Hasan Piker spends seven to eight hours a day, seven days a week, streaming on Twitch. The far-left political commentator got his start in 2013 interning for (and sometimes hosting) the Young Turks. More than a decade later, he’s a powerhouse newsfluencer with the number-one channel in Twitch’s Politics and Commentary category. More than 3 million people follow him for his takes and humor on the crumbling American empire, foreign policy, and why Bernie would have won. He is also considered, by some, very hot. Piker works out every available morning and eats 1 pound of chicken with some rice at 6 pm. The rest of his free time is spent researching, planning his streams, and getting in fights with people who have AI avatars.
Phone model: iPhone 16 Pro MaxFor years and years, I would do the classic iPhone-on-its-last-leg on principle, because I hate the planned obsolescence and I just am a very stubborn person. I’d have the oldest possible iPhone I could for as long as I could until I’d have it basically stuck to an electrical outlet for it to work.
Now I have to have one of the latest ones for cybersecurity reasons. That's what the civil rights lawyers I talk to tell me. We're kind of all just trying to do our very best for privacy and for security against warrantless surveillance by the government. But they tell me, “You got to get the newest and you got to always keep it updated.” It's been very frustrating for me, because I hate the new iOS, Liquid Ass. It's so ugly. It's so unintuitive. I cannot believe it. It's so frustrating.
Computer model: Intel PC, gifted by StarforgeIt's a PC, a prebuilt sent to me by friends. The previous one I had was made by Linus [Sebastian, creator of Linus Tech Tips]. We called it “Big Red.” I still have it in my house and use it as my secondary. It’s a behemoth that has the USSR crest and Jeff Bezos’ head on a dinner plate on it. It's beautiful. There's a YouTube video where he makes it and gifts it to me. He took out one of the legs so it always leans left.
I have an iPad as well. I'm a “screenager” now officially. When I traveled, I used to just use my phone, but then I realized I'm on planes for 15 hours at a time. Why am I putting myself through this?
Daily average screen time across Apple devices (not including PC): 7 hours and 8 minutesOh my Lord. That's a lot. Last week I spent 22 hours and 14 minutes on Twitter. And my daily average is three hours and 42 minutes on Twitter alone. But to be fair, I read articles off Twitter, so I don't know if it’s counting that as well.
It's funny because I used to delete Twitter off my phone. It made me an angrier person, especially post–Elon Musk takeover. I realized I would just be getting into arguments or just straight-up having a bad time. I’d sit on my couch, and I'd turn on Twitter, and I would just see some of the dumbest people on the planet, just the most racist, toxic people on the planet. I noticed that it was making me lose faith in humanity, so I would delete it and then only download it when I was traveling to places.
Now I'm back on because I feel like woke is coming back, and as the Ayatollah of Woke, I have to make sure that I'm on the front line. I'm fighting the battle in the trenches directly in enemy territory.
Music app: Apple PodcastsI don't listen to any music. I only listen to podcasts. I definitely used to listen to music a lot more back in the day, but I had a Walkman and then a Discman. When I was growing up in Turkey, I'd burn CDs and stuff. And then I had an iPod. Since 2014, my diet has mostly consisted of podcasts and nothing else, because I don't have time. I listen to Chapo Trap House, Trueanon, The Daily, Up First, NPR Politics, NPR News, Democracy Now, sometimes Consider This.
Number of unacknowledged …Emails: 1,049Texts: 225Missed calls: 352Discord notifications: 6,353Signal notifications: 3WhatsApp messages: 7My unread emails used to give me anxiety, but they don't anymore, because I don't ever use my email. I have people now that do my comms, luckily. I primarily text.
I don't even see these notifications. After a while, it's just gone. It is what it is. I just don't care. I don't know.
Last person you FaceTimed: A group of friendsI'm a texter, but sometimes I'll do a FaceTime. I don't mind it, especially if it's a friend I haven't seen in a while. My family always loves FaceTiming. We FaceTime basically every day in the morning.
Last thing you Googled: Belly of the WhaleI was trying to Google “Belly of the Beast,” which is a Cuban news outlet that does primarily English-speaking coverage. And the reason why I was doing that is because I wanted to pull imagery for them, because I'm about to interview one of them today. But instead of that, I ended up accidentally Googling “Belly of the Whale song.” I have no idea what that is.
