you know in it i try to be honest and you know and i try to answer the question that i get asked the most probably which is is being united states senator as much fun as working on saturday night live and the answer of course is no why would it be and i also get  lot how did you make the transition so i explain the hat and i also get asked a lot what's the senate like you know what's it like especially for someone who didn't come from bollix and  then of course right now are being asked all the questions and i'm sure people are interested in terms of what's happening in washington right now and so well that's a good list i was going to i was going to start with the transition the arc of the story of your book traces your journey from saturday night live to a lot of other things dealing with comedy and political comedy and then you transition into politics but the question that you threw out here is a question i think a lot of people have i had starting the book why would you do that why would you become a politician well  you know i always had been political and the sort of the initial animating issue was civil rights and my parents and my brother and i would watch the news while we ate dinner on trade we had dinner on tray tables and it was good my it was t v dinners and my had a good dinner and but my dad was a republican he was a jacob javits republican there used to be these things called liberal republicans and my dad was one of them and during the civil rights movement when demonstrators we have dogs more billy clubs or fire hoses put on them and we see that on cronkite or huntley brinkley which you know we kind of trade back and forth my dad would point to the t v and go no jew can be for that i mean my brother no jew can be for that then sixty four when barry goldwater was the nominee for the republican party he my dad switched because goldwater i voted against the civil rights bill so this is like the basic lesson that my brother and i learned which is justice is about justice and you know when l b j signed the civil rights bill he turned  staffer i think was bill moyers and said you know we've just democrats lost the south for a generation and he was wrong it's like forever and we've lost and so here we've lost t that was and i love my mom too but he she was a different crowd already and i really was kind of identified with him and so that was a big deal so i was always  very politically minded and public policy minded an issue minded and doing comedy when i started doing comedy in high school i mean i actually started doing it earlier but when i was doing with my partner tom davis in high school we were doing political satire and that's what i have i was the focus of what we did and when i got to s n l wrote and i write about this we wrote a lot of the and he is a thoughtful conservative and we never felt it was a job of the show to have a political point of view to have a bias and we wanted to do well observe satire that didn't punish you for not knowing stuff but rewarded you for knowing so we i was very proud of the stuff i did over the years so i was always interested in that and  when i finally left saturday night live i wrote a book called rush limbaugh's a big fat idiot and other observations and people were coming up to me and saying thank you thank you for doing this and you know i kept doing that and i got to my a radio show and what really motivated me to run for the senate and i write about this in the book is paul wellstone and paul was  minnesota senator mazing lee passionate guy who really believed strongly and just us and ng you know mental health was a huge issue of his that is part of his legacy that i fight fight for but he fought for veterans homeless veterans he fought for poor people he did this while he was a professor at carleton college he won in one nine hundred ninety in a campaign that was an amazing campaign he was a he was an organizer and he was he was the guy i did the most fun raising for in the most stuff as a senator for he died eleven days before the election in two thousand and two about a week or  week or two before that i guess about three weeks before that he had voted against going to war in iraq and he was one of the very few incumbents who did that and  so it was a just tragic when he died i'd been campaigning for him and then norm coleman won that race and a couple months after he was in  i don't know why people would do that but he just was full of himself and at one point he said to be blunt i'm a ninety nine percent proven over paul wellstone and i read that and i just went who's going to beat this guy and i didn't quite say that  but and that was the first moment ever i had ever considered running for office and frankly i didn't right away think that i was that guy but the more and more i took it on you write about how the closer you got to declaring your candidacy and when you finally did declare your candidacy the more you got the advice stop being funny and you had a hard time with this right what what made it's what made you stop because you did eventually reign it it well having coffee with jeff and he said you know just as an exercise why don't you write a five minute speech without a joke and i thought to myself why would anyone do that i go why then when i finally did now it's right away everything they put the coleman campaign the republican started putting everything i had ever written or said comedy through this fifteen million dollar machine called the dehumanizer and it was it was built with this very very sophisticated israeli technology that could just take the ambiguity and man oh man robbed of those things things can look pretty ugly and so it was just a nightmare and i