Confronting Hasan Piker on Socialist Grift, Hypocrisy, and How "The Top 1%" Keeps You Poor!

Primary Topic

This episode features a discussion between Hasan Piker and the hosts, exploring the contradictions of advocating for socialism while participating in capitalist practices.

Episode Summary

In this episode of "The Iced Coffee Hour," hosts Graham Stephan and Jack Selby confront Hasan Piker on his views and lifestyle, which some critics argue are hypocritical given his socialist beliefs. The conversation delves into topics such as the responsibility of governments in preventing poverty, the role of taxes in a capitalist society, and the public perception of wealth and success. Piker defends his position by discussing systemic issues in the U.S., such as income inequality and education disparities, while also addressing personal attacks and misconceptions about his own lifestyle and beliefs. The episode is candid and provides insights into Piker's perspective on a variety of social and economic issues.

Main Takeaways

  1. Hasan Piker discusses the complexities of advocating for socialism while living in a capitalist country.
  2. The conversation highlights the impact of systemic issues like education inequality and healthcare access on poverty.
  3. Piker critiques the U.S. tax system, advocating for more progressive taxes and wealth redistribution.
  4. The hosts challenge Piker on his personal wealth and public persona, discussing the broader implications of his platform.
  5. The episode explores the tension between personal actions and political advocacy in public figures.

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction

The hosts introduce Hasan Piker and outline the main topics for the discussion. They set the stage for a deep dive into issues of socialism, hypocrisy, and societal wealth disparities.

  • Graham Stephan: "Welcome to another episode of The Iced Coffee Hour!"
  • Jack Selby: "Today we're diving deep with Hasan Piker."

2: Socialism and Personal Wealth

Hasan discusses the criticism he faces for his lifestyle choices as a public socialist figure.

  • Hasan Piker: "I advocate for systemic change, not personal perfection."

3: Taxation and Government Responsibility

The debate shifts to the role of taxes and government in addressing social issues.

  • Hasan Piker: "We need a tax system that does more to address the wealth gap."

4: Public Perception and Media

Discussion on how public figures like Piker are perceived and the role of media in shaping these perceptions.

  • Hasan Piker: "The media often simplifies complex issues, which affects public understanding."

5: Conclusions

The hosts summarize the discussion and reflect on the insights provided by Piker.

  • Graham Stephan: "This was a revealing conversation on the challenges of advocating for change within a capitalist framework."

Actionable Advice

  1. Educate yourself on systemic issues: Understand the broader societal and economic systems that impact poverty and inequality.
  2. Advocate for change: Use your voice and platform to support policies that address social and economic disparities.
  3. Be critical of media portrayals: Analyze how media representations shape perceptions of social issues and public figures.
  4. Engage in community efforts: Support or volunteer in initiatives that aim to address local inequalities.
  5. Reflect on personal impact: Consider how your own actions can align more closely with your values and the changes you want to see.

About This Episode

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People

Hasan Piker, Graham Stephan, Jack Selby

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Transcript

Hasan Piker

People call me a commie socialist, champagne socialist, and I'm saying chinese style communist takeover, eminent domain. That's mine. Now, you guys that up. We're taking every single person from skid row and we're putting them into that luxury high rise condominium. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.

Perfect solution. I don't have investments. Why? I think that that was a major l for me, I guess, but because I'm so stubborn, I just, you know, I can't shut the up. And I should have.

Should have grifted a little bit. I think one of the worst things that I ever said in my career was openly admitting that. No. Hasan, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. Everyone loved the first episode.

Jack Selby

We really appreciate it. It was great. Honestly, I don't really get a lot of opportunity to just talk without chat, going 1000 miles an hour on the side, yelling at me. So it's like, I always appreciate it. Plus, you guys did one thing that I really genuinely appreciated.

Hasan Piker

Fact check me. Which, ironically enough, of course, I was factually correct. But, you know, it was. It was good. I appreciated that you guys were like, I would, like, draw up some numbers from top dome and then you guys would be like, on it.

Graham Stephan

That was your facts and figures? Yeah. Most people always think that I'm just, you know, ratting off, rattling off numbers without knowing what the hell I'm talking about. No, I'm sure a lot of people do. But, yeah, editor was great in that.

Jack Selby

And they just got all the supporting evidence and sources and everything. So that was impressive. Yeah. So it's interesting. We offered you a Starbucks and you said you couldn't drink it.

Graham Stephan

And here I am with a Starbucks. You said you'd get canceled. I would. Well, it's kind of funny that you guys immediately, as soon as I came in, you were like, do you want this water? I was like, no, I'm good.

It's not a setup, by the way. This is the surface, which is funny. Cause I'm drinking a mountain dew on my pepsi. I was in Australia last week. Wasn't even an altercation.

Hasan Piker

It was like, a fan who came up to me and was LIKE, oh, you're drinking coke zero. You need to stop drinking coke zero on StReAm. You support bds, which boycott divestments and sanctions against ISrael. Why are you doing that? Like, you're.

Are you a supporter of Israel? Like, why are you doing that? Like, you know, be a better ally to Palestinians? And. And then I thought that was like a random, you know, it was like a quick back and forth.

I was just LIKE. I laughed it off and I was like, ha ha. OKAY. Like, oh, is Pepsi okay? You know, I was joking around.

Cause it's not. It's not actually a part of the official BDS sanction list. Like any other sanctioned companies. Like, Coca Cola is not one of them. Um, and I didn't want to get into a debate on stream with a fan.

You know what I mean? I feel like this just long and convoluted for no reason. But then they clipped it and then they posted it on Reddit and posted it all on Twitter. And they were like, hasan is like, you know, look at him. Like, woke guy gets owned by his own audience.

Like, this is how goofy the left is. And blah, blah, blah. It made it to Sky News Australia. Rupert Murdoch owned just, like, Fox News. Sky News Australia made that into news.

It has, like, 750,000 views on YouTube right now. So what was, like, the agenda with Sky News? Like, why did they turn that into news? Oh, they were like, lefties losing it. This Hasan dude, he's in Australia.

Like, we don't have enough crazies in the country. That's what they were saying. I think the larger agenda overall is to just be like, let's not talk about Israel Palestine. Let's talk about how crazy the left is. Why are they crazy?

Because, you know, they want you to stop drinking coke and don't talk about, you know, anything that's going on in Gaza. Just talk about how crazy the left is. I think this is a distraction to, like, move discourse in a different direction. One thing to change the pace. Yeah.

Jack Selby

Is we've had a broad range of people on our podcast recently, and this question's really interesting because we get a wide variety of answers based off of the person's politics. Usually, if you're poor in America today with no dependence, no disability, cognitive or physical, and you're between the ages of 25 and 60, is it your fault? Um, no. What do you mean? Wait, sorry, say it again.

Hasan Piker

If. If you're poor, if you're poor between. The ages of 25 and 60, no disabilities, no dependence, no. No cognitive or physical, is it your fault? No.

Jack Selby

And why? We are a product of our own material conditions, our environment. And I do think that there is a severe income inequality in this country still. There's not a lot of. I mean, there's a lot of racial inequality in this country still.

Hasan Piker

I don't think that someone who was born into, like, drastically different conditions, like in Flint, Michigan, or in Detroit, or in, you know, forgotten parts of the country, like the appalachian area, the appalachian region, like in West Virginia. I don't think that person's starting point is identical to someone who grew up in a nice neighborhood in Connecticut and had access to public schools or even private schools. And their parents were able to afford healthcare. Their parents were able to afford the best education for them possible, a middle class education, but still a much better one overall. So I think that there's that aspect to it.

There are a lot of people who do not get that leg up. That shouldn't even really be a leg up. It should be the bottom, basically, like, social safety nets that are offered to every single person unconditionally so that we can be a more productive labor force overall. And then beyond that, I think there's always. We're all victims of circumstance in one way or another.

And I think poverty in that regard is almost always. Almost always systemic. So whose responsibility is it for these people to not be poor? Oh, I think it's the government's responsibility, for sure. I think it's a policy failure overall.

Poor is relative, obviously, because a poor person in America is infinitely better off than a poor person in Rwanda. Right. So if we're talking about poverty in America, if we're talking about that, we're comparing it to, like, whatever the middle is, right? Like, below the middle. We're talking about elevating every single person and ensuring that their.

Their needs are met. It's still up to the system to provide them with the social safety nets, with the amenities, with the means to achieve some kind of fulfillment for themselves. So what sort of policies do you think need to be in place to prevent that or help the situation? I think right across the board, flattening out education is definitely one of the first things I believe. I mean, healthcare is really important.

Properly feeding people is really important. I mean, we have child poverty in this country. We have issues with food security in this country. There are millions of families that still lack access to proper nutrition. One of the major hurdles even in schooling, which is not what you would think, but I mean, something as simple as, like, having AC in your school can yield much better results for.

I mean, for educational outcomes in general. And I think those are. Those are some of the most glaring, most obvious systematic failures in the. So when you say evening, even evening out schools, do you mean things like having computers and AC or demi, is. A computer food higher educational standard in general?

A lot of that is fixed with resources. I don't think we pay enough for our teachers, for example. I think teachers are, like, grossly underpaid in this country. The standards are also very low in general as well. I think, like, the quality has, the quality has gotten worse and worse year over year.

I think this, like, become basically a job of passion. Like, nobody's getting. Nobody's becoming a teacher because they're like, I'm going to make a lot of money. They're becoming teachers because they're like, this is what I want to do. I genuinely want to do that.

Jack Selby

Couldn't you make an argument that that's a good thing? No, I don't think that's a good thing. I think that's a bad thing. You think it's better that people say, I'm going to get rich because I could be a teacher? Not rich, but I want to be comfortable financially, and that's why I want to be a teacher is a good thing.

Hasan Piker

I think overall, money is a great motivator for these sorts of things. That's why if you look at a country like Finland, for example, where they have a much higher, a much better education structure specifically for teachers, they're revered as, like, they're. They're treated like lawyers almost, and they yield significantly better educational outcomes overall across the board, and most of it is public. So what advice would you give those people who are poor between the ages of 20 to 60 who are a victim of circumstance? What would you tell those people?

Get your money up, not your funny up. No. I mean, there is a lot you can do. Obviously, there's a lot you can do in general. But, like, overall, I would.

I don't know. I mean, I feel like, is it a lost cause? I don't think it's a lost cause necessarily, but I also don't think that, like, you know, scheming in certain ways or trying to develop passive income or whatever is going to be the solution for every single person. Like, oh, you're going to become an entrepreneur, and then you're going to start making money ultimately, because there's plenty of people who try that and fail and fail over and over again and never actually make it. I had to live a fairly ascetic lifestyle for a big chunk of my early twenties after college.

I mean, I lived in the kitchen of a frat house, right? And I had two jobs at the same time. I was in the lowest tax bracket possible, making literally less than minimum wage because I had a sales position. So it was like, so, like, you know, my bosses beforehand were able to get away with underpaying me in that regard because I have to bring in commission on top of that. I was budgeting all the time in order not to get in the red.

Still got into red, overdraft fees, all that stuff. I mean, it was terrible. I still made it through. But I think as someone who's made. It through, I feel like you should have valuable advice to people that are stuck in that position.

Well, I made it through because I'm lucky, though. I made it through because, like, you. Don'T think it had anything to do with the amount of time you were working. Cause you've gone on the record and. Said, I worked very hard, but it doesn't matter.

Like, it's just luck still, I think is a really significant factor in people achieving success. Working very hard is also important. Not to say that I'm not discounting people that become profoundly successful by saying, oh, it's all just luck. Cause it's not. You have to work very, very hard.

But there are people who work very hard every day. You have teachers in Oklahoma that teach all day, and then after work is done, they have to take a Uber job. What ratio would you give luck, do you think that was? 20%, 50%, 60%? I don't know if I can give lick an exact number.

Cause I think it changes for every single person. Some people are 30% unlucky. Some people are 50. In your situation, though, in my situation. I think luck played probably 50% of the way.

Graham Stephan

Half. Yeah, for sure. Because, listen, I was born into an affluent family. I got great education as a consequence of that. Now, that didn't really translate to living in America because it was in Turkey.

Hasan Piker

But it still doesn't matter because, like, I didn't have the financial setbacks that a much poorer person would like having to work a job when you're going to high school. Right? Like, I didn't have to take care of my parents when I was going to high school. I could just focus on my studies, even though I didn't really study that much either. But can you also say that someone else in your situation could say, I don't need to work that hard, I don't need to do much because I'm already kind of set.

Graham Stephan

So I'm just going to chill and do the bare minimum? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's definitely much different trajectories for someone like myself, especially from my background. But, um. But I would say that, like, that motivation.

Hasan Piker

I had a great upbringing. I love, you know, I have a very healthy relationship with my family. I think that is luck. That's what I mean when I talk about luck. It's that like, I had a great upbringing.

It didn't translate to, like, me having any sort of money when I was on my own after college, but it still doesn't matter. But before we get into that, AI actually might just be the most important new computer technology out there. I mean, I use it every single day. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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Jack Selby

What I found really interesting from our first episode we shot together was you were talking about idolizing the american life and all you ever wanted to do was go to college in America. That was like what you aspired to do. There was something where like people in foreign culture, like, not fetishize but like idolize America. And you were definitely one of those people. Do you think the american dream is dead now since you've came to America and you kind of like idolized the american dream, the white pick off fence and going to college here.

Hasan Piker

My idealization of the american dream began and ended it, like being able to go to college and partying, though. So I didn't have a broader understanding of it. There were definitely a lot of moments throughout american history where it wasn't all that real, regardless, but especially of, as of late, I feel like people's financial opportunities have worsened overall. I mean, it's very much alive if you are lucky to a certain degree, and also on top of that come from a better financial circumstance. If you're like upper middle class or, well, I guess everybody considers themselves to be upper middle class, that, that categorization is very broad.

But if you come from a relatively affluent background, like, there are opportunities for you to like to get upward social mobility. And I guess that is the american dream after all, you know, be able to own a house and whatnot. But beyond that, that window that is open for americans, for upward social mobility is like shrinking. The number of people that can actually have a better financial situation overall than their parents is getting smaller and smaller, in my opinion. Why do you think that is?

Graham Stephan

What's causing that? Wealth disparity is growing in this country. The wealthiest people are getting wealthier and wealthier. I would even factor myself into that as well. The way I describe it is this.

Hasan Piker

COVID is a great example. COVID recovery. Uh, during COVID recovery, there was, uh, a lot of upwards wealth transfer. A lot of people couldn't work. The government gave them money for a little bit, but, and there was unemployment insurance, which was great, um, but that dried up and then there was a shortage of jobs as well where people were like, oh, nobody wants to go back to work anymore.

In that entire time, we had what is known as a k shaped recovery where the, like, the top 1% of wealth kept growing absolutely in a seismic way, whereas the rest of the 99% did not experience those same returns. They did not, their wealth did not grow overall. And then we had inflation as well, which made things even worse. Real negative wage growth for at least almost two years under the Biden administration especially is like something that people are not willing to forget. And why should they?

It's understandable that they don't. They remember it. Can we get a quick, maybe two or so minutes explanation of who you are for the viewers if it's their first time hearing from you? I'm ah, Sahm Piker. I am a turkish american political commentator.

I stream on Twitch every day. I have a YouTube page, TikTok. I have it all. Came to the United States of America when I was 18 years old. I grew up in Turkey and I studied political science, communication.

First I went to University of Miami, transferred to Rutgers, graduated from Rutgers with honors. And then I got a job. I was looking for jobs like crazy after college. Didn't mean anything because I did not have like the networking opportunities or the relationships that like other people had at the time with other companies that they could normally work at. So I worked for my uncle as a salesperson at the Young Turks.

Some of you might know that it's a, it was at the time a 26 person, like independent news, YouTube channel and I built their entire advertisement sales and operations. All the back end did all the cold calling for a couple years. And during that process, while I was doing that, I was like, this sucks. This is, I hate this. I hate sales.

I want to do content, and because I wanted to do content, I was like, you know what? I'll do this for free. There's a studio that isn't really a studio. At the young Turk studio, there was a closet, basically. And I was like, I'm going to put a green screen here and I'm going to do a very different type of content that you guys don't do.

