Happy Birthday to us!  Here’s how it got started.  About a year and a half ago I wrote an email to Sandeep saying we should start a blog.  He ignored me and I forgot about it.  Then a few months later he wrote back something like

Hey:  I’m into the idea of starting a blog as long as I can blog about topics other than economics (and occasionally mention economics!). Interested?  They’re hard to sustain on your own unless you have verbal diahorrea and are vain enough to think every stupid thought is worth writing down.

which to me read like a reply to an email I never sent (I forgot I ever sent the first one) so I thought he must have meant to send it to someone else and had sent it to me by mistake.  But in fact I had already started “blogging” to myself as a sort of trial run for starting a real blog.  I would write a few sentences in an email to myself every day to see if I had enough ideas and the stamina to keep it going.  So I thought I would take advantage of Sandeep’s mistake and I wrote back

totally, i was going to ask you.  in fact i ahve been planning for a while.  i have been writing mini blog posts and saving them so as to have a stockpile before actually starting.  i have a few thoughts about format too.

definitely not an economics blog (except when we feel like it.)
most of my stupid thoughts i think are worth writing down.

i have even decided on a name for my blog but if you dont like it we could come up with one together.

And so we started thinking of a name.  Sandeep had a lot of bad ideas for names

  1. hodgepodge hedgehog
  2. platypus
  3. bacon is a vegetable
  4. release the gecko
  5. coordination failure
  6. reaction function

and he is too much of a philistine to appreciate my ideas for names:

  1. banana seeds
  2. vapor mill
  3. el emenopi’

so we were at an impasse.  Somehow we hit upon the name Cheap Talk.  Sandeep ran it by some folks at a party and it seemed like a hit.  (That name was taken by a then-defunct blog and wordpress does not recycle url’s so we had to morph it into cheeptalk.wordpress.com.)

The first post was February 2, 2009.  We didnt publicize the blog widely at first because we wanted to make sure we could keep it up before making a big commitment.  It seemed to have some momentum so we went public about a month later.  It has been a ton of fun and I am really glad we took the plunge.