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When Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a friend gave him one piece of advice about his own prognosis that he still credits with how he's lived every day since. Bryant Lin is a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and the Arts at Stanford, a fourth-generation physician who spent two decades in primary care before his own stage four diagnosis in 2024. He built a medical school class around his experience that drew coverage from the New York Times and CBS Mornings, and he's the author of Sunshine: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying. In this conversation, you'll explore: The advice from a fellow doctor that changed how Bryant thinks about his own prognosis, and why he stopped looking at the numbers everyone else obsesses overA simple filter he now uses to decide which commitments are worth keeping, and what needs to goWhy he changed very little, even after learning how much less time he likely hadWhy he chose to teach a Stanford class, narrating his own cancer journey, while going through chemo in real timeWhat a good life means, once you learn you have a lot less time to live it. It's a conversation for anyone asking themselves what's actually worth their time, whether or not a doctor has given them a reason to ask. You can find Bryant at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The most accomplished women in Terri Cole's therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound. Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing. What you'll explore in this conversation: The question Terri's own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years of striving in a single sentenceWhy the traits most likely to get you promoted are often the exact adaptations that keep you from enjoying any of itThe two behaviors that look identical on a Tuesday night on the couch and do opposite things to your nervous systemWhat Terri means when she says you need nothing from your father to heal this, including his apology, his participation, or his being aliveThe fear that stops high achievers from starting this work, and her direct answer to whether healing costs you what you built If you have built a life that looks right from the outside and quietly wondered why it does not feel like yours, this is the conversation about what is actually underneath that. You can find Terri at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The year-end review most of us attempt starts with goals and ends in self-criticism. Tiago Forte has run one every year since 2008, and he has come to treat goal setting as the last step of the process, almost an afterthought. Tiago is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over twenty-five languages, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Through Forte Labs, he has taught this practice to more than ten thousand students in over seventy countries. He is also, by his own description, someone who resists self-reflection and does it anyway, which makes him unusually useful on the question of how to start. The question Tiago offers the person whose year contained something they would rather not open, and the year his entire review became a single long walkWhy nearly everyone reaches for their work life first, and where he finds the actual source of most people's dissatisfactionA daily capture habit with a name, and his sharp reason your AI-generated notes are the wrong raw material for itThree signals he waits for in his own body before committing to anything big, and what he does when only two show upFour principles built to stop a life review from turning into the performance review you dread If you have ever closed out a year feeling like it went by without you, this is a conversation about getting some of it back. You can find Tiago at: Website | Tiago's YouTube | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you. Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it. In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore: The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it onWhat to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday partyWhy ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrongHow much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you canThe form of anxiety you're most embarrassed by, and the thing it has been quietly training you to do for other people If you've spent years trying to get rid of the feeling, this is an invitation to stop fighting it and start setting the volume. You can find Dr. Wendy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 hitWhy he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failuresWhat incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal he set that most writers today would be embarrassed to admit toThe two things fear does to people who want to make something, and the daily choice that decides which one you getWhy he tells every aspiring writer to stop talking about the book they're working on If you've been waiting for more time, more proof, or more permission before you start the thing you keep circling, this one is likely to shorten the wait. You can find Harlan at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 itThe everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now that's silently raising one of the 7 key drivers of inflammatory agingHow chronic stress can disable the anti-inflammatory drugs meant to fight itThe one daily habit David says adds roughly fifteen years to your healthspan, and it isn't the kind of exercise you'd expectWhat David actually eats, and avoids, to keep his own inflammation in check If you've ever wondered what's actually happening beneath the surface as you age, this conversation gives you a real way to find out, and a real place to start. You can find David at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 doesWhat one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically flawless performance, and where it sent him afterwardWhy the founder of a three-billion-dollar company looked at his own growth numbers and felt sick, and the one sentence of his Jimmy channels at every crossroadsThe difference between a kid wanting a parent alive and a kid wanting a parent to feel alive, and what it takes to hold both at onceWhat a seven-year-old said to her father at thirteen thousand feet that he is still thinking about six years later If you have hit the season where the boxes are checked and the question underneath them has gotten louder, this one is for you. You can find Jimmy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 badlyThe specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combinedWhat his team discovered when they photographed people's resting faces, and why it explains a train car full of strangers staying quietA kind word tends to land better than a polished