I'm gonna do teleprompted, pre scripted segments and, you know, I'll do it for free. I'll do it on my off hours when I'm not working, and it'll be free money for you guys, basically. You know what I mean? More bang for your buck. First they were resistant, then they were like, sure, whatever, why not?

And I sucked at it, too. I wasn't good at all, but I kept doing it over and over and over again. I got better at it eventually. And then I moved over to handle our Facebook operations at the Young Turks. Had a very successful show called the Breakdown that I had created.

It was right around the same time as Facebook was opening up video as an initiative. So there was like tens of millions of views to be had on each video and it was blowing up a lot. So that's what I did. And then I realized a couple years in that I wanted to have something of my own because I had no creative control over it. I had, I don't.

I didn't have enough autonomy. So I was like, I want to do something on my own. First I pushed people to my instagram. Then I decided, I'm going to go on this platform called Twitch. Leftist ideology was under represented in that space at the time.

This is like Gamergate, post Gamergate era for the oldies in the chat that know what that is. There wasn't a lot of like, people who were like, I'm a socialist or I'm a leftist, I'm a progressive and I'm a gamer. So I went in there playing Fortnite, strapped the PlayStation Eye camera to my PlayStation four, started playing Fortnite. I played for now with like other journalists as well and other podcasters as well at the time. Well, we talk about stuff like Israel Palestine by 2020.

I went full time, became a full time Twitch streamer, and then COVID happened and the George Floyd protests happened, and a lot of people started catching up to my politics, especially as it pertains to police brutality. And I was there doing live coverage every day. And then the election cycle happened, and I would say that 2020, I exploded in popularity and have been streaming every single day ever since I went full time. And how would you describe your political ideology as a label? I don't really like labels when it comes to political ideology.

People call me a commie socialist champagne, socialist leftist. I am, I would say, a progressive person who believes that everyone should be able to pursue a life of dignity and find free moments and have some autonomy and have a sense of purpose in their own lives. So the achieves, that is what I want. The main thing that people have, the main problem they have with I feel like that ideology is the taxes. That's like, one of the main things.

Jack Selby

What do you think would be a fair tax bracket in the highest percentage or just a fair tax bracket structure for you? Our highest tax rate is pretty bad in America overall. But I also, more importantly, think that the way we tax is really bad in general. I think that a lot of Americans are taxed on their wealth, their assets, without recognizing it, unless you have a lot of money in the stock market, in which case you're paying a much lower percentage in your taxes, in your overall net worth across the board. What do I mean by this?

Hasan Piker

What is it, like 40% of Americans own their own home, right? Something like that. Something around those lines somewhere. Many of those Americans are paying property taxes. That's their primary wealth accumulation.

That's their nest egg. That is what they can take mortgages out against or used to be able to take mortgages out against. Not. Not anymore, not as much right now, but that is what they see as their, like, their future, right? And those guys all get taxed on their wealth, whereas there is a ton of wealth specifically that is left uncaptured in the stock market.

So while I do think that our tax brackets could go a little bit higher, for sure, I think overall, trying to tax just straight up income is not the end of the deal. I think we need to fix our wealth taxes as well. Start wealth tax. I don't know what the exact number would be. I genuinely don't know.

Jack Selby

Would you fall in the wealth tax? I don't really have a lot of assets. I already pay income. Like, I pay everything off income, straight income. So in California, living here, that's.

Hasan Piker

I'm in the highest top. I'm in the highest tax bracket. So I'm paying around like 50% of more than 50 include property tax and. Sales tax and all these other gains tax. Yeah, even before all of that.

Yeah. But I mean, I am perfectly fine with increasing the highest tax rate as well, which would, yes, definitely impact me. Although, you know what? Before we go into that, we got to do some quick math, because the less money your business spends, the more money you get to keep. But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, everything's costing more.

Graham Stephan

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Jack Selby

Thank you so much, Netsuite. And back to the podcast. Let's just say someone's taxed at 60%. Do you feel like people would say there's really no point in me working that much harder because I'm only going to keep $0.40 on the dollar? No, I don't think that this is.

I think people have. Wait. I mean, you get taxed at that rate. Do you think it. No, I don't move.

Graham Stephan

37. 37%. Okay. But regardless, you still get the federal 37% correct. Are you disincentivized the work harder?

No. Well, there you go. But there's a difference. When you go above 50%, I think people really have a negative reaction. When it's over 50.

I would say 50 to 50% to 60%. I would incentivize a lot of business spending just because I didn't want to get taxed on it. So I would say that would be the only thing. But beyond a certain point, I probably would be disincentivized beyond a certain point. 60% is just if the goods that you're being provided from the government are just so good for.

Hasan Piker

Great. That's a great point. I was about to say that then. I would be okay with it. But I know for a fact, let's just say I make 100 grand or something, 50% I cut to the federal government.

Jack Selby

I feel like I get maybe like 2000, $3,000 worth of value back, which is what, four? Not even, 6%, not even. And if I spent the 50,000, I would get one to one value to dollar spent. No, I completely understand what you're saying about that. I mean, unless you're talking about, like, you know, money being spent on roads and stuff, which I think is good.

Hasan Piker

It's not like you don't see it as like a direct return. Right. Well, the roads also aren't the greatest. Yeah, but precisely, you absolutely correct. You nailed it.

That is the biggest problem in this country. Good for you. I think the biggest problem in this country isn't necessarily the taxes, because I have this conversation with my european friends all the time. I have some, some lovely friends who were visiting from France recently. We sat down, we're having this dinner, and they were shocked when I just started describing to them the american tax structure.

They were like, what? Like, we thought, you guys don't pay any taxes at all. You have no amenities for it. You have nothing to show for it, because unfortunately, our spending is awful in this country. It's awful.

A lot of it goes into, I guess, subsidies that you don't necessarily see that are keeping the economic engine running. That's for sure. A lot of it goes with the fence. And we have so much money that we get, even in a place like California, for example, where we had an $88 billion surplus in the state, and yet we have nothing to show for it in terms of, like, in terms of the roads, in terms of, you know, public health initiatives, in terms of overall quality of life for the average citizen. People might look at that and go, oh, it's because they're giving it to immigrants or whatever.

That's not the case. In a lot of instances. There are middlemen who know someone in government, and they get these fat contracts and they hold it up and they don't do, uh, they don't do the actual infrastructural development that they were tasked with doing. When it comes to creating affordable housing, there are a lot of initiatives to combat homelessness. We talked about this a little bit last time.

Those initiatives get funded, we vote for it in ballot measures. They're very popular in Los Angeles county. We added an extra 5% taxes on sales of homes. That are over $5 million. Everybody voted for it.

They loved it. They're like, great, let's do it. That raised the shit ton of money. But that money doesn't go back into, like, actual direct initiatives. It just stays there.

It just stays there. My understanding is that it's. They projected it was going to make way more money than it actually ended up making. And so what ended up happening, just from a real estate perspective? Everyone sold their house prior to this going into effect.

Graham Stephan

After it went into effect, you had so many listings that were, like, five and a half. They just price it 4995, where they'd sell furniture separately. And doesn't it also dry up the market a little bit? Dried up the market completely. But the result was that I think they thought it was going to bring in, like, $800 million over five years or something, but it ended up bringing in a fifth of that.

I'm sure we could put up the numbers here, and we don't know, but that's the point. But that's a lot of money. But it crippled the markets. Imagine if those homes would be able to be freely bought and sold, that. Commerce would generate a lot of revenue.

Right. And I think, too, with. With increased property taxes or the type of person buying those five plus million homes, what could they contribute that could be greater than what this tax generated? You mentioned something really interesting. I think it was on our podcast with Anna about some guy that was renting a vacant warehouse.

I think we talked about that. Oh, did we talk about that with you? Yeah. Did we? Do we talk about this?

Jack Selby

So this is just another prime example of this. Yeah. So exactly what you mentioned. There was supposed to be a homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles, and there's this big expose about it because it's been vacant for, like, seven years at this point, and they're spending $50,000 a month for this homeless shelter. So why is it empty for seven years?

Graham Stephan

Well, it turned out that they couldn't build it because it had a foundation issue, but they were trying to figure it out. So until then, they had a signed lease, and they just kept the lease agreement going. Well, when they dug into it, the person who signed the lease was, like, a former business associate or friend with the person who was in charge of finding the homeless shelter. And so it seems as though they did this backdoor deal. It's like, hey, I'll give you 50 grand a month for this place.

We good? All right. All right. Let's do that. And nothing.

The money just goes to waste. Not even remotely shocking to me. There's a lot of, there's a lot of corruption that happens like that. And I think that's a major issue. I mean, think about, like, high speed rail development in this state.

Hasan Piker

It's been ongoing since, like, the eighties. China, since, like, 2001, has laid down an entire continent worth of high speed rail over the course of such a short period of time. When there's a will, there's a way they did it with much less money than. Than we're working with. Right.

That level of corruption is more so about just, like, people making money off of government spending. And the government has a lot of money, so they're willing to throw money in that, in that direction because they can tell their constituents, hey, it's out of our hands. We threw money at this problem. I want enforcement. I also, ironically, I guess, chinese.

I want chinese style enforcement. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're doing that. That's great. You're going to jail. Like, where's the fucking homeless shelter?

You're going to jail. You didn't build it. All right, sorry. We're going to prosecute you. I think we need to be harsher on punishments.

Jack Selby

And I also have this idea. I brought it up, our last podcast, and I want to know your opinion on it. I think there needs to be a massive. What was the term you said? 10,000.

10,000 accountants in the government that sole job is to internally audit, which I know we already do, and you can already access this information, but it's horrible. It is unattractive, and it's also, I feel like, just like, for the average person, you're not going to go in and read this crazy, complex Ui of how our budget is spent, but if we had 10,000. No, no. Thousand accountants that internally audit the federal government just to show everyone, hey, we're spending $22 per muffin at this random bureaucratic, like, agency or whatever. Doesn't matter.

I want to know about it. The way that the american government works also is, like, it's always dished out to, like, private contractors. And those are the guys who are making, like, those are guys who are making buku bucks over there when they're just, it's the greatest. It's the greatest grift of all, you know what I mean? Whether it's defense contractors or whether it's anything else, like, they get so much money.

Hasan Piker

And like I said, it's a way for policy to be like, see, we're spending money. Like, we're doing the thing that you wanted us to do, but people don't see any results, and then we just kind of forget about it. And I agree. I think that that would be phenomenal, especially with the Pentagon, too. But, you know, you're gonna get assassinated by the CIA if you start talking like that.

Jack Selby

We had an international arms dealer on the podcast that did us defense contracts, and he said, companies like Lockheed Martin, what they used to do is just charge whatever they wanted because there's no competitor, and you have the contract, and it needs to be a safety protocol. So they only create, you know, the f 35 jets or whatever. But instead, what they changed to was cost plus. So it's the cost of building an f 35 plus a fee of how much you spent. So, like, 3% of the entire cost.

But then this incentivizes them to spend twice as much, because then they get 6% instead of 3%. Let me tell you, they're not spending it on their workers either. Okay. They're not. They're not.

Hasan Piker

It's not like they're spending it on their engineers, either. Not surprised. I'm sure that you guys have some engineers watching right now that'll know exactly what I'm talking about. It's, you know, I mean, I guess it goes to the executives or something, maybe marketing initiatives when they turn around and they're like, they do, you know, gay pride parade floaties, Raytheon. But overall, yes, there's a lot of money out there, and we are not.

Not using it in the way that it's intended to be used. And I think that people get hurt as a consequence of that. But my point was that I think a lot of Americans would be a lot happier with the taxes they're paying if they actually. If they actually even felt like the government had their back. Do you feel like a wealth tax is an actual solution to that, or do you feel like that's.

I think it goes both ways. I think we have to do internal accounting, and I think we also could tax more as well. Like, where there's a lot of. There's a lot of asses out there that could be taxed, I think. And I do.

I mean, you might hate me for saying this, but I do think that we should incentivize seeing home ownership as a investment vehicle rather than just simple shelter. I think it's difficult with the housing example, because you have people who don't want to own a home, who prefer renting. And there are advantages to renters, as well, that they don't have the overhead and the responsibility, and they have the mobility to be able to move around. So in that case, who rents out a property like that? And.

Graham Stephan

But what if you own a house, and let's say you've owned that house for 20 years and you downsize, but you want to keep the house? Are you allowed to rent at that point because now you've become an investor? Probably not. I I believe in, especially when housing comes into play. I think it's a shelter is a human right.

Hasan Piker

That's just the way I see it. And, uh, there are places that do a pretty good job with this. Uh, Austria comes to mind. Vienna is known as Red Vienna for its pretty marxist housing policy. 65% of the homes in Vienna are owned by the government.

They're social housing, it's public housing, and they're beautiful. These are, like, actually very well put together building complexes that are mixed income. And it's not even, like, a weird thing at all. You got pools, you got gyms in there, you got facilities, you have amenities, and they have done a much better job dealing with the homelessness problem in a place like that. Helsinki is another city that worked very hard with a housing first initiative, which is, ironically, something that they at least say they learned from America.

Housing first was an american policy originally. We never really implemented it, but it was theorized here where in order to start the healing process for homeless people that are, like, deeply addicted to drugs or whatever, or even, you know, engaging in criminal activity and whatnot, which many homeless people aren't. But for even the hardest to tackle cases, it starts off with putting them into permanent housing, not shelter, mind you, but, like, permanent housing that they can call their own. And then they find that there are much better results as far as, like, recovery, as far as reintegration into society. So I think it's a mixture of both of those policies that would be greatly beneficial for Americans in the long run.

Graham Stephan

So do you think capitalism is a net positive or negative? And its inception was definitely much preferable to feudalism, but I think it's outlived its usefulness in our day and age. That's what I would say is the most conservative. So what would be a better alternative? That's the million dollar question.

Hasan Piker

I think a better alternative to capitalism is trying to move in the direction where we, like I said, work towards disincentivizing homeownership as an investment, but instead a shelter and trying to give back more autonomy to people in all workplaces. The ability to be able to have a say, at the very least in the hours that they're putting in, in a more democratic process and then seeing where that takes us. What policies do you like that are currently held by the Republican Party. The Republican Party. What policies do you think probably that you agree with?

Graham Stephan

Nothing. Nothing? No, I mean, because, like, I think America policy. I mean, if you ask me, the Democratic Party, there's very few I would say I agree with as well. Anyway, I think that, like, neither party represents the interests of their constituents.

Hasan Piker

They talk like they do, and I think that the republican party's politics are bad and their policies are even worse overall. As far as, like, social stuff goes, the Republicans are pretty bad, antithetical to my worldview in general. And as far as economic policies goes or even worse. Why do you think they believe in what they believe in, like, in these policies? Because you have to think from their perspective.

Graham Stephan

Perhaps they believe it's an improvement. They believe it's for the greater good. Do you think that they're just misinformed? Maybe some people do believe it because they're misinformed. It's social conditioning.

Hasan Piker

But, like, I mean, like, I don't think Lindsey Graham is, like, actually homophobic in practice, behind closed doors. I think he's very much not practicing what he preaches. I guess I just don't think that a lot of these people genuinely give a shit about abortion, for example. I don't think they think it's, like, actually murder. There are definitely some real Americans who do feel that way, evangelical Christians.

And that's a whole different concept. But I don't think the politicians care. I mean, they demonstrated that pretty quickly when they immediately were like, okay, maybe abortion is not as long as. It's like when they found out that it was very unpopular, which it was, even Trump is now saying he wants to do what, a six or twelve month abortion ban? So I guess, like, it's not murder up to twelve months now.

I mean, I told you, dude, imagine. Pretty late state coming out with a beard or something. Three months after birth. They're still chopping their heads off. Yeah.

Twelve weeks. Sorry. So I guess it's not mercury. We're gonna fact check that. Okay.

Jack Selby

So what I want to know is, the way I see it is on both sides, there are incredibly intelligent people, period. And there's a lot of people. Right? So a lot of very intelligent people on both sides. Are we talking about politicians?

Hasan Piker

Are we talking about people? People, just people that would identify as Republican or Democrat? Fair. Okay, that's fine. You're right.

