I'm Bob Crawford.

And I'm Ben Sawyer.

This is The Road to Now.

Ben, this is our first podcast.

We've talked about doing this for five years.

Right.

And finally, today, here today, we start our history podcast.

That's right. And we met years ago, and I remember we met through Scott and Seth and Dane, who I grew up with those guys back in Cabarras County, North Carolina.

We met and we discovered that we have this shared love of history, which we would spend hours discussing whenever I ran into these guys.

And Bob and I became friends through this, and we would get, we would just make each other excited about talking about history. And now this opportunity to share it, you know, when we talked about doing it, you know, I remember when I first started speaking to Bob, I was living in Michigan in graduate school of Michigan State. He was, they played a venue in Detroit where 125 people showed up.

And I was like, how could world get any better than this?

And then now I'm actually a full-time teacher at Middle Tennessee State University.

And Bob is a rock star.

So Ben's a historian and I play bass.

So what we're going to do is we're going to bring in some great guests over the weeks,

and we're going to talk about how we got to where we are today on particular historical issues.

So we hope that you will join us on this journey.

Our first episode coming up right now is about new populism.

Right.

And I think one of the things that's going to set us apart is that we genuinely are

led by questions. How did we get to hear? And we will ask those questions and pursue them on our

own. We will ask those questions of academics, of politicians, of really anyone whose stories

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