Hi, everybody. Welcome to the scoop. I'm super excited to talk to you today. We're going to cover a lot of ground and go back to the mission of smarter news, which is high quality information and small doses. So we're going to cover a lot of different topics. We have a lot of updates on many of the stories we've been watching over the last several weeks, months, years at this point. I'm going to knock on wood right now. But so far, there doesn't seem to be

that big story that is driving the news cycle this week. So I thought this is a good opportunity.

Catch our breath. Look at a couple of the updates that could be important to us as we continue

to watch these different stories develop. I am sitting in my home office today. I have some special headset on. I'm trying

out. This is a noise reduction headset because I have chainsawing happening all over our neighborhood.

And you know what? I went into my quote unquote real office just last

week to do an interview. And as soon as I started the interview, the chainsaw started. And that is

just the soundtrack of our life right now in Texas, still recovering from this freeze from several

weeks ago. So if you hear a little chainsaw, please forgive it. But it's sort of, it's adding.

It's adding to the story that I'm just about to cover because I thought to myself this weekend as I was looking at the news out of California. There's some pretty serious news coming out of California where the snow fell in areas that aren't used to this sort of snow. In fact, I have an incredible photo to show you, which shows people standing next to this snow drift on the

side of the road that's at least two or three people high. So the snow has been extreme in areas

that we haven't seen it. The weather has been extreme in areas around the United States over the

last week, including tornadoes and hurricane strength winds and all sorts of things, depending on

where you are. So I thought, what is the big takeaway from this as we're still watching people concerned about being traps in California,

down roads that they can't get out, worried about fuel and food? That's something I relate to

in Texas because just a few weeks ago, we had friends no water, no electricity, running lower

on supplies, not being able to get out and get the things that you need. So I thought, okay, the big takeaway I should start with this week is actually news you can use. What do we actually need in our house? Real quick, let's just go through this. Why not? We have some time. If we don't have that breaking news, let's go through it. What are the things that you need in your house in case of an emergency that you

would never expect, the worst case scenario. The first thing, of course, is water. We know that.

But even when I reviewed this list, which by the way, you can find on ready.gov, which is

linked to the U.S. government, but it's a very, it's a good list of emergency items that you should have in your house.

It was a reminder of just how much water you would need.

So one is the number that you need to remember.

...