Jack Selby

You're right about that huge population on both sides. And within that population, a lot of very intelligent people, a lot of deep thinkers, a lot of empathetic people, sympathetic, whatever. What do you think is the fundamental difference in belief about human nature between conservatives and liberals? They aren't really that different in their way of thinking. I think both sides think that, like, humans are either naturally good or naturally bad, like, and they're naturally greedy.

Hasan Piker

Naturally not greedy or naturally greedy. I disagree with all of those ideas in general, so I always find myself a little bit left out of that conversation. But what are some fundamental disagreements between Republicans and liberals? Republicans are more free will, while Democrats. Are a little bit more deterministic, I guess.

Jack Selby

But the way that I see it is if you are a deep and critical thinker and you do subscribe to one side, I'm guessing you've boiled down your argument to a sheer belief about human nature and all of these policy prescriptions, everything that you support you can tie back down to. This is why it's good, because humans are fundamentally x. Yeah, I mean, I. Think humans are fundamentally a product of their material conditions. Their.

Hasan Piker

Their social, their environment is what makes us who we are. Obviously, there are still, like, you know, naturally occurring phenomena that, that medical science is not caught up to, like, I don't know, or like antisocial personality disordered people that want to do violent crimes and whatnot. But I think that most of the crime could be reduced for all the way from violent crime all the way down to, you know, theft and burglary and everything else can be reduced to material conditions for sure. Do you recommend people listen to other political commentators on the right and on the left? And if so, who?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I. I probably spend more time listening to right wing commentators on my stream than I do left wing commentators. Really? So who on the right does it.

Jack Selby

Right? Does it write as in, like, entertaining? Because I don't. I don't. Entertaining or thoughtful or good faith?

Hasan Piker

I don't know. I don't know if I would ascribe good faith to anybody, to nobody in general. What about yourself? I think I'm good faith. Yes.

And I also like some commentators that I do think are good faith as well. As far as, like, Chapo, trap house. There's a podcast, JT. Second thought, it's a YouTube channel, the Deprogram boys. Like, there's a lot of people that I think are very good faith.

Majority report. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Sam Cedar and Emma Viglin. They're great. Even if we don't almost always align on everything, it doesn't matter. I still think that they are valuable, and I think that they are good faith overall.

Jack Selby

But you don't think a single person on the right is good faith. Like, I don't want to say that they're good faith, because, like, I feel like that's even worse, because I do genuinely, like, I think Ben Shapiro and almost everything he represents is just wrong. I do. I legitimately believe that. Charlie Kirk, Stephen Crowder, Ann Coulter, some of these people I have debated, and I have, like, in the flesh, been around, right.

Hasan Piker

Tim Poole, who portrays himself as a centrist or a liberal. I don't think he's a liberal or a centrist at all. I think he's a right winger, and he just, like, hides that he is a centrist. I don't even know if. If he still says he's a centrist or a liberal.

Jack Selby

Well, Don Lemon said he was a centrist. I think Don Lemon is a centrist. Don Lemon is. You know who's a real centrist? Lex Friedman.

Hasan Piker

I think. Yes, I agree with that 100%. I think. See? Okay.

Good faith. I think lex Friedman is. But he's not on the right. I see people on the right. He's not on the right.

Jack Selby

No, I would say he's in the middle. Yeah, no, I think he's in the middle. Like, I think Joe Rogan used to be kind of like that. But I think Joe Rogan has developed his own personal political opinions over the course of the years, especially when it comes to certain issues. Like, he's very right wing, and then sometimes he'll be, like, weirdly left wing on others.

Hasan Piker

But overall, like, lex Friedman is, like, down the middle. I agree. I think he is, like, the one guy that I truly believe is a real centrist. Lex, we love you so much. Lex is one guy I will glaze till the end of my day.

Jack Selby

I love you, lex. Lex, if you're watching this, thank you for being yourself. Comment on one of our. He did comment on our episode with destiny. That was great conversation, guys.

Thank you, lex. He's a big destiny glazer, which is a big l for Lex. But honestly, it's fine. Although really quick. I just want to point this out.

Graham Stephan

Are you noticing anything on this angle versus this angle? This angle is blurry right here, and it's because the camera was dropped. Jack, I'm looking at you. It's not my fault. You probably dropped it.

Jack Selby

We don't know who dropped it. The point is, it's going to cost like $2,000 to replace the lens. However, we were able to get to almost a million subscribers without the really expensive equipment, and our sponsor, Streamyard is able to help get you there, too. For those unaware, Streamyard is a live streaming software that allows you to create high quality content, content with just the click of a button, and all you need is a camera and an Internet connection, and you can stream directly from your browser. They also have a multi stream feature that allows you to stream throughout multiple social media platforms at the same time, from Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and more.

I know for us that when we got on Instagram and TikTok, it absolutely exploded our growth. And I highly recommend that to anyone looking to get started to get on every single platform. And Streamyard makes that incredibly easy. Streamyard is really one of the best ways that you could get started creating content without spending any money out of pocket, because they also have a completely free option, which means it costs you absolutely nothing to use the link down below in the description. Once again, it's completely free to try it out and get started.

Graham Stephan

So enjoy. Thank you so much. And now let's get back to the podcast. And when it comes to Ben Shapiro, I'm curious, what do you disagree with the most? Where do I begin?

Hasan Piker

I mean, Israel Palestine right now, obviously, because, like, but he's God. He has such immoral opinions on Israel Palestine. I mean, he wrote, transfer is not a dirty word. All the way back in like 2004 or something when he was talking about population transfer of Palestinians, advocating for that on town hall. And his opinions have not really changed since then either.

It's not like that was the old him. The Arabs like to bomb things and live in sewage. Israelis like to build. That was like 15 years ago. Yeah, but has his opinion changed on the matter?

Jack Selby

Probably Arabs, period. I think. I think, I think a lot of his motivations for defending Israel do stem from just like islamophobia. And obviously his upbringing, I'm sure, played a role in it. Like I said, everyone's a product of their social conditioning, but I think it's still pretty much motivated by Arabs or barbarian.

Graham Stephan

Would you debate Ben Shapiro? Oh, yeah, I would love to. I'll bring it up to Ben, because you know what? We're going to take credit for this. We had Ben Shapiro on the show.

Jack Selby

We said you should debate destiny. And he said he would do it. Yeah. And then we reached out to his team. We got in contact with Destiny.

Hasan Piker

I don't think they, I don't think they really debated. I think they agreed on a lot more. They did. They did agree on a lot of stuff, but we will take credit for that. That was awesome.

Jack Selby

That clip went viral. Everyone started talking about it. And Jubilee, Jubilee tried it and then Lex Friedman tried it and he ended up doing it. Jubilee tried. I think we initially offered.

We initially.

Hasan Piker

Jubilee tried getting me to debate Ben Shapiro, not destiny, and he did not respond to that. I don't think he. I don't know. He's also very far removed, in fairness. Very far removed.

Yeah. Even though he talked to Ben about destiny, he was like, oh, destiny. We had to show him. He's like, oh, yeah, I think I've seen him before. He made videos on me before.

He knows who I am. Okay. He's definitely, he's definitely cut some videos. But he is far removed. I will say he's got a huge team who really coordinates a lot of this behind the scenes.

Graham Stephan

So if you reach out to him directly, you're never going to hear. It's gotta be through his team. You have no way of reaching out to him directly, and I'm fine with that. But I do believe that there are people on the right and on the left, obviously, that are good faith. I think.

Hasan Piker

I guess Ben is good faith. You're right, he does. But I don't think that's a good thing. But I feel like that is the base that you can ask for somebody, the fundamental, you can ask that someone at least tries their best and does what they believe is right. Right.

Jack Selby

And if everybody did that, sure. You'd have some people that believed in things that you disagree with and they do something that maybe hurts you or whatever, but they're trying to do it in good faith with good intentions. And if everyone was that way, then people would see a bully and they'd stop the bully. Right. Okay.

Hasan Piker

But, but Ben Shapiro is good faith, as I've acknowledged. But he's good faith in the bad. Direction, from your perspective, and he would argue otherwise. Yeah, I think. And then you let the public.

Well, I mean, most people, even in your, even in your comment section, are probably going to say Hussein grifter, he doesn't practice what he preaches, not understanding what I preach nor what I practice. But as far as, like, I'm a very stubborn person, I'm honest to a fault, I would say, and that really ropes people the wrong way. But as far as, like, being good faith. Yeah, sure. I think Ben does believe what he's talking about, what he says, but the outcomes are terrible.

Whether it be abortion, whether it be LGBT rights, like denying civil liberties, social liberties to people of. Of different marginalized backgrounds. I don't agree with Ben Shapiro when it comes to America's militarization. I don't agree. I don't agree with him when it comes to pretty much every single issue.

I would say that I am almost on every single issue. I'm on the diametric opposite side of Ben Shapiro. I can't think of a single thing that I would agree with him on. But can you appreciate the fact that he's good faith? I.

Sure, but that doesn't really mean anything to me is what I'm saying. I guess I wouldn't rather him be bad faith, but I would rather him not have those opinions and not advocate for those things. Like more police brutality, please. You know, I think that that's bad. I think that's a horrible worldview to have.

Jack Selby

So you recently debated Piers Morgan on his show? I guess. Cordial. Sure. And it got over 4 million views.

It went crazy viral. Everybody loved it. What has been your favorite debate of all time? My favorite debate of all time? I don't know.

There's one that's already came to mind. What is it? There has to be for you? Oh, no. Not even.

Hasan Piker

I mean, I guess maybe Ann Coulter. Ann Coulter was fun. I debated Larry Elder. That was also fun. I guess Ann Coulter probably only because she's like the OG.

Have I ever lost the debate? I'm sure I've lost in the minds of the broader audience. I think debates are mostly for showmanship. Like, it's pseudo intellectual sparring. There can be utility for it.

I think it's good to have your side's talking points be represented and then the other side's talking points also be represented. But I think the skilled order always overpowers their opponent in debates. It's like the example I would use is this Ben Shapiro. Very skilled order. Right?

He has great rhetoric. If Ben Shapiro debated a socially conscious, kind of anxious, maybe a little neurotic climate scientist, even on the science of climate change, he would probably be able to destroy the floor with him. He would wipe the floor with him. Does that mean he's right? No, of course not.

According to scientific consensus, he is objectively in the wrong. However, because he's a skilled orator, he would be able to thoroughly dismantle the arguments or put you into a logical corner, you know what I mean? Trap you. So it's a very different set of skills. I would say the same thing about destiny.

I've said this for years. He is very good at rhetoric. But until he is met with an opponent that both knows more on an issue and is also very good at rhetoric, or very stubborn, for example, to a fault like Norm Finkelstein, he is not going to be seen as intellectually fraudulent by the broader audiences, which I do think happened. So shouts out the likes for that one. Why does it seem that more democratically ran states are failing than conservative states?

What do you mean by that? Well, we just got Starbucks right before this. I know, guys, we're not supposed to go to Starbucks for a litany of reasons. What a change. What a change.

Jack Selby

And there's no tables on the inside. No bathroom. Because you can't. Yeah, there's no bathroom. It was $13 for two medium sized drinks.

Hasan Piker

Is it different in, like, other states? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Graham Stephan

Some of that probably has to do with the rent to be on Hollywood Boulevard. Places are like. I know companies are, like, fleeing San Francisco. I'm sure you could correct me if I'm wrong on that. There's no.

Hasan Piker

I don't know which companies are talking about. I think Nordstrom's is one of them. Just a lot of companies that were. Suffering from brick and mortar retailers shrinkage. I don't think it's shrinkage that actually.

That I will correct you on. So that was actually the common metaphor of quite some time post, you know, post COVID. Everyone's like, oh, organized retail theft is happening. And at the time I said, it's not organized retail theft. Shrinkage has increased.

But if you look at the National Retailer association numbers, you will realize that, like, the shrinkage actually grew alongside with at the normal rate that it does when more shopping is happening. That has always been consistent. These companies said, like Walgreens, for example, famously said, we're leaving San Francisco because we're closing these locations because of theft. It's out of control. And then they quietly admitted that they were lying about that.

A year later, the CFO actually openly admitted that they. Maybe we exaggerated the theft situation. What's the real problem there? Real estate. It's too expensive.

Brick and mortar can't compete with e commerce. Amazon is dominating that market. And I think that because of that, they're having. Well, and also real estate prices are so high to begin with that they just don't see it as valuable enough. They will say shrinkage, I think, or they'll say theft because it's like a better political message to shelter the real reasons.

Graham Stephan

But then why, when you walk into some of these places is the deodorant behind, like, bars. It's like in a cage if it's not theft. There are so many things that I've seen where they lock up, like that happening. Yeah, of course it is happening, for sure. And it has always happened.

Hasan Piker

There's always a much more important reason for why companies make decisions like that. Right. But it does seem as though there's a concentration of failure in states like California and New York, where you have a bunch of smash and grabs happening a lot. And of course, this is happening in every state, but it seems like I said, there's a concentration, and then you have the poop maps or whatever. Fecal matter concentration as well.

Jack Selby

In San Francisco, I think a lot. Of people point to the lack of penalty for crime and how it's almost encouraged that you could go in a place, steal up to $1,000 with the goods, and just say, well, I'm. You know, it's not. They're not even going to come after me for that. Like that one video, I think it was a Tommy G video where he went with people who would just straight up walk in and say, this is part of my routine.

Graham Stephan

I'm just going to go in there with a bag. I'm going to openly do this. They're not going to stop them. I get $800. I'm going to sell it to the guy down the street for 100.

I've made a day's worth of work. And the prices and the homelessness and just the filthy. That guy's brilliant. Why? Like, so we must ask ourselves, why is he doing that instead of, like, actually doing a job that would pay him quite more and with way less risk than, you know, what's the risk?

Hasan Piker

Stealing. It doesn't seem like he's a risk. Whenever you steal, there's still. There could be a citizen that, you know, comes in. It's not like, like, like, think about it this way.

Do you like stealing? No, exactly. I don't either. We wouldn't stop it because I know. Now you can be saying.

That's what I'm saying. I'm talking about like, like, what motivates someone to go out and steal? I think it's infinitely more productive if that person had some kind of productive output instead of stealing toiletries and then selling it down the street. You know what I mean? Not to say that this doesn't happen.

Of course it's happening. But I look at that and I think, well, why doesn't it happen everywhere? Why doesn't it happen not just in, like, red cities, because it's happening in red cities, too. It's just that cities tend to be more diverse and therefore vote democratic because they think the democratic party, I guess, is, like, less openly racist than the Republican Party or whatever for a multitude of different reasons, and they end up voting democratic. But, like, cities where high numbers of the population congregate have tremendous issues with real estate.

And that's why you see more income inequality in cities, and that's why you see, like, crime running rampant in cities, even though technically it's a. It's a problem in red states as well. Do you think there should be stricter punishments on crime? I think that the solution to fixing crime, if it was more draconian measures, stricter punishments, America would be crime free. It would be a crime free dystopia.

We house, like I said last time, I believe we house 25% of the incarceration incarcerated population of the planet. In spite of the fact that we only have 4% of the entire planet's population. We have the highest prisoner per capita density. If that was especially even in California. California is a state in and of itself.

If it was a nation state, would still house some of the largest prisoner population on the planet. So, obviously, more stricter measures and worse prison conditions is not a successful policy at all. And we, for some weird reason, keep trying the same thing over and over again and doing, like, more of it and hoping that it'll fix itself this time when it has been a demonstrable failure. And that's because you can't solve crime or poverty by criminalizing poverty or having worse, more draconian measures as a way to enforce it. It's not a valid deterrence.

It seems clearly you can kind of make it go away a little bit. It, like, you can put. Cast it aside and feel like, you know, the streets have been cleaned, I guess, because, like, now the poor people are not in. Within our vicinity and they're not doing crimes or whatever. But ultimately, where did you do?

What did you do? You put them in prison? I guess so. It's not about enforcement. We do a lot of that.

I do think that police are overall very bad at their jobs, for sure. In places like San Francisco and places like Los Angeles, absolutely. Our police department is very bad at enforcement to begin with, but there's a whole different subject. But I don't think it's necessarily about the punishments itself. But instead of a lack of opportunity, a lack of access, not having enough educational opportunities, and beyond that, no no decent rehabilitative measures and also no real future prospects for a lot of people anyway.

