I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. On September 15th, 2019, I wrote down what the world looked like to me that day. And comments and questions and things flooded in,

and I thought, well, I'm not going to write the next night

because that's just going to crowd the zone

and nobody wants to hear from me every night.

And so I didn't write on the 16th of September, but I felt by the 17th like I needed to

answer people's questions, so I wrote again on the 17th and I've written every night since. People always talk about reaching their audiences

and for me it was the opposite.

My audience came to me and said,

can you please explain what's going on?

And it happens that I'm very well trained at explaining politics and the political

system and American history so yeah I could. That's Heather Cox Richardson. Her letters

from an American land in the

inboxes of some 2 million of us every morning as they have for the last four years.

She's a historian who's able to look back into our nation's past and bring an

often unexpected and always clarifying perspective to these turbulent times.

And remarkably she does it with the intimacy of a friend.

Well, this is so great to be talking with you because I actually do think I know you.

A few days ago when the weather was unexpectedly wonderful, you wrote a letter that said

you spent the whole day kayaking and you didn't have the strength to type.

You said you had things to say, but you'd save them for tomorrow and I thought oh I

hope Heather's okay. Actually that was a great day because I went out kayaking

and kayaked for a couple of miles and my sister saw me and said wait wait I want to go to so I kayaked home that two miles and then she and I decided to go around a nearby island and by the time I'd been on the water about six hours,

...