Hey everybody. We've got a special treat just for our podcast subscribers. My friend

Khalil Jibran Muhammad is a professor of history, race, and politics at

Harvard University. But I met him when he was the head of the Schoenberg Center for Research in Black Culture,

which is this hugely important center here in New York, part of the New York Public Library,

and he was convening all of these remarkable events and conversations there that I just loved. Anyway, now he's doing something

similar on a podcast. He's got this cool new show called Some of my Best Friends are, and you can probably

guess from the name what it's all about. I talked with him recently about the show and I'm going to share that conversation with you and also share an episode of his show that I really just loved and frankly that I think would have made a great episode of our show. So check it out.

Kaleel, thanks for coming on the show.

Hey, Kai, it's great to be here.

So you've got this wonderful new podcast.

Some of my best friends are, which, you know, is a great tease for what the show is about I love that

sort of trailer so with my best friends are but it's you and it's journalist Ben

Austin in these intimate conversations about I guess the lived experience of race and racism in America.

Yeah.

And so first off, who is Ben Austin to you?

Yes, Ben Austin is my best bud.

We've known each other for 35 years. 35 years. Yeah, we met when I was

14. He's a year older than me, but we were both freshmen in high school and we met at a job actually you know I was kind of like the doogie

howser of early computing and so I knew it some help. Yeah I was selling computers

to like University of Chicago faculty and a whole bunch of other people who were making the shift from word processors to IBM PC compatibles.

And so Ben and I got to know each other both at work and we ended up being tennis players together.

We played high school tennis and we've been best friends ever since.

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