Piker was chubby, a self-described “outcast” who doodled animé comics and questioned authority. Once, in a third-grade private-school religion class, he criticized the curriculum for covering only Islam. “I would ask about dogmas, like, why are we supposed to believe this, just because the book says so?” he says. The next year, Piker’s dad moved him to public school, and Piker’s questions and lack of physical fitness attracted bullies. “I got beaten the fuck out of,” he says.
Growing up “horny in a repressed culture,” Piker fantasized about moving to the United States. “There’s a saying in Turkey that, when you go to America, the girls ask to fuck,” he says. His parents let him go to the University of Miami, and within weeks of his arrival, he was approached to promote nightclubs around South Beach. On the job, he met the first woman he had sex with. “I pulled the worst fucking line I’ve ever pulled on a girl, which still probably works to this day whenever I say it. I said, 'Let’s get out of here,' ...because I can’t do the things I wanna do to you in here,” he says. The two went to a nearby apartment-complex courtyard, where they had sex on a gravel staircase, Piker’s back bleeding the whole time. “I remember thinking, I don’t know the next time I’ll have sex again, so I better make this last,” he says. “Which I did … It was fucking amazing.”
After two semesters in which he earned a 2.9 GPA, Piker’s parents made him transfer to Rutgers University. There, he rushed Theta Delta Chi after asking girls which fraternity they liked most. Now, Piker attributes his approach in “The Breakdown” to debates with his conservative frat brothers. “I am a little bit more tolerant to understanding the other side’s opinion because of that,” he says. In 2013, his senior year, he skipped a spring break trip for a weeklong internship with his uncle Cenk Uygur’s news network, The Young Turks (TYT).
Riled up by her provocative stances, Piker posted his first Tomi takedown video, in which he ripped apart Lahren’s commentary on the Women’s March, in January 2017. It got more than 12 million views. His next two videos were also anti-Lahren rants — one about the Muslim ban (17 million views) and another more generally about Lahren’s conservative opinions (18 million views). But Piker’s videos about Lahren also started to get him in trouble. In each, he mentioned that Lahren is “kinda cute,” asked her to slide into his DMs, and asked why she hadn’t hit him up for a date. (Lahren declined to comment on Piker and has never publicly responded to his videos.)