(cache)Hasan Piker Interview on Livestreaming, Socialism, and the Future of Politics

This story appears in i-D 376, “The Lore Issue.” Get your copy of the print magazine here.

written and styled by THOM BETTRIDGE
photographed by HENDRIK SCHNEIDER

The average age of a cable news viewer currently hovers at about 70 years old. It begs the question: How are non-Boomers finding out about politics? Optimists might vaguely point to newsletters, podcasts, and the “new media landscape.” But look a bit closer at said landscape and you’ll find a terrain swarming with crackpot commentators, trad-wife firebrands, and looksmaxxing eugenicists. It is within this fray that Hasan Piker livestreams eight hours a day, six days a week to a concurrent audience that could fill a football stadium. The Los Angeles-based, 34-year-old political pundit takes pride in delivering progressive politics to the young men who have become most susceptible to online radicalisation—in other words, he’s a based unc red-pilling Zoomers into socialism. On a Sunday afternoon (the one day of the week he doesn’t stream), Piker sat down with Editor-in-Chief Thom Bettridge.

Thom Bettridge: If someone who didn’t know you asked me to explain what you do, I would say that you go to spaces where young people are getting radicalised by the internet, like Twitch, and you red-pill them into a socialist worldview. Why do you think you have credibility with that group of people?

Hasan Piker: It’s becoming increasingly hard to relate to a younger audience because I’m 34, but I think the reason why I have some semblance of credibility in these spaces is because I operate within them, and I primarily focus on trying to make things as appealing and palatable as possible. I like to say I’m an entertainer first and foremost. And my worldview revolves around rehabilitation above all else. Everyone is redeemable, everyone can actually change their minds. Every single American citizen has some kind of blind spot to others. So if that’s my first principle, then I would be a major hypocrite to assume that people are irredeemable. Because that’s my mentality, I’m much more forgiving of microaggressions and things of that nature and much more hopeful about being able to change people’s minds. I always like to tell people I’m here to pull them from the margins—from the throes of radicalisation. If I’m talking about trans issues, for example, I’m not talking to trans people. Of course, trans people can enjoy the content. But in most circumstances, I’m actually talking to someone who is in the throes of transphobia, who could go in either direction. If I’m talking about white supremacy and racism and anti-Blackness as a core principle in American society, I’m not talking to Black people, because they know what that looks like. They experience it. They live it every day. I’m talking to people who have been blinded by social conditioning and have adopted a white supremacist framework.

Are there go-to ideas or concepts that are ‘aha’ moments for people?

One of the best arguments is one that I used on Theo Von, which is: “Your issues are your rent and your wages, right? You hate your boss and you hate your job and you hate how little benefits you have and you hate your landlord. You hate how much you have to pay in rent and how little you get in return. And the reality is, your boss is not a Guatemalan migrant. Your landlord is not a trans person. Anyone that consistently shifts your attention and priorities in the direction of trans people or undocumented immigrants is actually lying to you because they don’t want to fix those other issues.” That’s usually very effective in getting people to come to terms with the system itself. Because there’s not a bunch of Guatemalan migrants sitting on the board of BlackRock.

Robe DUSEN DUSEN, Top and sunglasses Hasan’s own, Pants PHIPPS, Necklace DON’T LET DISCO.

Top LACOSTE, Jeans CARHARTT WIP, Belt stylist’s own.

I wanted to talk about Zohran. He talks about how the government can substantively make people’s lives better. Did Zohran’s winning feel like a validation for your worldview?

He has made my life a million times easier because I can point to him as a success story—a real example where someone went out, asked the people what their problems were, and figured out quite a reasonable, modest proposal as to fixing some of them. Fast and free buses, universal child care, a rent freeze on rent-adjusted housing units in New York City, and a modest increase in taxes for some of the wealthiest New Yorkers. All of these things are possible. He was very issue-focused throughout the entire campaign, and he was identifiable on those boundaries. That’s what voting for someone is supposed to be about. “What can you do for me? How will you represent my values?”

You’re very central to a new generation that is—despite outliers—far more left than the generations before it. When you game out the future, once the boomers are gone, is someone like Zohran going to be a centrist politician in America?

