Andrew Marantz
speaker
381 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 10 Apr
Andrew Marantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Or I've heard it said that people don't even necessarily vote for the politician they like. They vote for the politician who they think likes that likes them.
I guess my sort of like really rudimentary rubric on this would be it's not, you know, how many celebrities can you line up on your side? It has more to do with kind of. What does it signify? And to your point about identity, showing up at a UFC fight is not just a random room with a lot of people in it. It's about brutal combat. It's sending a very, very specific message.
Certainly there was more that the Harris campaign could have done. For example, she tried to get booked on Hot Ones, the show where you eat really spicy wings.
And that would have been, I think, a great humanizing moment for her. She could, you know, place for her to hang, be a human being, be relatable. You know, yes, I think there is more that any politician can do to get out there, but a lot of times... just speaking purely from a kind of
media, new media, social media angle, it's not always can you get the biggest celebrity because often that doesn't have the spontaneity, the authenticity, the feeling of, you know, this is really what people are like in a room. Beyonce is many, many things, but she's not spontaneous and authentic. She's very controlled about her image.
I mean, the sort of viral behind-the-scenes moment that was working, as far as I could tell, the best for Kamala Harris was... I think I do. Yes. And I just think it's an element of campaigning that when you're too controlled, too risk-averse, and too cautious, and you let it fall by the wayside, you're leaving votes on the table.
Definitely. There was a really interesting moment on Theo Vaughn that I spoke to Stavros Halkias about. He's another comedian who's actually a much more leftist comedian. A lot of these guys are professional comedians for, I think, interesting reasons. And when Stavros went on Theo's show, Theo started to say stuff that sounded pretty xenophobic. And because Stavros is his friend...
He didn't say, how dare you, sir, and get up and leave and storm out.
You know, he kind of laughed along and yes anded the joke in a way that kind of steered him away from the xenophobia parts and toward a kind of more common understanding to the point that by the end of that interview, Stavros was offering a kind of very concise explanation of why he thought Trump and the Republicans were terrible and delivering this to Theo Vaughn, who is
had kind of just been at Trump's inauguration and almost seemed to be in his corner. And it wasn't contentious. It wasn't heated. It was real disagreement, but it was in a kind of amiable, bro-y way. So I don't know. I mean, if that's the manosphere, then it's not as scary as all that. But it's not always possible to model – That kind of agreement, it takes, you know, prior relationship often.
It takes trust, the word you brought up. So it's not like this is a kind of cure-all for, you know, all the cultural ills of America. But I do think it's worth it for at least Democratic politicians to take note the kind of pearl-clutching aesthetic is just very, very off-putting to people. I mean, I heard that more times than I could count.
Well, I think there's something about when your job is to talk for a living and to kind of push boundaries for a living. You, I think, kind of over index for that.
I mean, a lot of the comedian's craft is to look at something you've seen a thousand times, you know, the line to get into the airplane or the, you know, room service at a hotel and find something quirky and new and maybe a little bit taboo to say about it. And so it kind of makes sense that if you're on one of these long form podcasts, you're
It's not going to sound like, OK, here's a very tidy, efficient summary of the negotiations yesterday over the budget shutdown. It's going to sound like, man, like what even is a budget? Like, why do we even give money to each other? Have you ever thought about that? You know, it's like sort of radically open.
And I think a lot of Democrats underestimated how powerfully affecting that is for people. I mean, in the piece, I kind of refer to this as parasocial media. It's not social media anymore. in the sense of, you know, an algorithmic feed. It's parasocial in the sense that, I mean, that word means basically a kind of imagined one-way friendship that the listener has with the host.
So if you're listening to Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for tens or dozens or hundreds of hours while you're at the gym or while you're folding laundry or whatever, you'd feel like you know them. I mean, I feel like I know them. And so then when they tell you something or they start a line of questioning,
you have a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of generosity like oh let's see where he's going with this and that's a very very very powerful tool in culture and in politics and I think for a long time there's been this assumption that oh politics is one thing and Spotify is another and they're just not separate things at all and I feel like
It took way too long for political consultants to learn that about social media. I feel like they've now learned it about social media, but they're a little behind the ball on parasocial media.
I first encountered him in 2020 while I was covering the Bernie Sanders campaign for The New Yorker, and he was covering the Bernie Sanders campaign for his Twitch channel, which he had just launched. So he started out on a YouTube show called The Young Turks, which was one of the first online shows. Sort of populist left shows.
It's been around forever and that it just happens to have been started by his uncle. Hassan was born in New Jersey, but he grew up mostly in Turkey. So he's kind of been back and forth between Turkey and the U.S. his whole life. And when he landed in L.A., he got a job at the Young Turks. And he eventually went solo on Twitch. And what that meant was just basically streaming all the time.
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