But it certainly sound like, sounds like she's trying to fight against hopelessness, uh, that especially Black voters and especially Black voters in these districts that are being destroyed might feel right now.

Yeah, I mean, quite frankly, the reason I wanted to talk to her is, was my own hopelessness, [chuckles] um, and, uh, she is someone who, as you point out, you know, I have covered her work on voting rights for a long time.

Um, so I wanted to speak with somebody who could say, "Okay, well, well, what's the hands-on response here?" You know, how do we get past wringing our hands about it? And I think, Brian, the, the, the piece of that, that...

There were two pieces of that that I thought were really useful for me.

One was her opening point of, like, just the framework that we are now in a place as a country where the state has been weaponized against democracy, and that's an important, like, mental shift that I think a lot of Americans have to make, where we still, we're still in this space where we're always like, "Oh, well, you know, we have these institutions.

They're gonna function.

We're gonna just, we just have to wait for the next election." And what she's trying to tell us is that we live in a place now that's that competitive authoritarianism where, like, an, an authoritarian regime has weaponized the state and its institutions against democracy.

I want people in this country to feel like their vote matters, and it's so upsetting to me as someone who believes in the promise of the United States that people don't feel like that is the case anymore, and that their government is working against them to undermine democracy, as Kai has pointed out.

But it certainly sound like, sounds like she's trying to fight against hopelessness, uh, that especially Black voters and especially Black voters in these districts that are being destroyed-might feel right now.

Yeah, I mean, quite frankly, the reason I wanted to talk to her i- was my own hopelessness, [laughs] um, and, uh, she is someone who, as you point out, you know, I have covered her work on voting rights for a long time.

Um, so I wanted to speak with somebody who could say, "Okay, what, what, wh- what's the hands-on response here?" [laughs] You know, how do we get past wringing our hands about it? And I think, Brian, the, the, the piece of that, that...

There were two pieces of that that I thought were really useful for me.

One was her opening point of, like, just the framework that we are now in a place as a country where the state has been weaponized against democracy, and that's an important, like, mental shift that I think a lot of Americans have to make, where we still, we're still in this space where we're always like, "Oh, well, you know, we have these institutions.

They're gonna function.

We're gonna just...

I want people in this country to feel like their vote matters, and it's so upsetting to me as someone who believes in the promise of the United States that people don't feel like that is the case anymore, and that their government is working against them to undermine democracy, as Kai has pointed out.

I'm Emmanuel Dzotsi.

We are both journalists and culture obsessives who love trying to understand the world through an individual person's life.

These are architects of our culture, people who have just had a huge impact on the way we live, the way we take in art, the way we think of ourselves, but who have been flattened over the years.

And so we wanna bring them back to life, look into their complicated, big lives, and we're using the treasure trove of the BBC archive to do that.

There is over 100 years of tape [laughs] of some of the biggest cultural figures in our world.

The BBC's got it, and so we're digging through it.

[upbeat music] So listen, first off, the, the basics of Richard Pryor, if you don't know who he is, he is a genre-defining comedian.

Yeah.

And-

Told y'all to remix it.

Uh, shout out to everybody who took Ben for...

You know what I mean? That hot 15 for that 250.

I know everybody won 7,000 yesterday off that bet alone, so-

[laughs] Shout out to-

I told y'all to remix the bet, though.

I, I was unsure, but Ben was really supposed to go off, but he, he cracked it at 15, so yeah, that's a good life for everybody.

Oh, say more about that.

That you see them side by side.

We are obsessed in this culture with false binaries, and particularly with false bari- binaries around race, gender, and sexuality.

You have to stay inside whatever box we have decided exists for that category because those boxes exist in order to create a caste system.

And anybody whose existence challenges the boundaries of those boxes becomes, uh, an outcast in society.

People start coming for them.

And people whose sexual behavior and sexual identity don't match challenge the idea of, like, there's straight people and there's gay people and here's how they get ranked in society.

Why does the idea of the DL man fascinate people so much, especially straight people? Like, who, who benefits and who is harmed by the existence of the DL trope and, and all the attendant mystique?