I don’t believe in generational politics like that, unfortunately. We have to organise and we have to keep pushing. The reason why this next generation is seemingly more radical in its politics, some might even say more sympathetic to the socialist or Marxist tradition, is because of deteriorating material conditions. They don’t believe that they’ll ever be able to own a home. They don’t believe that they will be able to retire at a reasonable age. Fifty percent of their salary—from jobs that they actually despise, that they didn’t even train for, that they didn’t go to school for—directly subsidises their landlord’s lifestyle. They have no control. It’s a really dire situation for many of them. People get so frustrated with the way capitalism operates that they inevitably go, “Okay, I’m willing to explore alternative ways of thinking.”

“I don’t think people are as on board with this unlimited death and destruction campaign—war in Venezuela, ICE agents in every neighbourhood. A lot of people think this is dangerous.”
hasan piker

One of my favourite Marxist ideas is historical materialism—the idea that ideologies are downstream of relations of production and the actual social reality happening on an economic level. In the Obama era, it was all about ideology and culture of reality: Shepard Fairey posters, “Hope,” and all kinds of good vibes. But the social reality remained as it was under Bush. A lot of people became very cynical after that. It’s cool to see a politician say, “Hey, I want to actually talk about the dollars and cents of what it means to be alive in America today.”

The economic realities were decent enough back then to make people feel like they were invested in this system. Even after the 2008 housing market crash, there was this notion that these institutions were actually serving the people, right? Maybe they failed every now and then, but the alternative was far scarier. There was still some sort of confidence in the government. Now that confidence has withered away. And I would say it’s been withering away since the Reagan era. No one believes that there is any sort of positive future right around the corner.

One of my favourite things you do on your stream is the Hogwatch segment, in which you watch right-wing content and totally eviscerate it. Who’s your favourite hog to watch?

I don’t really have any big ones right now. All of the previous era’s GOATs have died or their careers have diminished. I think the Ben Shapiros of the world, the Steven Crowders of the world, the heyday of the intellectual dark web is just gone now. Tim Pool is gone. Many of these guys have lost a big chunk of their audiences because they were so pro-Israel. They lost the legitimacy and the credibility that they may have had at a certain point. Credibility that they’ve actually garnered from being as reactionary as possible, as right-wing as possible, toward every other marginalised group. That’s precisely the reason why you see all these other figures all of a sudden blow up—Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes. There’s a reason why these guys are now the major figures on the independent content creator side, as opposed to the old guard.

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As someone who’s standing on the other side of the proverbial tug-of-war, are the Groypers [followers of Nick Fuentes] a scarier foe than Ben Shapiro? Because Ben Shapiro is inherently easy to make fun of.

I think the Groypers and Nick Fuentes are very easy to make fun of as well. I’ve just shied away from doing it because I feel like, on the right, they’re trying to figure out whether they isolate him or just make way for the Groyperification. Donald Trump is running around saying all Somalis are garbage people, that they need to be deported. Ninety percent of them are already American citizens. The other 10 percent are legal permanent residents. And he’s talking about denaturalising them. He’s talking about [Congresswoman] Ilhan Omar, an elected representative, as though she is this parasitic force that needs to be forcibly excised. This is really dangerous rhetoric at the end of the day. And the very fact that the president is normalising this kind of rhetoric with very little pushback is terrifying.

Do you feel like the Overton window is just going to keep expanding? Because even eight years ago, imagining a QAnon believer like Marjorie Taylor Greene being a congresswoman was an outlandish idea. Now it’s kind of the norm. Are we just a couple years away from a Groyper justice on the Supreme Court?

In the real world, I think that there’s a lot of resentment towards this kind of politics. If there is a competent counterbalance to this growing right-wing fascination with racial purity, then I think we will be able to combat it effectively. But there is no organised left that has any sort of political expression in the two major parties. There is a growing left flank in the Democrats, and that’s great, but there is tremendous resistance to it. Meanwhile, the Overton window consistently expands on the right in this dangerously reactionary and fascist way. Currently I don’t think people are as on board with this unlimited death and destruction campaign—war in Venezuela, ICE agents in every neighbourhood. A lot of people think this is dangerous.