Our collective psyche is kind of broken in America, where we just don't feel like, you know, a lot of people, at least in my generation, don't feel like they're ever going to own a home, that they're ever going to retire. I feel like that probably plays a role in the way that people operate and the way that people view themselves and the way they behave. How do you think Japan is doing it differently? Because we were both there recently. I love Japan.

Graham Stephan

Oh, my gosh. It was. To me, it was like a utopia. It really was. It was so clean.

There were no homeless. Everyone was polite, and I felt completely safe. It's the public trash cans is what it is. Two decades of deflation that'll do it. No, I mean, that's.

Hasan Piker

That's. I'm joking, but. So, for example, japanese work culture is very different. You can't get fired. They can't fire you in Japan.

In most corporations, no matter what you do, you can't get fired. It's not in, I think it's, like, legally protected as well, but it's also very culturally protected. It's capitalism on overdrive in many respects, with a collectivist identity that was built into them for thousands of years due to pushing out western influence and still maintaining that through a series of xenophobic attitudes and legislation that they champion, even though it hurts them in the long run. I think that probably plays a big role in the way that the Japanese still continue to, I guess, uh, keep society ticking without complete collapse, complete failure. But, uh, they do a lot of that, like pushing the.

Brushing everything aside, uh, as well. There's, there's a lot of homeless people in Japan. You just don't see them because, like, one, there are more diverse housing opportunities that we would consider to be unconscionable. There's also a shit ton of housing that is readily available that people aren't living in because most people have moved into the cities. And that's a big problem as well.

The government is trying to incentivize people to go back to the urban, to the farmland, basically, because there's like, entire villages that are decimated, just empty things are just cheaper. They build more, they build more housing in general. And that definitely plays a big role in making Japan at least seem like it's a little bit better as a tourist, which is very different than, like, living there. I think there's a lot of societal problems in Japan. Aging population, I think younger generations also are seeing that same anxiety that we experience here in America as well, with, like, no future prospects and whatnot.

But, I mean, no society is devoid of problems. Their criminal prosecution is also very, very authoritarian. Yes, they have a super strict policy. It's like, just say you did the crime and you will get off. Easier than being held in not solitary confinement, but being held for questioning for 28 days until they make you admit that you did something, even if you didn't do it.

They have, like, a 99% conviction rate or something like that. So there's issues in their court system as well. But I don't think that's the solution. I don't think that's the reason why there is, like, seemingly less crime in Japan overall. I saw a really interesting study that showed in a pretty linear chart that liberals are more unhappy than conservatives.

Jack Selby

Do you know why that is? I have some opinions. Maybe. Let's hear them. I mean, I think conservatives have a lot of fun.

Hasan Piker

I mean, they're, like, very paranoid, depending on what layer of conservatism we're talking about. If we're talking about, like, QAnon people, I think they're, like, scared all the time. They're scared of the shadows. But I think the average conservative doesn't really think about things much. And they're just like, yeah, things are fine.

I think I'm just going to make it on my own. And they just have fun. Whereas maybe liberals are constantly worried about how shitty everything is and that that hurts their feelings. David Pakman said something about conservatives are more fear based. Yeah, and maybe that's the reason why they enact the policies that they do or have the beliefs that they have, because it's based out of, on fear and self protection rather than the benefit of others.

Graham Stephan

At least that's what he theorized. No, I think he's nailing it. That's absolutely correct. I think that that is a big part of the conservative ideology. Now, it does seem like a lot of very public figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are sympathizing more with conservatives over time.

Why do you think that is? I mean, they're really rich, but they. Didn'T just become rich. I know, but they got really, really rich. So you think it's when they cross.

Jack Selby

The billion, you go from, like 80 billion to 200. Yeah, I think that maybe that's the threshold for Elon. I think guys like Elon, I mean, they were already like, I have this belief that I think a lot of liberals already are like, primed to be conservative in many ways because, like, there's not a lot of difference from where I'm standing, at least between, like, liberal attitudes and, like, mainstream conservative attitudes. Liberals more so just, like, care a little bit more about harm reduction. And conservatives, depending on what kind of conservative we're talking about, are, like, way more aggro and want to do harm directly.

Hasan Piker

Both sides do fall into black and white thinking as far as, like, good and evil. Things are, people are good, some people are bad, and we have to deal with that on those terms. I don't think people operate on that. I think people operate on their self interest instead, and that, like, no one is truly good or truly evil their actions might be, but deep down inside there, they're born. These opinions and these attitudes are born out of their material condition.

Jack Selby

I have a hard time believing that Elon Musk decided to just, like, randomly have more conservative aligning beliefs. He probably would not identify as a Republican or as a conservative. He says the left should be now so far left, though, like, that's his thing, is, like, I've always been right here, but the left has gone way over here. And that's why now it appears that I'm more right. I think that's just, like, looking for social permission, uh, to be more open and honest about your worldview, in my opinion.

Hasan Piker

Cause, like, obviously the media landscape is dominated by liberals 100%. I mean, a lot of these outlets are liberal. That doesn't mean that they're not conservative. I still think that, like, um, like, Republican, Democrat doesn't matter. I think liberalism is still, uh, either triangulating itself to the center in an increasingly right wing country, or it is a little bit to the center right.

As far as, like, economic policies goes, as far as social policies. I guess there's a lot of lip service being paid to marginalized groups by liberals that, you know, don't really match up with enforcement or regulation or even deregulation in certain aspects. I think Elon Musk, probably the simplest answer is, I assume, maybe COVID, radicalized them a little bit in the right wing direction, and same with Joe Rogan. As how did it radicalize them? I think they felt like the government was restricting freedoms during COVID like many people did, and they found themselves in the comfortable bosom of right wing radicalization.

Because it can be very alluring when you have these opinions and one side is saying, no, you're wrong, and you're a bigot, and the other side is saying, no, you're right. Come listen to us. And we also have some other ideas for you as well. And then you slowly but surely start going, well, these guys agree with me. They're right on this.

They think I'm right on this. Maybe they're right on some other things, too. Too. But then again, I don't really know Elon Musk's like, personal politics. I do know that, like, Tesla was very into Dei and stuff like that as a marketing initiative for many, many years, even though now he's, like, the brave anti Dei warrior.

I think that that was always just for marketing to sell liberals Ev's. And now he doesn't give a shit about that as much. Do you think a lot of companies use Dei just as a marketing ploy? 1000%. That's all it is?

Yes, absolutely. Dei is just a. Is a repackaging of the same concept that both sides are constantly pushing in either direction on. It used to be CRT, not that long ago. Now is Dei.

It was woke, and it still is woke. And before that, it was, you know, affirmative action. Like, people being like, oh, it's affirmative action. Affirmative action is putting people that don't deserve it in the positions of power. I think it's a misunderstanding, and it's a band aid solution to begin with.

And it is. Both sides are misunderstanding the point. Overall, what do you think about Dei? I'm sure you saw the interview between Don Lemon and Elon Musk. I did.

Jack Selby

So they had a really interesting back and forth about Dei, and Elon was just saying, like, on a fundamental level, if I'm quoting him correctly, if you decrease standards for surgeons to include other races or something that people argue are misrepresented or poorly represented in medicine, then it will cause more people to die. Yeah. And then I think that there was a little bit of, like, a miscommunication. Like, Don wasn't really picking up on. That exact, because Don doesn't believe fundamentally that Dei is, like, lowering the standards, and that's why he didn't understand the point Elon was making.

Hasan Piker

And I agree. I don't think Dei is anything. It's just fake people being like, oh, yeah, we care about, like, making sure that there's more black surgeons overall. I also do disagree, even if you were to incorporate more black surgeons into the medical field, that that would be objectively a good thing for american healthcare in general, because there are massive disparities with treating black people in this country, in our healthcare structure.

I think the mortality rate for pregnant black women is insanely higher than the mortality rate for pregnant white women in this country. What's the reason for that? Medical racism is one of the reasons for sure, which is not even something I'm saying as, like, a woke guy. This is literally taught in med school. It's.

It's such a glaring, obvious problem that, like, medical ethics is a class where they do literally sit down and teach you about, like, no, black people do need the same level of painkillers that white people do. Like, we promise, like, think about that. You wouldn't need to do that if there were enough black doctors. Like, they would be in the class being like, yeah, we're the same. Doctors tend to prescribe less painkillers to black people than they do to white people thinking that they can overcome pain easier.

They think they have a higher level of pain tolerance. It's just one aspect, like, one immediate thing that comes to mind when talking about this kind of disparity, but it's normal because you don't. We are, like I said, we're all products of our conditioning. So if that's. If you grew up in a somewhat segregated neighborhood and you never really met any black people, and you only saw black people on television, and the stereotypes were what guided you into understanding what black people are like, and you were, like, kind of always at an arm's length, like, you're not going to know, and you're gonna have some implicit biases about it.

Even if you don't recognize that you do. Even if you're like, oh, I'm not a racist person. Nobody wants to obviously think that way. But even if you don't recognize it, like, you will still have a blind spot for it. Do you think that we should hire surgeons then, purely on merit?

Jack Selby

And do you even think that the question. And I think we should keep doing that. Do you think that, okay, do you think that the question of your race should even be asked? Because even when I was applying to universities and there have been studies that. That have came out that show that different SAT scores for different races will allow them admission into a certain college, do you think that the question of race should even be in the picture, or do you think it should?

Maybe. I think you could argue, oh, what were your parents income? And I feel like that could be a decent question rather than race. Or do you think that the race. Question is, I think that's the even better way to do it.

Graham Stephan

But what if the parents aren't even supporting the kids? Yeah. Are you predating for your college? You will run into that problem as well. But I do still think that, like, coming from a more affluent background?

Hasan Piker

Like I said, I mean, I had to take out student loans, but because I was very affluent growing up, but my father lost all of his money by the time I got to college. I had to take out loans, and I was now fortunate enough to be able to pay those. Pay my brothers, pay my mother's student loans as well. However, that affluent beginning still helped me a lot, I think being able to study for things like study for exams and stuff like that, study for the SAT. But do you think the question of race should even be asked, or do you think that we should just look past it and, as Elon Musk would say, look forward into people's character and their integrity and their skills, rather than back on all of these things in the past?

No, I think that it's not a bad thing to look at the racial background of someone, for sure, because I think a lot of these college campuses, one of the things that you learn in college, college beyond, like, actually learning the. Whatever the fuck you're there to learn. Obviously, this doesn't pertain to, like, hard sciences, but, like, for most people's college experiences, I think one of the things that they learn is, like, being in a diverse environment. So I think that's really beneficial for a lot of people to get a college education in a genuinely diverse environment that reflects the broader american society. So I think that, like, having that kind of, like, at least making sure that you have that that same demographic represented on a college campus is a good thing overall and is more conducive to a better learning environment overall.

Jack Selby

Diversity of. What is it? Diversity of skin color, diversity of intelligence, diversity of, like, socioeconomic status. All of it. But what if you just had a bunch, like, the highest creme de la creme people, the people with the highest scores, and you put all of them together, then don't you think that there could be some positive externalities of that as well?

Hasan Piker

No, I think that. I think it's overall a good thing to have, just like you mentioned, a diversity of intellect, a diversity of background, a diversity of experiences. So I would learn anecdotally, when I was around smart kids in school, I felt and acted smarter. And when you're around a whole bunch of people who are dumb, I felt dumber. And the purpose of that is true.

Jack Selby

That's really true. It's true, though. But, like, I had one AP class, it was like an AP English class. And the difference between that AP class and, like, the normal English class, because I think I got, like, bumped up up huge, and the people I was around, like, forced me to be better as a person versus the other class or the kids. You think you had better teachers in the AP class?

Graham Stephan

No, it was purely the students. And you could see, like, they were very studious. They took the assignments very seriously. They were more intellectual. And that, to me, I absorbed that.

So I'd find myself showing up on time, doing better in this class. So anything that's better for maybe some of the dumb guys to get elevated like he did, like, in his AP. Class, it depends, because how many, you know, should we bring into there? And also, I heard this one analogy, the one time the sled only goes as fast as the slowest dog, which I think also can be kind of applied. Like, if there's one person holding everyone back, you kind of have to go at their pace.

Jack Selby

I remember I read this. You read outline. Graham felt like you got pulled ahead at AP. I did, yeah. Yeah.

I didn't. There was that the stutter, as I stutter. The stutter study. Did you hear this? The stutter study?

Graham Stephan

Yeah, the stutter study. They had, I think it was 20 kids with a really bad stutter, 20 kids without a stutter who spoke really, like, really well. And they mixed them. They put ten of the kids that had a perfect speaking ability in the stutter, ten of the stutter in the perfect speaking. And the people that had the stutter eventually improved, being around other people who didn't have a stutter, and then people who didn't have a stutter spoke worse, and it was purely based on who they were around.

Jack Selby

I guess the question that I wrestle with is, I just don't understand how race still has anything to do with that. Yeah, that wasn't a race thing. It was purely, just literally like the color. Here's how that works. Whether we acknowledge it or not, I think that the wrongs of the past of this country were done on the virtue of the color of your skin.

Hasan Piker

Slavery was dished out by the virtue of you being black, like you were a victim of it if you were a black person. And I think that we never really addressed it. We never offered reparations. The only reparations that this country ever gave was the actual white slave owners for. For lost property.

Basically. In the abolition of slavery, reconstruction became a failure, and that the same racial hierarchy was very quickly instituted by force, mind you, by former slave owners and others who did not like the new racial pecking order and were terrified of black people in positions of power. And I think that that created an environment of chaos that desperately tried to return to the old modes of existence. And because we never truly addressed it, and because we did redlining where we pushed black people into certain neighborhoods, and we built highways around said neighborhoods, we sometimes physically destroyed black neighborhoods that were thriving, like Tulsa. Black people never really got the same level of material equality that white people did.

And it's not just black people either, obviously, like different minority groups throughout time have been oppressed in different ways, never to the same degree as chattel slavery, of course, but almost always, you see those minority groups, groups ultimately get captured under the white umbrella, the broader white umbrella. Irish people were obviously. I mean, they were. It's not a comparison. I'm not saying that, like, irish people had it as bad as black people did, but irish people were definitely discriminated against.

Jewish people were definitely discriminated against throughout our history. Polish people, greek people, japanese people, japanese people. But they all inevitably become a broader part of the white umbrella, or at least the model minority, I guess, whereas that never happened for black people. And we still see the impact of that racial discrimination to this day. It's not an accident that, you know, predominantly black neighborhoods are worse off overall than white neighborhoods are.

You can look at it and say, this is born out of material conditions, external circumstances. That is the reason why next generation, middle class, black person children do worse overall than a middle class white person. And their children, you can look that and say it's because of their race, they're racially inferior, which would make you a racist person. Some right wingers tried to mask that by saying, it's actually culture. It's black culture, even though black culture dominates all american culture.

And some, for some reason, I guess, white people are not impacted by black culture in the same way. Or you can look at that and go, oh, this is a product of racial discrimination being baked into our institutions, whether it be the criminal justice system or whether it be discrimination of different sorts in every facet of society. And I don't mean, like, directly being like, oh, you're a black person. I'm not going to hire you, even though that factors into it as well. I'm talking specifically about, like, the neighborhoods that you grow up in, the educational opportunities that you have, and how much that stunts your growth and limits your opportunities.

I think that that is something that we've never really addressed in this country, and that is the reason why something needs to change. I think that we need to improve that situation altogether. Affirmative action and initiatives like that are a band aid solution to a gaping wound, if you will. But many people don't even want to acknowledge that that wound is there at all. So that's really interesting, because I always wondered, because I know a lot of other people have been subjugated to, like, persecution and being marginalized.

Jack Selby

And, like, we just talked about the irish people, the japanese people, the jewish people that have come to the United States and suffered a lot, but you're saying that they were assimilated and filtered in a little bit more to our culture. For some reason, it was after slavery. We segregated them off still into these certain urban neighborhoods and stuff like that. And then, like you said, built highways around it, and then that kept them. Kind of and purposely underserved these communities because of the way that, like, we've designed our taxing structure as well.

Hasan Piker

Like, if you're in a poor neighborhood, you don't have enough income or you don't have enough taxes to, like, be able to. To have better schools and hire better teachers, and then that creates an unstable environment, a volatile environment, because it's just a poorer neighborhood. You know what I mean? We've done it to white people, too, by the way. Nowadays, I mean, if you look at fucking West Virginia, that's a great example.

