WATCH: Our New Weekly Video Commentary and Interview Program, SYSTEM UPDATE, Debuts Today

I’m very excited about the launch on Wednesday of the new video interview program I’m hosting, called SYSTEM UPDATE. The show will air each week on Wednesday on the Intercept’s YouTube channel, and will typically explore one topic in as in-depth and critical manner as possible.

This program was one that we had been developing prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and Latin America, with the intention to produce two separate shows — one in English for our U.S. audience, the other in Portuguese for our Brazilian audience — in conjunction with a television network in Brazil. With isolation making it impossible to go into a studio, and with people confined to their homes craving original content, we decided to launch a stripped-down version of it to reside for now on YouTube.

For our first episode, we deliberately chose not to focus primarily on the coronavirus pandemic — in part because it is easy for all of us to reach a saturation point and in part because so many other vital topics have been under-discussed as a result of the understandable fixation on the health crisis. This episode instead examines the fallout from the 2020 Sanders campaign: what went wrong, what lessons can be drawn from it for left-wing populism in the U.S. and more broadly in the democratic world, and what does Sanders’ likely loss to Joe Biden say about the possibility for meaningful political change through working within the Democratic Party? I spoke to two guests who were (and are) vocal but critically minded supporters of the Sanders campaign yet who evaluate these questions from quite different perspectives: the co-host of the great TrueAnon podcast Liz Franczak, and the wildly popular YouTube host Kyle Kulinski.

The 2020 Democratic primary vividly revealed, for those who did not already know, that a huge political and ideological swath of the U.S. citizenry is completely unrepresented — disappeared — by corporate-owned cable news outlets. For that reason — similar to the dynamic that gave birth to the Intercept itself back in 2014 and then its podcasts hosted by Jeremy Scahill and Mehdi Hasan — a rapidly growing ecosystem of independent video programs has emerged on YouTube and in the world of podcasts, devoted to airing views and perspectives not typically heard in other venues. I’m very excited for this show to be part of that community, with very similar goals: being able to dig in-depth into complicated topics unconstrained by the limitations of 7-minute segments jammed between commercials and liberated from the need to adhere to prevailing orthodoxies or appease myopic partisan factions.

You can watch the first episode of SYSTEM UPDATE on the player below, but we encourage you to subscribe to the Intercept’s YouTube channel to automatically watch each episode as well as other original content we produce. We will soon launch our Portuguese-language show for Brazil, but will sometimes feature those shows with English-language subtitles when the topic matter is of interest to an international audience. As we progress, we hope to experiment with other suggestions, including audience participation and live commentary regarding breaking news.