As we bring this year to a close, and what a year it’s been, I’ve been reflecting on how profound so much of the past 12-months have been. So much change, uncertainty, and disconnection, inexplicably bundled with moments of profound hopefulness, connection, creation, and possibility. Along the way, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to sit down with over 100 of the wisest, most inspiring, genuine, kind, creative, and “tapped into source” human beings through the vehicle of this podcast. It has,...
Dec 30, 2021•2 hr 46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Even as a kid, my guest, Elizabeth lesser was the rebel, the activist, the feminist in the family. Growing up with three sisters, and one very traditional father, she could never understand why the women didn't make more decisions and have more power. Hers was not a voice that could be silenced, even from the earliest age. She eventually traveled down a path of activism, social justice, graduated from Barnard, became a student of a renowned Sufi mystic, and studied with a wide range of spiritual...
Dec 27, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast My guest today, Mansi Shah, spent years building a stunning career as a lawyer in the fast-moving world of Hollywood entertainment, working with some of the most iconic storytellers in the industry. But, behind her success as an entertainment lawyer, a lifelong yearning was brewing. She felt deeply called to not just help others tell their stories, often built around narratives that didn’t resonate with her background, but to actually be the storyteller, herself. And, to focus her lens on bringi...
Dec 23, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast How do you live a good life? That’s the question we’ve been asking here for nearly a decade. My guest today, Cathy Heller, has been along a similar journey, exploring the role of intentionality, purpose, and presence in a life well-lived. Raised in a household where mental illness and conflict were the norm, she took on the role of peacemaker at the age of 5, became a deep observer of human behavior, first, out of necessity, then out of curiosity, and eventually from the lens of calling. Cathy i...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast You may know my guest today, Jeffrey Marsh, from their spiritual and inclusive messages that have received over 1 billion views on social media. Jeffrey is a viral TikTok and Instagram sensation, the first openly nonbinary public figure to be interviewed on national television, and the first nonbinary author to be offered a book deal with any "Big 5" publisher, at Penguin Random House. Jeffrey’s bestselling Buddhist self-esteem guide How To Be You , is an innovative, category-non-conformin...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast We tend to take on one of 3 modes as we head into the end of the year: Rush To The Finish | Goal Striving Mode Check Out | Vacation Mode Reflect, Integrate & Assess | Review & Plan Mode That last one is my approach. I love to use these final weeks to understand what happened over the last 12 months, in all parts of life, consider what went well and why, where I stumbled and why, and how I can learn and integrate all of it into setting up the year to come to rise higher. And, I thought I’...
Dec 13, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast This has been a year that has tested our boundaries on nearly every level. Work, friendship, family, community, geography, politics, religion, social issues, love, wellbeing. It’s like we’re being asked to draw lines, all day, every day. Question is, how? How do you create and uphold boundaries that are clear, healthy, and constructive, while also acknowledging the nuance, kindness, and understanding this moment demands? Well, my guest today, Nedra Glover Tawwab, can help. A licensed thera...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast From the age of 3, Micah Johnson knew what he wanted to be when he grew up - a professional baseball player. From that moment on, he lived baseball, and in 2012, his dreams came true when the Chicago White Sox drafted him. But, what Micah didn’t know was that his true calling in life was just getting started. Traded to the LA Dodgers a few years later, Micah, almost on a lark, discovered painting, something that had never been a part of his. And it called to him in a way he never saw coming. Now...
Dec 06, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine going to college and getting a minor in ‘you!’ Well, that’s just one of the semi-wild ideas that bubbled up during my conversation with week’s guest, Mark Groves. Mark describes himself as a Human Connection Specialist on a mission to help individuals step into their most authentic, effective, loving selves by way of a little bit of tough love and no-BS relationship guidance. Immersing himself and pursuing an education in the world of psychology after his model of life and relationships ...
Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast With the rigor of a world-class researcher and the intention of someone who cares deeply about the human condition and understanding how we all got to this moment in history, Dr. Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian of the 20th century United States with specializations in African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and the president of the African American Intellectual Hi...