In 2020, when peak “woke” was happening, I think that the ruling class hated it so much that they had to read white fragility and bow in congress with a Kente cloth. That experience was so humiliating and infuriating for them that there’s been this kind of backlash. It’s like the pendulum swung the other way. For example, when Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan was like, “We need feminine energy out of the office.”

He’s overcorrecting. I don’t think he genuinely believes we have to get feminine energy out of the office. I think he’s just tuning into whatever frequency people told him he needs to move in the direction of—and there is this institutional backlash right now to what they perceive as “woke.” Which is weird, because it was the institutions themselves that were abiding by this ridiculous standard. It was this incredibly sanitised, incredibly brand-friendly image that didn’t do anything to solve any underlying material inequalities. The example I always used is Walmart throwing up the Black Fist, and at the same time funding their local police departments and paying for the new cruisers. These megacorporations are not going to be able to change society, because they’re not actually invested in it. There are some outliers—you got the Ben & Jerry’s of the world—but there’s limits there as well. But that’s very different from the way that Target has consistently tried to use identity politics or quote-unquote “woke” as a way to sell more product.

It seems more and more that the actual political discourse of the world is happening on streams and podcasts, and not on CNN or BBC or MSNBC or Fox. Is mainstream media about to die? Or will people like you be the ones running, say, CNN in the future?

I have no ambitions as far as moving into the traditional media space. Part of that is because I care about my editorial freedom. Nowadays, part of that is because their audiences are diminishing and I already have the audience. My goal ultimately is to be in front of as many people as possible. But I’ll always collaborate with the wonderful friends I’ve made in legacy media. It’s very important for legacy publishers to exist. The future for me is doing exactly what I’m doing for a much broader audience.

One of the biggest differences between right-wing media and left-wing media is that the right-wing—whether it’s conscious or not—has a very good sense of how rage-bait works; it can actually make you more powerful.

I will say there is one difference in terms of how that works on the left versus the right: The right is far more unified. So when someone like myself actually gets mad at a right-wing figure, that’s unifying for all of them. They go, “We hate this guy. He’s a leftist. We’re going to ride with whoever this right-wing figure is and defend them.” Liberals, on the other hand, unfortunately have a slight antagonism towards the left. I do think that there are a lot of people who are maybe centre left, or find themselves to be progressive, or claim to be liberals, that are much easier to manipulate by the right. This happens to leftists as well. There is this purity spiral that you don’t really see on the right as much. There’s no ideological buy-in in the same way, where someone’s like, “This guy’s not a real racist.” On the left-wing side, people straight-up will be like, “You bought a house. I personally think that’s against your values.” The standards are ridiculous.

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The rules of Cheap Date are simple: spend no more than £20. The reality is that I have never once followed them (sorry to the team). This week’s casualty was Barshu, the beloved Sichuan spot in London’s Chinatown, where I met Wasia Project—siblings Will Gao (yep, from Heartstopper) and Olivia Hardy—and immediately started ordering like the concept of a budget was more of a suggestion than a rule.

The name Wasia Project might read like a cultural signifier—“Wasian,” shorthand for mixed white and Asian identity—but for the siblings, who are half-Chinese with ties to Beijing, the moniker represents something looser. Both classically trained—Olivia on piano, Will on violin—they grew up on traditional repertoire before forming the project in their teens. The duo’s music, shaped by pop, jazz, and something more cinematic, has steadily built a devoted following, evolving from the soft, diaristic charm of their early releases into something moodier and more self-assured. “I like that it can mean different things depending on context,” Olivia says.

The meal: cloud ear fungus slicked in coriander and vinegar. Fragrant fried chicken buried under a landslide of dried chilis, the kind that numbs your mouth just enough to keep you chasing the next bite. Dry-fried green beans with minced pork. Mapo tofu, fabulously glossy and blistering. Three bowls of jasmine rice, which, in hindsight, felt optimistic! Will got a full-fat Coke, Olivia a lychee juice, and I, in an act of self-delusion, ordered a Coke Zero.

“We have a weird relationship,” Will says early on, glancing at Olivia. “It’s very close, and quite unspoken.” It’s immediately clear what he means. They talk in fragments, frequently interrupting, overlapping, and correcting each other mid-thought. That push and pull is the architecture of Wasia Project. That’s family.

