Andrew Marantz
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He didn't say, how dare you, sir, and get up and leave and storm out.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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,
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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...
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
in their coalition. And then he started saying these very, very edgy things about Gaza. And then they took his credential away.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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 –
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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,
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's just backwards. But, you know, I think it's going to take a few years for people to catch up.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, it's interesting. I listened to that episode, and he was being very deferential. I think it's also really funny the way you introduced it as Gavin Newsom joining the Manosphere, because it's not clear what that means exactly, other than people talking in an unscripted way. So I understand the reaction to things like Gavin Newsom deferring to Charlie Kirk too much.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
My guess is that what he's trying to show is kind of modeling a... I'm not afraid. I can swim into uncharted waters. I think people like Newsom are guessing that they'll fare better if they are willing to go out and engage and show that they're not afraid. And I mean, this is something that I heard from multiple people in the piece.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Just the idea of showing up and holding your own and humanizing yourself in many instances is almost more important than what you say, at least to a certain type of voter.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yeah, so just to start from defining terms. So manosphere is, like a lot of internet terms, pretty ill-defined, and it keeps changing. So often, originally, when people used the term, it was for really, really extreme, hateful stuff, right? So it was for... Andrew Tate, who is a proud misogynist, defines himself that way, has been accused of human trafficking. Really, really, really bad dude.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And so often when people talked about the manosphere, they would talk about that. But then it kind of migrated into people who are, you know, conservatives on gender roles or who don't even have like gender content. that they often bring up, but maybe are just into things that are commonly coded as dude stuff, you know, video games or hunting or, you know, lifting weights or whatever.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So all of that is kind of depending on who you're listening to, contained within that category. And there's no reason that the right has a monopoly inherently on being down to earth or being relatable. You know, it's been mentioned many times that people like Bernie Sanders have no problem going onto these shows and, in fact, have been criticized for going onto these shows.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
So it's a bit of a caricature, but it's definitely one that's stuck. And I think we can now see in the data it's definitely one that hurt Kamala Harris in the last election.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Absolutely. And Joe Rogan has been around since he was, you know, telling people to eat worms on Fear Factor. And so and I think you nailed it with the word trust and authenticity. I mean, a lot of times and I think this is true for everyone, but I think it's especially true of listeners who don't think of themselves as political people.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
People who I think are sometimes pejoratively called low information voters, but people who just don't think it's their job to study up on the ins and outs of politics. often what it comes down to is who do you trust? And so you hear a lot of conflicting, competing information.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, you hear one source telling you Doge is just a scam and it's just, you know, a way for Elon Musk to enrich himself. And then you hear Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or Theo Vaughn saying, I don't know, it seems cool to me. You know, we're cutting waste from the government. And if you don't want to embark on the
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
really difficult project of sifting through the conflicting evidence, you can just trust one source and not the other. So you mentioned Theo Vaughn. To my mind, he is a funny, really affable, kind of goofy guy. He presents himself as basically so curious that he almost seems to see it as his job to go in with no prior information into any conversation. And
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You can hear him from one week to the next. I mean, he, within the span of a week last summer, interviewed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. And with each of these interviews, his stance is to kind of just sit back and go, oh, well, that's interesting. I never heard of that before.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
He kind of copied this format from Rogan where when something new comes up that they don't know about, they have a production assistant or an intern or someone kind of sitting in the studio and they'll go, oh, could you pull that up?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Yes, very much. It's a dorm room kind of sitting around at a diner kind of conversation. They are a proxy for the audience who may or may not know all the proper nouns. And so they'll just Google it for you in real time. And often that's why it takes two or three or four hours because they're really not in a hurry.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
You know, I believe he said he wanted to speak to her. And they were kind of still negotiating the details and then it ended up not happening. There are many people who – I mean sort of should Kamala have gone on Rogan was one of the main Monday morning quarterback topics after she lost the election.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And there are people who said she would have been great on Rogan because he wouldn't have asked her tough questions. He's not generally a very tough interviewer. There are other people who said she might have had a tougher time because – She is more of a kind of buttoned up politician than Trump is certainly.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Actually, Joe Rogan was talking to Theo Vaughn on his podcast and he said, he sort of crystallized this. He said, look, man, I didn't want to ask her about policy. I just wanted to get her in a room, get her talking for a couple hours. And I feel like if you start talking for that long, I'll just start to see if your mind is calculated or if you're just free.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And so that seems to be for people like Rogan and Theo Vaughn, and I think for a lot of their listeners and for a lot of potential voters, that seems to be like the main criterion. Are you calculated or are you just free?