Nov 29, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re entering a time of year where gratitude is on our minds. And, honestly, it’s also been a year, even a season, where being thankful, noticing what’s wondrous or good, or even just not bad, well it's not always the easiest thing. And, yet, gratitude, attentiveness, and appreciation are such deeply-wired contributors to the human condition, ones that carry with them the capacity to transform nearly any experience - one of anger, one of loss, one of fear, one of anxiety, one of sadness, ...
Nov 25, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a Professor of Physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She’s also one of fewer than a hundred Black American women to earn a Ph.D. from a department of physics. Born in East Los Angeles, a devout Dodgers fan, she’s a citizen of both the United States and Barbados and a descendant of Afro-Caribbean and Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. Chanda decided to become a th...
Nov 22, 2021•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast What if you could work, play, and live in a state of wonder? Even now! That’s the question I explore with today’s guest, Jeffrey Davis. A poet, writer, deep-thinker, founder and CEO of the Tracking Wonder Consultancy, Jeffrey’s got an invitation for all of us. To get off the toxic productivity treadmill, which so many have been hammered by in recent times, and reclaim a sense of possibility, meaning, and wonder. To step back into a place of curiosity and lightness. And, when Jeffrey offers...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you LOVED this episode: You’ll also love the conversations we had with Kamal Ravikant about reimagining life and learning to love himself. You can find Tim Ferriss at: Website | Instagram | The Tim Ferris Show podcast Tim Ferriss has been a man on a mission, driven to deconstruct mastery and excellence, then share what he's learned. It began with his own relentless experimentation and documentation, which yielded #1 New York Times bestsellers The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body , The 4-Hour ...
Nov 15, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is an author, Activist, and Public Theologian, the first woman and first Black Senior Minister at Middle Collegiate Church, which is a multiracial, incredibly welcoming, and inclusive congregation in the Lower East Side of New York City, which dates to 1628. Growing up in church in the South Side of Chicago, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when she was nine incited what would become a lifelong devotion to activism and social justice. Graduating school,...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine going through life with the name, Andy J. Pizza. That’s what my guest today goes by, but it wasn’t his given name, but rather his claimed name. More on that when we talk. Andy was the kid who perpetually zagged when everyone else zigged. And, at a young age, he saw this same pattern in his mother, he was so much like her. Which, in part, lit him up, but also terrified him. In his mom, these same impulses were married to mental illness that led to a life of struggle. He feared that’s wher...
Nov 08, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you LOVED this episode: You’ll also love the conversations we had with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about how we can understand and tap our whole brains to live fuller lives. Anthony Trucks entered the foster system, along with his two siblings, when he was three years old, then spent years enduring a series of brutal experiences. Until he found a home where, after 8 years of legal battles, he became emancipated from his mom and was adopted by his then longtime foster parents. Still, a young Black m...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Born in Guayaquil Ecuador, Deigo Perez - who is known by the pseudonym Yung Pueblo - moved with his family to Boston, where he saw his parents work relentless hours and struggle with poverty. He turned to activism and advocacy at a young age, then attended Wesleyan where his life devolved into partying and drugs that threatened to become his way of being as he moved into adulthood. But a moment of reckoning would awaken him both to his need to refocus on mental and physical wellbeing, as well as...
Nov 01, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brought up in a deeply observant Jewish Orthodox household with a reverence for her family’s history, Shelly Tygielski embraced the traditions, teachings, and practices of her faith, even spending summers in Jerusalem with family. Heading to college, then grad school, she pursued her masters in international affairs, then began building a powerhouse career in business, along with a family. But, along the way, she found herself questioning the rules and assumptions by which she lived, and the mor...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Surviving what he describes as a tormented childhood riddled with abuse, Alan Cumming turned to acting, before he knew it was acting, as a way to step out of the world he inhabited and into one of his own creation. One that was safe, where he made the rules. That impulse eventually led him to leave home, study drama in Glasgow, and, in his words” tumble” into a career that, from the outside-in, has appeared as an endless stream of successes. He’s performed with everyone from Jay Z to Liza Minell...
