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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · The Political Battle For The Bros · 20 Mar 2025 podcast

I think part of what he means is you can't just have a kind of astroturf industry. solution where you throw a bunch of money at sort of randomly selected people whose views you like and that'll do it. Right.

So to kind of play out that argument, the way that argument would go is, OK, let's say some left of center donor decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to whichever, you know, TikTok star was kind of supporting the Democrats and Would that boost awareness of the Democrats? Probably.

But what it wouldn't do is have the authentic feeling of an organic, trusted, authentic, weird voice, right? So you were saying before people who've known parasocially someone like Theo Vaughn or Joe Rogan for years, they have a kind of trust in them. And a lot of what that trust comes from is not just –

putting in the parasocial hours, although that's important, but also, frankly, how weird and idiosyncratic these people's interests are. You can't grow Joe Rogan of the right in a lab because Joe Rogan wasn't the Joe Rogan of the right until a few months ago. In 2020, Joe Rogan was the Joe Rogan of the left. He supported Bernie Sanders for president. And then between 2020 and 2024, he was lost.

But the point I'm making with that is if you had decided to astroturf your way to Joe Rogan, you wouldn't have been looking in the right place because you wouldn't have been funding Joe Rogan. So a lot of where the trust and authenticity comes from is... You know, this is someone whose interests I actually just vibe with at a totally apolitical level.

And then when they start talking about politics, maybe I'll take some advice from them. That's a very hard thing to kind of recreate from the top down.

The way Hassan Piker put it to me is, yeah, Trump lies constantly, but at least people get the sense that he's saying what he really thinks. So it's kind of a tricky double-edged sword because I think a lot of his supporters don't even necessarily believe that he's being truthful, but they believe that he's authentically speaking his mind.

And actually in his flagrant interview with Andrew Schultz, who I also spoke to for this piece, When Trump was interviewed on that podcast, he at one point said, you know, I'm basically a truthful person. And the host, Andrew Schultz, laughed in his face and was like, what does that mean, a basically truthful person? But I think there is ironically some truth to it.

I think Trump does constantly say things that are demonstrably false, but he gives the sense that what's happening on the inside of his brain is coming out of his mouth. And I think if the rubric you're using is are you calculated or are you just free, you it's very hard to beat Donald Trump at that game.

And I should also just say on the Rogan thing, we were talking about the, you know, did Kamala Harris try to do Rogan and all the miscommunications there. One thing I found interesting when they were debriefing the kind of top campaign staffers debriefed after the election, they actually, on a podcast, they went on Pod Save America, and they were talking about the different

decisions in the campaign and what they could have done differently. And they were asked this sort of big question of the day, why didn't she go on Rogan? And they claimed that it was because of scheduling and they couldn't get to Texas that many times. Texas is not a battleground state. But another thing they said that just has stuck with me is they said,

You know, we did want to do it not so much for the conversation itself, but just because it would have broken through, meaning like presumably it would have gotten attention in the mainstream media. And I just thought that's such a mistaken old school way of thinking. I mean, even now you're thinking the point of a Joe Rogan interview is to get a headline on CNN.com. It doesn't.

It's just backwards. But, you know, I think it's going to take a few years for people to catch up.

Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk was on Rogan a week or two ago talking about all this stuff. And it was after the Doge stuff had started, after they had made these massive cuts to USAID. And Rogan asked him, what's going on with this, man? People say that, you know, like babies are dying and all this terrible stuff is happening. And Musk just said, oh, no, that's not really true.

And then they kind of moved on. You know, again, this is not a journalistic standard of pushback. This is not a you know, I'm coming in with the receipts and I'm going to make you answer.

I think that could be really illuminating, actually, if someone could get someone like Elon Musk to sit down for four hours unedited with receipts and say, here you said you cut a billion dollars, but it was actually a million dollars. Your explanation, please. You know, but I just don't think that is what someone like Joe Rogan sees his job as. I think he sees it as a hang.

I think it is. Luckily, I'm not a political strategist, so I have no idea how to do it. But one thing we haven't mentioned, which I think I should just explicitly say is that what do we mean by the left is actually a very live question. So when people talk about the, you know, can there be a Joe Rogan of the left or can the left win back young people?

Are the left and the Democrats the same thing or are they actually at odds in many ways? A lot of what Hassan Piker does is criticize the Democrats from the left. And often what he says is, I'm a leftist, not a liberal. So one thing that has to be sort of Or at least the tension has to be, I think, recognized is what do we mean when we say the left?

And then I think to the second part of the question, can the center left Democrat anti-Republican coalition win young men back? I think yes. And I think it, you know, based on the conversations I've had with various people, you know, it's a combination of material factors and kind of cultural factors.

So I think it's trying to deliver a coherent policy agenda that will actually benefit people and make their lives better and more meaningful. And then also showing up in these spaces, both online and IRL, to help tell them how you're going to do that. So easier said than done. And as I say, luckily, it's not my job to do it, but it's possible for sure.

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