Before we get to this week's show, I want to introduce you to a special guest and one of my favorite colleagues, Kai Wright.

Hi, Kai.

Hey.

Kai, you host a podcast called The United States of Anxiety here at WNYC Studios.

And I have to say, that feels like the most apt podcast title.

Like, every week it feels like an apt podcast title, and then it keeps feeling more and more apt as the weeks go on. Telling me, sister.

So how would you describe what this show is about?

Well, I guess it's two things.

One is that it just became clear to me in the course of making this show over the last four years of presidential politics that like how little we, all of us, we being, you know, black and white, left and right, how little we know about this idea of America that we feel so strongly about.

You know, it's ruined. It needs to be great again.

It's never great.

But so few people really know the history.

And so, and we think that matters in our politics today, how ignorant we are about that history.

And so what we're doing is going back, looking at the period following the Civil War, when we came up with all the things that, you know, that shape what America is, all the ideas about equality and freedom.

And thinking about the things that were unresolved in that moment, the debates we didn't finish, and how they show up in individuals' lives today and then telling stories about that.

Yeah, that's what I love about this season, that, like, I turn it on thinking it's going to be a show about what I'm worried about in this moment in America.

And you're so reminding all of us that these are not new worries.

These worries all have deep historical antecedents.

One of my favorite episodes so far this season is about the school district

in Marin County, which is in the Bay Area where I live about segregation today in this school

district. And it's all of the historical reasons why the schools look like they do right now

and how that's affecting elementary school students today right here in the Bay Area.

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