John McWhorter has been one of the clearest thinkers on race in America for decades, and one of the few willing to say what a lot of people quietly believe. He’s a linguistics professor at Columbia, a New York Times columnist, and one of my personal heroes. It’s good to have him back on the show. The years between roughly 2014 and 2022 were defined by a particular kind of cultural intensity around race, and that intensity has undeniably cooled. John and I both think we’ve turned a page, but we disagree about how cleanly. The mood hasn’t vanished. If anything, what replaced it is harder to laugh off. We also get into the growing number of black men voting Republican, a trend a lot of people spent years denying and now can’t. From there we talk about how mass immigration has subtly scrambled the old racial calculus in America in ways nobody predicted, and what the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act actually means once you look past the headlines. We end on Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey film and the decision to cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, which somehow became a proxy war for everything except the actual question.