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.
