Good Life Project

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 on
What 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 party
Why ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrong
How much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you can
The 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

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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 hit
Why he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failures
What incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal he set that most writers today would be embarrassed to admit to
The two things fear does to people who want to make something, and the daily choice that decides which one you get
Why 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

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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 it
The everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now that's silently raising one of the 7 key drivers of inflammatory aging
How chronic stress can disable the anti-inflammatory drugs meant to fight it
The one daily habit David says adds roughly fifteen years to your healthspan, and it isn't the kind of exercise you'd expect
What 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

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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 does
What one of the world's great cellists realized in the middle of a technically flawless performance, and where it sent him afterward
Why 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 crossroads
The 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 once
What 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

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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 badly
The specific belief researchers found sabotages more conversations than shyness, rudeness, or bad timing combined
What his team discovered when they photographed people's resting faces, and why it explains a train car full of strangers staying quiet
A 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 why
Acting 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

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