Ladies and gentlemen, essentialists, one and all. Here we are again. I am your host, Greg McEwan, and this is for the first time the what's essential podcast just a few months ago.

We decided to launch a podcast. It was in the middle of lockdown. We literally couldn't even buy the recording equipment that we needed.

We couldn't use offices where we'd designed and intended to create this show, but we felt we needed to do it anyway.

We felt that the circumstances were calling it forward because perhaps at no other time, a lifetime was the message of focusing on what was essential, more needed.

We started just with nothing. We launched a new newsletter on LinkedIn's platform. We started with zero.

It's been amazing in just a few weeks to see that up to 17,000 followers now, which is for something like that, an amazing growth.

And we've seen the podcast subscribers just continue to grow again and again week after week.

It's been a thrilling thing, exciting to see this growth, this transformation.

And I just wanted to begin this episode by saying thank you for being there with me from the very beginning and building this and communicating back, sharing questions, feedback, what's working and what's not working.

What you love, your own stories. Indeed, some of your stories that have been shared with me have gone on to become not only one minute Wednesday newsletter posts, but also whole podcast episodes.

The content itself as we had originally imagined it has changed because this podcast has grown into something with a different kind of life.

It's become something of and for and by the essentialist tribe by you.

And so at this juncture because of this evolution, this learning, it felt completely right to just give it a new name.

It's a subtle change. It was the essentialism podcast before. Now it's the what's essential podcast.

That's because of these life changing conversations that we've been able to have with listeners like you, people who have been open and vulnerable to really explore what is essential to them.

Particularly areas that they may not be investing in sufficiently well, things they know really matter, but somehow slip to second place or even last place.

That has brought an authenticity and a depth to this experience that has definitely surpassed my expectation for this early stage in this endeavor.

And so it is in honor of you, the listener and of the compelling experience it's been to have a chance to talk together with you that we make this perhaps small, but for me symbolically important shift.

This is now the what's essential podcast and it's what's essential because of the power of the impact that you have had in changing and shifting and guiding this experience.

Thank you. And speaking of someone who has been there from the very beginning and now back by your popular demand.

I am joined in this episode, this new inaugural episode by Anna Elizabeth McEwan, a person of talent and exquisite beauty, the most essential person in my life.

Anna, welcome back to the podcast.

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