I don't know if you've heard, but there's been a bit of news over the past few days.

A government shutdown averted at the very last minute, the former president in court, again, this time on business fraud charges.

And for the first time ever, the House Speaker was fired. Not retired, not primaried, not gently convinced to step down, fired by his own party.

Part of my job is to try and make sense of a week like this.

But the CNN newsrooms also uniquely qualified to make sense of the minute to minute of this.

And one person I find myself sitting next to on TV

quite often is CNN political director, David Chalien. With me here, CNN's Audie Cornish

and CNN political director David Chalien. Let's take a moment. I'm Audie Cornish,

and you're listening to The Assignment.

Some of you may also know David as host of the CNN Political Briefing podcast, which drops every Friday afternoon.

The reason we're talking to him today is because starting next week, the assignment is also

going to tackle politics.

You're going to get two episodes a week

because there are a lot of questions out there about the weird and wild politics of now.

So, David, first of all, how long have you been doing this?

Just over 10 years.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Which in political years is like 90 years.

Right.

Something like that.

Basically.

And I always like to ask people sort of how they got start meaning like what was, how should I say this.

...