It's very white, and it is like a third world country, literally, like, no hospitals for hundreds of miles. Everywhere you look, it's a food desert. People are barely making. People are. Are barely making a living out there.

I think that needs to be solved as well, for sure. It's really interesting. I've never thought about it like that. Do you think there's any solution to this? Or what do you recommend or think is a good idea to at least move in the right direction?

Everything that I explain here, everything that I put forward as a solution, is gonna be shot down by the broader, you know, by the majority of the public because they're so primed into going, why do we care about race at all? Actually, it's been done. Slavery's over. Get over it. No matter how good of an argument.

Jack Selby

I present, I thought that was a really compelling argument. And I don't know, obviously, how much data or media there is on what exactly happened after slavery and how are black people treated differently than these other groups and why they're better off? Black people have continued to suffer. Yeah, I think that. That we also do have a very divisive media environment that primes people into thinking that anytime black people talk about, like, emancipation or economic restitution, it immediately is presented as like, this is anti white.

Hasan Piker

So I think people do have that conditioning as well into thinking, like, oh, wait a minute, like, is this anti white at all? And I'm sure there's a lot of people for sure that are also distasteful of white people across the board. I mean, that definitely is a real thing, but, I mean, it's not. It's ultimately not that big of a deal in my opinion. I mean, look, I don't know about that.

Jack Selby

I think as long as you push someone off to the side, they're just gonna punch right back and it's just not gonna be a good thing. If you have to constantly justify your existence, not just as a black person, but just in any situation. If you constantly have to, like, be overcorrective and, you know, the hangups that people have about people like you and they think you are a certain way, it's probably going to get exhausting after a while. Like, I'm not saying that it's good that people have resentment towards others across the board, but I'm simply stating that, like, I kind of understand why someone might be resentful because, you know, you just automatically assume that I'm going to have similar racial hang ups that, like, many other people who look exactly like me have had throughout time. I understand the resentment as well because that, I think that was a key thing that you just said.

You understand the resentment that these people would have when they feel like they're. Constantly, obviously not all black people. We're just talking about, like, you know, if a black resistant, three white guys. Just talking shop guys I know don't even listen to what we're saying, to be completely honest here. But if you say you can understand that resentment, I can as well.

Like, I see why they would feel that way 100%. I think it's just human nature. Right? But then couldn't you flip that coin and see the other side of the token when people say, oh, you did this because you're white, you're this because you're white. Don't you think that over time it's part of human nature that once again you're gonna be like, okay, guys, serious.

Like, when can I just do something? Get a breath of fresh air and do something? Not just because I'm white, because of the contents of who I am. And all I'm saying is I think that it would help everybody tremendously. I really hope the comment section doesn't have a field day and say, jack is a champion of white, something I don't even know, but no, no, I.

Hasan Piker

Get where you're coming from, for sure. I think a lot of people do get radicalized in that way in the. In a different direction. You said you recognize and understand what I was mentioning as far as, like, system systemic failures and black people across the board being left behind deliberately in many instances. If you recognize that, then you do understand internally that one party does still have this privilege over the other in that regard.

So I don't know. I guess I, like. I do see myself in that regard as a very privileged person. This probably is, like, very frustrating for a lot of white people to hear. They're like, oh, this guy is just, like, fucking genuflecting and saying, like, oh, woe is me.

He's so woke. But, like, I try to use that privilege for good. Like, I know that there are a lot of people who could be moved in a different direction politically that are just simply at first not gonna listen to a black person. They're just not. They're not gonna listen to a trans person about trans issues.

They're not gonna listen to a black person about black issues. So I tried to be a vessel for communicating the different perspectives to an audience that is going to be more receptive to a white dude. Now, this next one, I'm really curious. Everyone's talking about squatters right now. What are your thoughts on the squatter situation?

I think. Oh, man. I think squatters are. I mean, they're dope. Like, as long as no one is living there and it's not being put to use, then the fuck's the house doing anyway?

It's just a piece of property. What about damage to a property? What if someone wants to move back into their property and someone's living there and they say, no, you want to kick me out? And they know the legal system to be able to live there for free. File for bankruptcy, and extend your visit.

Wait, so you can, if you want to live in a property and, like, someone else is like, this is my house. Like, I want to live here. You can just, like, stop them from doing this. I think that that is a little bit trickier. Civil matter.

I think it's a little bit trickier in general. But, like, overall, if it's not, like, that fucking building in downtown Los Angeles, the one that famously has been tagged into oblivion. Yeah. And people are freaking out over. I'm like, why are there so many fucking buildings that are just, like, left halfway in limbo and halfway developed?

It's like, repurpose that, in my opinion, if I'm the government. If I'm Governor Gavin Newsom, gruesome Newsom, I'm coming in and I'm saying, chinese style communist takeover. Eminent domain. That shit's mine now. You guys fucked that up.

We're making this into permanent shelter. We're taking every single person from Skid row and every single homeless person, and we're putting them into that fucking luxury high rise condominium. And not only that, but we're hiring, you know, 10,000 new social workers to make sure that we have the proper tools, readily equipped, so that we can reintegrate these people back into society. And we're gonna have all these fucking jobs for them. We're gonna make them fix potholes, okay?

They're gonna love to do it because they're gonna get paid to do it, and we're gonna treat their drug addiction and as a. As a wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. Perfect fucking solution. What good is a house when it's empty as an investment vehicle? Sure.

Graham Stephan

You would see, you'd give the squatters rights that if someone decides to move into a vacant house without a lease agreement, they could claim that they have a lease and they should be entitled to live there. It's a little medieval, but, you know, look, people need shelter, and I think if they're. They're getting it that way. I think it's, like, the worst way to solve it. But if it's medieval, should then the property owner be able to defend their property, go in there and forcibly remove somebody, just like in medieval times?

Hasan Piker

It depends entirely on if we're being serious. I think it depends entirely on, like, whether they genuinely want to live there or not. Right. But overall, I think that, like I said, I personally love discouraging people from home ownership. Like, not home ownership, sorry, but, like, using homes as a vehicle, as an investment vehicle.

But what's the funniest place to say? But what's interesting is that for a lot of the squatters, it's not, uh. The property's not used as an investment vehicle. It could be, uh, somebody passed away. The house is empty for a week or two while they try to sell it.

Graham Stephan

They go to list the home for sale, and the realtor says, hey, there's a whole family living in here. There's, like, three people. I can't show it. They claim they have a lease agreement. They try to get them out, but they say, no, we have a lease, and then it's six months to get them out.

Hasan Piker

Yeah, I think edge cases like that, sure. Uh, demand legal expediency. But overall, I mean, when I think of squatters, like, I'm thinking of, like, the. There was a coalition of, like, black mothers that were in a house in Oakland, I think I remember. And they had to be, like, taken out by force by the SWAT team at a certain point.

And they were doing it as partially as a protest as well, maybe a couple years back. Like, there are plenty of homes that are just vacant. Vacant, you know, and they're just. They're an escrow. They're vacant.

Who knows when they'll sell? There's a shit ton of property, as I'm sure you know, that are owned by, like, foreign investors. And they're just empty. They're sitting there because it looks good on their portfolio. Or maybe they got a.

What's that visa that you get for $500,000 of investment into the United States. You got it for, like, visa purposes or whatever. Can you say the same thing about a car? That if somebody doesn't have a car and there's a vehicle that's not being driven, you should have the rights to use that person's vehicle. That could be cool, I think.

Jack Selby

Do you have more than one car? I don't. That would have been a good. I want another car. You know, that would be kind of.

Graham Stephan

So what's interesting is that DeSantis passed a bill in Florida called the property rights bill that made it a first degree misdemeanor for making a false statement in writing, a second degree felony for any person who unlawfully trespasses or occupies a residential dwelling, and a first degree felony for knowingly advertising the sale or rent of a residential property without legal authority. And it's to combat squatters. Wait, you can do it? You can try to sell it if you're a squatter. I don't understand.

Hasan Piker

What's the third one? You could try to sublease the property. That's sick. Get your money up. So that was actually a very common scam on Craigslist.

Graham Stephan

Oh, yeah. Back in the day, I remember 2010 through 2013, it was a big issue, that empty properties that were listed on the MLS at the time, people would go in, usually from other countries listed on Craigslist, and then for a really low price for rent. And so people inquire about it, and they say, hey, I'm out of the country. Usually I'm on deployment. I just want someone nice to rent my house out.

Send me $500 and it's yours, and they'll send a lease agreement. They sign it, they send the $500, the people show up, and then it turns out it was a fake listing, and they just got scammed. That's crazy. I mean, that's. That's bad.

Hasan Piker

That's bad for everybody involved, for sure. I don't think that there is an issue with that side of it. I just don't know what the application of it will be. I haven't read into it. I'd have to look into it a little bit further to give you, like, a.

Like, my full blown opinion on it. On its face, obviously, as it goes, most legislation is not written as, like, we're going to shoot homeless people, Bill. But I feel like sometimes the results do come out to be that. That, uh, and it's also deSantis. So I I'm sure it's devious and awful in general.

Like I said, I'd have to do a little bit more reading on it. On its face, the. The legal language doesn't seem all that out there, but the enforcement of it probably will be very. The enforcement of it will probably cause a lot of harm. But as far as the cars question that you asked, as a beautiful question, why is it a beautiful question?

Because we need to have public transit. Like, if we had public transit, then you have just completely eradicated the need to steal someone's car to drive it. Right? In that situation, just like if we had public housing, you have completely eradicated the need for someone to be like, I don't have a home. Well, I don't think people are stealing cars because they want to drive.

But in that direct analogy, it would be because people aren't, like, squatting in houses, because they're like, I fucking love squatting. They're squatting in houses because, like, I don't have a home. Or it could be they want to save money. There was a story. This is crazy.

Graham Stephan

Now, I know this is an extreme, but there was a house that a colleague rented in 2009, and this guy was, like, a really wealthy attorney. This guy had a ton of money, and the house he was renting, I think, was like $15,000 a month. It was a home in Beverly Hills. Developer built this as a spec house to sell, and the real estate market was crashing and values were plummeting, and he was in it more than the house was worth. So he was underwater on the loan.

So he decided, I'm gonna rent it out, and what I could do is at least cover my cost. This guy moved in knowing that the owner was, like, a month behind on his payments. So he purposely sought out this house and knew that he could rent it. So he moved in, he paid the first month rent, paid the deposit, stopped paying rent afterwards. He knew the owner was doing, like, a loan modification.

But in order to do and qualify for the loan modification, you have to stop making your payments. So the owner was accepting at the same time that he wasn't making his payments to try to modify the loan to get some amount forgiven. But in the process of doing that, the tenant found this loophole that basically said, or he was familiar with this, so he purposely tried to do this, not paying his rent, and he stopped and said, I'm not going to pay my rent until you pay your mortgage. And the owner says, like, I don't have, you know, like, I need to do this. I can't afford the house.

Hasan Piker

That's a DNA slick. You have to admit. That's a bit, that's kind of brilliant. So what ended up happening, believe it or not, is that for two years, the tenant was able to stay there. And what the tenant did halfway through, to stay there even longer because he went through the eviction, is filed for bankruptcy.

Graham Stephan

Didn't have to go through with it, but just filed. And they kept postponing and postponing. The, the owner of the house ended up losing it to foreclosure. I mean, it's. He didn't have enough money coming, and.

Hasan Piker

It'S shitty for that guy. Yes, I get it. But it's kind of like, I mean, he got. God a little bit. Yeah.

You know what I mean? But it turns out later, this guy discovered that. This guy just has a habit of doing that. He purposely seeks out houses where the owner's doing a loan modification, moves in, stops, bang. Wow, that's kind of brilliant.

I mean, honestly, that, like, I'm in awe of what people do to take advantage of, like, a fucked up structure to begin with, obviously. Demonstrably. Like, the loan modifications and everything else that, like, definitely participated in the, in the broader crisis. Right. One guy, at least, was able to use that to his advantage while manipulating and weaponizing, uh, bankruptcy filings, which many people do to begin with.

I mean, bankruptcy is not something that you can take advantage of as, like, a poor person. Usually. It's something that you can take. It's there for mostly people who were wealthy at certain, at a certain point or are still wealthy, uh, to avoid legal scrutiny in different ways. But, yeah, this guy, this guy seemingly got his, uh, he, he was able to, he was able to utilize it in a much better way than like the people that I'm thinking of, which is, you know, like a poor homeless family that is looking for shelter.

And I do understand the human need for them to get shelter. I guess I felt bad for the property owner because they also, he also had a family. This house was part of his journey to be able to support his family. That's what I'm saying. See, everyone, homes are a vehicle of.

Investment and a vehicle for wealth accumulation. But also keep in mind, I mean, they're tearing down, when they build these constructions, they're tearing down on old, old, old houses where it wouldn't make sense for someone to move in. I mean, the house is from the 1920s falling apart. It needs investment. Like, you have to buy that house and put hundreds of thousands at minimum.

Jack Selby

Just to make it live. I'm not saying keep the houses old and shitty. I'm a believer that we should reinvest into our communities and rebuild them and uplift them in general. I just don't think that the only way to do that is through the private purchase of homes specifically for wealth accumulation. Well, see, in this case, a lot of the constructions, it's like a first time homebuyer is not going to do that.

Graham Stephan

It's not going to take on the project. It's going to require hundreds of thousands just to make it livable. So the market for that is pretty slim. The market for a fully redone house is much greater. No, I agree.

Hasan Piker

I'm saying that there should be a better solution. And for eradicating the need to even do something so dire in this circumstance is the extreme case. Obviously, it's like one guy doing this, but in most circumstances it's extreme in the other direction where people are like super, super poor. Like, you're not going to squat in someone's house, right? I'm not going to squat in someone's house.

There's a whole legal complication that I don't want to take on. I got a fucking job. You know what I mean? I got mouths to feed. I got business to attend to.

I'm not going to do that. Why? Because my financial conditions make it so that I don't ever have to. I don't even have to think about that. And I think I would laugh at that notion, but there's no more like myself.

So the way I look at it is how do we make sure that there are more people who are in a better financial situation? If, if someone had shelter, if someone had access to public housing, they're not going to squat. And how many different things can eradicate those. Eradicate the other people who are like. Like trying to manipulate the system.

Graham Stephan

But how would that be different than any other type of theft? If someone just breaks in and says, I'm gonna take this, you already have it. I don't have it. It's mine. Cause for a lot of people, they would say that taking over a property is theft of that property.

Hasan Piker

That's a great question. I think that one is something that you need to survive, depending on situation to situation, obviously something that you need to survive, you need to brave the. You can't brave the elements. Whereas in the other circumstance, like theft, like property theft, like you stealing something from another person is still overall a much more traumatic experience than like, someone sitting in an empty house. I say this as someone who has, you know, who has experienced that quite a bit.

I mean, obviously there's a lot of. There's a lot of wealth disparity. I understand where it comes from. It is what it is. You know, it's the cost of doing business, I guess, like living and its life in the big city.

But I also do recognize why that would be a more traumatic experience overall, especially if it's like, you know, at gunpoint or something. It's more so the. The, like, society is collapsing right in front of you in that very moment, versus someone squatting in an empty, vacant home that is not being put to use. What are your thoughts on Castle Doctrine? It's fucking nutty.

I think it's very american. Do you like it or do you not? No, I don't like it. So for those that don't know, Castle Doctrine, also known as Castle law or defense of habitation law, is a legal doctrine that designates a person's abode or any legally occupied place, for example, an automobile or a home, as a place in which that person has protections and immunities permitting one in certain circumstances to use force, up to and including deadly force, to defend oneself against an intruder, free from legal prosecution for the consequence of the force used. If someone goes into your house, you're able to delete them.

Jack Selby

Yeah, to protect her. It's another one of those situations where, like, the law seems sound at face value, and you look at it, you're like, what the fuck? What do you mean? If some rapist is, like, trying to come in and my family or something, like, I should be able to shoot them, right? That's.

Hasan Piker

That's what you think. And that's what you. That's what the law is like, specifically supposedly designed for but then castle doctrine is greatly expanded where you can shoot someone ringing your fucking doorbell and say, I'm scared. You know what I mean? And you probably get prosecuted for that.

