Good Life Project

Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them. With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will Find You, Harlan Coben is one of the most widely read storytellers on the planet. His new book, Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, is both a memoir and a writing guide, because he can no longer separate the two. He is also, at this point, one of the most credible voices arguing that the creative work you keep postponing does not require a bigger life than the one you already have. In this conversation, you'll explore: The two-word question he has been asking since he was a kid, and how it turned a boring family hike into a global hit Why he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failures What incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first…

Every year you get your blood drawn, and someone circles a number that supposedly tells you your inflammation level. Turns out that number is barely more accurate than a coin flip. But, knowing how chronically inflamed you are is critical in preventing disease and slowing the age clock. David Furman directs the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project and runs the Bioinformatics and Data Science Core at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where he's spent over fifteen years studying how inflammation drives the diseases most of us start worrying about in our forties and fifties: heart disease, dementia, diabetes, cancer. He's the researcher behind the first published clock that can predict frailty seven years before it shows up, and along the way he's worked with NASA and SpaceX. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why the inflammation test your doctor already runs is barely more accurate than flipping a coin, and what David built to replace it The everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now…

We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone. Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National Geographic photographer, and a New York Times bestselling author. He made Free Solo, Meru, The Rescue, and Nyad, he skied off the summit of Everest, and he lived out of the back of a Subaru from 21 to 28. Then he turned fifty, started looking at his life in chapters, and went looking for people who could tell him what success meant to them at the start and what it means to them now. Those conversations became his new book, Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters. Here's what we get into: The question Jimmy says he has been asking since he was ten years old, and why the answer keeps moving while the question never does What one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically…

Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never calls. The thing stopping him wasn't what he expected. Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he's spent over fifteen years studying why smart, socially wired people routinely misread each other. His research on human connection has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR, and he teaches an MBA course called Designing a Good Life. His new book is A Little More Social. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why the experiment that convinced Nicholas to talk to a stranger on a silent train started with him assuming it would go badly The specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combined What…

She measured everything about her illness. The measuring turned out to be part of what kept her sick. Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York, and one of the few people alive who can take raw data and turn it into something you understand in your bones and feel in your body. In 2020, a mild COVID infection set off four years of long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, mast cell activation, and a level of disability that left her housebound, out of work, and eating eight foods for an entire year. Giorgia did what she does. She tracked every symptom, every test, every prognosis, and limitation. Then she published 1,374 Days, a visual op-ed in the New York Times built from her own symptom data, and readers with chronic illness wrote to say it was the first thing they could hand to the people who loved them. That, however, was just the beginning of a story of recovery that was about to take a wild, transformative turn. One that would find her rethinking her approach to…

Shawn Achor spent twelve years at Harvard studying the science of belief and success, and his TED talk has been watched more than 25 million times. His new book, The Power of Beliefs, grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and out of watching his own daughter fight for her life three months early. The 7 core beliefs that control much of our lives, without us knowing it Why believing you’re alone in your effort can make hard things harder. The two small words that turn a hollow pep talk into a path to success. What a stranger's ten seconds on an escalator taught Shawn about the difference between mattering less and not mattering at all. A five-minute weekly habit Shawn's family calls the Memory DeLorean, and what it does to the story you tell about a hard season. How time-stress can make you abandon everything you believe is important. How to harness hidden beliefs to feel more alive and connected, and thrive in all parts of life. For anyone in a season where the…

Today, we’re introducing a new conversation format that we’ll be working into the mix called Good Life Jams. These sessions take on 2-3 hot topics and go deep. Today’s conversation partner is Leah Smart, a senior editor at LinkedIn, a writer and speaker, and the host of Everyday Better. The topics we’re digging into: When women earn more, the physical housework shrinks. The mental load doesn't move at all. What’s going on there? And why are self-help books crashing, while coaching is taking off? In this conversation, you'll explore: Why the most common fix for an overloaded household leaves the heaviest part completely untouched The question Leah's husband asked her about the word "good" that quietly reset her entire standard for running a home What the data leaves out, and why the scorekeeping it invites can erode a long partnership Self-help book sales fell roughly 25% in a year while coaching grew about 15%, and what people are actually paying for instead The one thing a human can do that no book and no…

