Good Life Project

Jonathan Fields / Acast
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated twice weekly

Good Life Project is a podcast and video series for people navigating midlife with intention. Hosted by Jonathan Fields, each episode is a deep, honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a life that feels like yours, through the reinventions, reckonings, and reclamations that define your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Grounded in science, fueled by genuine curiosity, and always in service of the real work of living well. Often top-ranked, it’s been listened to and viewed more than 100 million times. New episodes weekly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 8 hr ago ·  Video

    Inflammation, Aging, & How to Put Out the Fires Your Body Keeps Setting | David Furman, PhD

    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.

  2. 4 days ago ·  Video

    Jimmy Chin: The Cost of Risking Too Little

    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.

  3. 12 Oct ·  Video

    The Social Fear That Keeps Us Lonely (and the easy fix) | Nicholas Epley

    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.

  4. 8 Oct ·  Video

    47 Doctors, Data Galore, and a Problem Only She Could Solve | Giorgia Lupi

    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.

  5. 5 Oct ·  Video

    How 7 Core Beliefs Shape Your Health, Happiness, & Success | Shawn Achor

    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.

  6. 1 Oct ·  Video

    Good Life Jam: Parenting Burdens & Self-Help Book Burials | Leah Smart

    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.

  7. 28 Sept ·  Video

    Getting Back Up After You’ve Been Brought to Your Knees | Mark Nepo

    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.

  8. 24 Sept ·  Video

    He’s Spent 20 Years Trying to Change The World | Scott Harrison

    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.

See All (1.2k)

Trailer

Hosts & Guests

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

Good Life Project is a podcast and video series for people navigating midlife with intention. Hosted by Jonathan Fields, each episode is a deep, honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a life that feels like yours, through the reinventions, reckonings, and reclamations that define your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Grounded in science, fueled by genuine curiosity, and always in service of the real work of living well. Often top-ranked, it’s been listened to and viewed more than 100 million times. New episodes weekly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Jonathan Fields / Acast
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodes
    1.2k
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Good Life Project 2016
  • Show Website
    Good Life Project

More From Wondery

You Might Also Like