Yeah, but that gives you some level of, like, legal protection in those circumstances. And then there's also an expansion on the castle doctrine where you can utilize castle doctrine when you're out and about. And this has happened many instances. Many instances like high profile killings of black people, for example, where like, someone will just like, shoot a black person and be like, it was a castle doctrine. I was scared.

I was scared for my safety. This person was like, coming at my car. And that is used as a legal cover, and it is quite expansive. And depending on what state you're looking at, the law should be significantly more restrictive in situations like that. Like, I would put precautions in there for even force, you know what I mean?

Making sure that we don't encourage people to be so gung ho about, you know, using extreme force, like taking someone's life for anything and everything. I guess my concern. So you were saying there's lots of negative externalities from Castle doctrine because you can expand that into other things that aren't necessarily going back to your house. Exactly. And I see concern with the externalities of removing castle doctrine because then essentially you're incentivizing people to go into other people's houses because they're like, okay, well, if I go into this person's house, I'm not going to get shot.

The point I will always make is this. This is a fundamentally american conversation to have. Have. Here's why almost every other country does not have castle doctrine. There aren't like a litany of home invasion break in rape scenarios that are occurring in all these other countries.

So one must ask the question, why is America preventing even more home invasions from occurring with this castle doctrine? Or is it a law that is designed and is oftentimes used in those extreme circumstances? And it gives basically people the allowance to. To feel like they're free to shoot people if they come to their homes and are inconveniencing them or scaring them. It seems like the fundamental belief that you have is that you give people every tool necessary to live a good life and then they will live a good life, essentially.

Jack Selby

Maybe a basic income, a job, some meaning in their life, good resources, access to technology, Internet and stuff like that. And fun, I think. And fun, like items, consumer purchases is a big part of that for sure. Like, you know, get people to have a little bit of free time, whether it's drinking, whether it's gambling, whether it's whatever the fuck they want to buy thumb, silly things. And that essentially solves every issue.

Hasan Piker

No, of course. Well, like. But a lot of important issues. And I do believe that. I think.

I guess the reason why I believe that is because, like, I look at the United States of America and the problems that we face, and then I look at like my theory in practice in many countries, right? What I'm talking about is such a normal part of everyday existence that people look to us in the United States of America like we're fucking crazy cowboys in the way that we live. They don't understand it. They're like, what do you mean you don't have healthcare? What do you mean?

Your healthcare is tied to your job. So if you lose your job, like, you lose your healthcare, what the fuck? And you have to pay $30,000 for like a regular procedure. That sounds insane. And they're right.

It is fucking insane. So we have been conditioned into thinking that this is normal and the alternative is scary socialism or whatever. But like in a lot of countries right now, they do have these social safety nets. They do have no castle doctrine, for example. And things are fine.

People aren't going around and it's not a chaotic situation where home invasions are occurring every single day. I think human beings are very adaptable to their environment. And if we overall are priming people up with the idea that everyone is violent, everyone's out to get you. Hyper individualism all the way, you have to be self interested. Greed is good.

If you prime people up in that way. Yeah, they're going to respond in that way and they are going to genuinely think that if you don't have castle doctrine, people are going to be doing break ins like nonstop. Or that, you know, the lack of deterrence is the reason why people are doing crimes, for example, in all these big democrat cities when in fact it's abject poverty and horrible living conditions for so many people and overall no end in sight for the cruelty that they see on a daily basis, they experience on a daily basis. And I want to fix those problems instead of trying to do the same old backwards way of thinking of like, oh no, if we put in deterrence measures like this will stop when we have so many deterrence measures in this country and it hasn't stopped. That makes sense.

Jack Selby

Even if it's just intuitively. I think that makes a lot of sense. I guess the main problem I feel like that could exist with that is just the idea of taxing more and taking more people's money, because I think a vast majority of Americans just think that the money is just being mismanaged. Is not even being mismanaged per se, but it's like it's being deliberately channeled into these avenues where the reason why I brought up, like, housing policies that, like, Californians vote on and then see no end in sight to, like, the horrible housing market conditions that we have and the homelessness that is born out of that is because, like, we do have a lot of money. We could do project Turnkey, the initiative to revitalize, like, old vacant hotels and turn them into homeless shelters.

Hasan Piker

Even though there's not even a fucking permanent solution. It's a temporary one. Shelters can be very violent for homeless people. Like, way more violent than even living on the street, which is crazy to think of, where you can't bring your own property. We have to go cold turkey, which leads to a lot of medical complications, where there's a litany of assaults and sexual violence and the like and thefts as well.

So it's already like a hostile environment for them, too, inside of shelters in comparison to permanent shelter, like a housing first policy, where you have some level of privacy and some level of dignity so you can, you know, focus on reintegrating into society and also rehabilitating. All of those initiatives get purposely kept up, purposely stopped, I guess, by people who genuinely don't want it to happen, whether it be the chamber of commerce that doesn't think that we should re incorporate vacant hotels and, like, turn them into homeless shelters, because then what will people think? Then the hotel is gone. No one is ever going to want to live. No one's ever going to want to frequent that hotel ever again if they ever turn it back into a normal hotel.

Like, there's financial interests at play that stop these initiatives. So it's mismanagement for sure, but it's beyond that. I think that there's a lot of corporate interests, a lot of capital interests that plays a role in the mismanagement, starving the beast. And reaganomics has been very successful in this country, and it has led to the demise of american existence in the way way and the american dream, if you will, because it didn't stop with Reagan, you know what I mean? Bill Clinton was also a massive neoliberal.

So many austerity measures implemented under his watch, and that's kind of continued on and we've continued on that trajectory and with seemingly no end in sight. And I'm not saying that the solutions are easy. And you can, you know, change it overnight. I'm simply stating that, like, we have to move in that direction, no matter how shitty that turn might look like at first, because that is the only viable long term solution out of this without completely succumbing to crisis. So to change the current, the tides of this conversation, this is completely different.

Jack Selby

But how do you think Mayorkas has performed as director of Homeland Security, which is a job that's main responsibility, is to counterterrorism and enhance security, secure and manage our borders? I mean, I think as far as, like, DHS, ironic. Cause, like, we have terrorism and, like, an ice under the same umbrella, which I think is, like, really funny. I mean, there's not that much, like, foreign terrorism happening under his watch. So I guess that's a big dub for him.

Hasan Piker

But as far as immigration goes, I think it's not even just Mallorcas, but I think the Democrats have failed tremendously in processing migrants expeditiously and ensuring that. I am using this word a lot, integrated into society and can have tps and work status as well, which is like, what many people are begging for right now in places like New York and Chicago. I think the Republicans have done a really brilliant job of politicizing this issue and, like, fucking up the process even further in a country where this process is already pretty broken fundamentally. And, you know, the human trafficking component of, like, shipping tens of thousands of migrants without giving a proper. Without giving proper acknowledgement ahead of time to the places that you're shipping them is both uniquely cruel and uniquely inhumane, brilliant politically, because then you're like, see, they are failing with it, too.

You know, these blue states, they're supposed to be sanctuary states. They're failing with this process as well, just like we're failing with it. When I think that the influx of migrants is not only not a bad thing, but it is part of the reason why America's economic engine has turned for as many years as it has. I also personally believe that we have enough wealth in this country that there is no lump sum of labor, that this is a fallacy. There can only be a lump sum of labor that is like, you know, for a limited amount of the population.

If there is a different tier of labor, undocumented migrants are undocumented. Aviva Chomsky talks about this extensively. Noam Chomsky's daughter, she wrote about this. The criminalization of migrants is, I guess, not a relatively new phenomenon in american history, but it was born out of the interests of capital to create an underclass, a permanent underclass of people that don't have the same legal, uh, protections that the documented worker class, the documented labor class has, that you can easily exploit. I think that Republicans and Democrats both rely on undocumented labor, and they want them to stay undocumented so that there's always a pool of.

Of laborers that you can recycle, that you can cast aside when you're done with them, and you can hyper exploit them. That ends up depressing domestic labor wages in general, because. Because you're not going to pick avocados. You know what I mean? You're not going to go out and pick avocados for fucking $0.20 an hour.

But someone else will. And as long as there's someone else that will do that, and every business owner knows this, why will they do that? Because they're not documented. Because they have different economic circumstances. They're coming from much worse conditions overall.

So we have this labor process in the country that makes sure that those people are kept undocumented so that we can continue hyper exploiting them, uh, and. And cycle them out when we see fit. An example I always use is purdue. Not the pharmaceutical, but the chicken factory. Purdue has a process where they go specifically to undocumented immigrant populations.

They literally build trailer parks next to their fucking poultry facilities for said undocumented immigrant populations. They bring them into the factory, they use them and abuse them. They deny them back pay. There is, like, rampant sexual assault happening on the factory floor. And whenever.

And this has happened before, when the workers get together and they go, okay, what the fuck? You haven't paid me enough. Like, I have back pay that you. You I demand from you. There's sexual assaults that are happening on the factory floor.

They call ice. They fucking bring in ICe. Everyone gets fucking deported. Everyone gets put into a processing facility, and then they go back again because there's always new undocumented migrants coming in. They go back again, and they.

They bring in a new pool of undocumented migrants to the same fucking trailer parks so they can use them again. We talked about incentives before, when the government doesn't punish businesses for hiring undocumented workers and simultaneously refuses to document said undocumented workers and don't. And doesn't have a faster, fast track process where they can expeditiously go through the paperwork to document them so they can become a part of the documented labor force. Well, they're basically telling you, like, yeah, no, keep using undocumented labors. It's great.

We keep prices low. This way, we'll keep giving you subsidies and we'll only punish you a little bit. We'll give you a slap on the wrist when we catch you, when you call ice on your own workers. So everyone makes that same math calculation where they're like, yeah, it's much easier for us. We get way greater returns when we continue to use undocumented laborers and we'll pay a fine.

Inevitably, as long as the government is not punishing us and they are not, it's great. We'll keep doing this over and over again. So it's a system that, that is designed for its purpose. So it's doing exactly what it needs to do from the perspective of those in positions of power. They can yell about, like, how scary immigrants are or whatever, but ultimately it's an economic problem.

And if you, if these Republicans were truly racist, for example, if they were like, we cannot live around Mexicans, like, no fucking way. They would literally do what Oregon did. Back in the day, Oregon was a, was a no slave state. Why? It was a white state because they did not want to live around black people that badly.

Where they were like, no slaves at all. Because we just don't want to live around black people. So they, they were truly racist in that sense. So they had, they had laws against having any black people around, uh, whatsoever. If American Republicans were that racist, if they really didn't want to have undocumented immigrants in this country, they would fucking destroy any company that hires undocumented laborers.

But they don't do that because that whole reactionary sentiment of white nativist immigration policies revolves around ensuring, knowing full well that people are going to come in regardless and kind of, you know, kind of even enthusiastically guiding that process while simultaneously saying, oh, no, they're rapists, they're drug dealers, they're murderers, they're scary. And that's why we have to do more enforcement on the border. That way you ensure that no one ever sympathizes with undocumented migrants. And there's no amnesty, there's no documentation process. And that process is more focused on enforcement rather than processing these people so they can become a part of the documented labor force and advocate for better wages alongside the documented american labor force.

Graham Stephan

Speaking of wages, what are your thoughts on unpaid internships? I think it's bad. Why is that? I mean, because you're still doing a job. You know what I mean?

Hasan Piker

You're getting trained to do a job, but it's the same if you didn't. It's the same if you oops sorry if the same as you were starting in that position anyway, I think you should pay interns for sure. Now, what about you and your example where you worked for free for the Young Turks and you got experience, you grew as a person and you came out better because of it. Wouldn't that be almost the same thing that you were putting in work for free? Yeah, it is the same as putting in work free.

I did put in work for free. It would have been much better if I got paid for it. That's it. Like all three of us did unpaid. Work for a good amount of time.

I still think that the way I see it is it doesn't matter how unskilled someone is in a particular field, it doesn't matter if you're training them. I guess I have a drastically different perspective on this. I guess. But as long as they are providing value and there is a contract at play, like you are contracting them as an unpaid intern, they should still get a percentage of the value that they provide. Now, how is it different from going to college?

Graham Stephan

Because in this case, you're learning something. Like you, you might be learning a skill or a trade or something, but you're paying for that experience. You know, you wouldn't be very shocked when you find out that I don't think college should be paid at all. I think college free. But even if that's free, how would that differ from an unpaid internship?

That's not to say there are countries. Where they even pay you to specifically take on certain, uh, certain majors. For example, the government will pay you because there's like, let's say there's a need for doctors. We don't have enough doctors. Let's say.

Hasan Piker

Well, we literally don't in America, but that's a whole different story. Let's say we don't have enough teachers, right? The government should not only. Not only is education free in this society that I envision, but now the government is also paying you to go get education, technical training, and to learn how to become a teacher. I think that is what we should be doing, and that is what some countries do already.

Graham Stephan

So you think under any conditions, nobody should work for free? You can do work for free if you want to, right? Like, I'm not going to be like, it's illegal. You know what I mean? Like, if you, if you truly want to do something for free, then that's fine.

Hasan Piker

You know, I, I did it, but it still would have been better if I got paid for it. The way that we're seeing it. Is the fact that we were so excited to work, that we wanted to work and we wanted to provide value and we wanted to be, you know, like the person's right hand man. Like, we'll just happily do it for free. Whereas in other instances, probably the ones that you're thinking about, it's like companies that work with colleges and then try to source free labor from students, which.

Graham Stephan

I think is like an exploitation of free labor versus people who are truly doing it to get ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's better overall if there is a payment across the board for it. I mean, it goes back to like, NCAA athletes. Right? Like, I'm sure you think it's a good idea that they can at least, like now make money off of merchandising agreements.

Hasan Piker

I think it should go beyond that. I think the college should pay them too, as well. But the fact that they were able to make so much money off of their likeness and they see nothing in return for that, I think was ridiculous. If someone approached you to learn and work and they supported your cause and wanted to work for free, would you pay them anyway? I mean, I probably wouldn't hire them if I have no need for them, but if I did, then I would pay them.

Yeah. Do you pay your twitch mods? Yeah. Do you pay your discord mods? Uh, yeah, I pay every, I pay every single person in my community in, in different ways.

Uh, and it's not like a, like a contracted, uh, it's not a contract basis specifically because I, the discord, I don't even touch in general. It's like elections are had and then the teams then decide on who they want to bring in as like regulators and whatever. I think. I'm not entirely familiar with how that works, to be honest with you. But overall, I, if it's an avenue that I'm like, generating income from in some capacity, then, and if it's like something that I cannot live without and I need help in a specific field, I still want to ensure that people that work in, people that are there are just like doing it for fun.

Like, they're not there. I'll take on the, the workload, the, you know, the majority of the workload myself because like, that's, you know, I think that's my responsibility overall. And I don't want to like, incentivize people to do it for money, basically. I don't want people to like, uh, I don't want people to sit there for 8 hours. I don't think anyone else is going to do that.

I think it's a fucking ridiculous proposition. And I feel like when you have a contract of that sort, then it's like. Like I'm requiring a shit ton of, like, emotional labor, even from people that I don't think is appropriate to ask of. So one thing that is a common controversy that people accuse you of is the champagne socialist. Can you explain what a champagne socialist is?

I think a champagne socialist is born out of the misunderstanding that, like, socialism implies that you have to be poor, that, like, you cannot be successful, and that, like. Like, everyone has the same thing. Like, it's. Socialism is about, like, instituting by force the. The same standards of existence for everyone.

You know, city, the gray city blocks come to mind, you know, social housing, soviet era, maybe. Equity instead of equality. Exactly. That was the word I was looking for. Thank you so much.

It is about. It is about equity instead of equality. That's what people misunderstand about socialism. It is not about equity instead of equality at all. All.

We don't have material equality as a baseline in this country. We don't have that at all. I'm advocating for a baseline of material equality, and I'm advocating for better worker protections, better worker rights, and more and less alienation from labor and more autonomy that. That everyone can have a say because they are a part of the puzzle, that everyone that touches a project also has some level of. Some level of say in what gets done with the surplus labor.

