It's been a long time since we've done a Blitz edition.

And as a friend pointed out to me when I explained that this latest program of ours was going to be a six hour long show that we were going to classify as a Blitz edition,

they said, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not sure you know the meaning of the word.

And I laughed because he's right.

These started off this idea of a Blitz show was going to be something to help us get more shows out.

And some nice quick ones right in other words in addition to these great epics that took forever and you know half killed us and half killed you to listen to them.

We'd have things in between and they grew too because I'm obviously, you know, I have a problem.

I'm addicted to context is one of you said.

A firm believer in the past is prologue and that there's no good natural place to start any story right everything's connected.

It's arbitrary where you decide to begin things.

That's how I you know how to show I wanted to do about Cleopatra that stretched into a six part series on Rome because where do you start the Cleopatra story?

The reason I chose the topic that I originally chose for today's program was because I thought it artificially constrained me.

It's two weeks long.

How could you possibly do a really long show on a two week long event? Well, six hours later here we are.

And it's also a blitz edition which now doesn't have anything to do with the length of the show.

It's turned out through evolution to be a different kind of show that focuses on different things.

Instead of being about people or events or eras specifically.

Usually they focus on an idea or a question and then you know weave history around the question somehow.

And usually the recipe has a slightly less drama than the historical epics but slightly more twist as we call those musings and weird twilight zone things that sort of come with the territory with these programs.

For what it's worth this could have been a two-parter but we didn't want to do that to you so you get one long one instead.

And maybe in an experimental effort here to see what works and in addition to some feedback we got from you folks we tried arbitrarily after the fact mind you it wasn't put together this way to separate the show into sections books book one book two in places where maybe there are natural breaks.

You know stopping points or what have you will see based on your feedback whether you liked that approach or not.

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