What Event is Socialism?

It's great to hear about your political journey and how you got involved in leftist politics. The growth and popularity of Marxist ideas have been notable in recent years. It's important to keep steering the movement in the right direction and ensure it remains true to its principles. The "Deprogramming" podcast sounds like a compelling platform to discuss these ideas and reach a broader audience. It's encouraging to seme it kind of started back in 2016-ish uh with Bernie his campaign when he suddenly you know he was saying all these things oh wow I've never heard that before that that kind of makes sense why don't we have you know Universal Health Care and all that stuff we know oh other countries have that that's cool why don't we have that and that kind of started you know going down the rabbit hole like it did for a lot of Americans where you know I learned that oh Bernie's not actually a socialist he's a Social Democrat okay what's the difference between social democracy and socialism um you know things like that um and then I started doing some reading myself about you know what socialism is really about and then I read Lenin I was like okay I get it now this makes sense this is for me um and then come 2020 with the botched coronavirus response um you know in the nation with the most resources to bring to bear to to handle this pandemic we just didn't do it we just sacrificed a million Americans on the altar of capitalism um we had to make the line go up and that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back from me that's when I I felt the need to to Pivot to use my platform for something useful rather than you know general interest sciency stuff I was like all right let's talk about socialism let's let's bring some other people on board and uh that was pretty much it for me but ever since then it's been more or less going down the rabbit hole reading as much as I can watching other uh socialist creators I've teamed up with Hakeem and you gobnik to make a podcast and it's all been very fun very rewarding much more so than what I was doing before that seems to be the a general consensus we used to talk about Bernie as a sort of Trojan Horse where like you have social democracy and then inside you have you know hardcore Marxism leninism and uh it's it's the path that I know Eddie and myself uh took and a lot of the friends that we grew up with doing socialist activism they ended up taking a similar path by the way I just wanted to say that the name um the deprogramming of the podcast uh it's it's such a good name because the the word that Mao used to use for a similar phenomenon was brainwashing but it doesn't have the same positive connotation podcast so well thank you yeah we were pretty pleased when we came up with that one and uh that was that was a unanimous vote for sure we like it I'm also a very big fan of puns so the the double meaning of that really hits me yeah I'm glad you guys like it yeah we're we're thrilled with the response we've gotten from the podcast so far I mean it was when we launched it was like number one on the educational charts for the for that week uh over you know garbage like Jordan Peterson's podcast and he had tremendous reach so that was uh really a vote of confidence for us that okay maybe people do want to listen to this sort of thing absolutely I have oppression lack of real Capital behind us more and more people every year and I've I've been at this a long time especially in the last couple of years even more than with Bernie more and more and more people are just learning about Marxism it's really inspiring yeah totally agree and it's it's something that I wouldn't have expected even a few years ago how much it's kind of taken off and it's it's really heartening to see that we just have to make sure that you know we do continue to steer it in the right direction it doesn't become co-opted like a lot of things have uh recent