Tell me a little about your background. How did you find your way to Chicago, and what keeps you attracted to the city?

I found my way to Chicago by accident. I moved back to Seattle after graduating from Princeton, unsure of what I wanted to do. After a couple of months I decided that I would head back to the East Coast. My college roommate, James Lowry, was a New Trier grad and had moved back to Chicago after graduation. I was driving through town, planning to crash on his couch for the weekend, and never left.

RealClearPolitics was launched in 2000 when the commercial Internet was still in its infancy. Where did the interest in politics come from originally, and what drove you to create RealClearPolitics 18 years ago?

I was basically apolitical through college, and got bit by the bug after graduation. The Co-Founder of RCP, John McIntyre, had been a political junkie for years, and when he arrived in Chicago in 1993 to trade at the CBOE [Chicago Board Options Exchange], we had this shared passion for politics and elections. As you point out, the internet was still in its infancy, but by the late 1990s we realized you could read online what was being written in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times on the same day. That was our "aha" moment, which spurred the idea of a site that would gather up all the best news, commentary and analysis of politics and elections for junkies like us.