Thank you, evan. Thank you very much for being here, congratulations on the book. Thank you, thank you. I have to say i was little surprised to learn about the book and to read it. Its a funny book, thats not the surprise but the surprise is that i remember when you got to the senate, there was talk of you, i guess the expression was the Hillary Clinton model, following the Hillary Clinton model, you know, do your homework, go to committee hearings, dont do national press, basically show that you mean to be a serious senator. Youve been in there for nine years. Right, right. This is not the kind of book you wouldve written, almost nine years, this is not the kind of book you wouldve written maybe at the first, would you . Oh, not at all. Basically, i had to not be funny publicly [evan] right. For my entire first term laughs . audience laughing and i took hard to do. I mean i get, the book is a response to a lot of questions i get asked. The first i get asked the most is is being a United States senator as much fun as working on saturday night live. audience laughing and the answer is no. Im guessing probably not. audience laughing yeah, yeah. Why would it be . But its best job ive ever had because i get to improve peoples lives, i get to do that work. And another question i get is whats chuckles it like to be a comedian, howd you make the transition from a comedian to being a senator and, of course, first you have to get elected and that First Campaign was a very tough campaign cause my opponent and the republicans had created this 15 million machine called the dehummorizer audience laughing and it was made with stateoftheart Israeli Technology audience laughing to take any of the context or irony or anything out of a joke, make it not funny and offensive at the same time so i had, as you know, a very, very close election the first time. 312 votes separating you and the incumbent norm coleman, who was the republican out of 2. 5, six nine million, 2. 9 million. Nine million cast. Were very, very close, and so basically, coleman didnt have much accomplishments to run on so it all a right. It was an incredibly negative campaign. I had to prove the people that i was taking this seriously cause so much of this had been about hes gonna disgrace minnesota and embarrass us and so i, my chief of staff, drew littman, had me meet with tamera luzzatto, who had been hillarys chief of staff and we, basically, i said hillary came here with some challenges. She was very well known she was a celebrity not a celebrity. Not exactly the same. A different celebrity than me, bigger celebrity, and also had been the first lady in a previous and because of that, probably republicans were gonna look at her a little, you know, askance. Right. And democrats would worry about her taking their camera time, so basically, the hillary model was dont do national tv. Yep. And work very hard, show up for your hearings early and stay late and come prepared and just be a workhorse and not a show horse, so thats what i did and i did that and i talk about there were times where i was tempted to, we had a hearing in the help committee, health, education, labor and pensions, we had a hearing on enda, the employee nondiscrimination act and still in 30 states, you can get married now on a saturday, get fired on monday for being an lgbt, so we were trying to correct that and give, you know, say that you cant discriminate people for that and im remembering the joke, thats why i yeah, yeah, well its a great joke. Well, it was a good joke. audience chuckling but ill be the judge. Okay. audience laughing anyway so better. So we have the hearing and its on this issue and not one republican shows up and it was the first time id ever been in a hearing where no one from the minority showed up there. They were in the minority at the time and so im sitting there and im the newest member so im down in the row and im sitting there going like, boy, it would be funny if i said its a shame that none of the gay members of the committee showed up. audience laughing and. And the whole, the hearing was full of lgbt advocates so you know you had the room, right . I had the room. Wouldve been a funny joke. And this voice said, tell the joke audience and evan laughing itll kill and that was the devil and the angel was going, now, al. Dont do it. You know why you came here audience laughing to improve peoples lives. This is not gonna, as well, come on audience laughing you know chuckles . Well, i will say that one of the best things about this book is that it is like an inner monologue, right, this book, you tell well, that part is laughs . A number of instances in which you talk about i wish i had said this or i thought about saying this and i didnt and its actually, i wanna, you said, remember why you came here, the angel saying that. Lets talk about why you came there so you were the angel was actually im sorry, that side. Ill get it right. audience chuckling no, i dont know well edit that in post. Thats exactly al laughing your friend and mentor, the late Paul Wellstone had this seat previously, died tragically right before the 2002 campaign. Right. You began to consider seriously running following his death, right . Not immediately. Yeah. Norm coleman, who got elected after paul died, a couple months after taking office, his first capitol hill interview and he said, to be blunt, im 99 improvement over Paul Wellstone. audience murmuring right and i just said, i wonder whos gonna [evan] whos gonna take him on. Whos gonna beat this guy. Yeah, right, right. And i didnt say those words exactly. audience laughing and that was the first time id ever considered running and i didnt actually think i was gonna be the guy but franni and i are about to be empty nesters. Obviously, my kids have grown up in new york city but i wanna go back to minnesota, i thought about, so we moved back to minnesota, i did my show back in minnesota and i explored it and i talk about what its like