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
I mean, I thought I knew the basics of what Twitch was, but I really didn't get just how constant it is. So when I encountered him in 2020, I was, as I put it in the piece, a kind of youngish reporter from an oldish outlet doing the traditional thing of taking notes and then, you know, writing about it days or weeks later.
And what Hassan was doing was he had a backpack on, an IRL backpack with a camera rigged up to it, and he was just live streaming it. And there were all these people in his chat, these kind of commenters who were constantly offering him comments in the chat. He was monitoring them on his phone.
And people kept coming up to him out of the crowd and, you know, wanting to get selfies with him and get him to sign stuff. So it was kind of half journalism, half kind of celebrity influencer stuff.
It's completely incredible how often. I mean, so that year that was 2020. That year he was live on camera for 42 percent of the hours of that year, like all the hours of the year, not waking hours. And he doesn't like film himself sleeping like this is him hosting a show for 42 percent of his life.
Oh, yeah. I flew to L.A. and I, you know, took a lift to his house and rang the bell. And, you know, he showed up at the door and he said, all right, sit out of the shot. Don't make any sound. I'll talk to you when I'm done. And then he just sat down and kept going for four more hours. This was already four hours into the stream that day. That was a Sunday. And so...
He's just doing it all the time. And he's getting numbers that are like, you know, that day it was a Sunday. It was kind of a slow news day. He had maybe 30 something thousand people watching him simultaneously, which is like better than some cable networks. And especially in the coveted youth demographic. Yeah. And he was covering the overthrow of Assad in Syria, which had just happened.
He was covering a YouTube documentary about NATO. You know, just whatever he's looking at on his screen, you're looking at with him. And it actually sometimes can be really exciting. Like the next day when I came to his house, you know, he went to play basketball in the park. And then he came back and said, OK, what should I talk about today? Maybe I'll talk about this. Maybe I'll talk about that.
And then about, you know, a few minutes before he went live. Luigi Mangione was arrested, the suspect in the United Healthcare assassination. And he said, OK, this is what we're talking about. And for six straight hours, he just went through all the things his commenters were sending him. You know, what was Luigi looking at on Twitter? What was he looking at on Goodreads?
Can we watch his valedictorian speech from high school? And it's kind of thrilling to watch someone dig through it in real time and be making comments. live commentary. I mean, it's kind of a high wire act. He's trying not to say something too erratic, but he's trying to be erratic enough to be entertaining.
He was trying to be careful not to, you know, actually explicitly glorify murder, which is against Twitch's rules. But he was not exactly condemning Luigi either, or he was kind of doing it, but doing it semi sarcastically. So it's kind of an incredible thing to watch someone do that for that long.
Yeah, he's really the only leftist star on Twitch. I mean, it's kind of hard to overstate how thoroughly platforms like Twitch have become magified. And so Hasan Piker is really the only outspoken leftist. There are other people who probably have progressive politics, but they don't talk about politics all day. They talk about video games or something. He's like a real leftist.
I mean, he's a kind of like a socialist Marxist leftist. And so he has a lot of views that put him to the left of the Democratic Party's leading politicians. You know, throughout the 2024 election, he was... sort of taking this position that Trump is really terrible, so you should probably cast a vote against him.
But, you know, I can't exactly defend what Harris and the Democrats are doing either. So it was this kind of critical support outlook. And we didn't end up having space for this in the piece. But I was reporting from the DNC in Chicago last summer. Hassan Piker was there. He was actually kind of given a seat of honor by the DNC because they realized that he's this very prominent voice
in their coalition. And then he started saying these very, very edgy things about Gaza. And then they took his credential away.
I think it means a few things. So I don't think he is saying stop all podcasting, stop all streaming, right? It would be hypocritical of him to say that in the middle of his 10-hour stream. So he is not saying to pull out of the battlements that the left is currently in and is currently losing. I think what he's saying is you can't exclusively podcast your way out of the issue.
So when he's objecting to someone like Gavin Newsom, it sounds like what he's objecting to is – Gavin Newsom apparently saying, well, instead of rethinking what about our policies is driving people away, let me just start a podcast and that'll fix it. Right. So it's sort of a question of is this a Band-Aid solution?
But Piker is like a really committed leftist and he really thinks that the Democrats do not have adequate solutions. So I think. What he would probably say is, OK, great. Someone like Kamala Harris should go on Joe Rogan. But when Rogan asks her, how are you going to fix the health care system? Instead of having a really simple answer like Bernie, like we'll just give everyone health care.
She has this sort of ticky tack, you know, technocratic answer. Like if you make under $60,000, we'll do this. Right. So I think he would sort of say that the policy doesn't make for good messaging because it's not universalist policy. It's not clear, simple policy. Now, you can agree or disagree with the sort of Bernie bro democratic socialist policy platform, but it is empirically the case that.
When someone like Bernie Sanders goes on these shows, he doesn't have to struggle with how calculated to be. He says what he says, which is what he says when he's talking to NPR or The New York Times or Fox News because he just says the same thing every time. So I think the Democrats can't podcast their way out of this means if your policies are unpopular, the messaging can only get you so far.
Yeah, there's definitely money going into the right wing podcast sphere, some of it from political donors and some of it just, you know, Joe Rogan got a massive deal from Spotify just because he was very popular. And part of what, you know, when Hassan Piker says, you know, the Democrats can't podcast their way out of this.
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