Tech
Hasan Piker Built His Twitch Empire With Shure Microphones, Lumix Cameras, and Lots of Zyns
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.
A multifaceted decahedral black ceramic bezel and sandwich-style three-piece case—a reworking of Bremont’s signature Trip-Tick construction—house a chronometer-rated automatic chronograph movement made by Sellita, with a 62-hour power reserve.
The watch will be a passenger aboard the FLIP rover, due to launch as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One (Griffin-1), expected to land at the lunar south pole at some point in the second half of this year.
It’s a one-way mission: The rover will remain permanently on the lunar surface, with the watch ticking away as it roams the landscape. FLIP’s objectives include reaching elevated positions on the lunar terrain, gathering data on lunar dust accumulation, testing dust-mitigation coatings, and surviving a two-week lunar night in hibernation (which would be a first for a US rover).
In terms of serious timekeeping data for Bremont, the mission is frankly symbolic. The watch will be positioned vertically in a specially designed housing within the FLIP’s chassis, between its front wheels. Only the watch head, weighing 107 grams, is included, glued in place using a specialist composite, its face visible to FLIP’s HD cameras. But the hibernatory periods will mean the watch (whose mechanical movement is driven in normal circumstances by the motion of the wearer’s arm) will stop running once its 62-hour power reserve runs down.
When the FLIP is on the move again, its motion should—in theory—jolt the mechanism into action once more. Despite the gravitational pull that’s a sixth of the Earth’s, the acceleration, pitches, and tilts of the rover should swing the winding rotor, if with less torque and efficiency than on Earth.
“My guess is that the watch will function from time to time, but for short periods,” Cerrato says. “We will learn along the way. But that’s what is exciting—it projects us into a thinking process that is absolutely out of the box. Just the fact of having it there is inspiring.” However, there is little doubt that Bremont will, just like other brands with any ties to the cosmos, mine its new space connection for all it is worth.
FLIP itself, which weighs just 1,058 pounds and carries a mix of commercial and government payloads, four HD cameras, and a deployable solar array, is fundamentally a technology demonstrator for Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX), Astrolab’s much larger SUV-sized rover destined to support NASA’s Artemis program. The firm developed the FLIP from scratch after NASA’s equivalent vehicle for which the Griffin-1 mission was contracted, the VIPER, was put on pause in 2024. This left Astrobotic seeking a stand-in in short order. Astrolab, which signed the contract within a month of hearing about the opportunity in the fall of 2024, took the FLIP from blank sheet to finished rover in roughly a year.
Its standout feature is its hyper-deformable wheels, minutely structured from silicone, composite, and stainless steel, which create a soft, enlarged contact surface with the terrain. “It’s like if you’re off-roading in a Jeep or Land Rover where you let some air out of the tires to go softer and spread the load over a larger area,” explains Astrolab’s founder, Jaret Matthews. While the moon’s nighttime temperatures of around -200 degrees Celsius (around -328 Fahrenheit) would cause conventional rubber tires to become glass-like and shatter, Astrolab’s solution is intended to keep the rover from sinking into the unconsolidated lunar dust—or regolith—that covers the environment.
The people running UK public services are busy working out how artificial intelligence (AI) might improve things.
There’s some good stuff happening, like tools to digitise planning information, transcribe probation officers’ conversations or rapidly assess stroke victims. There’s some nicely radical thinking coming out of various pockets of the Government Digital Service and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Teams across government are running countless experiments.
But what if governments are looking through the AI telescope from the wrong end? What if citizens’ own use of AI to access public services proves to be an even more transformative force?
Creating friction
Many public services rely on friction to stay viable. They depend on slow, confusing, frustrating user experiences to put off those otherwise eligible – how often do people just get fed up trying, and give up? This is both unfair and politically convenient. You could say “’twas ever thus” – until now.
From parents seeking special needs support to property owners appealing council tax bands, it’s often the friction of bad service design that restrains demand, not the law.
AI – specifically AI agents – will remove that friction. Your AI agent will be doggedly relentless in how it accesses public services on your behalf, however byzantine those services may be. It will make sure your application is perfectly crafted to maximise your chances of getting what you want, treating any appeals process as just another stage to be navigated.
Ask your agent
I’m lucky to have played a lot with AI agents recently – the likes of OpenClaw, PicoClaw and Claude Cowork. I recently ran an experiment with OpenClaw – what would an AI agent do if I asked it to tell me whether the council tax band for my house was fair, in comparison to my neighbours?
It came back immediately to tell me the band was higher than all my neighbours and suggested some next steps it could take. At this point I stopped it, as I’d realised something stark.
If I’d have let it, my AI agent would happily have run off to compare neighbours’ floor areas by querying the Gov.uk Energy Performance Certificate API; it would have measured neighbours’ extensions from Ordnance Survey; downloaded Land Registry’s historic house price dataset; searched property websites for number of bedrooms; and researched how best to craft an appeal over my council tax band to the Valuation Office Agency. It would then have written a far better appeal letter than I ever could and submitted it on my behalf. Just like that – all without any intervention on my part.