Martial artists spend years learning how to fall before they learn much of anything else. The rest of us just brace, then wonder why the landing does so much damage. This is a best-of conversation, first aired in 2023, and it has only gotten more useful with time. Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual teacher who has been working in poetry and spirituality for more than fifty years. His book The Book of Awakening was a #1 New York Times bestseller, he has written twenty-six books translated into more than twenty languages, and he was named one of Oprah's SuperSoul 100. In his thirties, he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, and that experience runs underneath everything he writes about adversity, grief, and what it costs to stay open. He wrote Falling Down and Getting Up when his cancer years came flooding back during the pandemic. Since this conversation first aired, Mark has published The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why aikido teaches…

Jonathan sits down with Scott Harrison, charity: water founder, for a wide-ranging reflection on his 20-year mission to bring clean water to everyone on earth. Scott revisits the original spark, the scale of the problem, the storytelling strategy that helped build the movement, and the personal tension of leading a global nonprofit while raising a family. We discuss the long game of solving a problem that is both massive and solvable, why generosity is often unlocked through story rather than statistics, and how Scott thinks about balance, legacy, and “the work with no end.” Key topics: Scott looks back on the early days of charity: water and the energy of the original nightclub fundraiser that launched the organization The scale of the mission has grown to more than $1 billion mobilized, 216,000 projects across 29 countries, and about 700 million people still without clean water Storytelling, not statistics, is the core tool charity: eater uses to overcome apathy and make distant suffering feel personal The…

Susan Bratton has spent over two decades teaching people the passionate lovemaking and intimate communication skills that sex education (and life) never covered. At 42, after eleven years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm from intercourse, and her husband was already having an affair to cope with it. What actually turned things around wasn't couples therapy. It was something else entirely, and it changed how she teaches everyone who's come to her since. Susan is the author and publisher of 44 books and programs on lovemaking, sensual communication, and what she calls regenerative intimacy, reaching more than 1.5 million people worldwide. She's become one of the most trusted, least censored voices teaching people how sex actually works in the body, at every age. This conversation is guest-hosted by acclaimed author and coach Cynthia Morris. What you'll explore: The three different things people lump together under "low libido," and why untangling them changes what you actually need to fix. Why Susan…

Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've been living. In this deep-dive solo, Jonathan Fields unpacks an idea he calls unmarked lasts, the everyday endings that slip past without ceremony, starting with a story about fifteen years of chairlifts with his daughter and the ordinary Sunday that unceremoniously closed an era. It's a conversation built for anyone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond who has started to notice that the archive of things that ended is getting fuller, and wonders if they should have been paying better attention. In this episode, you'll explore: Why the baby book has a page for every first and not a single page for the lasts, and what that asymmetry does to us The structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter…

Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life. Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things, and Wish You Were Here. Her new one, Hollow Bones, arrives right around the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and centers on a woman whose entire career is built on preparing for catastrophe, who gets blindsided anyway. For three decades, Picoult has done her research by climbing all the way inside other people's lives, including people whose beliefs she can barely stand to sit across from, and a good part of this conversation is about how and why she does that, how it impacts her own life, beliefs, and approach to storytelling. We explore: What thirty years of living inside other people's heads has actually cost her, including the nightly ritual one narrator forced on her before she could face her own…

Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends. Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participants read identical biographies, differing only in one line, single or married, the single people who said they were happy were assumed to be exaggerating. The married people were taken at their word. Bella is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard) and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Her TEDx talk on what no one tells you about single people has been watched more than 1.8 million times, and The Atlantic has called her America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She's been writing the Living Single blog at Psychology Today since…

Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the results rattled her enough to send her on a curiosity tour, looking for answers that had nothing to do with biology. What she found became her new book, Your Turn, a reframing of the years between 50 and 75 as a third turn, the part of life where, against every expectation, a hidden surge of energy and purpose becomes possible. In this conversation, Jonathan and Allison get into the moment a lab technician's offhand comment sent her into a spiral, the recurring dream that a professional dream analyst helped her decode, and the real reason she finally stepped away from the newsroom rhythm she'd built her 25-year identity around. You'll hear how she distinguishes passion from purpose from simply mattering, and why one of…

