Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Serwer and welcome to our guest Sherry Weston,

CEO of Sesame Workshop. Sherry, great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

So first off, tell us how and why Sesame Street is more than just a children's TV show.

Well, that's one of my favorite subjects, because I do think people everywhere know Sesame Street.

They think they do, but they're thinking of this iconic domestic television show.

You know, it's beloved, it's educational, but they often do not understand the depth and breadth of our work, the reach and impact of Sesame Street.

You know, if you think of our origins, Sesame Street was started as an experiment.

It was the late 60s, it was the Johnson administration, the war on poverty.

And Joan Ganskuni, the creator of Sesame Street, had this idea that you could use the new medium of the day, television, to reach children and teach them instead of jingles and beer commercials, you know, you could teach them letters and numbers.

And it was largely because there was so much research that showed that children in poverty were arriving at school

without the skills they needed to learn. So wouldn't this be a way to use media to reach children

who didn't have the same advantages? So that was the experiment. And it's a cultural icon,

it's a global icon. There are all these different facets of it which we'll get into.

What is the mission of Sesame Street?

Well, the mission is to help children everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder.

And I know that sounds like a clever tagline, but it's baked into everything we do.

It's a whole child curriculum, always has been.

So when you think of smarter and you often think of Sesame as ABC's a whole child curriculum, always has been. So when you think of

smarter and you often think of Sesame as ABCs and one, two, threes, it's the academic basics,

stronger in terms of resiliency, health, and kinder, empathy, understanding. So our mission is to

reach children everywhere, to give them the skills they need to thrive,

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