Hasan Piker is 15 minutes late to our Zoom. He’s just gotten back from the gym, where he works out seven days a week, first thing in the morning, with no rest days. He’s been up since 5. In 45 minutes, he goes live for an eight-hour stream on Twitch. Everything is already set up, so we can chat right up until he needs to switch over, he tells me. There’s no buffer time.
Piker is a man accustomed to operating under pressure, which is fortunate because the pressure has rarely been greater. To his audience—mostly young, white men—the 34-year-old far-left commentator is a spokesperson against a failing establishment. To his critics within the Democratic Party, he is a liability protected by his “jock insurance” when he makes controversial comments about Israel and US foreign policy. Last month, a Wall Street Journal op-ed demanded that Democrats sever ties with him entirely, branding him “anti-American, anti-women, anti-Western, and antisemitic.” As Politico puts it, the left is in a Piker pickle. Piker has learned to manage with the help of his daily routine.
“Mental sanity in an insane world has to be propped up by a rigorous regimen,” Piker tells WIRED. “Think about it. Death. Destruction. An ineffective state that won’t address the working class’s needs. To maintain some semblance of hope, I have to keep my sanity, and I figured out this is the way to do it.”
I spoke with Piker—who has previously chatted with WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond—about his relentless routine, his streaming setup, and his borderline obsession with Zyns.
When you wake up, what's the first thing you reach for?
My phone, unfortunately. Then, my Finasteride.
Are you a coffee person?
Yes. Once I’m done tweeting, reading, and listening to NPR Morning Edition, I get out of bed and slam two double espresso shots back-to-back. And I take a bunch of pills. I take my creatine in the morning. I take fish oil pills because I throw up when I eat seafood. I take a bunch of multivitamins, ashwagandha, zinc—all that good stuff.
You stream for at least eight hours a day. When do you have the time to eat lunch?
I eat the same lunch every day, on stream, usually around 3 pm. It’s a pound of chicken. Straight white chicken breast and rice—it’s either going to be Asian or Middle Eastern chicken. I also drink a lot of cold brew while I’m slamming 3-milligram Zyns. Sometimes I substitute the 6-milligram Zyns. Coffee and cinnamon are my two flavors.
You're often reacting to breaking news in real time for thousands of viewers. How do you avoid giving an instant take that might age badly?
It happens, but I try to be restrained. I have my ideology and message discipline on the things I've been talking about for years, and because the problems persist, it's not difficult to have an instant reaction. I have talked about the necessity for gun control thousands of times at this point. So, in the aftermath of yet another horrible mass shooting, I know there are certain systemic factors at play that I can talk about instantly.
There are a lot of younger crowds watching you. How do you frame some of these political issues to them?
Donald Trump has made my job infinitely easier. My job is to educate people on imperialism and sometimes reflect on the perspective of victims. This is not an often-discussed part of our war machine. We talk about how wars impact us—our sons and daughters are sent overseas, they die, and we're spending all of our money on it, for petro-capitalists or whatever. But rarely is there focus on the actual victims on the ground and how their perspective even shifts over time once they realize that America and Israel aren’t exactly invested in the liberation of the Iranian people as they initially presented.
In the past, it was much more difficult to educate people on the dangers of imperialism. I would just get called a terrorist or an America-hater—and I still do. But Trump's vulgar and chaotic way of trying to justify these military actions made it easy for me to say, look, he's saying it himself. With Venezuela, he was like, “We're doing it for oil.” It's vulgar imperialism, and it makes it easier for people to identify the problem.
If I wanted to replicate your setup at home, what are three pieces of gear I’d need?
That's impossible. It's a much more professional-looking setup than you would think. I have a remote desktop setup, a remote IRL roaming setup, and the regular main studio I'm speaking from right now. With my regular main studio, I have four cameras and three light boxes. I have multiple camera angles. I have a RodeCaster Pro 2. I have numerous SM7B microphones for myself and guests. I have a fairly fat desktop PC with an NVidia GeForce RTX 4090 in it. I have some beefy specs for this operation.
What if I were just starting out?
You can do it with just a laptop. I have a remote desktop that I take everywhere with me in my Pelican backpack. You can also just do it with your phone if you want to. That’s how I started.
What's something that lives on your desk that viewers can't see on stream?
My assortment of things that I've gotten from China, like this Mao pin. I have a little scale for my chicken, that I weigh my chicken on—and a shit ton of Zyns.
Is there a piece of gear that you bought that you regret?
The cameras I'm currently using, I hate, but they're so expensive, and we bought them when we first built the studio, and I was just like, “Well, what are you gonna do? We got to use them somehow.” They’re Panasonic Lumix BGH1. If you have a controlled studio environment, they’re actually pretty good. It's like the lowest level for a Netflix show. But my issue with it is that there are a lot of software problems. And my studio is not controlled. It's my living room.
When you started making money on Twitch, do you remember what the first purchase you splurged on was?
I leased a Porsche, and I got canceled for it. Everybody yelled at me for it, and they still do. They’re like, “Socialist bought a nice car, how dare you!”
Do you have any personal rules for how you shop? Because I'm sure you get that a lot.
Not really. I abide by BDS to the best of my ability, and outside of that, I don't have any restrictions. I don't do anything. I just do this. So, there isn't a lot of opportunity for me to splurge on anything. But now I can fly business, and I can fly at whatever time I want. Outside of that, I don't have a crippling addiction to purchasing Warhammer figurines or a gun collection. I'm not invested in cars. I have some anime figurines and some manga. But overall, I don't think I have anything super costly. A lot of people think I spent a crazy amount of money on fashion, and even that's not the case. I mean—it's a crazy amount of money in comparison to the average person's salary, for sure. But it's also a little bit of a costume, considering that I'm an on-camera personality.
What’s an app on your phone that you use that people wouldn't expect?
If you could only keep three apps on your phone, what would they be?
Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Signal.
There are a lot of politicians appearing on podcasts and streams. What do you think they don't understand about the internet?
They don't understand that it's probably the easiest way to access a younger voter base in an unfiltered manner. A lot of politicians are terrified of having town halls and facing their constituents, and that's why many of them also don't want to do this unrestricted format. This is a live broadcast; you can mess up, you can say the wrong thing. Now, we live in the age of Donald Trump, so I don't think it matters as much, but Democrats are still operating with the old ways of doing media, and it’s a major mistake. Ro Khanna is endlessly available and recognizes that there is a real need to do this kind of stuff. I urge other politicians to do the same. Figure out what you care about—truly, look within yourself—and pursue podcasts and livestreams to advocate for those things. You would be surprised by the results.
What do you think political streaming will look like five years from now?
Hopefully better than what it is now, because there's a lot of unnecessary drama. Some brilliant content creators cut through that noise, but there are also a lot of people who recognize that politics is somewhat boring for the average person, and to make it more entertaining, they have to put a drama slant to it. So instead of addressing ideologies and policies, they address drama—oftentimes made-up drama—manufacture outrage, and keep people's attention on that, which I find very unproductive. I hope we don't continue leaning in that direction.
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