2016-2020 was peak chapo era and I'm guessing the period when most of us on this site listened to the podcast. I at least stopped listening at the start of 2020 and I think a lot of other people stopped listening in that year also. I think it was really a product of that time period, of these new extremely young leftists discovering socialism for the first time. Most listeners also I'm guessing were fully children of the end of history, many of whom came of age during the Obama era, and the irreverent takes and just taking the piss out of the absurdity of the 2016 election and then the subsequent dumpster fire that was the Trump administration were a breath of fresh air to the civility politics that had defined the earlier era, especially during Obama. People were sick of West Wing, they wanted Chapo.

So I think that's the context for the podcast existing and getting so popular. But the sub pretty quickly moved past the podcast, and I think the podcast hosts actually mentioned the sub on one episode to criticize it? They sorta hated the sub. So there was a divide between the sub and the podcast, at least by the time I got on there. Nevertheless, the subreddit always had the new episode pinned to the top, and the podcast was still mostly how people got on the sub - they were attracted by the podcast's refutation of liberalism and civility politics, and then found their way onto the sub to further their development into a marxist-leninist.