Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

And I am so excited to interview today's guest because she's written an entire book on something I have been trying to

articulate for years. As a political media guy, I've always viewed myself as either a butler or a jester, a kind of Jeeves, Mr Bean hybrid, amusing

amusingly navigating listeners through mindfields of ideas, more of a tour guide than a gladiator.

I have my own opinions, I have my own positions, I don't claim not to, but it's not my job to Sally Forth into the Thunderdome and do battle every week.

That's the remit of, well, pretty much everyone else in political media who are more than happy

to affirm what you already thought

and tell you that you were even more correct than you hitherto expected.

Whereas I like encountering alternate viewpoints most of the time, and one of the truly pleasant surprises of hosting this

program is that you guys enjoy being challenged so long as the challenger isn't a dick.

I find that contempt is really the only kryptonite to political orphans,

but otherwise we're pretty cool to discuss ideas with.

We can sit down and chat with you.

Outside of our ragtag team of independent thinkers, however, a ton of people

assume all political conversations are an exercise in either affirmation or combat,

that everyone is forever advocating for their tribe

and its theology against the infidels.

For folks like that, political conversations consist of making a declarative statement and then folding

their arms and waiting for everyone else to either assent or paray. But a lot of the time, we're just trying to figure out what's actually happening. We're thinking out loud. I imagine you've experienced this, where you're talking about some given subject, I don't know, college tuition or social capital or how political incentives work in Congress, and you're basically talking out loud trying to puzzle out a given topic for yourself.

But your friend, who knows you've previously voted differently than them,

can't assist in figuring things out with you because they assume if you're discussing politics

...