I’ve known Meshel Laurie for more than 30 years.

She was easily the funniest and most talented person in the first year of her acting course at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba.

I distinctly remember her doing a monologue for her end of year assessment and having the whole auditorium in hysterics but for some reason the lecturers didn’t let her graduate into second year acting.

So she was shunted into the drama course where she learned to be a drama teacher. It was one of those early moments in my life where I realised that there’s rarely any such thing as justice.

From Toowoomba, Meshel moved to Melbourne and started doing stand-up comedy. Her one-woman show The Whore Whisperer, which charted her time as a receptionist in a brothel,  was a huge critical and commercial success playing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Adelaide Fringe and the Sydney Opera House.

From there, she started doing radio on Triple R and then on Nova and Kiis. And TV stints included This Week Live and The Project as well as her stand up piece on ABC’s The Smallest Room in the House, where she talked about her time at University. Now she hosts the hugely popular Australian True Crime Podcast, which is an international hit with 1 million downloads per month.

I feel like this episode is sometimes less of a podcast and more just two old friends catching up.