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Welcome to episode 780 with my guest, Janet Varney. This is a best of episode. And this was our very first episode ever. This was in March of 2011. And if you thought I had a chipmunk voice

in last week's episode. Oh my God, listening back

to little parts of this, I'm just like, wow, I talked so fast compared to how I talk now,

and my voice was so high. This episode, I suppose it's self-explanatory if you listen to it.

There's no montage to it because I didn't have any clips to pull from, obviously.

And I didn't really know what I wanted the podcast to be.

And I thought I did.

And I quickly discarded a lot of things that kind of didn't work and kept the things

that did work and expanded on them.

And it was very much a shot in the dark.

But I remember being very excited about doing it.

It's kind of like this is, it was something that I had had inside me for the longest time,

but didn't have the right venue to do it in.

And when podcasting came about, I felt like, wow, it can be a really intimate medium.

And I was inspired by the episode that Mark Maren did where he interviewed Todd Hanson, a writer for the Onion, who had attempted suicide.

And it was so compelling.

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