Angela Duckworth on why grit is only half the story. Acclaimed researcher Professor Angela Duckworth returns to unpack a bigger idea behind grit: your environment matters as much, if not more, than your mindset. Jonathan and Angela Duckworth explore how situation, peers, mentors, and culture shape the thoughts you have, the effort you can sustain, and the kind of person you become. They also dig into the practical question of change: if you want a different outcome, how do you stop blaming yourself and start redesigning the conditions around you? Key topics: Angela Duckworth reframes grit as part of a larger system, arguing that the "inside game" and the "outside game" are linked. She explains why high achievers often think in more positive, productive ways, and why those thoughts are strongly influenced by the situation they are in. The conversation breaks down the three-box model: situation, thoughts, response. Angela and Jonathan discuss how emotions and behavior fit into that model, and how feedback…

Most of us think good decisions happen in the moment. Shane Parrish says they’re already decided before you sit down. And most of them end up being bad, because you waited too long to make them good. Shane Parrish spent years inside Canadian intelligence, making real-time decisions where the stakes were other people's lives, long before he founded Farnam Street and The Knowledge Project podcast. He's the author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, and has quietly become the person elite investors, athletes, and Silicon Valley leaders turn to when a single decision carries outsized weight. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why the position you're in before a decision matters more than the decision itself, and how Warren Buffett almost never finds himself in a bad one The four hidden "defaults" that hijack your thinking before you notice The three-word phrase Shane uses with his own kids to defuse an argument before it escalates Why "doing your best" almost never happens…

Priya Parker comes back to argue that the fights you're avoiding aren't threatening your closest relationships; they're the only thing that can save them. Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor who has spent two decades helping churches, companies, and families fight better, not less. She's the acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering and her new book, The Art of Fighting, and she's spent her career inside the rooms where groups either fall apart or find their way back to each other. What you'll explore: Why "conflict is not sin," and how a moral hangover from that idea keeps good relationships stuck in surface-level peace The concept of "relational longing," the pulse underneath a fight that tells you whether it's worth having Priya's three-phase framework for a healthy fight, and the one question that unlocks the middle phase The "we're not a" clause: a phrase to listen for that reveals what a group is actually trying to become Why giant sequoias can't reproduce without fire, and what that…

Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy decisions, and why nearly 40% of a woman's life happens after menopause even begins. It's less a symptom checklist than a new starting point for the next several decades. What you'll explore: The gas-tank way to picture where you actually are between reproductive years and menopause Why symptom severity has almost nothing to do with how "together" you otherwise are The difference between the "symptom bucket" and the "longevity bucket" in deciding on hormone therapy Why perimenopause itself splits into an early, mid, and late phase, and why the late phase is the window with the most protective upside for starting hormones What the SWAN study found about how menopause symptoms differ by race, and why that matters long-term If…

Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain health. Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood has spent his career studying what actually predicts a declining brain, and the answer has almost nothing to do with age. It's what happens the day you stop being challenged, especially the day you retire. This week: why the smartest, most accomplished people you know may be the ones most at risk, and the two-part check you can run at your next doctor's visit that sets the stage for the next fifty years. What you'll explore: Why age-specific dementia rates have quietly been falling for decades, even as headlines warn of a coming epidemic The real difference between forgetting a name (a retrieval problem) and never actually experiencing it in the first place (an encoding problem),…

Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better. Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where her research spans sleep's relationship to cognitive function, cardiometabolic health, and long-term brain health. She's published more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, co-authored Sleep for Success!, and her work is exactly the kind of research most of us never hear about until someone frames it the way she does here. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why sleep really does shift around age 38 to 40, and what that shift does and doesn't mean for you The neuroscience discovery of the brain's overnight "wash cycle," and what Dr. Robbins's own…

You can have a genuinely excellent self-care practice, the meditation, the training, the tracked sleep, the nutrition, and still be using every bit of it to avoid the one question that actually needed asking. In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, everything, ended in a stress-induced medical diagnosis at the exact moment I'd have called myself the most dialed-in version of my life. Turns out, you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life. So, today, we’re exploring: The real distinction between self-care that restores you and self-care that just makes a misaligned life more bearable, or worse, hides what actually needs your true attention. Three 90-second tests, duration, imagination, intensity, that tell you honestly which one you're running The five places structural misalignment…