one, according to decades of research on how we actually judge each other. Nicholas breaks down whyActing more outgoing than you feel might not cost the energy you'd expect, even for people who've called themselves introverts their whole lives If there's someone you've been meaning to reach out to, or a stranger you keep talking yourself out of talking to, this conversation makes the case for testing that instinct instead of trusting it. You can find Nicholas at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 measuring what was wrong and shifting to the opposite, realizing, all too often, that what we measure reinforces our reality. In this conversation, you'll explore: The number of practitioners she saw over four years before a single one offered to coordinate her care, and what her body did in that exact moment, before any new treatment was triedWhat she took off her wrist and archived on her hard drive, after believing for years that it was the thing keeping her safeThe first entry in the new spreadsheet she opened in 2024, and why something that small was the turnWhy the online illness communities she went to for support sent her home more frightened every time, and what she went looking for insteadHow she started charting a different kind of data, and finding new answers that not only refuted much of the dire prognosis she’d been given, but also, slowly, brought her back to life.Why her working definition of recovery now, which is not the one she wrote down while she was sick, is not "getting back to normal" A note on how we held this one. Giorgia is careful, and so are we. This is her story and not a protocol, her symptoms were real, documented in labs, and measurable, and nobody in this conversation is suggesting anyone thinks their way out of illness. If you have ever looked fine from the outside while something underneath was quietly giving way, this is a conversation about what your body might be trying to tell you before it has to shout. You can find Giorgia at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 itWhy 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 ground feels tilted against them, this is a reminder that the tilt might be more changeable than it feels. You can find Shawn at: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 untouchedThe question Leah's husband asked her about the word "good" that quietly reset her entire standard for running a homeWhat the data leaves out, and why the scorekeeping it invites can erode a long partnershipSelf-help book sales fell roughly 25% in a year while coaching grew about 15%, and what people are actually paying for insteadThe one thing a human can do that no book and no chatbot can, which may be the real reason the advice stopped working Both halves of this conversation land in the same place, which is that the discomfort you keep trying to optimize away is usually the thing worth turning toward instead. You can find Leah at: Instagram | Everyday Better with Leah Smart Substack | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 students how to fall before anything else, and what that translates to when the fall is emotional rather than physicalThe journal question Mark asks people in circle that tends to surface, fast, whose voice you have actually been living underWhat a friend in the depths of grief told him about "the life after tears," and the line that separates it from everything that came beforeThe difference between grounding and chasing, and the small reorientation that changes where you go looking for a lifeWhat happened in a bar after the Iraq war that taught him how to feel for pain he had never lived through If you are somewhere in the middle of a fall, or still carrying one that never quite finished, this conversation offers you something steadier than advice: company, and a way to keep going that doesn't ask you to pretend you're fine. You can find Mark at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 organizationThe 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 waterStorytelling, not statistics, is the core tool charity: eater uses to overcome apathy and make distant suffering feel personalThe Rachel Beckwith story shows how one child’s birthday campaign became a global movement that ultimately helped more than 100,000 peopleThe conversation digs into the tension between mission and family, especially for leaders whose work could easily consume all their timeScott shares how his kids reflect back the values he hopes to modelThe closing theme is generosity as an endless practice - giving, serving, and sharing rather than accumulating You can find Scott at: Website | Charity Water Instagram | Scott's Instagram | Episode Transcript Next week, we're bringing you a best-of episode with Mark Nepo, to talk about why falling down might be the most useful thing that happens to you all year. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes! Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 stopped using the word "sex" altogether, and the shift she's seen in how people respond once she doesn't.The physical reason arousal builds so differently in men's and women's bodies, and the one image that makes it click instantly.The specific framework Susan built after her own marriage nearly came apart over unmet needs, and how any couple can use it.What changed the moment she stopped treating tools and technique as something to be ashamed of. If you've quietly decided your best sex is behind you, this conversation is the case for reconsidering that, whatever decade you're in. You can find Susan at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript You can find Cynthia at: Website | Instagram Next week, we're sitting down with Scott Harrison to talk about how twenty years, a lot of failure, and one story told the right way turned into a movement that's brought clean water to tens of millions of people who never had it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes! Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 usThe structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter how present or grateful you becomeWhat researcher Hal Hershfield discovered when he asked people to imagine a meaningful place for the very last time, and the surprising thing that didn't happen to their happinessThe centuries-old Portuguese word for the ache you've probably never been able to nameTwo kinds of lasts, and the completely different thing each one asks of you The endings you can't remember may be the strongest evidence of a life you were fully inside of. Episode Transcript Next week, guest host Cynthia Morris is sitting down with Susan Bratton to talk about why desire in midlife doesn't fade so much as it gets misread, and what actually rekindles it at any age. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes! Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.