Hello there nerds, and welcome to a very special episode of Let's talk about Myths Baby!

I am your host, Liv, that ridiculous woman who's been yelling at you about gods and heroes

and mortals and nymphs and playwrights in history in just a touch of Atlantis for, well, five years now.

Today is the five year anniversary of Let's Talk About Myths Baby, the podcast I started because I was bored and lonely and developing an anxiety disorder.

And now, here we are.

Five years ago, I'd moved to a new city after the career I'd been working towards for the entirety of my 20s turned out to be an enormous failure.

I was absolutely having a quarter-life crisis and then found myself in a city that I didn't like where I didn't have any friends working at a job that was considerably worse than what I'd left in terror.

But did, fortunately, pay a bit better.

All I did all day was listen to podcasts, literally all day.

And then one day I was listening and I thought, hey, maybe this is the thing I should do when I'm sad and bored and in need of an outlet.

So I started writing episodes of this podcast in the Notes app on my phone when I was supposed to be doing that job.

Just sitting in my sad, windowless, undecorated office, writing about mythology on my phone.

Starting a podcast is slow-going. It takes a lot of time and effort and has very little reward.

You just put it out into the world and hope people find it.

I wish I remembered those early days of watching as people listen to the podcast, paying close attention to when they found me on Instagram, maybe even reached out to me.

It was such a huge deal. I mean, it still is, but we're on a bit of a different scale now.

I still can't quite wrap my head around the fact that so many people love the show, that so many people not only want to hear this much about mythology,

but that they want to hear it in the way that I want to tell it.

They want to hear the stories of women, both the stories that we know and those that we know that we don't know.

They want to hear me talk shit about these because he's being an ass or rage on Zeus because he's an absolute predator.

You want to hear the intricacies of Euripity and Tragedy? Why he is definitely without question the best of the surviving playwrights?

The biggest and coolest shift on this show was when I discovered that not only did you all want to hear me talking about all this stuff,

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