We've been calling it a loneliness epidemic and treating it like a mental health problem. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way says that's the wrong diagnosis, and she has almost 40 years of data on teenage boys to make her case. Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has made her one of the go-to voices on loneliness, connection, and what's actually driving rising rates of depression, anxiety, and violence among young men, along with similar struggles with girls. And, these all tend to follow us well into adulthood. Her latest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why mental health is a symptom, not the root problem, and what Way calls "social health" instead The moment, around age 15, when boys start hiding their feelings in public Why boys learn to sacrifice the relationship…

What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn't have to mean anything? Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people's grief and her own. She's the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every wellness cliché about turning pain into purpose. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family's "Gray grief": a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural script The difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what's still there when it's gone) Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst days How her family held onto hope through her aunt's most devastating loss, and what happened after If you've ever felt ashamed…

For decades, migraine was explained to patients as a blood vessel problem: swelling, throbbing, treat it by shrinking things back down. That explanation is mostly a myth, and it may be part of why so many older treatments never worked. Dr. Fred Cohen is medical director of Headache Intervention and an assistant professor of medicine and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He's one of the few headache specialists in the country trained in both internal medicine and headache medicine, has over 40 publications in journals including The Lancet and Cephalalgia, and has lived with migraine himself since his teens. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why migraine is a neuroinflammatory condition, not a vascular one, and why some medical schools still teach the outdated version The "broken thermostat" phenomenon of chronic sensitization, and how untreated migraine can convince your brain that constant pain is normal Why only about 30% of people with migraine ever experience aura, and the…

You know that feeling, like you’re forever running behind in work and life? That you’ll never finally be “there,” or be able to relax and enjoy things. Like the days are just collapsing into each other? Welcome to the wacky world of time anxiety. You are not alone. Chris Guillebeau has spent fifteen years writing about the questions that keep smart, capable people stuck. He is back on the show to talk about his new book, Time Anxiety, the clearest thing he has written yet on why "get up an hour earlier" backfires and what actually helps. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why your brain is chronically wrong about how much time anything takes, and the fifteen-minute fix for chronic lateness The eighth day exercise, a way to find out what you actually want to do with your time by imagining a day with zero obligation to anyone else The traffic light method for working with your real energy instead of fighting it Why swapping the word "productive" for "valuable" changes how a day feels The shame so many…

Most of us think the biggest decision about a room is whether it's functional. Leidy Klotz thinks that's the wrong question, and the right one changes how a desk, a kitchen, or an entire return-to-office policy actually lands on the person living inside it. Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design. His research has appeared in Nature and Science, and he's been interviewed everywhere from Hidden Brain to Freakonomics to The Atlantic. Before any of that, he spent 22 years as a professional soccer player and then built schools for a living, which is part of why his take on space is so physical and so lived-in. In this conversation, you'll explore: The three psychological needs that every space either feeds or starves, and why they trace straight back to hunter-gatherer survival Why Susan Cain's open-office backlash and today's return-to-office mandates are the same failure wearing different clothes The strange,…

By the age of 7, most of us have absorbed the rules that run our financial lives…forever. And almost none of us checked to see if they were true. Not the numbers. The rules. The slogans we heard around the kitchen table about what money means, who deserves it, and what it says about us if we don't have enough of it. Leisa Peterson spent three decades inside the financial services industry before a near-fatal event forced her to see how far she had drifted from her own life. Today she coaches people, most of them women, on the inherited stories that quietly run their financial decisions long after childhood ends, and how to rewrite them, along with their financial futures. In this conversation, you'll hear: Why twins raised in the exact same household can end up in completely different financial and emotional places as adults The specific questions to ask a financial advisor before you hire one, and the one answer that should make you walk away Why financial regret research shows the real damage isn't the bad…

