, though, as far as what Joeiden has done i think that um there are a lot of issues with the biden administration from my perspective which most americans i don't even think uh care about um you know not allowing the railroad workers uh to truly fight for better contracts where you know you're forcing the hand of these like four major railroad corporations that have basically carved out the United States of America as their own fucking territories.

And they literally own the railroads as well as the train carts on top of them. The unions were absolutely correct on demanding that more people should be hired for the railroads and that they should get time off it was a totally valid thing to to ask and and joe biden absolutely uh did not give them that at all and utilized in the one instance where he had some power and influence he used it in the opposite direction yeah they were they were worried about a uh a strike and the economic fallout and what that would do to the larger no i i totally i totally get that but here's two right in the moment he could and what that would do to the larger no i totally i totally get that but here's two right in the moment he could have here's two ways to communicate that always capitalist dogma dictates that whenever there's a union uh strike whenever there's like even talk

of a strike work stoppage happening that it's always at the fault of the union it's always the workers that are actually causing the strike to happen why are they being selfish yeah why are they doing a strike it's like there's two sides to every kind of contract negotiation why does the media never talk about the manager side the boss side the employer side and their responsibility to offer a fair contract to these striking workers that want simply just a small fraction of the percentage a small fraction of the percentage of the value that they are generating for this company it's not like they're saying like you know we're overthrowing you this is a workers council we have a fucking vanguard that is going to control the railroad companies and the nation eventually they're not

like you know rugged marxist leninists they're just guys that are like we want some time off i want to see my children i want to i want to not go to work sick what's your best pitch to a 20 something in a swing state who's not sure if they want to bother to vote in 2024 well i mean i i say this all the time on my on my stream but i don't really care that much about the top of the ticket obviously it's you know it's the most significant least significant thing you can do you know what i mean but you should absolutely vote for your ballot measures you should absolutely learn everything you can about your ballot measures and vote for your local politicians because those guys

will have immediate and tangible impacts on your life. But you would say that, but like, you know, whether we get Biden or Trump, it seems like, for all your criticisms of Biden, it's still a bit, that's a big deal. There's a difference between Biden and Trump. I mean, I still voted for Biden. But ultimately, I totally understand why you feel powerless. I'm just saying, like, you got to get your foot in the door regardless for the down ballot shit. So while you're there, vote for the guy that's marginally better ultimately do i think that that is going to like

dramatically change the outcome i think that we greatly greatly exaggerate how different things are between both parties when like both parties kind of move the needle like this and the real damaging stuff happens uh over a lifetime uh the republican party did not eviscerate uh abortion rights uh and and a woman's right to choose and like you know these fundamental liberties the civil liberties that people took for granted for so long in one election cycle i know that donald trump uh they want a bunch of senate seats in uh really conservative states yeah i but like but the reality is that was a 40-year project by the federalist society that was successful ultimately there was billions of dollars of capital being pushed into it you go to fucking north carolina

you got the federalist society right there unc unc law school federalist society is right there literally you know plucking every fucking frat bro who's like i want to be a lawyer one day uh you know you know what i mean like theyat bro who's like i want to be a lawyer one day uh you know you know what i mean like they're local they're working they have put so much money over decades into focusing on local races that's why we have fucking state legislatures that are basically like one party states now oh yeah some of these red states wisconsin is fucking insane but wisconsin was a good example too where i was like i had given up i was like oh god the gerrymandering there we're fucked and then the supreme race, then we won the Supreme Court.

So I'm like, now, like that's a good argument to me about like why you never give up on states like that. Yes, exactly. Of course not. I'm not an advocate for giving up on any state whatsoever. But that's why I'm saying like- Focus on the local. The real boring minutiae is actually where it fucking matters.

Like your council district member is going to have more power over your immediate life. Like you're you're going to have more tangible differences in your way of existence than the fucking president. Because like the American government runs like a machine on autopilot. I think Trump proved that pretty well. If you get involved in local politics and you see that local politics can actually change your life and your community for the better, you're more likely to be involved in politics, right? You're less likely to stop having so much distrust in the system if you can see it in front of you working. Yeah, you want to know how you also feel that way, you want to know how we participate more workplace organizing yeah labor unions were

the reason why people uh felt like they had a say in this process even if there wasn't an immediate say and i'm not even talking about labor unions now but there was a point in time when like you know you you did feel like you had some level of influence over the democratic party at least i feel like with union participation at 10 11 which is literally lower than chile by the way this is a fun fact for everybody listening at home we wrote their fucking constitution like we wrote a neoliberal constitution in chile okay we did a coup we did all that we were awful to chile and even then they still have a higher labor union participation in that country than we do here in america yeah because and by

the way you can trace sort of like the labor unions in this country also used to be like the central infrastructure for the democratic party yes right and that's what and that's why he had a lot of people and when when as unions declined that's when the party lost a lot of working class people yeah no coincidence you know yeah absolutely manufacturing went overseas uh you That's why he had a lot of people. And as unions declined, that's when the party lost a lot of working class people. Yeah, absolutely. No coincidence, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Manufacturing went overseas.