Olivia, by her own admission, is the more meticulous of the two; Will is faster, more instinctive, happy to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. “If we made music on our own,” he says, “I’d release 100 mid songs, and Olivia would release one every three years.” Olivia shrugs: “Or none.” Somewhere in between is where the music lands now—and, as their latest single “2515” suggests, moving toward something darker and a little more confrontational.

We came for lunch, but somewhere between the chili oil and the sibling dynamic, it turned into something closer to a soft launch of their next phase—and a conversation about our shared Wasian experiences.

Alex Kessler: Be honest, did you actually like each other growing up?

Olivia Hardy: We were always friends. We used to do little performances together when we were young, so there wasn’t really a point where we suddenly had to learn how to get along.

Will Gao: Yeah, I don’t remember a phase where we properly hated each other. We’ve always been close, in that weird, annoying sibling sort of way.

How does that dynamic show up when you’re working?

Will: It’s unspoken. We don’t need to over-explain things to each other, which helps a lot.

Olivia: But we are very different people. I’m quite sensitive, aware of emotions, probably overthinking things a lot of the time.

Will: And I’m the opposite. I’m very present, very like, “This works, this doesn’t, let’s move on.”

So who leads in the studio?

Olivia: It depends on the song, but generally I’m quite meticulous. Once we have something, I want to refine it and really lock into it.

Will: And I’m more like, let’s just get everything out first. Try every idea, don’t overthink it.

You were both classically trained. What were you actually listening to growing up?

Olivia: Classical music, sure.But when I got into my teens, I was really into Phoebe Bridgers, Mazzy Star, that kind of thing.

Will: You’re underselling it—you loved Taylor Swift.

Olivia: Well… you’re into Benson Boone, no?

Will: [Insert side-eye] In all seriousness, I had a slightly confusing mix. I did a lot of choral and operatic stuff, so that was my base, but then I also got into indie and pop. I loved musical theatre as a kid—anything dramatic.

Do those references still show up in your music?

Will: I think the feeling does more than anything else. Even if it doesn’t sound like opera or theatre, the emotional scale of it is still there.

Olivia: Yeah, it’s less about genre and more about how it makes you feel. That’s the throughline.

Your new single “2515” feels like a tonal shift—darker, more electronic. Was that deliberate?

Will: It’s more confrontational. There’s a confidence to it that we didn’t have before.

Olivia: The earlier music was very youthful, very raw, which we still love, but this feels more… precise.

Is it setting the tone for what’s coming next?

Will: It’s part of a new chapter.

Olivia: We’ve been a lot more conscious about what represents us now, rather than just putting things out.

The name Wasia Project feels very of-the-moment.. Where did it come from?

Olivia: It wasn’t this big, calculated thing at the start. It came quite naturally from our lives and our friendships.

Will: I like that it can evolve. It doesn’t have to mean one fixed thing forever.

And why “Project”?

Olivia: It makes it feel bigger than just us as individuals.

Will: It’s like an entity that we’re both contributing to, rather than it being about one person. It gives it a bit of distance in a nice way.

We’re all Wasian here. What was the experience like growing up in the UK?

Will: I think I’m still figuring it out… There are things you look back on and realize felt a bit off, but you didn’t have the language for it at the time. Sometimes it makes me sad. And then when I go to China, I’m like, this is such a huge part of me, but also so far from what I experience day-to-day.

Olivia: It’s complicated because you’re between cultures that feel quite far apart, not just geographically but culturally as well. But there are positives to having the ability to pick and choose the best of both worlds.

I also love being able to pick and choose the best of both. Do you think that’s changing now, culturally?

Will: I think our generation is seeing it more, and talking about it more openly.

Olivia: There’s more visibility, which helps, but it’s still something people are figuring out in real time.

You both started this really young. Does that add pressure?

Olivia: Definitely. There’s the music, but then there’s everything around it—social media, expectations, staying relevant.

Will: It can feel like a lot, but having family in it with you makes a big difference.

Best and worst thing about each other?

Olivia: Worst? He’s embarrassing.

Will: She’s gross.

Olivia: Best… he’s very passionate. He cares deeply.

Will: She’s my rock. She’s always there, no matter what.

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Overordering with Wasia Project