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
Definitely. And it did not used to be the case. Liberals used to be the counterculture. They used to be the upstarts. And liberals now have become defenders of norms and institutions. But it's now the case in the data and in the perceptions as well that the base of the democratic vote is the educated vote.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
And if you're a working class voter, you know, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, et cetera, you're starting to see in the numbers that people do not feel as at home in the democratic party. It's still not obviously across the board and the Democrats still win a majority of votes of people of color and women and all these things. But
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
It's clear that the Democrats have lost this connection to being unassailably the party of the working class. And... Sometimes that has to do with policy and raising the minimum wage. And sometimes it just has to do with a vibe of feeling snobby or feeling like you're always being second guessed or you're always being fact checked.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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.
Fresh Air
The Political Battle For The Bros
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...
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Thank you so much, Tanya. So good to be back.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yeah. So just to start from defining terms. So manosphere is, like a lot of internet terms, pretty ill-defined, and it keeps changing. So often, originally, when people used the term, it was for really, really extreme, hateful stuff, right? So it was for... Andrew Tate, who is a proud misogynist, defines himself that way, has been accused of human trafficking. Really, really, really bad dude.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And so often when people talked about the manosphere, they would talk about that. But then it kind of migrated into people who are conservatives on gender roles or who don't even have like gender content that they often bring up, but maybe are just into things that are commonly coded as dude stuff, you know, video games or hunting or lifting weights or whatever. So all of that is kind of
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
depending on who you're listening to, contained within that category. And there's no reason that the right has a monopoly inherently on being down to earth or being relatable. You know, it's been mentioned many times that people like Bernie Sanders have no problem going onto these shows and, in fact, have been criticized for going onto these shows.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So it's a bit of a caricature, but it's definitely one that's stuck. And I think we can now see in the data it's definitely one that hurt Kamala Harris in the last election.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Absolutely. And Joe Rogan has been around since he was telling people to eat worms on Fear Factor. And I think you nailed it with the word trust and authenticity. I mean, a lot of times, and I think this is true for everyone, but I think it's especially true of listeners who don't think of themselves as political people.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
People who I think are sometimes pejoratively called low information voters, but people who just don't think it's their job to study up on the ins and outs of politics. Often what it comes down to is who do you trust? And so you hear a lot of conflicting, competing information. You know, you hear one source telling you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Doge is just a scam and it's just, you know, a way for Elon Musk to enrich himself. And then you hear Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or Theo Vaughn saying, I don't know, it seems cool to me. You know, we're cutting waste from the government. And if you don't want to embark on the really difficult project of sifting through the conflicting evidence, you can just trust one source and not the other.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So, you know, you mentioned Theo Vaughn. To my mind, he is a funny, really affable, kind of goofy guy. He presents himself as basically so curious that he almost seems to see it as his job to go in with no prior information into any conversation. And You can hear him from one week to the next. I mean, he, within the span of a week last summer, interviewed Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And with each of these interviews. his stance is to kind of just sit back and go, oh, well, that's interesting. I never heard of that before. He kind of copied this format from Rogan where when something new comes up that they don't know about, they have a production assistant or an intern or someone kind of sitting in the studio and they'll go, oh, could you pull that up? Could you Google that?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
I mean, I was listening when someone in a Theo Vaughn interview mentioned FDR and the New Deal and Theo Vaughn went, What is that again? Can we pull that up? And they Googled New Deal and started reading the Wikipedia article. So... The vibe is very much not, you know, we've done our research, we've studied up, we've pre-fact checked everything. It's really the opposite.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
Yes, very much. It's a dorm room kind of sitting around at a diner kind of conversation. They are a proxy for the audience who may or may not know all the proper nouns. And so they'll just Google it for you in real time. And often that's why it takes two or three or four hours because they're really not in a hurry.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
And when Stavros went on Theo's show, Theo started to say a lot of stuff that I think is frankly pretty offensive about why we need to close the border and 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
It takes trust. 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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,
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So to kind of play out that argument, the way that argument would go is, okay, let's say some left of center donor decided to give hundreds of millions of dollars to whichever TikTok star was kind of supporting the Democrats. 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?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
That, you know, we're just hanging. And it would be weird if you were hanging with your friend and you kept badgering them with receipts. So that's not what he's going to do.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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, 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, you are the left and the Democrats the same thing?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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 resolved or at least the tension has to be, I think, recognized is what do we mean when we say the left?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Seth Rogen / Can The Dems Win Back The Bros?
So I think it's, you know, 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, you know, 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.