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

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 syn

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, wi

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 mo

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

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 prob

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,

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 everyda

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

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 whe

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 wit

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 i

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. H

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

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 checkl

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 bra

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 an

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, trai

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, f

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, an