Your body already knows you're stressed before your brain finishes the thought. That tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The way your stomach drops before you walk into a room full of people. Logic doesn't reach it. Telling yourself you're fine doesn't touch it. What if you could send a direct signal to your nervous system that you're safe, and actually change the chemistry? Jessica Ortner is a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of The Tapping Solution, a movement that has brought EFT Tapping to millions worldwide, fueling hundreds of published studies, a massively downloaded app with tens of millions of sessions completed, and work that now extends to veterans, schools, and communities in crisis. In this conversation, you'll explore: What tapping is, where it came from, and how it works. Why positive thinking and reframing often fail, and what the nervous system actually needs to release stress The cortisol study that shows a serious reduction in stress hormones from a single…

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE. You have a plan for how to succeed in the second half of the year, how to “get back on track.” And a plan, it turns out, is the most sophisticated way to actually stand still while feeling like you're moving. This is Part 2 of a special two-part midyear series on Good Life Project. In Part 1, Jonathan led a different kind of honest check-in, setting down the scorecard version of taking stock and actually looking at the one part of life that has been running quietly low. This episode is the moving part. It’s about taking action and building momentum, without waiting for a plan. In this episode, you'll explore: Why plans fail, and why the reason is not the one you've been told. The flaw isn't you. It's how plans are built. The difference between a plan and a move, and why only one of them has ever actually changed a life. Seven elements that make a move more likely to survive a bad week, including Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions. The…

You can hit every goal you set in January and still be running on empty in the parts of your life the list never thought to measure. That's not a failure story. That's a design flaw in the instrument most of us reach for at the midpoint of the year. Jonathan Fields has spent 14 years exploring what it takes to build a life that genuinely feels like yours. In this solo episode, he gets personal about a stretch that looked, by every external measure, like one of the best runs he'd had in years. A major work transition, real momentum in business, and every morning from 7:30 to 9, writing the first draft of his first novel. A genuinely good season. And one that was quietly drawing down on something no scorecard ever caught. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why grading yourself against January goals in July is the least useful thing you can do at the midpoint of the year, and what to reach for instead The three Good Life Buckets framework (Vitality, Connection, Contribution) as a practical audit tool,…

Between 10 and 15 percent of mothers and 1 in 4 fathers are currently estranged from a child. If those numbers feel shocking, the harder truth might be this: most of the moves parents instinctively make once estrangement begins are the exact moves that keep the door shut. Dr. Joshua Coleman has spent more than four decades as a practicing psychologist and is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His own daughter once cut off contact with him. That experience, and everything he has learned since, shaped his work helping families find their way back to each other. He is one of the most trusted voices in the country on family estrangement and reconciliation. In this conversation, you will explore: Why estrangement rates are at historically high levels and what massive cultural shifts are driving them The five defensive moves parents make that almost always make things worse, including why fighting for fairness is the most damaging trap of all What a genuinely healing apology actually sounds…

Here is something most people never see coming: the hardest part of caring for an aging parent is not the logistics. It is the grief. The grief for who your parent used to be, for the life you thought you would be living by now, and for the version of yourself that is quietly disappearing inside a role you never planned to fill. Couple that with being there for kids, even adult kids, and it can feel like a lot. Candace Dellacona is a New York City estate attorney known as "a family's lawyer," advising families, athletes, and entertainers on estate planning, asset protection, and the full arc of what it takes to navigate a family through its most vulnerable seasons. Not just the logistics, but also the many, more nuanced shifts in identity, relationships, and responsibilities. She is also a member of the sandwich generation herself, which is what led her to launch The Sandwich Generation Survival Guide podcast. She brings both the legal expertise and the lived experience to this conversation. What you will…

There is something your brain is spinning right now, that you may never have been given a name for or a way out of. The thought you keep replaying. The conversation you keep recasting. The reel that loads up again and again without resolution, making you feel worse each time and no closer to clarity. That is rumination. And according to the neuroscience, it is the single greatest pre-diagnostic factor for depression and anxiety we have identified, and we are all doing it more than we ever have. Donna Jackson Nakazawa is an award-winning science writer whose work sits at the intersection of neurobiology, emotion, and mental health. Her new book, Mind Drama, is the most rigorous and humane investigation of rumination yet written: what it is, why your brain does it, what it is actually trying to tell you, and how to use a specific neurobiologically grounded framework to loosen its grip. In this conversation, you will explore: Why rumination is a survival response gone rogue, and why knowing that changes how you…

