Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Evergan.

This day, April 30, 2015, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders walked outside of the Senate

and had a 10-minute news conference to announce that he was running for the next year's

Democratic nomination for president.

Here to talk about it as always is Nicole Hemmer,

Nicky, hello.

Hello, Jody.

So we don't have to do a like post-mortem

what happened to Bernie in 2020.

We don't have to do a would Bernie have won in 2016 kind of thing

I feel like this is more of our chance to both look at why Bernie got into the race to begin with and then what he

symbolized and meant and kind of what the Bernie era has meant.

But can you remind us actually when Bernie walked out and gave that 10 minute news conference, which

I believe began with the words, I don't have much time so I'm going to be brief

which is very Bernie what did what did we know about him who was he and what did it mean for him to get

in the race he was this idiosyncratic senator from Vermont. He was someone who had a reputation as something of a

curmudgeon. He could be a bit difficult to pin down. You didn't always know where he was going to land on issues and he hadn't

been a member of the Democratic Party. He was somebody who described himself as a socialist.

So he seemed, I have to say at the time when Hillary Clinton looked like a lock for the Democratic nomination, it really did seem like this out of the blue sort of stunt campaign.

So when did that start to shift for you?

I mean, do you remember when you got a sense of

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