kind of prove months anyway so i just said and i said the internet is just a great learning tool for kids for example my son last year did a great six grade report on beastie ality for his class and he he downloaded a lot of great visual aids and the kids in the class just love them because you know at that age they're just  so the point of that joke is hey maybe you should look at what your kids are looking at it was kind of a conservative joe it was like monitor maybe monitor your kid's downloads and sat anyway so they may turn that into an ad which was like oh  lodhi and it came from infinity you know through your eyeballs out the back of your brain and my mother in law cried and she didn't cry because i joked about b c alice she cried at what are they doing to my son in law and so it just became i had to really and then we  also did we did focus groups early on and we learned that man people in minnesota at least then just didn't think being a comedian and you know having an award winning emmitt five emmys and all the shit that didn't mean that didn't mean you were smart and but they were impressed that i had written we found the sadness and the focus group and i had and and we found that we really and this was so counterintuitive to me i went to harvard i went to i went to harvard and it was played down the comedy books are ok and harvard is just great and that's so and does it i wondered in the context scart and he just played his t v persona straight into the presidency where you had to spend six year i write about this i write about sort of the iron i i didn't brag about ba but i also talk about trump in regard to where we are now as compared to where we were in two thousand and five and two thousand and five after this very close elect n you know bush said he had capital and rove talked about a permanent majority for republicans and we were organizing and  because air america and media matters which was pushing back on the right wing media and the center for american progress and of the we we stop them on the social security  privatization and you know it there are other and now we have to mobilize against this health care the bill passed and in the house according as somebody who's very you know very insightful about health care is mean this is the only guy in the country who had figured out that health care policy was complicated no one would have thought no one thought that man oh man it is let's go back to a simpler time for a moment yeah so you're getting everything you said in the past is getting put through the humor eyes or you're on the campaign trail you're trying to spin yourself away from your comedic park persona but it's not easy you've got a lifetime of instinct plus you think comedy is a good tool for speaking truth to power for connecting with people right and you go out just i'm one of many great examples of this you you bring up in the book you go to a town or city to make a speech and there's a giant germ and so herman the german know all minnesota's is beautiful town in south central minnesota and it's  was founded by germans and they have a statute to armenia us it was a hung who butchered and so in new all they have this statue to armenia us and it's a tall statue a twenty feet tall or twenty five and it's on a seventy five foot they have a we have a group of democrats and there's a tractor there now i am i grew up in st louis park minnesota st louis park is a suburb of minneapolis it's the jewish suburb of minneapolis and by that i mean it's about twenty five but when i grew up about twenty five percent jews and that's a lot of jews in minnesota that's that's a  it's called st jewish park and in minnesota and so i'm i'm a self respecting comedian and i'm in the shadow of herman the german and of course i immediately think of myself you know i grew up in st louis park and we had a statue too c so i was i had exercise a little discipline and didn't do it and then like about a month later new york magazine constitute like a profile of me and one point sit down for interview and they go i and my stamp goes like why did you do that and that's what i that's why i learned something which is the pivot but i learned a pivot sometimes you because i had always been taught as a kid of minnesota that you're the guy to take them on and you know i would at first would answer that question but then the pivot is you know as i travel around minnesotans minnesota minnesotans don't care about polls what they care about is their kids education what they care about is making sure that they get a world class health care and that everyone is covered even if they have preexisting conditions and then you know that's a pivot that's what you're supposed to do if you're a competent politician and it took me like a whole it took me a long time to learn that and right after this to the jew thing was that was it i went like why did i do that that was stupid and then so i got another training in pivoting and and then i did my next interview with like a guy who would interview me one i pivot even like i'm more agreed just pivot and that and nothing you know he's fine with that and then now i'm going like this is fun  like so i'm like wildly pivoting like just for the sake of seeing how much i can pivot and at the end of the interview you know like a twenty minute interview he turns to my press secretary and goes you know he's getting so you pivot all the way to the democratic nomination in your in your senate run but there is a point where republicans in digging up your old jokes and trying to make use of them find one that you end up having to apologize for against your own instincts well yeah yeah i first know it was against here's you know i'll