Andrew Epstein, welcome to The Dig. It's great to be with you, Micah. Longtime listener,

first time caller. Happy to have you here. Can you start with giving us just your general political

background? What was your trajectory from initial politicization to key player in the Zoran

Mamdani campaign? It starts pretty early, but I'll go through it as quickly as

possible. I see the first kind of moment of my politicization was the first week of high school,

which was September 11th, 2001, living in the suburbs, but family working in New York City

and able to see the destruction from the waterfront of the town I grew up in,

a real moment of being kind of wrenched into the world and feeling like things were not, as you thought.

That very quickly turned into outrage at the Bush administration's mobilization for war,

both through an older sister that was more

politicized and older friends and just the kind of ferment of the Iraq war movement in high

school. I pulled into that. I went to the major demonstrations in 2003 and 2004 and poured a lot

of the energy and the feeling of that into wanting to get Bush out of office.

It started the Howard Dean campaign, Dean for America, and then John Kerry.

When Kerry lost, I think, both that and then a year later with Hurricane Katrina being in the early days of my time in college at SUNY

Binghamton, I think both of those were radicalizing events that led to a deeper alienation

with the political system and many years spent quite opposed or not participating in electoral

politics and a much more kind of radical bent in college.

You know, I don't know that I had an entirely coherent ideology, but it was broadly the kind of anarchism that was at the time where a lot of anti-capitalist radical energy was, or it's where you kind of get drawn in. And this was before the days of

Jacobin magazine to kind of help us organize our thoughts and relationship to power and mass

movement. After college, I think my analysis started to shift, not least because I, you know,

started working and paying rent and all the rest of it that I think very quickly, at least

...