So it has nothing to do with, like, you know, making sure everyone is poor or whatever the fuck people think about socialism. I don't really care too much about it as far as, like, as far as an own, like, people be like socialism, but you have an iPhone or socialism because these, like, dumb things that you buy that are very expensive, which is true. I do. I buy fucking expensive shit from time to time. I'm an idiot.

But I've always, you know, these. These are things that I wanted to buy. Of course. I don't find that to be, I guess, a marker for your political beliefs at all. There are levels to it, though, for sure.

Right. But to a casual viewer that just kind of hears about you and maybe sees a few clips of you, a lot of the times, it's like ranting on wealthy people and, oh, people need to be taxed more. There's a privileged person, and then they look at your lifestyle and they see that you. You bought this fancy $3 million house or whatever. You have a Porsche.

Jack Selby

You got, like, you know, you got canceled for a $1000 shirt that you wore to Coachella. I did. Yeah. That was so. God.

Anyway, but you, but you see how this juxtaposition would confuse a lot of people and be like, this guy seems like a little bit hypocritical. Yeah, no, for sure. I understand that. But there's nothing I can do beyond the fact that, like, this is not explaining that this is not inherently contradictory to the things that I advocate for, especially considering that, like, I have no issues with being taxed more. I pay the tax rates that I do in California that you probably know better than I do.

Hasan Piker

Um, and although the spending on those taxes is not, uh, is not the best, I wish that they would spend it better. I still see that as my patriotic duty, knowing that at least some percentage of that is still going to places that desperately need it, like schooling, like the roads and, and, you know, whatever, whatever social amenities that are offered, the marginal amount of public transit that we do have. I guess overall, it's not inherently contradictory. Uh, it's not about socialism, is not about forcing people to live a certain set of standards. And I.

But that's impossible for me to, to change the mindset of, of every american. We are all conditioned to hate socialism in general. I think I've talked about this before, but I think one of the worst things that I ever said in my career was openly admitting that, or not even, like, saying, I'm not a socialist. I wish I had never done that. It doesn't matter what I advocate for.

If I had never said that. And there are plenty of people who don't that have almost identical values to me that are received in a much more favorable light, as a matter of fact, celebrated for how kind and how open minded they are. But when you get hit with that socialism sticker, everybody goes, oh, oh, Venezuela, Stalin, you want, you know, cultural revolution in this country and, or whatever. Whatever they think the socialist bogeyman is. I think that that was a major l for me, I guess, but because I'm so fucking stubborn, I just, you know, I can't shut the fuck up.

And I should have. Should have grifted a little bit. So making money and making more money than you need, making more money than you could possibly want, that is all a good thing. And you're saying a true socialist would, would argue that that is totally fine. The main.

How you make your money is important. Okay, sure. That's the fundamental difference that people don't understand. So I don't have investments. I do have a.

I guess, what is it, a 401K or IRA or something. I have that because like, I want to make sure that, you know, I. You can't work forever. Obviously, I do want to have a safety net when I inevitably stop working one day. However, I don't have investments.

Graham Stephan

Why? I know everybody always. Yeah, because that seems silly to me to not want to invest in a country that's given you so much opportunity as well. I don't see, because I don't see it as a net positive. I think that overall that is the fundamental difference between someone who is a capitalist or someone who makes money via capital accumulation versus someone who makes money via their labor.

Hasan Piker

I make all of the money that I make off of as ethical means as I possibly can conduct. What I mean by that is like, I have merchandise. This is my own merch, right? It's made in the United States and it's made with unionized garment manufacturers. This, of course, destroys the profit margins that I would normally have.

But it doesn't matter because, like, that is the most sustainable, most ethical way that I can make, make this product. I do it not because, like, oh, I'm going to make some extra money on the side. It's marginal in comparison to what I could be making. These are $35 t shirts made in the United States of America. You're not investing.

Graham Stephan

Just doesn't make sense to me. Well, let's just say your house, for example, $3 million, I'm sure I'm rounding up. Maybe it's worth that, you know, $3 million. I got it for 275. I don't know what it is now.

So let's just say it's worth $3 million today. How would it be any different for you to buy a $1 million house and invest 2 million in the stock market? Or instead of buying the Porsche, to buy a Volkswagen Jetta for 20 grand and the other hundred, let's just go. I would rather. I would rather buy something nice than buy something cheaper and then take the rest of the money and invest it in the stock market.

Hasan Piker

Beyond that, there's already. There is a lot of money that I could be investing right now. And what is it doing? Nothing. Either nothing or I just spent it.

Graham Stephan

On donations and the capital appreciation. I think putting it in a Porsche is worse for the economy than you investing $100,000 into stocks. At least if it goes into the economy, you could argue that it supports businesses with investments that they can. Other people are also invested in. That could be put into like an ETF that people have their retirements in.

And then you're taxed on that as well. If you go and sell it for a profit, it's gonna. I already get fucking tacked on everything, right? Because, like, I'm not investing anything at. All, but in a banking account, I feel like that is the most exploitative thing because they just go sell off loans to people, like, high car loans and stuff like that, rather than in the stock market where people.

Why not invest? Because there's no. There's no alternative to the banking then to me, you know, putting the money underneath my pillow. But it doesn't really matter because, like, like I said, I usually try to spend as much. As much of it as possible, either on my family or on my friends or on donations.

Hasan Piker

Like, I put it back into fundraising initiatives, charity, things of that nature. So that's the way I. That's the way I operate. It's probably very stupid, I know everybody always says, like, financially unsound for me to do that, that, but I think that it is. That is less at odds with my values than taking all of the extra money.

Because aside from, like, the flashy shit that you just brought up, like, my expenses are nowhere near, like, the amount of money I make. I don't. Like, I could be living a way more lavish lifestyle, I guess, than the way I do, because I'm doing. I'm very fortunate and I do the things that I love doing, which is, unfortunately for me, I guess, sitting in front of a fucking computer and yelling for eight to 10 hours a day. So I do that seven days a week.

I'm in my house. So if I'm using something a lot like my house. Yeah, then. And I live with my family, I need it to be a big enough house that, like, they can live there as well. And that makes me happy, and then I'm good.

Graham Stephan

So what's your plan for retirement? Let's just say, you know, your. You're 70 years old one day you don't have any investments. I would assume that you'd want to pay it off house or something, but property tax. But what would you do in the event that Social Security is not enough to pay for what you probably won't live?

Hasan Piker

Well, like I said, that's why I have the sep Ir. Sep Ira, whatever. Sep Ira. But I doubt you'd be able to accumulate enough to replace your current lifestyle expenses within that alone. And even within that.

No, my current lifestyle expenses are entirely adjusted to how much money I currently do make. I don't. I don't think I. I don't think I would be, you know, flying around the world or whatever. Like, I went to Australia.

If I don't have a lot of money, I'm not going to do that. It is what it is, I think. To be able to retire where we are in Los Angeles, you need about $5 million minimum to have an income of, let's say, 125 grand a year after tax in California, 90, which is a pretty reasonable salary for where we are. So that's $5 million that would need to come somewhere and need to be invested to be able to give you those returns. See, even with the SBiRA, I still don't have a credit card, by the way.

Graham Stephan

No, I think we talked about this before. I know you said you're going to. Get a credit card. I still haven't got one. Even with sbir.

Hasan Piker

Like, I was reluctant at first to get it. I didn't want to get it at all because I thought that it was, like, cheating, kind of. Cause, like, then I am technically accumulating capital, but, like, there needs to be an appropriate government substitute in normal circumstances, and there isn't one. Like, there is no. Social Security is basically nothing.

And then beyond that, there is no pension structure in the field that I'm in. But even if there was a pension structure, it's non existent in most industries in general. So then it's like, well, I have no. Like, I have no alternative, which is why I was. I was forced to concede on that front.

But beyond that, I think I will go at it for as long as I can, and when I am no longer able to, then I'll figure it out. But even the money that's just sitting in your. Your bank account, I'm assuming, like, it's probably more in alignment with your morals to be putting that in an index fund or something like that. Well, I mean, like I said, I usually give it to, like, I will buy things for my family instead. Like, so I don't have a lot of money sitting in my bank account.

Jack Selby

That is fascinating. This is like. I mean, we've never talked to anybody that. That, uh. That does that.

I mean, it's generous. It's very generous. You could spend it on us. Graham needs a new pair of shoes. We go to foga de chao.

Graham Stephan

We could go there. See, that's the thing. Like, what's wrong with that. Last one? No, I need to boycott them.

Jack Selby

Did they do something wrong? No, no, they just. I think that. I think that we sourced. No, no.

Hasan Piker

I love eating meat. Don't get me wrong. There's some really good restaurants with, like, really high quality meat that isn't, like. You know, shout out some restaurants right now for the people watching. Um, no, actually, I don't want to.

Jack Selby

You don't want to? Oh, no, no, no. I talk. I will. If I go to a nice place.

Hasan Piker

If I go to a nice restaurant, I'll fucking. I'll. I'll talk about it. What? Dude, this is.

This is the way I see it is like, that's what the money is for. What the fuck else am I gonna do with it? But now, why not donate it? Why not just give it? I do give it to people.

Jack Selby

What do you donate to what? Charities? Oh, okay. I do a lot of fundraising initiatives, and every single time I do, I'm donating like, 50 grand, 100 grand here and there. It's strike funds across the.

Hasan Piker

Across the country, abortion funds. We did a fundraising for releasing aging prisoners, releasing aging person from prison in New York, abortion funds in the south.

It's just Ukraine raised a lot of money for earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria. That was almost, I think it was $2 million, I think. And then same for Palestine, for palestinian charities. So here and there, whenever I'm doing fundraising, I will also put in my money as well into fundraising issues. I'm curious, what criticisms of you do you think are fair?

Give me the criticisms and I'll tell you if I think it's fair or not. Well, I'm guessing, you know, you're aware of all of the criticisms that people criticize. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but you think what. Criticism coming from you, maybe you're not even criticized on it publicly, but you think it's fair?

I get angry a lot. I think I get very emotional, and I get very passionate, and I get baited too frequently by people who want to get a clip off. Like, they'll come into the chat. I have a policy of, like, allowing everyone to talk to me and to talk to one another. Most places, especially, like, a political stream, normally would not have that policy in order to be able to conduct themselves in a different way.

Right. To be able to control the conversation and the narrative. So that sometimes opens up an environment for bad actors where they will come in and they'll say something malicious, they'll say something that is, like, purposefully incendiary, to bait me into, like, responding in an emotional way. And I do that 1000 times a day for the same exact issue. And on the 1001, I explode.

And then I gave them a great opportunity to clip that, put it on Reddit put it on Twitter. Be like, this fucking guy's an asshole. Look at him. He's so mad. And I think that in spite of the odds, I need to get much better at that for sure.

That is definitely a thing that I am frustrated by. I do care about that too much, and I get too mad. And then, you know, people only see the bad stuff, and they never see and they never factor in the eight other hours of the stream. Do you think it's a net positive, though, that more people are talking about you, what you stand? Do you think it's a negative?

No, because my line of work requires charitability. And, like, this conversation that we just had. You guys are very charitable, right? You're very open minded to my position. You're not inherently hostile.

You're not primed into being hostile to me. So we can have a normal conversation, normal back and forth, and it can be very productive. I think this was a very productive conversation. I hope you guys feel the same way. A lot of people don't think that way.

And a lot of people are just primed into hating someone because they've seen bad clips or things out of context or. Or they have their own. They've made up their mind, like, oh, this guy's a fucking porsche. But he's a socialist. Okay?

You know, fuck this guy. He's a grifter. Not realizing that, like, there are values at odds with socialism that. That are shocking for people like yourself. Like, the fact that I don't, you know, make investments.

For example, my. My line of work requires people to be charitable to what I have to say, that when someone is primed into hating me, it's over. I can't, you know, I. It becomes much harder for me to convince them. That is the reason why I fucking hate when I get clipped out of context.

It's just the worst thing, especially if it's, like, the opposite position of the position that I hold and that people make up additional assertions off of that. It's very frustrating. It's already frustrating in a human level. Like, I'm sure you wouldn't like it if someone clipped you out of context. And we're like, oh, yeah, now it happens.

You know? Yeah, I'm sure the most frustrating thing. And you guys do it in a podcast, which is, like, a very limited setting. Now, imagine if this wasn't just a podcast, but, like, there's hundreds of thousands of people coming in and out and are able to, like, at you and, like, directly address you over and over again. You would probably find yourself trapped in this weird situation where you're addressing the same things over and over again a million times.

Graham Stephan

I'm sure, too, when you put people in front of a camera for 10 hours a day, eventually out of those 10 hours a day for plenty of sleep. Oh, gosh, there's. Most people will probably have more slip ups than someone who's used to being on the camera and absolutely moderate themselves. And especially when it's a political subject matter that you're covering, which means that there's immediately going to be a lot of people who don't agree with you or are primed into hearing you in the exact opposite way, even if they're, uh, even if they're allies to your position. Does it ever get to you?

Are you ever bothered to an extreme level about negative comments? Yes and no. I think. I think it's frustrating to have people literally, maliciously misunderstand you, even if they know better, but they still have. I'll give you an example.

Hasan Piker

I went to a party the next morning. I'm streaming, and I was talking about my social battery running out when I'm streaming for 8 hours a day, due to some of the things that we just talked about and how I said it. And I said, streaming is soul sucking in that regardless, in comparison to the sales job that I had, that was also client facing and client pleasing. And I said that streaming is soul sucking in a very different way than other jobs are outside of, like, customer service. Like, being on the phone every day like that probably fucking robs you of your soul in a really meaningful way.

And I even compared it to, I even compared it to, like, if I did labor all day, I probably want to socialize afterwards. Whereas after I stream for 8 hours a day, I can work out, I can do something physical, but I can't do something social. I was talking about my own personal experiences, comparing it to another job that I had held in the real world, implying that, like, I understand real jobs are different than streaming, which is wonderful. Obviously, we're very privileged, and I'm very fortunate to be in the position that I'm in. I acknowledge it every day.

Someone purposely clipped the streaming is so sucking in a way that real jobs aren't like. And then they said, Hasan thinks streaming is harder than, much harder than a real job. That went viral before I was even done with my argument. It had already gone to Keemstar and so many other places who most likely knew better because they are influencers themselves. They understand it.

They don't fucking stream for a reason, because of the reasons that I'm mentioning. And yet they were like, oh, man, this guy has son. He's such a hypocrite. He hates fucking workers. Here's a guy who, I don't know what the fuck he does to his employees talking about someone like me, the largest donor to the Amazon labor union, the largest individual donor of the Amazon labor union who works with labor organizers every fucking day of the week.

And this fucking asshole is like positioning himself as like the true champion of workers rights by saying that I hate workers. Like, I hate, like, real american workers. That does get really frustrating because for two reasons. One, because nobody wants to be misunderstood by millions of people because that makes a lot of money for them to voluntarily and maliciously misunderstand my point. So they can make YouTube videos and get ad revenue.

Because that those clicks drive that controversy and those clicks drive revenue in your direction and affinity from people who are looking for someone to be like, yeah, fuck this, as long as guy. And it's, it's frustrating because then a shit ton of people misunderstand you. It's also frustrating because, like, then on issues where I would be able to make change and change someone's mind on, I'm completely shut off from that person. That person has a normal life, has a job, has friends. I'm an afterthought.

Of course I am. I'm just the afterthought of that hypocritical socialist who thinks that his job is harder than mine. So when I talk to that person about unionizing their workplace, they're not going to fucking listen to me. They're going to say, no, you're a bad guy. I think you're a piece of shit.

And I don't even fault them for thinking that, like, I, of course, fault those who have manipulated him, content creators who deliberately and voluntarily make this kind of drama content knowing full well the context. But I don't fault that person. I get it. Do you care about being liked? Yeah, of course.

Jack Selby

Would you say you're happy? For sure. And we're gonna do a real quick. Game at the end, and then before that, we're gonna ask you questions from your audience. So we actually went into your discord and asked some fans for questions for you.

Hasan Piker

Okay. Okay, so we have ten questions. I'll start. How many inches are your biceps? I think we fuck.

We did this. We measured it on the podcast. On my podcast, fear. I think it was like 18 inches, 1819. I don't know.

Jack Selby

That's pretty good. Should pineapple be on pizza? Eh, not really, but, I mean, it's fine, I guess, if you like it that much. I don't prefer it. How do you get along so well with woman.