Most of us believe more options equals better outcomes. Research says no. In much of life, the opposite is true, and the gap between what we believe and what the data shows is one of the more quietly consequential misconceptions shaping how we live right now. David Epstein is the author of Range and the new book Inside the Box, both New York Times bestsellers. He spent years studying human performance and creativity, and this conversation picks up where Range left off. If Range was about why broad exploration matters early in life, Inside the Box is about what you actually do once you have all that range. The answer turns out to be counterintuitive: you box yourself in. In this conversation, you'll discover: Why people with more options to watch are consistently more bored than people with fewer, and what that reveals about how your brain actually works The difference between satisficing and maximizing, and why maximizers make worse decisions, feel more regret, and are less happy with their lives despite…

There is a feeling many people in midlife carry that does not have a name, a clear cause, or anyone to blame. It shows up when you have been the dependable one long enough that dependable starts to feel like a cage. Or when you have handled everything capably and walked away feeling hollowed rather than proud. Or when you have given more than you have received for so long that the imbalance stopped feeling like generosity and started feeling like the terms of your life. In this solo episode, Jonathan Fields examines what he calls diffuse resentment, a specific, accumulated form of feeling that is distinct from the anger or grievance most people recognize as resentment. It does not have an address. It does not require a villain. And because it feels illegitimate, because the voice in your head says you made these choices, you have so much to be grateful for, it tends to go unexamined, parked, managed, and silently expensive. In this solo episode, Jonathan draws on his own experience, research from…

Gotta love a good midlife reinvention story, and today we’ve got a great one! Sari Botton built her career editing some of the most celebrated voices in American literary nonfiction. Then, in her mid-50s, she watched doors close in her face, turned down for jobs she was overqualified for, told by interviewers in their 30s that she had "done enough." Out of that experience, she launched Oldster Magazine on Substack, a publication dedicated to aging honestly, at every age. It became a global phenomenon, and led to a book deal. She turned 60 and called it the best moment of her career. In this conversation, Jonathan and Sari explore: Why the most painful thing about midlife is not getting older but realizing how long you spent performing a version of yourself that never quite fit What it costs to live at the intersection of "should" and "whatever," and what becomes possible when you stop The Gen X inheritance: latchkey-kid freedom, zero parenting bandwidth, and a generation that had to figure out what normal…

According to Dr. Vonda Wright, almost everything we believe about aging and muscle loss is wrong. The research that told you to expect decline was built on populations where 70 percent of participants barely moved. Which means the trajectory most of us are bracing for is not biology. It is behavior. You do not have to be a statistic. Dr. Vonda Wright is an orthopedic surgeon, researcher, and the founder of PRIMA, the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes at the University of Pittsburgh. She has spent her career studying what happens to the body when people stay active, not what happens when they don't. Her book, Unbreakable: A Woman's Guide to Aging with Power, distills what that research actually shows about muscle, bone, hormones, and aging in midlife. What you will explore in this conversation: The three MRI images that upended what we thought we knew about aging muscle, a visual comparison between a sedentary 74-year-old, an active 70-year-old, and a 40-year-old, that has become widely…

Four chemicals, produced by your brain, serve as a master switch for nearly everything you think, do, and feel. In no small way, they also control our lives. But, all too often, instead of harnessing them to fuel amazing experiences and outcomes, we are controlled by them. Today, we learn how to take back control and harness them for good. Our guide is TJ Power, lead neuroscientist at the DOSE Lab and the author of The DOSE Effect. His research investigates how modern sedentary, digitally saturated lifestyles are reshaping the brain chemicals that govern how we feel, connect, focus, and recover from stress. He has delivered live experiences to over 75,000 people at institutions including Oxford University, Amazon, and the NHS. His DOSE framework centers on four chemicals: Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins. These chemicals evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for a very different experience of life. One with more movement, more connection, more sunlight, more sustained effort, and far less…

