Hey everyone, this is Scott. I know we haven't talked for a while. The impetus for doing this

particular episode was I wanted to announce there's a new season coming up and also announce

a few changes regarding the show. But as I started thinking about it, I also realized that it might

be a good opportunity to both kind of help welcome and bring new listeners up to speed,

as well as for some of you long-term listeners, kind of explain a little bit of the method to my madness

because I realized that along the way you followed this podcast through a lot of twists and turns

and a variety of different series on different topics, for which I am eternally grateful because

you really let me indulge my passion of every given moment. So again, I thank you for that.

But also, even if you're enjoying it, I thought it might be beneficial or helpful or fun

to kind of walk through a little bit of the history, a little bit of the process,

a little discussion on the impetus for each series and what I was trying to accomplish when

I started, what I felt I eventually accomplished and how the process went. And again, let this serve

as a brief introduction to new listeners who may be just subscribed to the show and don't really

have a good handle on all the various series that have come out under the ancient world banner.

So this one's going to be a little more conversational and off the cuff. Again, hopefully,

to be enjoyable. Make sure you stay tuned for later on during this where I will be discussing

the new upcoming season and also some of the changes to the podcast and hang around for that.

But also hopefully the stuff between now and then will also be of some interest to you.

So let's talk about the origin of the ancient world podcast.

There are a lot of threads that came together to start me down the road of writing and

producing and releasing the first the ancient world podcast about 10 years ago now, which is

bizarre even to me. And just to go back a bit, I did not study history at university. I actually

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