Well, hi everybody. Welcome to the first Smarter News family meeting. It's the first annual family meeting.

I already think it should be sort of a tradition that we do around Thanksgiving time, but maybe more often than that, because as I've been preparing for this family meeting,

and I'll give you a little bit of a background about why we're having it in a moment,

I thought to myself, this is actually something that could be really cool to do on a more

regular basis with some really big topics and topic experts and really dig into some of

these tough conversations that many of us are having, you know,

with our family and with our friends. I am going to make sure that we invite our folks in from

Instagram to make sure that they get on. If you're listening to this later, what's great about

this platform that we use, we use a platform called Streamyard. I'm all about sharing information

because oftentimes you could find something better or something in improvement or something like that. It allows us to broadcast live on all the

different social media platforms. And with that in mind, we're able to have a live broadcast

simultaneously with a lot of different audiences, which is awesome. It also allows us to get some

instant comments, which I think is really important for the news. So many times the news is just

speaking at you and not with you. And really, if you're in journalism to be a reporter, we're here

to gather information and then answer questions as they come up. So that's what I hope the next

hour or so is like for us as we set the stage here for what could be, I hope, a very productive

conversation as we enter into what can be a tricky time of year. It can be tricky because

there's a lot of joy that comes with the holidays. There's also a lot of existential crisis.

Am I projecting?

Is that what's happening right now?

You're in the middle of the holidays and you're wondering like, what happened to the last

year?

...