Now I might still have lost the appeal, but the cost to me in time and hassle would have been negligible compared to even three months ago – one click and about 12p, which is the most expensive it’ll ever be. The friction that stops people from appealing their council tax band just disappeared. Ditto every other public service.
Now what?
Agentic flooding
Welcome to the new frontier of “agentic flooding”, a term coined by Chris Schmitz, a PhD student at Berlin’s Centre for Digital Governance. He’s created a dashboard highlighting increased demand for public services which might be attributed to citizens’ use of AI.
For example, benefit appeals to the Department for Work and Pensions have increased by over 60% since the first benefit-specific AI tools appeared in 2022. And this was before AI agents appeared on the scene at the end of 2025.
Governments are not remotely ready for the coming explosion in demand for their services driven by AI agents. It might take a couple of years, but it’s coming.
Much of this demand will be entirely legitimate. Some of it doubtless will be fraudulent. But demand is demand, and AI agents don’t ever get bored – they negate the friction that used to keep demand in check.
Adding more friction to restrict AI agents would see the government kicking off an AI arms race against its citizens in which both sides lose. Instead, governments will need to clarify – if not tighten – countless rules, policies, processes and regulations, otherwise public services risk being swamped. Along the way, policy grey areas will be eliminated, and that’ll be a loss.
All this won’t be popular, particularly if done in a hurry in response to a crisis.
There’s been a great emphasis in Whitehall on using AI to write better policy papers. I hope they’re using AI to explore the myriad tricky policy responses required to respond to the imminent explosion in demand.
Oh, and by the way – the same will apply for the private sector.
Tom Loosemore is a partner at consultancy Public Digital.
Listing consumer electronics on the internet’s large ecommerce marketplaces is a key step in “democratizing” the products, allowing them to be purchased by anyone with just a click. It has happened to cars (in the United States, you can buy a Hyundai on Amazon), and now it’s happening to humanoid robots.
The Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics, among the most active robot-makers in the field, is preparing to bring its most affordable model, the Unitree R1, to international markets through Alibaba Group’s marketplace. According to reports in The South China Morning Post, the rollout will initially cover North America, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. There’s no exact on-sale date for the robots yet, but the Post report says it will show up as soon as this week.
This is not the first time Unitree has used AliExpress as a global storefront. The company’s G1 model, the more powerful and more expensive predecessor to the R1, is already listed at just under $19,000.
It’s as much of a symbolic step before as a commercial one; selling a humanoid robot on a global marketplace positions the product as easily attainable. This serves as a step toward normalization of the tech, which is still not widely adopted. The sale of the R1 simply lowers the threshold of access even further, and shifts humanoid robots from the territory of promise to that of concrete availability.
Lower Price, Higher Demand
When it was announced last summer, the starting price of the R1 was 39,900 yuan, or about $5,900. Today, the basic version starts at 29,900 yuan, or about $4,370.
That price will fluctuate given changes in exchange rates and shipping costs that add on import taxes and tariffs. Still, that figure sounds surprisingly low considering that some of the R1’s other competitors in the humanoid robotics landscape are far more expensive.
The price tag for Unitree’s own flagship H1 robot approaches $90,000. Tesla’s Optimus robot, which is not yet on sale to the public, is aiming for a starting price under $20,000, but that price will only be attainable when Tesla reaches production of 1 million units a year. Meanwhile, robots from Figure AI and Apptronik are hovering around $50,000 per unit. The R1’s objectively low price essentially makes it a hatchback in a world of sedans.
The R1 is 4 feet tall, weighs 50 pounds, and has 26 smart joints. You can talk to it and give it commands; Unitree’s large-language multimodal model with voice and image recognition is on board. Curious coders can program it using a software developer’s kit. But the real calling card is the R1’s physical performance. The robot can do cartwheels, lie down and stand up independently, and run downhill. Unitree calls it “born for sport,” and videos of its presentation made the rounds months ago. Handstands and wheel kicks are not exactly what you’d expect from a robot that costs less than a used car.
Put It to Work
As impressive as the Unitree R1’s moves are, it lacks hands with articulated fingers, and its motors can’t generate a lot of torque. It is not designed to be a domestic helper or to manipulate complex objects. The company presents it as an “intelligent companion” for interaction, research, and software development.
The EDU model (Go2 EDU, G1 EDU) add an Nvidia Jetson Orin module with more computing power for artificial intelligence tasks. That model also has two degrees of freedom for the head and optional right hands. In that robot’s case, the target market is laboratories and universities. The limitations of the basic R1 put it largely in the same camp. This is not a household robot that makes coffee and walks the dog, but it is a good choice for researchers, labs, and anyone who wants to test robotics algorithms on solid hardware without spending a fortune.
It is true that bringing a relatively capable humanoid to global markets at this price does lower the barrier to entry for developers, researchers, and enthusiasts. It is a real leap from a few years ago, even if some people will buy it just to keep it in the living room to take a bow when guests arrive.
This story was originally published by WIRED Italia and translated from Italian.
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