Early in the 2008 election cycle, a politics-obsessed friend of mine introduced me to “Chuck Todd Facts,” a satirical list of info bits about NBC's political director, inspired by the epically hyperbolic “Chuck Norris Facts.” It featured stuff like this:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. From that point on it's pretty much been all Chuck Todd.”

Todd laughed when I brought up his “Facts” during a recent visit to NBC's Washington studios.

“I felt uncomfortable that somebody had done this,” he said on the set of his weekday MSNBC show, “MTP Daily.” “Now, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't cool. There are worse people to be compared to than Walker, Texas Ranger.”

For instance: Todd, 44, has risen to one of the most prestigious posts in American journalism — host of “Meet the Press” — without a college degree. (He's six credits short.)

And when Todd has trouble falling asleep, he counts senators instead of sheep. Seriously.

Here's more of our conversation. (The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.)

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Q: What will the convention stretch look like for Chuck Todd?

A: Election Day is the Super Bowl, but the conventions — probably the best sports comparison is NBA All-Star weekend. It becomes sort of a halfway point of the political season, in the same way that the All-Star game is the halfway point of the basketball season. And then as soon the All-Star game is done, all of a sudden everyone is truly focused on who is going to win this thing. After the conventions are done, it's like, “All right, now, what the hell does this race look like?”

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Q: You've got people in this building who have covered presidential elections going back decades. Do you have conversations about “the good old days,” when there were three networks, and everyone supposedly paid total attention to politics and policy? Do you feel an extra challenge today in holding people's attention and getting them to grasp all the nuances of a very complex race?

A: I look at it as a liberation, in some respects. I think in the “good old days,” the networks' responsibility was to tell you the who and what. You didn't have as much time to do why. Why does this matter? The advantage is the news consumer of today is much more well-informed than the news consumer of 30 years ago, and that gives you a license to be more nuanced in your coverage, to do more sidebar stories that give context to the larger issue that's being debated.

Q: I guess the counter to that would be: Are you intimidating new viewers? Is there too much of a clubby, insider-y feel?

A: I've been through this argument when I ran The Hotline. Most people don't want to admit they don't know. Most people want to believe they are smart enough to be a member of that club. I've always believed you don't shut them out. Make it accessible. Just make the insider stuff accessible.

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Q: So how did you end up falling in love with politics in the first place?

A: My dad was a political junkie. My most memorable year of realizing how interested I was, was in eighth grade. I got into “Profiles in Courage.” And then that summer, we had a cousin of mine essentially live with us. He was helping run a statewide campaign. He was a big Democrat, and my father was a big conservative. And he used to come over, and they would get hammered and debate politics all night. And I would sit there, refilling their drinks and listening to this and just having a blast.