What’s in Hasan Piker’s Starter Pack? Creatine, Zyns, Signal
Hasan Piker is 15 minutes late on our Zoom. He has just returned from the gym, where he trains seven days a week, early in the morning, without days off. He’s been up since 5 o’clock. In 45 minutes, he went live for an eight-hour stream on Twitch. Everything is already set up, so we can chat until it needs to change, he tells me. There is no buffer time.
Piker is a man used to working under pressure, which is fortunate because the pressure has rarely been so great. For his audience – mostly young white men – the 34-year-old far-left commentator is a spokesperson against a failing establishment. For his critics within the Democratic Party, he constitutes a liability protected by his “accident insurance” when he makes controversial comments about Israel and American foreign policy. Last month, a Wall Street Journal opinion piece demanded that Democrats cut ties with him completely, calling him “anti-American, anti-women, anti-Western and anti-Semitic.” As Politico says, the left is in Piker trouble. Piker learned to get by through his daily routine.
“Mental health in a crazy world must be supported by a rigorous diet,” Piker told WIRED. “Think about it. Death. Destruction. An ineffective state that won’t meet the needs of the working class. To maintain any semblance of hope, I have to maintain my sanity, and I realized that this was the way to do it.”
I spoke with Piker — who previously chatted with WIRED’s global editorial director Katie Drummond — about her relentless routine, streaming setup, and borderline obsession with Zyns.
When you wake up, what is the first thing you look for?
My phone, unfortunately. Next, my Finasteride.
Are you a coffee lover?
Yes. Once I’m done tweeting, reading, and listening to NPR Morning editionI get out of bed and throw two double espressos in quick succession. 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 time for lunch?
I eat the same lunch every day, streaming, usually around 3 p.m. It’s a pound of chicken. White chicken breast and rice – it will either be Asian chicken or Middle Eastern chicken. I also drink a lot of cold beer while I pop 3-milligram Zyns. Sometimes I substitute Zyns at 6 milligrams. Coffee and cinnamon are my two flavors.
You often react to breaking news in real time for thousands of viewers. How to avoid giving an instant shot which risks aging poorly?
It happens, but I try to hold back. I have my ideology and message discipline on the topics I’ve been talking about for years, and as the issues persist, it’s not difficult to get an instant reaction. I have spoken thousands of times about the need for gun control. So, in the wake of yet another horrific mass shooting, I know there are some systemic factors at play that I can speak to instantly.
There are a lot of young people looking at you. How do you present some of these political issues to them?
Donald Trump has made my job infinitely easier. My job is to educate people about imperialism and sometimes think about it from the victims’ perspective. It’s not an often-discussed part of our war machine. We talk about the impact of wars on us: our sons and daughters are sent abroad, they die, and we spend all our money there, for the petrocapitalists or whatever. But there’s rarely any focus on the actual victims on the ground and how their views change over time once they realize that America and Israel aren’t exactly invested in liberating the Iranian people as they initially presented.
