Have you ever listened to the WTF with Marc Maron podcast? If you haven’t yet, you should, because it’s pretty awesome. In a nutshell, Marc Maron is a stand-up comic who interviews other comedians. But that would be an unfair and reductive way to describe it. It’s so much more than that – Maron talks to his guests about deep stuff – there’s a lot of talk about anxiety and depression, and the harder parts of life that we don’t often acknowledge.

One of his episodes is an interview with comedian Louis CK. Slate recently rated this episode the BEST PODCAST EPISODE OF ALL TIME. And with all the crazy hubbub surrounding Serial, this is quite the honor. The episode deals with their 20-something year friendship and the rocky patches it went through – how they fell away from each other for a long stretch of time. Resentments built and tensions formed, miscommunications happened – all the stuff of everyday friendship.

I think the reason the episode resonants with people is that it just feels so true.  That’s the best way I can describe it. Over the course of the 2 hour interview, they take a look at their joint past and begin to re-build their friendship.

Maron had a lot of really insightful words on friendship that I wanted I’d share here. As we’re moving into our thirties, we’re growing as people and so are our friends. As easy as it is to assume we’re the only ones who are changing, our friends are changing too. It’s a never ending evolution, and the advice I tell myself is that we should constantly try to see our friends in a fresh light; to constantly try and almost listen to them like they’re a new friend. Does that make sense?

Here are some quotes from the kick-ass episode that I thought were worth sharing:

“Sometimes when you don’t see someone a lot, you just sort of hold them to who they were when you did know them really well. Like oh that guy must be the same guy.”

Similar sentiment, expressed a bit differently:

“A lot of times, in friendships, you tend the hold the person you’re friends with to the standard of what your friendship was originally.”

“Allowing each other to grow in a friendship is tricky, because there’s part of you that wants to be what you were when you were first friends, there’s part of you that’s wants that, because that’s an innocent place, that’s where the emotion started.”

You can download the episode here.