Last video you took: Of himself, doing an incline bench press at 205 pounds for repsLast screenshot: ?I don't want to reveal. A high-profile politician's comms person.
Last thing you asked AI: N/AI don't use AI. I think there's a real problem with cognitive offloading. There's a real problem with hallucinations within AI. I think that AI is making humanity dumber in general. Whenever I write a tweet and then the replies to it are like, “@Grock explain what he means,” I'm like, “You're literally not recognizing that you're getting a robot to try to train you. You are lesser than a human now. You are a lesser human being for this reason.” That's how I feel about it. I'm very frustrated.
I know that eventually people will look back at the statements that I'm making right now and read it—if they're still capable of reading—and say, “Oh, you were so smug and so elitist.” And I think it's devastating. Not for the ways in which Sam Altman and all these other AI people greatly overemphasize how powerful and scary their new tool is in an effort to fundraise another $500 billion for their projects to fearmonger people into thinking that the AI is actually much smarter than it actually is or whatever, but it's truly devastating for a multitude of reasons. Cognitive offloading, capacity for being a vehicle of unlimited misinformation, which we've seen already. And last but not least, of course, or probably the most significant, is the labor displacement mechanism.
While AI should be used as a tool to lift the burden of the workforce, I feel like it's being used by capital owners as a way to displace, as a way to replace the workforce for higher profit margins. And I hate it. I think it should make our lives easier, but it's just making it worse. In an effort to get mass usage and sell to the general public, they've created this generative AI nonsense, which is even crazier, because it's like the arts are what make us human. It's the little joys in life. And we're supposed to be making the AI do the rote tasks that are difficult to do. And then art is supposed to be left to the humans. And no, instead the art is what the AI is doing. And humans are still propping up the AI with the rote tasks.
When I see AI art, more often than not, especially on Twitter, people that are using it are right-wing monsters. AI thumbnails with my face on it, 99.9 percent are just some kind of right-wing psychopath.
Your three most recently used emojis: 😔🤮😩Favorite social network: YouTube (“maybe”)Most used is definitely Twitter. It's embarrassing, but it's not my favorite at all, honestly. I used to love TikTok. I would go on TikTok and I'd be like, “Damn, there's a lot of fun stuff on here.” It's, again, probably also sad to admit, but I think it sucks now. And so now I guess I don't really have a favorite social media, maybe YouTube, but I don't really go on social media that much other than Twitter. And Twitch, of course. I don't watch Twitch, but I'm on Twitch all the time.
Favorite news source: Democracy NowFavorite subreddit: Hassan_Piker or OkBuddy HassanFavorite tech product: Apple WatchI'm not a very techie guy, but the one thing I use quite frequently is my Apple Watch for fitness. I'm obsessively tracking everything that I do. It doesn't look great, but it's an Apple product, and it works perfectly with my other Apple products. So that's the reason why I use it. I used to have a Whoop. I stopped using it because it gave me too much sleep anxiety. Every morning I would look at my Whoop, especially if I didn't get enough sleep, and it would just be telling me, “You're going to die soon.”
Technology you’re most nostalgic for: N/AI don't feel nostalgic for anything from back in the day. I just kind of go along with whatever the new tech is.
Craziest internet rabbit hole you’ve gone down: Former hatersI’m fascinated by formerly right-wing guys or people who consider themselves to be centrist or apolitical, even though their political expression has always been on the right, finally moving away from the cottage industry that was designed around saying “Fuck Hasan. Hasan’s bad.” Because for a lot of people on the internet, the only political expression they have is through drama between content creators. They don't really care about actual politics. And I'm seen as a placeholder for all things left related. So if someone is anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-liberal, anti-Democratic party, a right-winger of some sort, or has reactionary opinions, their only political output and political expression revolves around whatever kind of manufactured outrage media cycle they create around me.
Where you fall on the “tech hygiene” spectrum: UnconcernedI don't know if it's because I have a very stacked day, but I go comatose. I lay in bed, I look at my phone, and when I feel tired, I just knock out.
A version of this article appears in the July/August 2026 issue. Subscribe now.
