What is a Good Life?

Registered dietitian Angela Jenkins spent nearly 30 years inside the conventional medical system. Then her own kidneys began to fail, and she was told, “You look healthy. We’ll just watch it.” Lying on a gravel bar on a Missouri river, she decided to figure it out for herself. That moment changed her approach to health, food, and life. In this conversation, Angela shares what she learned about con...

I recently watched a documentary that blew my mind: Where Everything Disappears . It was hard to hold the beauty and the grief it shared at the same time. It follows Dmytro “Doc” Dokunov, a documentary filmmaker who was living in a countryside eco-community, practicing yoga, breathwork and meditation, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He joined the Ukrainian army, became a commander, a...

What does a good life look like when your health is uncertain? Matt was born with a bone condition and has broken more than 40 bones. He’s had a liver transplant, and he’s now waiting on open heart surgery. He’s also one of the most positive, curious people I know, and I wanted to find out how he lives so fully. Matt has been a basketball coach, an equipment manager for the Vancouver Grizzlies in...

What happens when a hard-working founder is told by “the spirit world” to slow down and become a father? Philippe Birker is the co-founder of Climate Farmers, an organisation supporting the transition to regenerative agriculture across Europe. In this conversation he shares the question he’s living by: What do I want to leave behind? We talk about: A transformative ayahuasca retreat, and the messa...

What does it take to stand up when something doesn't feel right? In this episode, we speak with Kat Miles, a Brixton business owner, community organiser, and founder and Chair of the Brixton Traders & Community Association (BTCA). She has traded in Brixton Village since 2011, and her shop became an informal hub for advice and support, which led her to found BTCA to give traders and the communi...

This week we are joined by Nikkolas Smith, Hollywood concept artist, #1 NYT bestselling illustrator, and the creator of Sunday Sketch . We explore his journey from theme park designer to viral artivist. We talk about art as empathy, how art has helped him process grief and injustice, and the making of his hand-painted picture book The History of We – a 200,000-year visual journey back to humanity'...

Builder, broadcaster and author Harrison Gardner joins the show to talk about what it means to build your own security – the kind that comes from knowing you can meet your own basic needs. Harrison shares how he left Australia at seventeen with no plan beyond learning how the world works, the years he spent building preschools in an Indian slum, and how buying a derelict 200-year-old stone cottage...

Dreamworker and award-winning author Toko-pa Turner joins the show to talk about what it really means to let go – of the perceptions we project onto others, of the noise on the surface of life – so we can hear the "second attention" moving underneath. Toko-pa shares how she developed her own intimate relationship with dreams after leaving home at fourteen with no adult guidance, how a haunting nig...

This week we are in conversation with Laura Costello. Laura is Chief Communications Officer at Hometree, a nature restoration charity, and Ireland Lead with Purpose Disruptors. She led the Good Life 2030 Ireland project, which invited people across Ireland to imagine a brighter future and resulted in a national creative campaign promoting visions of wellbeing centred on connection rather than cons...

Ewan Townhead is an entrepreneur, coach, and the author of Artist, Merchant, Seeker: Bring Your Whole Self to the Path of Work. He spent a decade helping build Coaches Rising, a coach-training school, before stepping back to finish a book he'd been writing for seven years. We talk about the model at the centre of it – artist, merchant, and seeker – and his long process of trying to bring all three...

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,...

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...

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? Miri...

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...

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...

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 pu...

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 year...

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,...

Lucinda Millward is the founder of The Baskerville Project and a practitioner in embodied relational practice - bringing creativity, the body, and the nervous system into collective inquiry. She works across executive education, the arts, and public contexts, holds degrees from the University of Oxford, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and RADA and King’s College London, and has served f...

This week Mark McCartney sits down with Sam Smith. Sam sees life as a big old experiment. He used to play professional rugby, before starting a few businesses. Now he spends his time speaking to people, writing and loving his family. Last year he wrote his first book, The Door Was Never Locked . His latest project with his friend Garth, Conscious Soup launches soon, it's a Living Experiment. They...

What is it about dogs? It's the question Doug Skoke has been sitting with and it turns out, trying to understand what makes his golden doodle Harley tick has become one of his most impactful explorations of how to actually live well. Doug is the Founder & CEO of LFG NOW!, a boutique executive search firm, and a Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths Coach - but what defines him more than any title...

In this episode of What is a Good Life? , Mark McCartney sits down with Jennifer Garvey Berger - author, global leadership coach, and co-founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership - to explore one of the most honest questions a person can ask: am I actually living in alignment with what I say matters most? Jennifer has spent decades helping leaders untangle big questions and find more courageous, c...

In this episode of What is a Good Life?, Mark McCartney sits down with Laura Beckingham - a modern mystic for turbulent times. It's a conversation that remains as grounded in the bread and butter of life as it ascends into the spiritual. We move from asking what existence is all about through radical inclusion, Family Constellations, ancestral wisdom, the right size in relationships, grief and dea...

In this episode of What is a Good Life?, Mark McCartney sits down with Dave Snowden - Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Cynefin Co., creator of the Cynefin Framework, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of complexity science, organisational design, and human decision-making. The conversation moves through substrate theory, complexity science, psychological s...

What if it were easy? What would you do if you weren't afraid? This week I am joined by Dr Myriam Hadnes who shares with us two questions that have really influenced her life. We explore how passion can grow through doing rather than preceding it, why conflict in relationships can be a form of intimacy rather than a threat to it, and what it really means to act in integrity even when the cost is p...