French Kissing Life

I’m pausing French Kissing Life, and I’ve never been particularly good at endings. Even as a little girl, finishing a really good book made me sad. Saying goodbye to a chapter that has brought me this much joy is one of the hardest ones yet. Over the past several months, life has been throwing a lot at me. I don’t mean the occasional bad day or stressful week. It’s been the kind of stretch where e...

What if “I’m just not that kind of person” is one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves? Sara Torpey is the creator of the Uncomplicating Business Lab and Selling for Weirdos, where she helps teachers, helpers, and givers make business and selling a whole lot simpler. But Sara’s philosophy applies to so much more than business, because we humans are remarkably talented at making things complicated...

It started with free coffee on a Monday morning. A friend invited Natalie Lozano Trimble to the opening week of a new coffee shop in Fort Worth, the kind with no to-go cups because the whole point is to sit down and talk. She ended up at a medium-sized table with six women, three of them strangers, plus her five-year-old. Somebody said, "We should try this again." That was February 2020,...

Before we call ourselves procrastinators, maybe we should ask what we're actually avoiding. When something matters to us, and we still can't move on it, it's easy to decide the problem is us. Evangeline Garreau sees it differently. She's a creative project coach who helps artists of all kinds bring the things they imagine into reality, and she doesn't start with discipline...

What if remembering that we're going to die could actually make us better at living? Chloe Markham calls herself a philosopher of joy, and she's fascinated by what it means to live a genuinely enjoyable life in a culture built to measure, optimize, and improve every part of being human. This conversation gets into why mortality might make joy feel more urgent instead of less, and why cal...

What if imagination isn't something we lose when we grow up, but one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our lives? My guest today is Sarah Bush, a mixed media artist, writer, and creative activist who believes imagination is our greatest human superpower. Sarah and I talk about why so many adults lose touch with their imaginations, and get personal about perfectionism, burnout, a...

Coruscating. It's the only word big enough for today. NASA used it in an Instagram tribute to Dolly Parton, and it stopped the scroll completely. It means flashing brightly, sparkling, showing brilliant cleverness, and there's no better word for a woman who never did anything quietly. This episode was supposed to be a true crime deep dive. Then Dolly Parton died, and everything else had...

Unstructured time is something most of us have gotten pretty uncomfortable with. My guest today has deliberately built her own life around it, not as another productivity hack, but as a space to think, wander, get bored, follow an idea, or simply do something without needing it to accomplish anything. Abbey Harlow is a nonprofit strategist and facilitator who works with small and rural organizatio...

Could anyone really narrow their passions down to one answer? And why do we assume they're supposed to? As kids, being interested in everything is a good thing. Playing the trumpet, joining the science club, trying theater, deciding to be a marine biologist on Tuesday and a novelist by Friday. Then the message changes. Pick a major, find your niche, stay in your lane. But what if some of us w...

Remember when poking someone on Facebook was considered a legitimate form of communication? Today's guest is Brian Feister, a community builder, engineering leader, and the founder of Meet Near Me, a platform built to help people discover local gatherings and actually show up for real life. At first glance, this conversation is about friendship and community, but underneath that, it's re...

What if the scariest decision you make is also the one that finally makes you feel like yourself again? My guest today is Yvonne Hemmings, a life coach, virtual assistant, digital marketer, and full-time van lifer. Just two years ago, at 58, she sold her house, gave away nearly everything she owned, and moved into a camper van. Not because she'd always dreamed of van life, but because staying...

My niece told me what she thinks millennials get wrong about life, and honestly, I was shocked. Every generation assumes the one before it doesn't get it, and the one after it has completely lost the plot. I decided it was time to actually put that theory to the test. So my niece and I sat down and graded each other's generations: communication, fashion, work ethic, dating, boredom, priv...

Somewhere along the way, summer stopped being a season and started being a performance. There's pressure to travel, to be outside, to make memories, to say yes to every invitation and somehow have the best summer ever. Emma Sullivan Ebley joins me for the third installment of our seasonal series on creative rituals to talk about what nature can teach us about doing summer differently. We get...

Picture handing a kid a phone with a cord attached and watching pure confusion take over: turning it over, unsure which end even goes where, treating it like it just beamed in from another planet. That's not a hypothetical. It's happening in kitchens across the country right now, as parents start reintroducing landlines to kids who have never once seen one. This month I'm loving tha...

Picture this. You're thirty seconds into the talk you've been building toward for months, and your mind goes completely blank. You've forgotten your own story, live, on stage. That's exactly what happened to today's guest, Ashley Bryant, founder of AB Strategy, where she helps mission-driven brands trade vague messaging for clear communication that builds trust and inspire...

Imagine packing up your entire life, selling your house, bringing your dogs, and moving halfway around the world, only to discover that the biggest transformation had nothing to do with the actual destination. That is exactly what happened to Jennifer Yates. You may remember her from one of my earliest episodes, and she is back on the mic to give us every scoop on uprooting her life in Michigan an...

There's a version of summer where the light makes everything feel more possible, and I'm fully in it right now. Longer days, warm evenings, the whole thing. But here's what I keep noticing underneath all that brightness. Most of us are still living from the neck up. We think and analyze and push through, and meanwhile, the body is down there quietly trying to get a word in. This epi...

Picture this. March 3rd, 2026, Paris. The Palais Garnier, all gilded ceilings and red velvet and history, and onto the runway walks the first model in a corseted gown made from a French military parachute. The designer who built it had turned 10 years old two days before. This month, I am completely obsessed with a kid named Max Alexander. He holds the Guinness World Record for youngest runway fas...

Time is one of the only things we all share equally, and somehow it's also the thing so many of us feel like we're constantly running out of. We say "I don't have time" almost on autopilot. But what if that phrase is hiding something deeper? What if it isn't really about time at all, but about what we value, what we avoid, and maybe what we're afraid to face if t...

Have you ever walked away from a conversation thinking, "I know what I meant to say, but somehow it just did not land the way I had hoped"? Maybe it was a pitch, a hard conversation, an interview, or just trying to explain your value in a way another person could actually understand. This episode is all about that space between what we mean and what actually gets received. My guest is Cl...

Memorial Day has come and gone, which officially means summer has entered the group chat. And today, my niece Sarah is back on the mic, which means things get unhinged very quickly. We go through our highs and lows for the season, from sweet corn and pool days and the smell of a good thunderstorm to chiggers, birds at 5 AM, and the absolute audacity of assless bikini bottoms at the public pool. We...

Something has shifted. I don't know exactly when it happened, and it wasn't one moment. It was more like a slow accumulation, small disappointments that added up to something much bigger. Social media used to feel like a peek into someone's real life. Somewhere along the way, it started feeling like performance, like everyone, myself included, was packaging themselves. The more poli...

A few weeks ago, something happened in the world that I genuinely could not stop thinking about. Couldn't sleep. Sending voice memos to friends at weird hours. And even though the news cycle has absolutely moved on, I sure haven't, and I don't think you will either. Four humans flew to the moon and came back completely undone by how much they love Earth. That's it. That's...

Starting a business gets this very shiny reputation: freedom, flexibility, being your own boss. And then there's the version nobody talks about as loudly, the one where you're thinking about your business at 2 am because the to-do list is never actually done. My former professor, Tom Swartwood, has spent decades working with entrepreneurs across industries, countries, and stages of busin...

Plants have names for a reason. And once you start learning what those names actually mean, you can't walk past a dandelion or a hawthorn tree the same way again. In this episode, I'm joined again by Kim Gros, a New York City-based clinical herbalist, educator, and founder of an organic herbal product line. Kim leads plant walks in Central Park and has a gift for making the natural world...