Welcome to the history tricks where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello friends, this show is going to be a little bit different.

We are speaking at POTEX.

If you're living in the future, it was back in May of 2019.

If you're living in the present, it's this weekend.

So we thought we would go ahead and pre-record our presentation because a lot of you were

very sad that you couldn't come to Nashville, which is completely understandable to see us.

So since you can't be with us live, this is our not quite live show.

And so on with the show.

Once upon a time in the big woods of Peppin Wisconsin, POTEX was playing all-ling sign on his fiddle.

His daughter Laura asked him, what does that mean POT, all-ling sign?

We all wonder about that.

Days of long ago, he said.

And Laura Ingalls had, I guess, an existential crisis, though she would certainly not have called it that.

Now is now, POT, can never be a long time ago.

Fast forward to seven-year-old me reading Little House in the Big Woods and having that same line blow my mind.

Surely this avocado, shag, carpet, and harvest gold sofa would never be history.

That's when I realized at some level that history is nothing more than the stories of people

who are living in their own now, just like we are.

People who have the same feelings and motivations as now.

They're not butterflies pinned in a glass-fronted shadow box.

They're not foreign objects in a museum.

...