In 2016—you remember back then, it was nearly a decade ago if you can believe it—I made a proposition to Maureen Johnson, an author of YA books who I was friendly with online the way you were friendly with people online a decade ago. What if we did a podcast, I wrote, about the end of this crazy election cycle?

It was the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton race and, over the course of the summer, Maureen had been sending me DMs looking for reassurance that things weren't as tenuous as they seemed. She knew I knew folks involved in the election on both the journalism and political sides, and could I tell her anything that I was hearing to help her cope with the increasing anxiety of that race.

After a few back and forths, I finally made the proposition: Let's do this as a podcast. It will help us to talk it through, and maybe it will help other people too. But, I added, you're busy and I'm busy and this can't take over either of our lives, so let's keep it to just eight episodes—the final eight weeks of the election—and then that will be it. Besides, I said, it's not like Trump's going to win or anything.

You know what happened next.

Those eight episodes, which we called Says Who after a quote from Trump bagman Michael Cohen, ended with an election night livestream too painful to link to here, and then it was over. That is until Maureen posed a question a few exhausting days later: Are we really going to stop?

We'd committed to eight episodes because our lives were busy but those episodes had helped, and they helped not just us but thousands of people who'd listened, and what's to come is going to be hard and maybe continuing is something we should do? Besides, she added, he's probably not going to stay in office for long.

You know what happened that time too.

This is a long way of saying that this week Says Who, the eight-episode podcast we launched in the leadup to the 2016 election, released its 400th episode. Yes, we overshot the mark by nearly 5000% and no, I don't regret it. In the immortal words of Elvis Costello, it was a brilliant mistake.

Over the course of the 400 episodes we've released (don't misinterpret this as an ending, we're still going), the show has transformed. It's still about trying to understand current events and politics, sure, but more than that it's about Maureen and I trying to understand how to exist through it all, how to build lives when things are crumbling around you, and how to help others survive the cascading traumas of our time. But, you know, also funny.

For Maureen and I, we built a thing to help us muddle through a specific period of time that then became a whole era. And, in the process, we connected with people who found our muddling helpful and, in return, helped us to continue. Because, despite outlasting most podcasts, Says Who never got picked up by a network, never got a penny of advertising dollars, instead it has been entirely listener supported. Maybe some of those listeners are you. Thank you.

When times are hard—and they were then and they sure as shit are now—one of the best things you can do is build things with your friends. Build things that can help people get through it, even if that just means you. Because it almost always isn't just you. Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help. You never know where it might lead.

Here's to 400 episodes of Says Who, one of the best mistakes I've ever made.