This is a note. Judge your hair. This is a note. Judge hair. Okay. Loosen up.

Hey everybody. Welcome to the first episode of Hot and Bothered with Melissa Ford. I am Melissa Ford. Some of you may be familiar with me,

but for those of you who are brand new, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Let me give you a brief

overview of my career. I'm going to keep it short and sweet because I seem to be having a little bit of

like a stroke right now. I'm talking to my producers off camera because I am extraordinarily

nervous. I don't know why. I do this for a living and have been doing this for many, many

years, but right at this moment, I am

introducing the world to my baby, and I want the world to tell my baby that it's pretty.

So how do I backtrack 25 years? Long story short, started off as a video model, ended up as

a cover model for calendars and magazines. That was a transition for me to getting into television hosting, so I started my career with

BET that moved on to Stars and Black and ESPN.

I started to get a little bit of the acting bug, so I started acting as well.

Then I turned to philanthropy, ended up on some reality TV programs, and then I got

situated in the podcast industry. And that was where I feel like I found my niche. So I've

been podcasting for 10 years. I started a podcast in L.A. with a friend of mine turned into a very

big urban podcast, did that for about four years,

and then I decided to start my own podcast. It was called I'm Here for the Food, and I know

some of you foodies are here with me right now. That was a podcast that was born from an idea that

was given to me by Barbara Walters.

Every year she used to round out the year by interviewing 10 people that she found to be the most

fascinating.

And they weren't always celebrities, sometimes they were Pulitzer Prize winners, sometimes they

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