Hi there, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again a Big Think podcast.

Since the early days of the public internet, Big Think has curated more than 10,000 surprising brain bending significant ideas and shared them through video, text, and social media.

The Think Again podcast remixes this formula,

surprising me and my guests with conversation starters

that we didn't necessarily come here prepared to discuss.

Today I'm joined by a historian and journalist Jelani Cobb.

He's the author of Substance of Hope,

Barack Obama and The Paradox of Progress and other books. And one of our most

powerful writers on the complexities of race in America, Jolani is a staff writer at The New Yorker,

where he's given readers nuanced insight into gun culture, police brutality, the Black Lives Matter

movement, and much more. Welcome to think again, Jolani. Thank you. So I wanted to start with something that you wrote a very long time ago, like back in 2007,

this is from the foreword to a book of essays called The Devil and Dave Chappelle.

I wondered if you would mind just reading this paragraph and then we can take it from there.

Oh my god, this is...

The ghost of writing past, right?

Well, so what's funny about this is that this says 2007, but it actually is much older than that.

Oh, yeah?

Because I wanted to have a collection of my essays.

It was like a weird thing when I had, as a young person. I always wanted to have a collection of essays published.

And so maybe even 10 years before this book came out, I wrote this hypothetical introduction.

And so this says 2007, but it was actually written in 1997.

So it goes further than back than that.

...