You're listening to Something's Off with Andrew Heaton. It's a podcast that serves as a big cardboard box we can all huddle inside of.

And we're going to do something a little different today.

Monday through Thursday, the show is basically a hole

that we dump news into and then we shovel jokes on top of.

But on Fridays, I want to take a deep breath and skip

doing headlines and segments. We'll do them again Monday and during this time talk to

a proper adult about something interesting, you know, like an interview. And so today I'm going to do just that. I have brought on a proper adult to speak with me. He is an acclaimed and independent scholar named Dr. Arnold Kling and he's the author of the book The Three Languages of Politics

Talking Across the Political Divide. I will introduce him momentarily.

But first I want to tell you why I'm so excited to talk to this author. Most political conversations, if you

look around, are about 80% one conversation ad nauseum. My team is the best team, the other

team is dumb.

And there's deeper conversations that we can have.

Not whose team is the good team, whose team is the bad team.

It's not even what do the team specifically think in terms of policy and things like that. It's not even what do the team specifically think in terms of policy and things like that.

It's how they think.

And once you grasp that, how people think, when you understand the lens people are interpreting events through, when you understand the

rhythm of the story they are telling themselves, everything makes so much more sense.

It doesn't mean you're going to agree with everybody, but you will comprehend where they're coming from a bit easier.

And that makes people seem less crazy or evil when you disagree with them.

In fact, you might even be able to have an intelligent conversation with someone you disagree with.

And I'll give you a quick example to illustrate this.

My degrees in history, and there are different frames people interpret history through.

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