I went to a bar in Chicago and through a mutual friend, I made the acquaintance of a mathematician named Daniel Biss.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed talking to Daniel that evening on account of how throughout my life

I had worked pretty hard to avoid

Interactions with professional mathematicians, like I chose the college I attended in part because you didn't have to take math to graduate. Also

It's hard to make friends in adulthood, and I've never been good at it

But as Daniel, and I played an exceptionally poor game of pool that night

I had the feeling that I was making a friend and it turns out I was right Daniel and I have now been

friends for more than a third of our lives. He is the smartest person I have ever known

he was 25 when we met and had already gotten his PhD in math from MIT and was working as a professor at the

University of Chicago, but he has never treated me as anything other than an intellectual equal

And we remained close throughout big changes in our lives

I met Sarah and moved to New York

and then eventually

Indianapolis and became a dad. Daniel fell in love with a

Historian and they got married and moved to the suburbs of Chicago

and had two beautiful kids. Everything was good and

Normal, and then one day Daniel called me with the worst idea I had ever heard in my entire life

Which was that

He wanted to leave his very good job at the University of Chicago and run for a seat in the Illinois State House of Representatives

This seemed like a bad idea to me first because Daniel is like

nerdy. In my mind politicians were slick and wore tailored suits and Dan-- I

Don't know that Daniel owned a suit. Sara

and I were in the audience for Daniel's campaign announcement and what may have been his first-ever campaign speech and while his eloquence and

Intelligence were obvious as I was driving home, I couldn't help but think that Daniel

How do I phrase this gently?

Might eventually find his way back to abstract mathematics. And indeed while Daniel's 2008 race for state rep was

Agonizingly close, he lost. But he ran again in 2010 and won

And then in 2012 he became a state senator. And over the last eight years Daniel has become a brilliant politician and an extraordinarily effective

Legislator in a state where it's famously hard to get anything done

He's built bipartisan support on everything from improving retirement benefits

to ending exploitative student loan practices. And now he is running for governor of Illinois. Not just running in fact

he has a very good chance of winning the Democratic primary on March 20th even though his two opponents are

a billionaire who has spent tens of millions of dollars on advertising and a literal Kennedy

Those are the kinds of people we tend to think of as likely politicians

heirs to famous families, billionaires who can buy all the TV ads they want

I don't generally think of politicians as people, like in my mind they're somewhere between super heroes and super villains

Larger-than-life characters with tremendous powers battling it out while the rest of us get our houses stomped on by their giant robot suits

But imagining electoral politics that way can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy

Like the main reason I didn't think Daniel should run for office all those years ago was because he didn't seem to me

like the kind of person who would succeed at it.

But if people like Daniel don't run for office or we don't elect them

Then we end up with the comic book version of electoral politics.

Obviously we don't need Lex Luthor running our governments, but I also don't think we need Superman;

we need capable people who know how to govern, who can build consensus,

who can listen well, and who can hold competing ideas in their minds.

When your friend runs for governor you realize that politicians are people

Even the billionaires, even the Kennedys

So the question becomes not who looks or acts the part or who has the money or whatever

Else the question becomes which of these people, no more or less human than I

do I think would be best at this job

And if I thought of politics that way. I would have understood from the beginning that Daniel would make a successful politician

And for me that is real cause for optimism

I am so proud of Daniel and really excited to support him

He and I are gonna do a Facebook live event this Thursday at 1:00pm Eastern Time.

I'll ask him some questions

You can ask some too, more info in the doobly-doo below

and if you live in Illinois, VOTE.

Also if you don't live in Illinois, VOTE. Hank, I will see you on Friday