Hi, everybody. Welcome to Scoop. This is your scoop on the news week ahead. And I'm so glad you're here.

Thank you so much for your support of smarter news and quick concise, nonpartisan information.

I hope you're off to a great start to your week. It's a little rocky over here in this household.

I almost didn't hit the record button, so that just tells you exactly

where I'm at at this point. So as long as we're recording, it's up from here. And I'm glad that

you're here. We have a couple really big news stories that we have to cover this week to kind of get

you ready, get you going. But I want to start on a little bit of a lighter note. Do you remember a few

weeks ago I was telling you that we received some amazing feedback from an oil worker in West Texas? You know, when I launched Smarter

News, I was hoping that our audience would be all over the country, all over the world, from a lot

of different backgrounds, but you never know. You never know who's actually going to resonate

with your company's mission.

And so when Matthew wrote me from West Texas, I was so touched by what he had to say, which was

he was very grateful that we put this report on podcast because it was easier for him to listen to in an area where there wasn't great reception.

So we struck up a little conversation online about this because I appreciated his feedback. And I said, listen, Matthew, I want to send you a little something to say thank you because I really appreciate you. And he's, I said, I want to include something for your wife too, because she was really the key, the secret, the secret sauce in all of this. And they sent me a photo. I want to share with you. So here's Matthew and his wife. And I apologize to his wife. I don't know her first name, which is terrible. That's the first thing you're supposed to ask as a

journalist. But it's a great picture of Matthew and his wife holding different tumblers,

smarter news tumblers. There are different colors. One's white, one's black. One has the

states arranged in a heart shape. The other has the American flag created through different

pens that have been important throughout our history, like the pen that wrote the Declaration of

Independence. And so we call these two tumblers because they're different, but they are important,

the power couple. So this is the power couple in Tumblr's and the power couple

with Matthew and his wife. And I just wanted to say thank you very much to Matthew and his family

for his support of smarter news. It means so much to hear from you all and to think about the

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