Hasan Piker

With a woman. With woman. With women. Women. Yeah, women.

I just. We're on the streets. You're a charmer. Am I? Yeah.

Really? People say, yeah. That's crazy. Do you disagree? I get along fine with most people in my, like, immediate vicinity, I think.

But as far as, like, women goes, I don't know. I just. I just treat them like they're guys. I treat them the same as I would as a dude. And they like that?

Yeah, I think. Yeah. It's just like. I mean, it depends. It depends on how you treat.

What you treat men, I guess. But, like, if you treat them with the same level of respect and don't undermine them, I think that that's, like, half the battle. So just treat them like men. That's how I do it. But also treat men better, I guess.

Jack Selby

Treat men and women better. How much do you pay for a haircut? $0. Because it's usually my boy, Jeff Wittek. Free labor.

So it's free labor. Yeah, free labor. No, actually, he makes so much, actually. So Jeff is a good friend of mine. Love him.

Hasan Piker

Jeff Wittek. I don't know if he cut my hair once. He gave me a mullet. Me too. Oh, he did?

Graham Stephan

He actually gave me a fantastic haircut. Yeah. He's a great, great barber. He's dope. Great guy as well.

Hasan Piker

This shit makes so much money every time he comes on, because he's always shilling his products every time he comes on. He's like, oh, they do? Well, I think that's what he tells me. Good for him. But.

But even if. But he doesn't give a shit. He would do it even if he wasn't shilling product. But he'll. He'll cut my hair, put it in a fucking bag, and then he'll be like, the next guy that, you know, the next guy or girl that buys this buys one of my products, I'm going to ship this hair.

Jack Selby

Does he actually do that? Yes. Are you bought? Are you bothered by that? Like, are you kind of weirded out?

Graham Stephan

No. That's crazy. One day they're gonna have. Yeah. What if it's some guy that just randomly buys it?

Jack Selby

Wasn't even thinking. Why is it? Think about this. What if they put that in a crime scene? Like, there is a murder or something like that, some sprinkling your hair, and you get caught up in something like that.

Hasan Piker

Let me tell you, I have a permanent alibi. I'm literally always live. That's a really good point. Yeah. So that's the other thing.

Like, people used to. People always speculate about what twitch streamers do in private, right? Like, they always talk about stuff like that. Like, bro, I don't have any privacy. I'm live literally 10 hours a day.

What could I be doing? What have you noticed, by the way? This is just me. What have you noticed are the benefits of using nicorette? Or.

What is that? Is that not zin? I'm Zinn. Oh. Cause you know, Tucker Carlson does them, too.

Yeah, I know. Would you pop a zen with him? Um, I mean, if I'm out of Zen, maybe, but yeah, no, I do Zen now. I've nicarage grade. It helped me quit smoking.

I used to. What were you digging? Addicted to smoking cigarettes. Yeah, I started off with chew, actually, and then I started smoking. Usual story.

Pack a day. Tried to quit it so many times, and then nicotine gum literally helped me save my life. Crazy. Yeah. Wow.

Graham Stephan

What are your thoughts on Jack Doherty? Who's that? He's like that kid that is on. Wait, is he the fucking. Is he the little.

Jack Selby

He probably is. Is he the fetal alcohol syndrome kid who has, like, that big fucking bouncer? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, yeah.

Hasan Piker

No, I think mothers should stop. Mothers should stop drinking alcohol when they're pregnant. You will create more Jack Dohertys. Nobody wants that. We'll send this to Jack.

Jack Selby

He'll really appreciate that. Would you take him in a boxing ring? Take him. What do you mean? He's like.

Hasan Piker

He's like the size of my fucking quad. All right, you have it here. Hassan Piker calling out Jack Doherty. I'm not gonna fight Jack Doherty. We're gonna be hosting this next Sunday.

I'm not trying to go to jail for child abuse. And also, on top of. They'd be probably a hate crime because, you know, fetal alcohol syndrome. Okay. All right.

Jack Selby

Say you met the perfect girl. Everything was ten out of ten, but she had a body count of 1000. Would you date her? Yeah. I don't give a shit is porn.

Hasan Piker

That means she probably knows the fuck she's doing real well, too. Remember, these are questions from your viewers. Uh huh. That's surprising that someone asked that question. They're probably meming.

Okay. Is porn destructive?

No, but what if it's like, you. Know, hyper realistic porn where, like, everything just looks extra jiggly, everything looks extra supple? What are you watching, man? That seems awesome. What do you mean?

That seems even better. But it's maybe sets false expectations of people and standards. I mean, I think that's an argument that you can have for literally every form of media. You know what I mean? It's like, I don't see porn as anything different than, like, you know, like, any other kind of visual medium.

I think that, like, a lot of people set so many expectations on porn because we don't have, like, good sex education in this country or any sex education at all, or abstinence only sex education, which is really bad. And that it shouldn't be left up to porn to teach people, because that's fucking insane. It's like learning math from playing Pokemon or something. Like, that's not. Not.

You know what I mean? Like, it's ridiculous. And I think that the reason why, uh, porn. I think. I guess to a certain degree, porn can be unhealthy, especially if you have, like, unfettered access, unrestricted access, porn at, like, a very young age.

I don't know what the fuck will happen with the next generation. Like, but I'm. I'm 32 years old. It was very difficult for me to find porn, but when I did, it was awesome. Right?

And. And now you think I have, like, a much healthier. Now. I have, like, a much healthy, like, a normal relationship with porn. I hear about, like, porn addiction all the time online, and I'm just like, damn, bro.

Like, fuck. That's probably a deeper seated issue. Yeah. I'm always. I'm always wondering, and, I mean, I always do say, like, yeah, if you have a porn addiction, then it's good that you probably are not watching porn anymore.

But, like, I personally don't understand it. I don't think it's, like, across the board destructive or anything. And it can literally have a genuinely positive impact on, as far as I understand, like, gay people and trans people and whatnot that, like, become more comfortable with their sexuality. Like, almost every gay person I've talked to has. Has shared stories about, like, them slowly but surely coming into accepting their sexuality.

Like, porn does play a role that probably fucking terrifies right wingers when they hear that, because they're like, yeah, they're making him gay. But it's like, listen, dog, if you're watching gay porn and you become gay, you were gay, okay? It doesn't work that way. Like, I don't see dudes kissing on the street, and I'm like, oops, I'm gay now. Like, it doesn't work that way at all.

I think that it has its negatives, for sure. Setting false expectations of reality to a certain degree. Absolutely. Have you tried to quit porn? I mean, I literally, inadvertently, without realizing, quit porn for extended periods of time, I guess.

But I have, you know. Yeah, I would be perfectly fine. I have been perfectly fine throughout periods of my life, not watching porn. What do you look for in a woman?

I feel like these are like girls in my discord. Right? Yeah. We picked random ones. Yeah.

What do I look for in a woman? I look for a competent partner who will uplift my best qualities that I can work side by side in. What do you look for in a man? In a man? Like, in what regard?

In, like, a relationship. Just like. Or a brother. I don't know. Or, like, a.

Like, a friend. These are just questions from the. What do I look for in a man? A competent partner that I can. That I can work side by side with.

Okay. All right. Last thing is a game. You also don't have to answer somebody if you don't want to. Okay.

Jack Selby

You can blaze through this. You don't have to provide an explanation. Oh, I have to do it. Oh. Tier list.

Hasan Piker

Yeah. Cuz I am so wildly curious. Okay. Amazing. Alex Jones.

Amazing. One of the greatest fucking broadcast talents of all time. Anna Casparin. I'm gonna put her in a tier because she hates me now, I think. But, you know, I've known her for, like, 20 years.

AOC style. Ben Shapiro. C. D. Tier.

I think overall, Bernie Sanders used to be amazing. Tier. Just maybe s tier. Recently, he's been falling off a little bit. Brandon F.

Tier. F for dead. He's dead. He's dying. And his chances of reelection are dead.

Cenk, I'll put at. I'll put Cenk at s tier. Stephen Crowder. Oh. Oh, my God.

Major L for Stephen Crowder. Even. I'm glad that he was even incorporated into this list, honestly, because, like, you know, he's fallen off dramatically. Fell out of his relationship to. Fell out of his divorce.

Don Lamon. I'll put him as C tier. I guess he's fine. C for centrist. Elon Musk.

F. Tier person. Overall. Major. F.

Major l genuinely sucks. I think he's, like, the most thin skinned person on the planet. It's like, just do normal billionaire shit in a fucking island instead of tweeting all day, what the fuck's wrong with you? Like, he has the same kind of brain disease that I have where he just, like, can't shut the fuck up and has to engage people. I genuinely don't understand it.

Like, richest guy, used to be the richest guy on the planet and he's just like fucking become this, like, weird fucking Internet guy for, you know, he loves getting celebrated for nine gag memes that he's posting. Ridiculous. Gavin Newsom. Hot. So it bumps him up a little bit.

But still, c tier because overall, terrible. Governor, myself, I'm putting amazing right there next to my idol, Alex Jones. Amazing. Amazing. F tier is genuinely, I mean, just fucking one of the weirdest debates that I've ever had.

Jesse Lee Peterson. Joe Rogan. Used to be a major fan of Joe Rogan. Put him in b tier because. Because he's a fucking COVID nut in many ways.

Jack Selby

And also, this is so long. We tried to remove people, but we couldn't figure out how to remove people. Okay, John. John Oliver. I like him.

Hasan Piker

S tier, he's great. Probably one of the best brits out there, honestly. Jordan Peterson. F tier. Just genuinely, I think, boring in general.

I don't know why the fuck he, I mean, he's not popping anymore, but he used to be popping Kamala Harris. Also, f tier sucks. Charisma. Black hole at d tier nowadays because that coconut clip that she had was pretty funny. You didn't fall out of a coconut tree.

Graham Stephan

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree. Charlie Kirk. F tier. Head is way too fucking large. Faces way too small.

Hasan Piker

Lex Friedman, I put it a tier, honestly, the number one only centrist on the planet. Matt Walsh. Ew. Yuck. F tier.

Both ugly and also majorly transphobic. That dude looks so goddamn sweaty. Michael Knowles. I'm gonna put Michael Knowles at d tier because conversation. We had a conversation.

He's also, famously, in college, played a role as a gay person in a student film, which I think is fucking awesome. And now he's like always talking about how people are trying to make your kids queer or whatever. This fucking goober. Not even gonna mention him. Fuck that guy.

He's a literal Nazi. David Pacman. David Pacman's all right. I mean, we definitely disagree on Israel, but overall, he's a pretty progressive voice. I would say as long as, I mean, we have a lot of disagreements on foreign policy, but I'll put him a b tier above Joe Rogan.

Patrick by David s tier, my goat. I love him. That clip of him being like, are you gay? Oh, you saw that? We fucking watched that.

Yeah. You were there too. Are you gay? Me? Yeah.

Graham Stephan

No. Weren't you? Was I? You were next to him. Are you gay, anything.

Jack Selby

I remember that from the podcast. Let me tell you, I was fucking valuetained, okay? That guy is. I love him. I love show.

Hasan Piker

I will eventually know. Oh, no, I'm sure you'd love that. He had. He had my uncle on. He had Django and many other people that I know.

RFK. RFK. Long career in advocacy for environmental rights. He's, like, defended tribes successfully. Fucking major vaccine kook nowadays.

Would have voted for him if he got Jesse Ventura to be his vice president. Big F. Big l for not getting Jesse Ventura. Still a c tier guy. I mean, he's crazy, but at least he's, like, somewhat entertaining.

Russell Brand used to be cool. Now f tier, I think, you know, kind of washed Justin Trudeau. I don't want to fucking rank Justin Trudeau. Sucks. Sucks.

Trump. I'll put it b tier right here. He's a. He is so good when he's out of power and, like, give that man a fucking. My.

The perfect solution for Donald Trump is put him in prison and put 24/7 cameras on him. Like, big brother style and not like, a bad prison, you know, like, mar a Lago is fine. You know what I mean? House arrest. And he can just fucking have 24/7 broadcasting on his own network.

Everyone is happy. He gets admiration. He gets the fucking, you know, talk about, like, Kirsten Stewart or whoever the fuck he's angry at on any given day, but he doesn't have any power. In that case. He would.

He would be perfect, and it would be a win win target. Carlson. F tier just hates America, I think. Kind of fucked up. Hates America.

Loves Russia more. What the fuck's that about? That's weird, you constantly shitting on America, constantly talking about how much he loves Russia as well. Weird. You know what?

Put. I'll put Trudeau a d tier. Vosh loves goblin porn, horse porn. Bestiality. Lolly.

F tier. That's real. He got caught with his folder. Vivek Ramaswamy. Biggest drop off of all time.

F tier. Ron Desantis. Another one. Oh, my lord. This guy fucking.

He was, like, propped up as the guy who's going to defeat Donald Trump. And holy, what an uncharismatic person. Phenomenal. Like, just such a bad, bad fucking political trajectory for that guy. Candace Owens.

Um, I'll put her. D tier. Uh, hired by daily wire while she was, uh, openly a virulent anti semite and then fired by daily wire for anti semitism, even though it was, you know, anti semitism plus being anti Israel. I think, uh, Javier Malay, psycho. Just fucking insane.

Person. B tier.

What's his face? Chris Cuomo. Chris Cuomo. Hottie. A tier.

Jack Selby

Do you think him or Gavin Newsom are more attractive? Which one? I think Chris Cuomo is more attractive. Gavin Newsom. I think Gavin Newsom is handsome, but, like, Gavin Newsom looks like a straight to DVD release movie president, whereas Chris Cuomo is just like.

Hasan Piker

He's fucking shredded. He works out a lot. Mallorca is bald. Big. L.

F tier. Don't really care. You run ice XQC. F tier.

We had a falling out. Pokimane. Amazing. Austin. Gay.

So I don't know, maybe f tier for being. No. You know, I'll put it in. Amazing. This is my podcast co host.

I don't know if you guys know who the fuck this is. Miskif. C tier. Easy lock for that. Jeff Bezos.

That's my boss. So I have to put him in a higher category, but it's still f tier because he's a billionaire. Don't know who this guy is. Founder of Twitch. Justin Cohen.

Oh, that's the founder of Twitch. Okay. Fucking nice seat here. Fine. America.

The United States of America. The United States of America. A lot of promise. Uh, could be the best country on the planet. Chooses to be the worst country.

F tier. Uh, Candace Owens again. How does she end up there again? There's two. Candace Owens is, uh, this time.

Candace Owens. F tier. One Candace Owens or d tier one? F tier. Ethan Klein.

A tier. Uh, billionaires. F tier. Easy. Not even a question.

Uh, shouldn't exist. Straight up policy failure. Just like every homeless person is a policy failure. Every billionaire is a policy failure. Aiden Ross.

I mean, come on. Fucking getting owned left and right by every rapper out there. Total f tier. Kai sinat. Kind of fun content, I guess.

I'll put him in. B tier. Valkyrie. Amazing. Who.

What is this? Who is that? I don't know. What. Wait, is that you?

Is that me? Yeah. The way I'm there, too. What is. Jack.

Graham Stephan

Jack made this. Wait, what's. What? What is that photo? That was him as a real estate agent.

Hasan Piker

Oh, my God. You look like a baby. You look different. Which photo did you use? It's this.

Graham Stephan

It's your. No, it's your normal. Yes. It's your blue suit you look at. Geez.

Well, I guess that was, like, 2016. It's like shit. That's been. Oh, when I zoom in, I can tell, but from afar, when it was, like, zoomed out. All right, good.

Hasan Piker

Podcast host. A tier. Sneako. F tier. Easy lock.

I mean, both Aiden and Sneako have either a hosted Nazis and white supremacists or or have literally said nazi, white supremacist shit. Sneako has. And Andrew Tate, f? Tier always. Of course.

Yeah, that's it. Paul, amazing. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you.

Thank you. Good seeing you guys. He was so generous with his time, too. I just want to note this very, very, very generous with this time. So we really appreciate it, son.

Jack Selby

Amazing time. Until next time and anything you want, also linked down below, so check it out. Thank you. Cool. Sweet, dude.

Thank you so much. Honestly, this is going to be a banger up here. I think people are.

Hasan Piker

I think people are.