What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

Hello and welcome to the Longform podcast. I am your co-host, Evan Ratliffe joined here by Max Linsky. Aaron is away this week. How are you? How are you, Aaron? Are you not Aaron? How are you, Max?

It's okay. I can be. Should I be here? Should I be here? I don't think that's going to go well.

Evan, who did you have on this show this week?

This week I had the privilege of having two guests on the show at the same time. They were Ben Austin.

Ben, a lot of our listeners will probably know. He's a long time magazine writer. He also wrote a book called High Riders a Great Book about Cabrini Green, the housing project in Chicago.

He writes a lot about Chicago. He lives in Chicago. He's from Chicago.

I had him and Khalil Geron Muhammad, who is Ben's best friend. They have a podcast together, which is called Some of my best friends are.

Khalil is a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's also a writer.

He's got a book called The Condemnation of Blackness. He also contributed one of the essays to the 1619 project in the New York Times magazine,

which we talk about a bit. The two of them have this show where they talk about all kinds of issues, as you will know, if you listen to this show or their show, Ben is white, Khalil is black, and that is part of the theme of the show is sort of talking through big issues through the lens of their friendship.

I wanted to dig into how that friendship came about and both of their careers and how they approach this show.

I love the idea that this is just what, you know, 99% of podcasts are, which is just like two friends chatting, except it's two incredibly intelligent friends chatting who have a quite a bit of serious things to discuss.

Yeah, this is basically the highest level of achievement brought together of two friends, two friends chatting that you could find. It's really a great show. I really enjoy it.

It is one of those podcasts where two friends are talking, but they're incredibly brilliant friends.

We have some incredibly brilliant friends, Evan, new friends, at Vox. That's who we're making the podcast with these days, and we thank them for their partnership.

Love those Vox folks.

Now here's Evan with Khalil Jabran, Muhammad, and Ben Austin.

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