Hello and welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen. I'm joined as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen, so how are you doing today?

I am very happy that we're going to do this particular episode.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this one as well.

It's another year that's come to an end for us here both personally and on the podcast and I would like to kind of start this episode just by talking about that a little bit.

Just speaking personally for a moment, the outpouring of support that the

podcast has received from people has been really amazing. And I took a second to do a

little inventory of everything we've done over the last year.

So this year we've actually posted 72 different episodes, which is crazy.

We've spoken with, I think it's 28 different fantastic guest experts,

and the podcast has been downloaded amazingly almost a million times.

We came in a little bit shy of the million number for the year as a whole which certainly

exceeded any reasonable expectations I would have had for the

podcast going into the year, and it's just been really incredible on a personal level to receive that kind of support from people.

It has been endearing to do this with you for us, of course.

People can imagine how it might be for me about that and it's as good as you might imagine to do this with you.

Also it's been very reassuring and inspiring to get to talk with so many good people who are knowledgeable about what they do,

have made efforts to get good at it,

and then in turn are offering what they have learned and what they know to other people to help them too.

And there's something kind of, like I said, reassuring for me about that, the sense that there's

so many people around the world, most of whom we've never ever heard about, who in their own ponds

or puddles or big lakes of activity are sending ripples out to benefit a lot of people.

Those are really neat. Yeah, no, I think that's a great. sending ripples out to benefit a lot of people.

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