Luck is not a personality trait you either have or you don't. It is something you build, and science tells us there are specific, learnable skills behind why some people consistently seem to be in the right place at the right time while others walk right past the same opportunities. Tina Seelig has spent over 25 years at Stanford teaching and studying exactly this. As Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program and a longtime faculty member at the Stanford d.school, she has watched thousands of students move through the world, and the differences between those who generate luck and those who don't are far more concrete and actionable than most people realize. Her new book is What I Wish I Knew About Luck: A Crash Course on Turning Aspirations into Achievements. In this conversation, you will explore: What separates fortune from luck, and why that distinction changes everything about where you actually have agency in your life The ship, crew, and sail framework for understanding what it really…

There is a particular kind of loneliness that hits in the middle of a full life. Not because you are isolated. Because the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once. Your kids have left. A parent has died. A marriage needs new terms. A friendship has frayed. And the cultural rituals that once helped people move through moments like this are mostly gone. Bruce Feiler has spent the last three years traveling to 26 countries, attending over 100 ceremonies, and interviewing hundreds of people to understand what happens when we stop gathering in intentional ways. He's a seven-time New York Times bestselling author and the creator of the LifeQuakes framework. His new book, A Time to Gather, makes the case that we are living through both a celebration recession and a ritual renaissance at the same time. In this conversation, Bruce and Jonathan explore what it actually means to feel homesick in your own home, why the four traditional life rituals no longer match the lives most of…

Here is something most of us have never been told: falling in love was never supposed to be easy, and the fact that it hasn't been isn't a character flaw. It's a design problem. Your biology may be working against you. Your cultural programming works against you. But, more than anything, the list you've been carrying around of what you want in a partner is almost certainly pointing you in the wrong direction. Bela Gandhi is a dating coach and the founder of Smart Dating Academy, where she has helped thousands of people find lasting relationships. She was a longtime dating expert on Good Morning America and the Steve Harvey Show and built her methodology after realizing that love, like anything else worth doing, benefits from a system. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why 74% of third marriages end in divorce, and what that tells us about how most people approach finding a partner The "elevator people" exercise that reveals what you actually need in a relationship, and why it almost never matches…

Most of us reach our 40s and discover something unsettling: the ambitions we've been chasing weren't entirely ours. They came from parents, from culture, from the two or three careers we happened to see up close. Tom Rath calls this looking through a pinhole, and he thinks it explains more midlife restlessness than most of us are willing to admit. Tom is one of the most widely-read researchers on how careers shape health and wellbeing. His books, including the instant number one New York Times bestseller How Full Is Your Bucket? and StrengthsFinder 2.0, have sold more than 10 million copies. His latest book is What's the Point?: Turning Purpose into Your Daily Superpower. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why only 50 jobs represent half the entire labor market, and what that means for the choices you made at 18 The difference between a ladder and a garden as frameworks for a life and why one of them is making you miserable What headstones actually say (and never say) about what we thought mattered The…

Ever have something clearly wrong, and yet no expert can tell you what’s causing it? Or, worse, they DO tell you, but they’re wrong? Nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Not a minor mix-up, but a missed, delayed, or wrong diagnosis that shapes how long you suffer, what treatment you receive, and whether anyone believes something is actually wrong with you. For people in midlife, when the body starts sending new signals and the stakes of getting it right feel higher, that statistic carries a particular weight. Alexandra Sifferlin is a science and health journalist and the author of The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis. She spent years inside hospital systems, talking with leading diagnosticians, tracing families who waited decades for answers, and mapping the structural gaps that let real suffering fall through. Her book is dedicated to her sister, who spent years being told her severe hip pain was a pillow-placement problem, until imaging…

There is a conversation most of us are carrying right now. Not one we lack words for. We have plenty of those. One we keep finding reasons not to have. Not because we don't know what we'd say, but because we have become very skilled at building the case for staying quiet a little longer. Jonathan Fields has spent a lot of time in that particular waiting room. This solo episode starts with a story he describes as embarrassing in the specific way only true stories about your own behavior can be embarrassing: a decade-long friendship, a thing said in passing that he never addressed, and the slow drift that followed because he never said it. It's a story many people in midlife will recognize without needing the details changed. What you'll explore in this episode: Why intelligent, emotionally capable people are often the most skilled architects of avoidance, and what that architecture actually looks like from the inside The difference between protecting a relationship and protecting yourself from discomfort, and…

