What is a Good Life?

Mark McCartney
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

What is a Good Life? is a podcast about the questions that shape our lives: how we live, who we become, and what truly matters. For the past five years, I've asked more than 300 people one deceptively simple question: What is a good life? There isn't a single answer. Instead, each conversation offers a different way of seeing the world—through stories, ideas, struggles, joys, and moments of hard-earned wisdom. Together, they form a richer picture of what it means to be human. Whether you're searching for clarity, purpose, or simply a thoughtful conversation, this podcast is an invitation to reflect on your own answer. New episodes every Tuesday.

  1. 2d ago

    What is a Good Life? #186 - Self-Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Body as Art with OONA

    In this episode I was joined by OONA – an anonymous performance artist known for her works Milking The Artist, Dear David, and Look Touch Own. Recognised by her mask and dark sunglasses, she treats anonymity itself as both method and performance, examining power, value, and identity within digital culture. We discuss data, extraction, the body as art, and what sovereignty means through physical, digital, and spiritual lenses. It is a really thought provoking and stirring conversation that left me optimistic about finding connection and intimacy in the places we'd least expect it. For more of OONA's work:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/made.by.oona/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #186 - Self-Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Body as Art with OONA

  2. Aug 11

    What is a Good Life? #185 - Sarah Marquis on Fear, Instinct, and Surviving Alone in the Wild

    National Geographic Explorer Sarah Marquis has spent 25 years walking alone through some of the most remote landscapes on Earth — the equivalent of circumnavigating the planet on foot. Her expeditions include a 14,000km, 17-month crossing of the Australian Outback, three years walking solo from Siberia to Australia, and three months surviving off bush tucker in the Kimberley. In this episode, she talks about the seven-year-old girl who slept alone in a cave and never lost her sense of mission, why fear is a construction we choose to believe, how she learned to read the land through a herd of wild cattle, surviving a near-fatal fall in Tasmania that left her crawling out of a gorge with a broken shoulder, and the grief that followed her mother's sudden death. This is a conversation about instinct, consciousness, and what it means to build a life from the inside out. Sarah is a force of curiosity and nature and it was both a joy and inspiration to sit with her. For more of Sarah Marquis' work:Website: https://www.sarahmarquis.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explorer_sarahmarquis/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #185 - Sarah Marquis on Fear, Instinct, and Surviving Alone in the Wild

  3. Jul 21

    What is a Good Life? #184 - Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel

    What does it actually mean to be human in an age racing toward AGI? In this episode of What is a Good Life?, Mark sits down with Dr. Miriam Meckel - award-winning journalist, professor of communication management at the University of St. Gallen, and founder of ada learning - to explore the question that has shaped her life's work: what is irreducibly human, and what are we at risk of losing? Miriam, the first female editor-in-chief of WirtschaftsWoche and former State Secretary for Media and International Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia, opens up about a burnout that became a life-altering depression, the vulnerability of turning her private writing into her bestselling book Letter to My Life, and why she believes embodied experience — not intelligence — is what truly separates us from machines. It is a conversation about identity, friction, kindness, and what it takes to live a quiet, honest life. For more of Dr. Miriam Meckel's work:ada learning: https://www.join-ada.com/enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meckel/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #184 - Resting in the Core of My Identity with Dr. Miriam Meckel

  4. Jul 14

    What is a Good Life? #183 - When Fear Becomes My Partner with Ralf Wetzel

    In this episode of What is a Good Life, host Mark McCartney sits down with Ralf Wetzel - a leadership scholar who has taught at leading European business schools, and a clown and mask performer whose solo show Absolutely Reliable! has played the Edinburgh Fringe. This episode is built around one question: what does it mean to have a good relationship with fear? Ralf grew up under surveillance in communist East Germany, in a family where fear was something you lived with, not something you spoke about. He spent years trying to work through it - through therapy, yoga, and psychedelics, and eventually through improv and clown theatre. Along the way, we get into a teaching moment that tested everything he'd learned, and why a plastic clown nose turned out to teach him more about truth than theory ever did. This episode is for anyone who wants to reconsider their relationship with fear. For more from Ralf Wetzel:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralf-wetzel-3a742011/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #183 - When Fear Becomes My Partner with Ralf Wetzel

  5. Jul 7

    What is a Good Life? #182 - Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg

    In this episode of What is a Good Life, host Mark McCartney sits down with Lior Steinberg, a Rotterdam-based urban planner and co-founder of Humankind, a multidisciplinary team working toward urban happiness for all. Lior is also the author of the children's book The Car That Wanted to Be a Bike. Together they unpack why so many cities remain trapped in car-centric design decades after urbanist Jane Jacobs first warned against it. They talk about the "sidewalk ballet," how children's toys teach us to want cars, the surprising parallel between car culture and cigarette smoking, Barcelona's superblocks, and why trees are the best climate technology we already have.  This is a thought-provoking conversation on how often change feels impossible until it is here. For more of Lior Steinberg's work:Humankind: https://www.humankind.city/Personal Website: https://steinberg.nu/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liorsteinberg/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #182 - Cities That Make Us Happier with Lior Steinberg

  6. Jun 30

    What is a Good Life? #181 - Finding Peace Within Myself with Kadam Adam Starr

    What does it mean to live a truly meaningful life and why do so many of us feel an emptiness even at the height of our success? In this episode, Mark sits down with Kadam Adam Starr, who has been an international teacher of meditation and Buddhism for over 20 years and is the principal teacher at Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre in Dublin. Adam walked away from a corporate media career in 2005 to pursue a different kind of question. What began as a planned year or two away became a complete reorientation of his life. Together they explore the emptiness that often arrives in our late twenties and early thirties, the difference between fleeting pleasure and genuine peace of mind, and why Adam came to realise that the problem was never his career - it was how badly out of balance he'd become. They talk about the shift from an ego-driven life to one grounded in compassion, what a three-month silent retreat revealed about our shared humanity, and how living from a peaceful mind and a good heart can make life feel radically more simple. This is a conversation about self-knowledge, the attention economy, meeting difficult people with friendship rather than judgment, and the realisation that a good life may come down to how we choose to show up each day. For more of Kadam Adam Starr's work:Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre: https://meditateinireland.com/IG: https://www.instagram.com/tara_kadampa_meditation_centre/ For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #181 - Finding Peace Within Myself with Kadam Adam Starr

  7. Jun 23

    What is a Good Life? #180 - The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD

    Dr. Karen L. Jacob is a clinical psychologist, Program Director of the Gunderson Residence at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. She specialises in the assessment and treatment of personality disorders, with particular expertise in borderline personality disorder. In this conversation Karen talks about growing up with a love of art, spending four years after college searching for work that actually meant something, the influence of a father who treated the underserved his entire career, and what drew her unexpectedly to specialising in personality disorders. We also discuss a New Year's resolution with her husband that changed how she parents and how she works. It's a conversation about what it looks like to build a meaningful life with joy, and staying open to a path that keeps surprising you. For more of Dr. Karen L. Jacob's work:Profile: https://www.mcleanhospital.org/profile/karen-jacob For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #180 - The Art of a Meaningful Life with Karen L. Jacob, PhD

  8. Jun 16

    What is a Good Life? #179 - Trust, Water & Rewilding with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeldt

    In this episode, Dan talks with Mark about trading 80-90 hour work weeks and a self-medicating lifestyle in London for the forests and lakes of northern Sweden. He shares how his father's death became a turning point, how cold water swimming became a doorway back into his body, and how a small group of friends turned a Sunday morning dip into a movement. The conversation explores trust, surrender, community, and what it means to dissolve the "thick border" between yourself and the world. Dan Allen-Hörnfeldt is Chairman of Umeå Kallbad, a community swimming and sauna association recently named one of Sweden's best places to visit in 2026, and Head of Nature for People at Rewilding Sweden. A former GB triathlete, he spent fifteen years in restaurants and pubs, winning two Michelin Bib Gourmands and twice being named London's Best Pub, before building a nationally recognised restaurant in northern Sweden with his wife. He has also competed at an elite level in open-water and ice swimming, including a podium finish at the Ice Swimming World Cup. Learn more about Dan Allen-Hörnfeldt's work:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danallenhornfeldt/Umeå: https://umeakallbad.se/For more from Mark McCartney:Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

    What is a Good Life? #179 - Trust, Water & Rewilding with Daniel Allen-Hörnfeldt
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out of 5
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About

What is a Good Life? is a podcast about the questions that shape our lives: how we live, who we become, and what truly matters. For the past five years, I've asked more than 300 people one deceptively simple question: What is a good life? There isn't a single answer. Instead, each conversation offers a different way of seeing the world—through stories, ideas, struggles, joys, and moments of hard-earned wisdom. Together, they form a richer picture of what it means to be human. Whether you're searching for clarity, purpose, or simply a thoughtful conversation, this podcast is an invitation to reflect on your own answer. New episodes every Tuesday.

Information

  • Creator
    Mark McCartney
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    186
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Mark McCartney
  • Show Website
    What is a Good Life?

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