Hi, this is Al Franken.

Look, the truth be told, I started recording these podcasts right after the November elections and the midterms.

And the reason was to start interviewing experts on issues that I think are really important.

And I wanted not just knowledgeable authorities, but I wanted compelling guests

who I've gotten to know over the years in my various incarnations,

you know, like Jeffrey Tubin and Nancy Gertner, who we had last week to tell us about the

Federalist Society, how Trump is packing the courts with what Tubin called 100 percenters.

And the idea behind all this is to give listeners an in-depth handle on the issues that matter to the lives

of Americans going into the 2020 election cycle, issues like the courts, because during the

2016 cycle, there was virtually no discussion of actual issues. It was all the Trump circus and Hillary

emails. And that was not just CNN and MSNBC. It was the New York Times. It was the Washington

Post. If you did a word cloud for Hillary on election day in 2016, it would have been one big word, emails.

And the cable news channels would just cut to any Trump rally and stick with them because it was entertainment watching this narcissistic freak show.

And for any of the other Republicans to get any oxygen at all, they would have had to bite the head off a live chicken sometime during their rally.

And Ted Cruz did that toward the end of the primaries,

but the media never picked it up because they were on Trump.

And the only issues that we discussed during the 2016 campaign were through the prism

of something dumb or crazy that Trump would say.

So, for example, the terrible Iran nuclear deal, according to Trump, was negotiated by

very stupid people, like Ernie Moniz, who before being energy secretary, had been chairman of the MIT nuclear physics department,

and who negotiated the incredibly complex technical terms of the deal with his Iranian counterpart,

who was also a nuclear engineer. So idiots, like Moniz, had evidently

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