to put a campaign, well, at first, just even exploring it, theres this thing in minnesota called bean feeds, its the democraticfarmerlabor party. Thats sort of our organizing principle are bean feeds and you can have a spaghetti dinner or burger bash but theyre all called bean feeds. audience chuckling and theyre in counties or in Senate Districts, Senate Districts or in the state Senate District and so i started going around, and i really had a great time, i really enjoyed and i learned a hell of a lot and as i learned more, it became less about beating norm coleman and more about one of the big issues during that campaign, one of the things i kept hearing about was people terrified about going bankrupt because of a healthcare crisis and i was doing a radio show at the time. Elizabeth warren was on the show frequently and she would, i knew from her that about half of all bankruptcies in this country at that time were tied to a healthcare crisis, a medical crisis and but as i went around minnesota, you go into any cafe or a vfw hall and you see a flyer up for a family that are going bankrupt, someone was having a pig roast for a family to raise money for a family that had gone bankrupt because someone got sick and then it started becoming personal to me because it was personal to the people of minnesota. Right. So thats why right now, as were taping this, this is what the achievements of the Affordable Care act, which is, by no means, perfect are really threatened by this latest iteration latest iteration of the bill. Of trumpcare and so this is a really fraught time yeah, and years later, this was still an issue. I mean this is the issue you wanted to get resolved well, yeah and here we go. Again, the Affordable Care act isnt perfect but i write in the book about t. R. Reid wrote a book about our Healthcare System, and norm coleman during the debates would say like, we have the best Healthcare System in the world because we have the mayo clinic. audience laughing and i go, okay, mayo delivers good a care as anywhere in the world, youre right, but a hospital or a clinic is not a health care system. We dont have a Healthcare System in this country. We have a lot of systems if youre on medicare or medicaid, you are in the canadian system, youre in singlepayer. If youre getting your healthcare through the va, if youre in the military, youre in the british system, socialized medicine, if youre getting your healthcare or your insurance from your employer, youre in the german system, if you have no insurance at all, youre in the cambodian system. audience laughing and the point of obamacare was to get people from the cambodian system into one of the other systems. [evan] into something else. Yeah, and thats what we did. Now, there were some of us who wouldve gone, wanted to go to singlepayer at that time. Bernie sanders was leading that at that time. Well, youve now supposed senator sanders medicare for all bill. Yeah, but the time, and were still in the same situation, at the time, you needed 60 votes and we were about 55 votes short so audience laughing that was not an option. So youre saying theres a chance. audience laughing well, im saying theres not a chance now exactly but the thing where norm coleman was wrong is that actually, every other developed country has universal healthcare, they dont all have singlepayer. They have some combination of things, which ours would end up being too and but they actually deliver as good a care, as high quality outcomes, if not better, at often just about half the cost or a little bit more so weve had bipartisan hearings recently in the health committee, the help committee, health, education, labor and pensions, with Lamar Alexander as the chairman and Patty Murray Patty Murray as the Ranking Member of republican from tennessee, shes a democrat from Washington State and weve had some really good hearings and weve had the first hearing was with five Insurance Commissioners from three republican states and two yeah. Completely agreed. We need to do costsharing, we should do reinsurance. I dont wanna explain all that get everybody mad at me for boring them, then we had governors, five governors, three republicans, agreement. We were on a road to do this and then this, mcconnell nixed it, majority leader mcconnell nixed it so we could go to this vote on this terrible bill. Right. Thats gonna end up with tens of millions of people if it passes. If it passes, losing healthcare and some will voluntarily, the mandate will be gone, so they dont have to buy it and states will determine things but it means that you wont necessarily, theres no guarantee youll have protections if you have preexisting conditions. Theres no guarantee that you wont have lifetime limits or annual limits, which means that if you get sick and you go through your limit, thats it. Thats it. Youre screwed. Is the kind of bipartisanship youre talking about something that is possible at the moment in our politics . Republicans are awful, you say in the book, so democrats theres some irony, dont put it through the dehumorizer. audience and al laughing i wont, i wont. I wont, i wont, i wont, i wont. Okay. So democrats, you can rehumorize it as i go. Yeah, yeah. The position of democrats is, on the other hand, republicans are awful, we have to do everything we can to help america fight them and on the other hand, republicans exist so we have to everything we can to have america help them yeah, and i also say that we dont have a monopoly on good ideas, they have some good ideas so i say i guess the point is do you feel like you are in a frame of mind and is the politics of this moment make it possible, i should say, to work with the other party . Yes, and we do it all the time. It doesnt actually make any news at all cause its unless the president makes a deal with chuck and nancy, apparently, that makes news. That kind of, he almost always makes news. Period. Period, because hes different. audience and evan laughing