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All right, so we're going to do things a little bit different today because today is going to be created by listeners.

For the people who give us a little part of their day when they tune in, the ones who follow us and treat us like friends and even for the ones who might completely disagree with us but have the grace to make it a conversation rather than argument.

You know, I started this week and I thought a lot about when Tara's paler and I started this podcast together back in the summer of 2018.

That feels like it was a decade ago, but I do remember us talking a lot about what we wanted to give people who were exchanging some of their free time to listen to the two of us talk to each other.

And we agreed that two things were really important.

First, we wanted to be ourselves. We really wanted to be the best representation of who we were when people weren't listening.

We didn't just want to be some caricatures or fill the tired media gimmick of one-on-one conversations where a white guy and a black guy were just yelling at each other saying provocative things.

But the second thing we really wanted, and this was really shoulder to shoulder alongside us trying to be as authentic as possible,

was feeling like we had a relationship with the listeners.

And, you know, that always felt to me like it was easier for Tara's than myself.

He always seemed to have a big, inviting, and really encouraging personality.

And it was a little more of a reach for me.

I'm a little more, I don't know what the right phrase is here, maybe sandpaper-y, with people that I don't know.

But as we move into the Thanksgiving week show, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how Tara's and I did three of these.

And every year we talk a lot about the audience and how it got a little bit bigger each year.

How much we appreciated feeling like we might not have the biggest show, but it felt like the best room.

To us, maybe the numbers were smaller, but it really did feel a little more intimate when we talked about who the listeners were and how we were getting to know them.

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