Editing The Pen Addict 500/transcript (section)

== Anniversary Reflections ==


'''Myke:''' From RelayFM, this is episode 500 of The Pen Addict, a weekly show where we discuss pens, paper, and the analogue tools we love so dearly. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by the quincentennial king of the pen and pencil, the 10-year pro-gear, my friend and yours, Brad Dowdy. Hi Brad.

'''Speaker 02:''' And I said I wasn't going to cry. Like there was no chance. This is a very busy episode.

'''Brad:''' Oh my god, I started crying already.

'''Speaker 02:''' And now that it's actually real, my eyes are watering and we did 500 episodes with you, my buddy. And this is not supposed to happen.

'''Myke:''' We've got so much work to do and I'm sitting there crying.

'''Speaker 02:''' We fully intended, like, ah, no, there's no way we're going to cry. We've done this before. Like, this is old hat and now here I am, just sitting here, just like, my gosh, Myke, 500 episodes of a podcast about pens.

'''Myke:''' No, it's not the 500. It's the 10 years that gets me.

'''Speaker 02:''' It's 10 years. That is really a special amount of time.

'''Myke:''' My relationship with you is outside of my family, like, my second longest relationship of my life.

'''Speaker 02:''' Yeah, earmuffs, Adina, earmuffs.

'''Myke:''' We haven't known each other for long enough. I know. I hope, honestly, that my relationship with Adina last month. But to be honest, you're never going to go away. You're like 26 years old.

'''Speaker 02:''' Yeah, yeah, right, right. Yeah, thank you, Myke. I would not be here without you. Like, I think that is known for longtime listeners of the show. And I didn't plan out a speech at the beginning of this. Maybe I've been trying to, like, kind of avoid it this whole time. It's like, ah, no, it feels like such a weird thing. But I'm extraordinarily proud of what we have done, what we've made, how much fun we have, how our friendship has evolved, and how our listenership are just, like, genuinely the greatest people on the planet. And I'm just very thankful. That's really all I want to say about today.

'''Speaker 02:''' And, yeah, like, I'm just thankful for you and thankful for our listeners. And 10 years, man, it's amazing. I love it.

'''Myke:''' Everyone knows this by now, but I will recap. Obviously, this is episode 500. But the day that we are recording, which is February the 9th, 2022, is the exact 10-year anniversary of the first episode of The Pen Addict, which is February the 9th, 2012. So very special day for us. I'm very pleased that we're able to make this work today. We have a lot to go today. You can probably look at the runtime of the episode now as you're listening to this and understand what's ahead. So there'll be time for feelings later on, I'm sure. We have put out a call to The Pen Addict listenership with one simple question. What is your favorite stationary item? And what we wanted was your responses. We currently have – well, not currently because we cut it off because we're smart like that. We have 278 pen addicts who wrote in. A few more wrote in, actually, Brad. I cut a couple out because they weren't serious answers. So I would say close to 300 people written in.

'''Speaker 02:''' That's our literal entire listenership.

'''Myke:''' No. That's not true at all. I will say again, our listenership is a five-figure listenership, which is something that we don't really talk about. We don't. And I kind of can't believe that that is the case.

'''Speaker 02:''' It's serious business. Yes.

'''Myke:''' And that is kind of an incredible – honestly, the most incredible thing, more incredible than the fact that we've been doing this for as long as we've been doing this, is that we have that many people that actually really want to listen to this thing, and we love every single one of you, that you care enough to join us every week. But anyway, I'm getting off track. I interrupted my fault. We promised we would read all of the responses, and so we're going to do that.

'''Myke:''' There is probably not a lot of time for dilly-dallying in today's episode. We will stop occasionally because some, I think, we may want to discuss a little bit. But by and large, we're going to be turning this episode over to the Pen Addict listeners themselves to tell us a little bit about their favorite products, because you have to listen to us talk about ours all the gosh darn time. So Brad, do you want to start off?

'''Speaker 02:''' Yeah. I want to give our listeners a tip this episode. We are not going to have the most epic-length show notes. Oh, no. So what I suggest – You just have to Google this one. Yeah. Get out your favorite pen and piece of paper right now, and if we say something interesting –

'''Myke:''' I hadn't even thought of that, Brad. Yeah. Like 350 links in the show notes. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen.

'''Speaker 02:''' No, that's not going to happen. So you should play along because I'm doing that as well because the very first reply made me think of this. It was like, oh, I should have bought this a long time ago. So let's get it underway with my good buddy, Shmevelin. J. Urban. J. Urban.

'''Myke:''' J. Urban. J. Urban.

'''Speaker 02:''' This is kind of a perfect first link, by the way.

'''Brad:''' We can't even finish the first one. Yeah. We're already jumping in.