Alexa podcast skill kit, loading audio files from remote json

Question

So, I'm trying to use json to load the audio data for this: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-audio-player/

Using request (https://github.com/request/request) to get the json data Just as a test, I'm running this code. Episodes is defined as an array outside of the request.

request.get('myjsondatalink.asp', function(error, response, body) {
    if (error) {
        episodes[0] = 'soundcloud-url';
        console.log(error);
    }
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
        var podcasts = body;

        episodes[0] = 'soundcloud-url';
    }
    episodes[0] = 'soundcloud-url';
});

I know the code outside of the request works, because I've tried declaring episodes[0] outside of the request and it plays fine.

Console isn't giving me any errors, and I've tried just including this request stuff in the index and I can get it to at least work slightly (can get it to console log stuff within the successful request).

Any reason this wouldn't work? It was originally timing out at 3 seconds, so I increased it to 30, which was the only way I could get the test request in the index to work.

Just as a note, I ran

for(var podcast in podcasts) {
    console.log(podcast);
}

and it put out like... 1439, 1440, 1441, 1442, 1443, etc, instead of the strings. Also not sure about that, but I'm not that familiar with node so I assume something about that is wrong?