Hello, everyone. It's Pete Davis here, your host of the Current Affairs podcast. I am joined today by Ryan Grimm. Hello, Ryan. How you doing, Pete?

Ryan Grim is the DC Bureau Chief of The Intercept. He is formerly the DC Bureau Chief of the Huffington Post, and he is the recent author of the book. We've got people from Jesse Jackson to AOC, The End of Big Money, and the Rise of a Movement.

Love that title and subtitle, man.

Oh, thank you.

Ryan, I have brought you to the current affairs headquarters today to talk to you about three things.

The first is that I have brought you here because you are not just the intercepts DC Bureau Chief.

I would like to state today that you are the whole movements DC Bureau Chief in the sense

that you are the best person to talk to if we want to understand what is actually going on in D.C.

Behind the talking points, behind the campaign strategies,

what are these politicians actually like when no one is watching

except for you, Ryan Grimm? That's kind of you to say. I've been here. I got off a long time.

That was actually going to be my first question, which is how long have you been watching

the Hill and DC politics? You could date it to the midtermms of 2006 when I got a job actually a side gig, blogging for

the Washington monthly about the midterms.

They had a handful of young writers who they brought on for I think $25 a post.

And that was actually how I met Chris Hayes for the first time.

He was in Chicago at the time writing for In

These Times and also blogging on the campaign. So it's fair to categorize you as part of this

set of blogosphere folks that have now become established media folks. In a way, I was a little bit

peripheral to the rise of the blogosphere because I was in advocacy at first, but then I came into the blogosphere

kind of through that Washington monthly thing. But yeah, I always knew all of those people,

like Ezra Klein and Matt Glacius and Chris Hayes and all those folks, but I was a little

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