There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost someone to death. The rest of us are supposed to just get on with it. Dr. Lucy Hone is an adjunct senior fellow at the University of Canterbury, a leading resilience researcher, and one of the world's most trusted voices on loss and grief. Her TED talk on resilience has been viewed more than nine million times. She is also a mother who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident in 2014, and who has spent the decade since weaving her scientific training and her lived experience into tools that actually work. Her new book is How Will I Ever Get Through This? In this conversation, we go to the places most conversations about grief are afraid to go. What you will explore: Why grief is not an emotion but a…

Somewhere in the last few years, a lot of us started asking a version of the same question: who am I now, and what am I actually here to do? The answers don't come from a quiz or a vision board. But they just might come from the one word that has been running your life all along, whether you knew it or not. Erin Weed is a speaker coach, keynote speaker, and the creator of the Dig, a purpose-excavation method she has used with over a thousand leaders, founders, and changemakers across every stage of life and reinvention. Her new book, Just One Word: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Discover Your Purpose and Unleash Your Power, is the culmination of that work. She also spent over a decade as head speaker coach for TEDxBoulder, helping people find the one true thing they need to say and the courage to say it. In this conversation, you get to watch the Dig happen in real time, because Jonathan sits down in the chair and lets Erin guide him through the full process. What you will explore: What the Dig is and why…

The voice telling you that you're not enough, that something is about to go wrong, that you should have done it differently, it sounds like you. That's exactly what makes it so hard to catch and so hard to stop. Emiliya Zhivotovskaya has spent decades inside the science and practice of mental wellbeing, training thousands of coaches worldwide through her Certification in Applied Positive Psychology program. Her own path into this work began with a personal reckoning. An eating disorder that started in adolescence, years of thoughts she couldn't separate from herself, and the moment someone first told her she didn't have to be a passive recipient of what her mind was doing to her. In this conversation, we go deep into the phenomenon most of us call overthinking and find out it's not one thing. It's five distinct types of chatter, each with its own voice, its own purpose, and its own specific antidote. What you'll explore: The five types of mind chatter: worry, motivation, mindset, judgment, and regret. And…

What if procrastination has been working exactly as intended? Not as a character flaw, not as laziness, but as a solution you invented for a problem you were more afraid of than the thing you kept putting off. That reframe changes everything about how you approach it. Jon Acuff has spent decades thinking about why people with real ability, real ideas, and real desire still find ways to delay the work that matters most. His newest book, Procrastination Proof, is the result of working with hundreds of thousands of people on this exact struggle. He brings both the humor of someone who has personally been inside the loop and the precision of someone who has studied the patterns long enough to see what's actually underneath them. In this conversation we get into: Why procrastination is a solution, just not the best one, and what that distinction means for how you actually change it The four permissions most of us never gave ourselves: to dream, to plan, to do, and to review How desire creates discipline, not the…

The anxiety you carry, the way you go silent in conflict, the relentless drive that never quite feels like enough, these didn't start with you. They started much earlier, in relationships and environments your body learned to survive before you had words for any of it. And according to Dr. Nicole LePera, until you understand what your nervous system actually encoded in those years, you'll keep bumping into the same walls, the same patterns, the same exhaustion. Dr. Nicole LePera is a clinical psychologist trained at Cornell University and the New School for Social Research, a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of the global SelfHealers community. Her new book, Reparenting the Inner Child, brings together neuroscience, attachment research, and epigenetics to explain not just why we are the way we are, but how real change actually happens in the body, not just the mind. In this conversation, you'll explore: Why your childhood adaptations were brilliant at the time, and how they became the…

Learn how to say what you think without blowing up your relationships. Most of us have been there. A conversation that starts completely normally and somehow ends with you lying awake at 2am wondering how it went so wrong, again. Whether it is a partner, a teenager, a colleague, or someone on the other side of a political divide, the cost of disagreement done badly is one of the quietest, most cumulative kinds of pain there is. Julia Minson is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who has spent years studying the psychology of disagreement, researching how people handle opinions, judgments, and beliefs that differ from their own, and what it actually takes to navigate those moments without losing the relationship in the process. Her book How to Disagree Better distills that research into a practical, science-backed guide for anyone ready to do the real work of staying connected across difference. In this conversation, you will discover: The single most common mistake people make…