tell what this is pretty dark and launching right and the so in fact christine zander i write this in the book writer wrote on the show for seven years great the whole irish writer you know she would she had a thing when someone would say something watch your sob and she just go do your lawsuit diary and and it's just you know and a lot of what you write at that time you're getting punchy and you're just right but you're right you're working this is work this is the work the comedy writers do and there is such a thing there is an actual phenomenon about late night rewrites so anyway norm macdonald had this take on andy rooney and it was a similar take that most comedians had on andy rooney which is and he was amazingly popular sixty minutes humorous and but that the take that most younger comic comedians had was that he it was his stuff was just b and irritatingly so so and norm did andy rooney and we were rewriting the andy rooney sketch that he had done and he had a great first part of it and it was about it was just i cleaned out my desk this week and i said you know there are a whole bunch of old ladders here's one from california this one's from illinois here's another one from california this one's from michigan ayres another one from california this one's from california to i guess a turn him into a monster and so like you know here's a vile ol here's an empty pill vial of quail ludes i slip some of these in the leslie stalls coffee and and rape her ok not a joke for the error it was for the table there was a new york magazine writer who was there that we and he captures a say now they use this is like i didn't intend that to be on the air liesel you know so this really caused a crisis as you can imagine and i remember talking to conan o'brien and during this period he said like if i was on trial and a prosecutor came out to me and said mr o'brien during have you ever during a three am rewrites session made a joke about the filing of lincoln's body immediately after he had been assassinated i would have to throw myself on the mercy of the court so i'm trying the looks we get this thing where i'm bleeding delegates because of this and there's a convention there that we really normally bestow there are there is a was i write about bus service i didn't have the way things were going things happen so fast i didn't really have time for dark knight of the soul but i had like a dark hour of this whole and i was thinking like maybe i shouldn't have done this maybe you know i can't and everyone saying you should apologize for it and i'm going like i don't want to i was doing my job i was and what happened was we changed it to he put it in mike wallace's coffee and took photographs of him nude or something that was i was how it ended up but i'm just trying to do and we get to the convention and making this speech to a big crowd of delegates and this is it this is sort of it everything hung in the balance here and i had wanted to apologize but in a way that wasn't selling out there wasn't dishonest you know so i basically and i got i finally found it and i just said you know this is why i'm running to get health care to every minute so your kids a good education to make sure that we have good jobs but that's not what this camp this week has been about and i'm sorry for that i really was sincerely sorry for that i said i'm sorry for that the whole place just one zero thank god they wanted me to apologize and i wanted to apologize but i wanted to do it because my campaign manager after that she said i never had a base problem after that i never had a problem i we had all the volunteers we wanted it was and that when i said that they they all and then i got a standing ovation and it was basically we got they knew i wanted to do it they knew i wanted this and they got that guy they wanted so that was a moment and i try to explain serve you know the most important cubic foot of the campaign is in side the candidate skull and i kind of try to explain what i was going through in this really weird unique situation from having been a comedy writer and i actually started that whole thing out by the guy who was probably my biggest challenge or mike's or receive it was wildly successful trial lawyer he he dropped out one day and right before he dropped out i saw that eliot spitzer had been nailed for you know going to a prostitute and i remember just thinking like why the hell would he do that doesn't he realize all the people that are working for him that have worked to get him where he is and that's how i felt and and then this cheer goes up in our office and cerise see it dropped out and everyone's just nuts and i'm going like yeah it's great why did eliot spitzer do that and so i reasoned i start with that is i had that moment of like have i  and you don't know how much paul wellstone memory hung over this race and so i felt like i was letting paul down i felt like maybe i shouldn't have done as some maybe and but i suck up because i asked al gore i emailed al gore i said i don't know if you know this but i think sometimes you're unfairly criticized in the campaign and what advice you have for me and i just wrote so we're turning past many pages in the book here but you ultimately win this race yes big fight a recount the closest race in senate history is my percentage basis yeah three this couple years ago for your whatever was and were just sitting after you know some rich person's house and afterwards afterwards where it's in the san juan islands you know it's a beautiful gorgeous yours again i went eight months and she goes oh my god i went you know it wasn't the bataan death march i mean you know at a certain point in that eight months it was kind of my new