Oct 25, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Najwa Zebian is a Lebanese-Canadian activist, author, speaker, and educator who developed a passion for language at a young age, immersing herself in Arabic poetry and novels. As someone who found herself repeated displaced, leaving Lebanon for Canada when she was 16, not realizing it wasn’t just a trip, but rather a permanent change, would she’d find herself searching for a home—what Najwa describes as a place where the soul and heart feel at peace, a quest that continues into her adult life. H...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adam J. Kurtz (whose artist’s identity is Adam JK, is a designer, artist, and speaker whose work is rooted in emotional honesty, humor and even a little bit of darkness, but always with the intention of connection, honoring the reality of any given moment, and being honest. He’s been making and sharing on the internet since age creating his first fan website at twelve years old, eventually went to school for graphic design and learned to express, in his words “slightly too much." Adam’s work emb...
Oct 18, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine being so drawn to a pursuit as a kid, it consumes most of your waking hours, rapidly becomes your identity, and is the thing you believe you’ll devote your life to, and then, in the blink of an eye, it’s taken away. That’s what happened to Maya Shankar, who fell in love with the violin as a small child, studied it with love and devotion, was being mentored by the legendary Itzhak Perlman, and was sure it would be her profession for life. Until, an injury took it all away in the blink of ...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joanne Molinaro was deep into her career as a full-time attorney when she started blogging as The Korean Vegan, a nod to both her heritage and her curiosity about reimagining the cuisine she grew up on. She soon after launched a TikTok account that exploded and, along with her other platforms, boasts over 3.5 million fans. She’s appeared on The Food Network and Al Jazeera English, been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and CNN, and has just released her d...
Oct 11, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1992, after years of teaching workshops on creative unblocking, Julia Cameron self-published The Artist's Way , which became a global phenomenon that sold millions of copies, was translated into 40 languages, and anchors companion workshops that have brought creativity into the mainstream conversation. Along the way, Julia has authored more than 40 books, plays and screenplays, written for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and The New York Times , and collaborated with legends of television ...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the age of 24, living in Ibiza, Matt Haig stepped to the ledge of a cliff with the intention of launching himself to his end. But something pulled him back. That experience led him and his girlfriend, who’d eventually become his wife, back to his childhood home where Matt would begin the process of picking up the pieces of his life. A writer, he kept that season of profound darkness, revelation, and recovery within his family, while he deepened into a career as a novelist and children’s book ...
Oct 04, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast I first met Kristoffer Carer nearly a decade ago when he raised his hand to participate in the inaugural Good Life Project immersion. It was a yearlong deep dive into work and life that we ran for about 5 years. Kristoffer or KC as most people call him, was running fast. I wasn’t sure if he was running toward something as much as he was running from it. In the end, like most of us, it was probably both. A married dad of three living in Ohio and working at a Chicago ad-tech startup after exiting ...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mel Robbins is one of the leading voices in personal development and transformation and an international bestselling author. Her work includes the global phenomenon The 5 Second Rule, four #1 bestselling audiobooks, the #1 podcast on Audible, as well as signature online courses that have changed the lives of more than half a million students worldwide and now her groundbreaking new book, The High 5 Habit. As one of the most widely booked and followed public speakers in the world, Mel coaches mor...
Sep 27, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast So question for you: When was the last time you did something where it was so immersive, so enjoyable it so captivated, the essence of who you are that you completely lost track of time? You just vanished into the experience, the activity, the moment, the conversation, the relationship, like the world around you ceased to exist. The only thing that you became aware of, if you were even aware of that, was you and the thing that you were doing, or the person or the group of people that you were en...
Sep 23, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode will be unlike any conversation we’ve ever aired on Good Life Project. For the first time on the podcast, I’m on the other side of the mic. And, to be honest, the thought of it kind of terrifies me. Even now, with it’s recorded and I know how it went and what’s on tape, it still kind of terrifies me. I’m pretty comfortable asking the questions, and even answering questions on other people’s shows. This, however, is different. Today, I asked my dear friend, big-hearted human, r...
Sep 20, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast