Hello and welcome to the political orphanage. If you're tired of the blunt, ham-fisted, and generally useless left-wing versus right-wing analysis of politics, if you're less interested in red team versus blue

team head-bunning and more interested in learning new ways to think,

but welcome home.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and as you listen to this, I am almost certainly wearing a blazer with a pocket square, maybe even while I'm asleep.

Well, I guess today is Mr. Joel Stein, who is the author of In Defense of elitism, why I am better than you and you are better

than someone who didn't buy this book. And you have the distinct honor of being recommended to me by George Will.

That's so, it's the craziest thing that's come out of this book

was that a guy I know suggested I send it to George Will.

I was trying to get a blurb, but I didn't do it in time or he'd enough time to read it he was busy and then all of a sudden George

Will wrote a column about my book in the Washington Post. Okay yeah he didn't he didn't

mention that to me he just like I was telling him I was funny and he was like you know you should look into this Joel Stein guy.

Wow, that's so crazy. Yeah, that blows my the 16 year old in me's mind. Yeah, but it blows my mind that I had lunch with him.

And it also made-

How was that?

He's really nice.

I really like him a lot.

I interviewed him on the podcast about his last book about six months ago.

And it was kind of like I having listened to a bunch of

interviews with him I know the parts that are boilerplate so I called him back a

week later unscheduled and was like can I just ask you questions about

superpowers and things so that we've got like real like rapport he played ball he was

very good about it and so when I was in DC last time I just called him randomly and was like

...