normal in a and i won the recount like after two months and the rest of the six months was litigation and and you know coleman was ahe the morning after and he said if he were me it's it's just take a step back and let the healing begin and then i won the recount and he he just adopted the anti heeling position and stuck with it for as long as possible so you land in the senate and you still feel that you need to hold your comedian persona close you need to prove to minnesotans that you have specially now i won with such a close margin and i just wanted to prove the people in minnesota that i was there are first a serious serious reason so i just i'm not going to be funny i'm just not funny did you find anyone in the u s senate any senators who you could actually share a joke with it was only nine yeah i don't know no i mean now i meant publicly funny right actually sense of humor in the senate is a good thing and cliche ality is a good thing you can't it's impossible to gaining dung unless your word is good first of all but then you just develop friendships and you know the republicans were a little wary of me because i'd use so much of my comedy to heap scorn and ridicule on republicans but like man right away they figure it out like the first day i got sworn in and jim de mint south carolina cent incredibly conservative comes up to me and says how are things on the far left and i said they're great how are things on the nut case right and he thought that was hilarious and that's a long story but jepson wife mary knit a baby blanket from my first grandchild so it's hard to hate a guy whose wife that and you don't want to unfairly demonize a guy's wife knit the blanky for your grandson so it was good that i've been able to fairly demonize h but anyway  presidential race i went up to him and i said lindsay if i are voting in the republican primaries i'd vote for you and he said that's my problem so so most of my you know most of my colleagues have a good sense have a sense of humor and some even have a good sense of humor and but there was one tom coburn who you know most so anyway so after nuff of this i went to my i said i'm tom can i take you to breakfast because we hadn't been connecting at all everything was a misfire so he said ok i take you to lunch i said and he said to breakfast i said ok so we go to breakfast in the senate dining room and say the morning and we're sitting down and i said look for the next forty forty five minutes however long this is let's just have fun ok you know sure ok farm and i said let's talk you know we can talk about politics we can talk about you know our families our careers whatever it goes but let's have fun and go ok fun and i say ok now now he was known as dr no and santa because he would put a hold on what his stuff is a big career let's talk about our previous careers let me ask you something to be a doctor in oklahoma do you have to have any formal education then for the next forty minutes or so i taught him what a joke was what the proper reaction to a joke was and at the end later that day we got a note from it which  i really had fun and so that was that was that so then you know i made it i observe the protocols of the senate and when i had any story that involved a private conversation with i mean exception on this which is cruise ted cruz but i contacted my colleagues and i just got permission to tell the story so i  call tom he's retired in oklahoma and i call my but tommy remember that breakfast we had number you know the joke i go like is it ok if i tell that my my book and he goes like we have a first amendment you can say whatever you want have come to have a certain feeling for him was i say in the book i say that what you should know about ted cruz is that i probably like ted cru more than most of my colleagues like ted cruz and i hate ted cruz and and i like them more than most other colleagues like him because he actually has a sense of humor not a good one but he has one and he ballyards comedy or at least he says he does so i mean it's you never know with this guy but i write a chapter in which i explain why people don't like him in the senate and in the senate you know not be a toxic coworker which he kind of is he's the guy in the office who microwaves fish you know you have it just and he doesn't and they get anything done in the senate you've got to have some decent relationships with somebody and something and he has not really done accomplished anything other than really getting the government shunned shut down once i brought up jeff sessions about when to go because you do have a light moment with him in the book but more recently and thankfully you got him to perjure himself some would say you had moments like this with neil gore such that's the devote your question why have you i mean i didn't get gorsuch to purge no no no but you have had moments that reached reached us because your question somehow penetrated the clutter more than  now obvious what i was writing this book i didn't anticipate trump winning and i didn't to speak these hearings but i wrote about hearings because i'm good at hearings and it was particularly at you know you get the testimony the night before usually and i would like to read the testimony because these this is important stuff these hearings are important things and it's important issues that affect the people of minnesota affect the people washington state and affect the people of the country and these you know when you're testifying before the united states senate i think you should one be truthful and i just had this kind of thing where i would read the republicans testimony first and because of my training from wise the lying liars who tell them