chuckles and, but, you know, were in texas, john cornyn and i did something that on basically Mental Health and our prison system and Law Enforcement and i dont wanna help him, you know, vote against him audience laughing here in texas but we worked together on this and it was almost unanimous in both affect and kind of basically was in both houses so we do this all the time. Let me ask you about trump, so im quickly running through our time, i wanna get to the president , last two chapters of this book are about the president , the book was written recently enough that you get to go through the victory and also through the inauguration. Well, yeah, but my take on trump is really tying it to the rest of the book cause i used to write books like lies and lying liars who tell them a fair and balanced look at the right. [both] Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot and other observations. audience laughing and a lot of those books were about lying. Yeah. And i have this just, i just cant stand lying and so i think what happened is that lying just became normalized or something and it didnt matter and so i talk about that. I talk about the contrast between what they tried to do to my character and through by putting jokes through the dehumorizer and what trump clearly chuckles his character, i do not know if you know this, is a little dicey. Do you understand, youre from the state in which Hillary Clinton prevailed but only won by 44,000 votes if i did the math right. She won by one and a half points. Right. There a lot of franken trump voters trump voters in minnesota. So you know people in minnesota who supported him. You have a sense why they supported him and do you have a better understanding of what caused him to win is a conference of those people who supported and sure, sure, sure, i mean i write in my book about me growing up in the 50s and my dad didnt graduate high school, he was a printing salesman. We grew up, my brother and parents and i in a four, a twobedroom house, one bath, i felt like the luckiest kid in the world cause i was growing up middle class, at the height of the middle class in america in minnesota in st. Louis park. I felt like i could become anything i wanted. It was almost a birth right for americans that your kids will be better than you and my parents assumed that and i assumed. And people dont feel like that anymore and with good reason because theres no evidence and this is why i had Elizabeth Warren on my show cause she was talking about the middle class squeeze and part of that was the cost of healthcare and part of that the cost of education and the flat wages and the economy, you know, globalization, all kinds of things and people were angry about that and we may have a little, a different take on why that is. Democrats arent great at messaging. I say in the book that our bumper stickers always end with continued on next bumper sticker. audience and evan laughing but we do have approaches to do and part of it is what we were doing in that committee with Lamar Alexander and patty murray was taking steps to get the cost of healthcare down on the exchanges and is the messaging the problem . Why didnt democrats do better last year . Why dont democrats do better generally . There are just, i mean how long do we have . Well faint speaking . evan and audience chuckling yeah, i mean, look i know you believe this and i know that others believe it but, obviously, were at a place now in this country where the president won the election, whether or not he won the argument, you guys are not in control of either the white house or the congress and so oh, yeah. Whats it gonna take to get back to get back . Well, in 2018, i dont know what were going to do. Im not a prognosticator but i think what we have to do is let people know they were on their side and that means you have to go to rural and exurban areas in my state. There are a lot of trumpfranken voters or frankentrump voters in my state. Now i am cochair of the Rural Health Caucus and so during these, again, these iterations of trumpcare, ive gone to a lot of hospitals and Nursing Homes and they hate this trumpcare, they hate it cause they know that slashing medicaid will hurt Rural America worse than anything. The hospitals in minnesota, because we expanded medicaid, theres so much less uncompensated care now that theyre able to hire more people and deliver better care at their hospitals and that has been a tremendous boon for everybody in rural minnesota and ive had round tables where people will cry because they know what happens if you cut medicaid this much. My mom, someone will say, gets her Home Healthcare through medicaid, my husband and i both work. If they take that away, theres a good chance they will if this happens, we dont know what were going to do. So the root back is for you to persuade those people youre on their side. Yeah. Thats it, you and people like you. Yeah, and then to talk about things like bring down the cost of college and then talk about about things that arent bipartisan like going, i go around the state talking about workforce training cause in minnesota, we have a very low Unemployment Rate and we have a skills gap. Yeah. And i go to communities where they wanna keep their kids there and these jobs, they worry about these factories leaving they cant, they dont have the skill labor but im trying, ill sit around a round table. I dont know what Political Party anybodys in and i dont care and i will never care and we talk about i meet with the community and Technical College president. Ill meet with the superintendent of schools, the high school principal, the junior high principal, the manufacturers that are in that town, the hospital because, again, theyre the biggest employer so well talk about having a career track where you can Start High School to be a certified nurses assistant and ive talked to a young woman who, in burnsville, minnesota, who said, im gonna be a cna when i ge