You know, capital owners wanted to squeeze out profit. Profit rates have a tendency to decline. I didn't come up with that. Some other bearded dude did 200 fucking years ago. He was right. And then another guy said imperialism is a necessity to ensure to ensure that you know profits stay stable even though it's constantly declining another guy who was bald and had a mustache said that both of those guys are very smart i think but regardless this system is designed in a way to continue that

to continue finding profit wherever and if you are doing that kind of devastation overseas it's inevitably going to come back yeah if our military is being brutal and awful in places like iraq and afghanistan if we have 700 military bases all around the country and we're doing like direct violence direct acts of violence in places that are overseas we're sending you know 12 000 young men and women to die in in the war on terror right Hundreds of thousands more to come back in a state of constant PTSD. You know, 22 veterans are killing themselves every day. Like all of this stuff is happening

so that the bottom line of corporations is protected. That shareholder value is protected. That global capital ends up, you know, behaving in the way that it's supposed to. This is a very powerful structure that we've designed. It's so great in maintaining its stability. Neoliberalism is great at maintaining stability. That even when you speak out against it,

like people who don't benefit from it at all will come out and like speak out against it and yell at you and say that you're in the wrong. Do you see yourself as a political activist? come out and like speak out against it and yell at you and say that you're in the wrong do you um do you see yourself as a as a political activist like how much do you feel like your role is to get your audience involved in politics at all or like how do you how do you think about that i think a lot of people in my audience do get involved in politics um they become labor organizers they become community organizers they run for you know local office and whatnot and that's great but i see myself as just some guy that's the way i see it um i am uh you know i am what would happen

if you were like a like an influencer who just uh i guess read capital and and uh you know just kind of went along with it what drew you to twitch as a platform i play video games or used to i don't really play video games uh online as much i still do but offline i i saw the space i knew that the space was very diverse but unfortunately the output from like uh you know video game essays and commentators were like incredibly right wing yeah and i think that they were radicalizing a lot of people and uh youtube probably played a big role in that, too, like the YouTube algorithm. But I saw that and I was like, this is not right. This is not correct. I think there are a lot of people that also would understand my perspective and would probably mesh better with my worldview than these like neck bearded divorce dads that are talking about you know uh the great replacement uh and and you know having richard spencer on yeah uh those guys are fucking weirdo losers you know what i mean and they're not real gamers either the other thing with twitch is that it's all

like it's live you're interacting with your audience in real time like i spend most of my week prepping for all these podcasts i like get to spend a lot of time thinking about what i want to say how i want to respond to the news you're just like responding in real time what is that like i mean that was also part of the reason why i got on twitch because originally when i was at the young turks i would write for hong kong post and i would write all of my scripts out and they were all uh you know pre-scripted all the assets that i would collect and whatnot and then i would make these like short five minute videos about one particular subject in the news on that day. I wanted to get better at off the cuff commentary. Like I was just, I had all these ideas. I had all these opinions, but I could never communicate it adequately when I didn't have this crutch you know a teleprompter so or like when

you're self-editing all the time yeah that's the other yeah so basically i wanted to get better at free flow conversation and uh what better way to do that than you know just putting yourself in the in the crossfire putting yourself in front of the crosshairs of thousands of people for uninterrupted 10 hours where you can't have any sort of dead air that's why i don't shut the fuck up if you noticed you you have me on the podcast i rolled out of bed i didn't do any prep work for this but i haven't shut the fuck up at all but i'm sure that you also are it's strengthening the relationship with your audience because you're always responding to them right like i we do live

shows and then we get to see people and it's the one of the best parts of doing this because i actually get to talk to people but you don't get that feedback all like in real time all the time it must be nice to actually have that sort of yes and no i think it it's really great and it helps me recenter my focus uh but it also can be bad because people can like weaponize that. They can use that against you and come in and say insane shit. Just curious is the phrase that we make fun of all the time. People will be like, why did you buy a $7 trillion mansion in West Hollywood? Just curious. No, you're not just curious.

That wasn't a question. Also, there's like 10 jokes that everyone uses over and over again that are really not that funny anymore. Someone once described you in an article by saying, Hasan consumes the internet at the speed of the internet. This show is called Offline. We talk about being extremely online and how to unplug. Does it ever get exhausting? Like being online, consuming content constantly, constantly.

Like do you ever try to unplug? Sometimes. Burnout is very real and i do uh go live for eight hours on the minimum every day seven days a week so long and i talk about politics for a big chunk of that uh some ways to to mitigate that is by shifting my content on the on the tail end on like after hour four five six try to do some more light-hearted come like you know fun commentary yeah uh play video games every now and then things of that nature and uh you know there's still politics kind of involved in it because this is who i am i can't turn it off but overall um you know that's one way to to mitigate burnout like to to combat it and then sometimes i just take a day um you know that's one way to to mitigate burnout like to to combat it and then

sometimes i just take a day off you know that's good um and uh and on the day off are you not looking at the news all day long uh usually i am more aggressively but lately i've gotten a lot better and now with uh with the puppy it's like impossible for me to look at the news non-stop so that has actually been kind of helpful yeah um puppy's a good distraction it's like impossible for me to look at the news non-stop so that has actually been kind of helpful yeah um puppy's a good distraction it's a good way to unplug yeah and i i have like a social life uh i you know i have this like rigid work structure that i definitely follow aggressively but that work structure also has like blocks that i have uh for working out for example and like socializing so i you

know get some sunlight i work out outdoors with my trainers and i play basketball go to public parks you know those are things that i think keep me a little bit more uh grounded and uh you know i i do stuff like that even though i do have have the perfectly broken brain for eight hours of uninterrupted commentary while I'm processing information at the speed of the internet. Hasan Piker, thanks for joining Offline, and good luck with the puppy. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me, guys. Of course. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.