a fair and balanced look at the right and  rush limbaugh's a big fat idiot and the truth with jokes all these books i had written i really am good at spotting when they're lying can i translate bullshit because in the audio book you say that senators can't say something like that so i just wanted to yeah it's one of the older all right i have a little thing says u s s after words like fo states senate you can say what you said so but no i mean and i'm really i'm kind of good and also because i'm a comedian and a performer i was a performer too  i'm good at framing things in a way for of maximo fact i think so the best see the vos it was simply that i had a oh my goodness i had a i have been told you have a courtesy visit with these nominees in your office and i've been told before my visit by colleagues that on the health committee and little she knew so i basically what happened was i after two or three questions by me and my education staff were going like oh my goodness oh man she does not know anything about public education she just doesn't she's been this she's done this voucher stuff really and she's sad and her husband s build god's kingdom so you get you know public school money to pay for kids to go to parochial school and that and she and her family the device family has given about to actually bernie asked her this in the help committee just went how much money has your family given to the republican party and she just go about two hundred and then you go well let me ask you something do you believe that you would be here if your family hadn't given two hundred million dollars to the republican party because only oh yeah i think i would and then i just asked her and i thought a lot about this in education and no child left behind was all about testing and all about trying to hold schools accountable and the first no child left behind the first rules the rules were that you had to test only in grade level  so if you were sixth grade teacher and they were test say in the test and that or eighth graders the kids would be tested just at that level and you you in the school would be judged on what percentage of kids exceeded proficiency and so it created this perverse race to the middle which is that teachers would focus on just the kids above and below just above and below proficiency and the kid up here there's not nothing you could do that kid that they would fall below proficiency and the kid down here that year you probably couldn't get that kid the proficiency so the focus kept being on these kids right in the middle well in minnesota they felt that was silly and also the no child left behind tests were given and why late april and you didn't get the results until the end of june or in july when it was too late for the teachers to use the test results to inform their instruct so minnesota we started in addition to the no child left behind test taking these computer adaptive tests and they were computer tests so that you get the results right away and they're adapti meaning that you could test out of grade levels of the kids are getting questions everything you know getting stuff wrong the questions get easier and you could determine what grade level they're at if they're below proficiency and if the kids were getting everything right the question again you'd see where that kid is so and the whole thing about this is that a fifth grade teacher who takes a kid from  second grade level reading to a fourth grade level of reading is a hero and not a go but under growth and that's why you measure growth instead of proficiency and this is sort of the key to the debate and how will you hold schools accountable and of course if you're going to be giving money from the public school system to private schools and catholic schools or you really want to make sure that that's actually doing some good and and by the way it hasn't and so i basically said two thirds of what i just said before asking her i'd like to hear your thoughts on the controversy over the argument of growth versus proficiency  it was stunning and went viral and every teacher and not just teachers but parents and principals and superintendents some anybody involved in education  way at all you know was going think you and she i want to particularly here in seattle people spend a lot of time feeling bad about the state of our politics feeling scared about where the country is going and worrying about what is going on in congress you're there how bad is it really well you're not alone believe me you  guy is president  and i write about sort of my you know i wrote these books about why and it seems that you don't pay a price now for lying at all you know just shamelessly lying repeatedly and whining for the sake of lying and almost as if you're rewarded for it as if his  don't know his supporters feel like it's just more interesting if you why you know it's like a movie loosely based on a real story if you and that i'd rather see the you know a movie that takes a lot of liberties and you know i don't know where this is all going to  lead but he you know i just put it this way in terms of the russian investigation and whether they had any ties to it to the interference the trump people and trump himself aren't acting like people who have nothing to hide and so in the meanwhile in the meantime we have terrible stuff happening whether it's about dropping out of paris and the biggest crisis to me is health care and what's happening and what's happening right now and what's happening right now in the senate and so that's where my focus is i do i'm on judiciary committee i have some oversight on this investigation but i am just scared to death about any version of the house bill passing