Good Life Project

My guest on today’s Best Of conversation, Cleo Wade, is a community builder, artist, activist, and the author of the books, Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life ( https://amzn.to/2Ltivce) and Where to Begin: A small about book your power to create big change in our crazy world . She has been called the poet of her generation by Time Magazine and one of the 100 most creative people in busine...

In 2010, folk-singer and songwriter  Zoe Boekbinder  (http://zoeboekbinder.com/) visited New Folsom Prison for the first time. What they thought would be one interesting day turned into a decade-long collaborative project. Boekbinder visited the prison often over the next five years; performing and teaching music workshops quickly turned into the beginnings of collaborations with wr...

Question - how do you talk to friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances about things that matter - hard things - in a way that leads to each person being seen, heard, acknowledged, and treated with dignity? How do you get to a resolution, and sidestep the hurt, the wounding, the rage, and reactivity? How do you have conversations, in work and life, that lead to genuine understanding and chang...

Andrea Gibson is one of the most stirring and influential spoken word artists of our time. Best known for their live performances, in which they regularly sell out large capacity rock clubs and concert halls, Gibson has changed the landscape of what it means to attend a “poetry show” altogether. Gibson’s poems center around LGBTQ issues, gender, feminism, and mental health, as well as gun reform a...

In many circles, Angela Duckworth’s name has become synonymous with the word grit, this elusive trait that fuels the sustained action-taking in the face of relentless adversity that leads to big achievements. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and Duckworth is founder and C.E.O. of Character Lab, a nonprofit that uses psychological science t...

Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana, and she has a lot of jobs. She’s currently writing her memoir, Somebody's Daughter (https://amzn.to/36dFO7M), hosts The Chronicles of Now podcast, and is the former host of seasons one & three of Mastercard’s Fortune Favors The Bold, as well as PROFILE by BuzzFeed News, and Brooklyn-based news & culture TV show, 112BK.  Ford has...

The Most Reverend Michael Curry is the first African American individual to serve as Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church, Chief Pastor, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Chair of the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church. Born in Chicago, in the 50s, with a father who was an Episcopal priest, his mom died at a young age and he, along with his sister, was raised by his...

As a kid, all David Fajgenbaum could think about was football. It consumed his life, being the quarterback on a top college team was his singular mission. And, he accomplished that, landing a spot on Georgetown’s team. But, fate would soon step in, when the loss of his mom to aggressive brain cancer would change his focus and inspire a new devotion, to help find a cure and support families moving...

Elizabeth Lesser wants to set the record straight. The one that started all the way back with Adam and Eve. The origin story that positioned man as firstborn and favored and women as second-born and scorned. The mythology that seems to exist in nearly every faith, tradition, culture and history about the “place” of women in relationships, family, society, business, power and the world. Lesser deci...

Bryan and Shannon Miles fell in love when they were young, got married, started a family and each started building their own successful careers. But a series of unexpected experiences led them to re-evaluate what they wanted out of their lives, and the way they wanted to contribute. So they pretty much blew everything up and went out on their own, starting a new venture together with the goal of c...

Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including Walking the Bible and Council of Dads , the presenter of two primetime series on PBS, and the inspiration for the COUNCIL OF DADS series on NBC. He describes himself as an experiencer and explainer. Growing up in Savannah, Georgia, for as long as he can remember, he’s loved going out into the world, creating powerf...

Today is a special conversation, featuring two guests. Dr. Yusef Salaam was just fifteen years old when his life was upended after being wrongly convicted with four other boys in the “Central Park jogger” case. In 2002, after the young men spent years of their lives behind bars, their sentences were overturned. Now known as the Exonerated Five, their story has been documented in the award-winning...

Kate DiCamillo writes books for kids and young adults that also just happen to break open grownup’s hearts. Moving to Minnesota from Florida in her twenties, homesickness and a bitter winter helped inspire her to write Because of Winn-Dixie( https://amzn.to/39I3Vee) , her first published novel, which became a runaway bestseller and earned her a Newbery Honor. Since then, Kate’s written for a...

Maybe you’ve seen today’s guest, Arian Moayed, on HBO’s Emmy-Award winning show, Succession, where he played Stewy. Or, in movies where h worked with legends like Bill Murray, Spike Lee. Or, on stage, where he was nominated for a TONY. Or, you might’ve caught his groundbreaking thriller, The Accidental Wolf (http://theaccidentalwolf.com/), which he wrote and directed, starring Kelli O’Hara, Laurie...

In February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson (http://sirkenrobinson.com/) stepped onto the TED stage and delivered the most viewed talk in the history of TED, entitled Do Schools Kill Creativity. Viewed by than 66 million people, Sir Ken called on us to re-examine how we learn, and to encourage every kid, every person to seek out the myriad unique ways intelligence shows up in every one of our lives, then h...

Donna Carpenter met Burton founder, Jake Burton Carpenter in a Southern Vermont bar on New Year’s Eve 1981. Within a year they married and became partners in business and life, working side-by-side dipping snowboards in polyurethane and answering the customer service line that rang in the bedroom. Donna quickly became a driving force, working with Jake to build Burton into the world’s leading snow...

Dave Evans is a Lecturer in the Product Design Program at Stanford, Management Consultant, and co-founder of iconic gaming company, Electronic Arts. Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. And, maybe, along the way, answer the questi...

As a kid, Arlan Hamilton loved music and eventually found her way into the world of live concerts, working as a tour manager. Along the way, she also published a magazine and wrote the popular Your Daily Lesbian Moment blog, that drew a large, devoted community, before pivoting into the world of venture capital where, with no connections, degree or experience, she built a fund from the ground up,...

The incoming Academic Director and core faculty member at the Spirituality Mind Body Institute (SMBI), Teachers College, Columbia University, Dan Tomasulo holds a Ph. D. in psychology, MFA in writing, and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He authors the daily column, Ask the Therapist, as well as the Learned Hopefulness blog for PsychCentral.com, and deve...

Marta Zaraska is a Polish-Canadian science journalist who has written everywhere from the Washington Post, and Scientific American to New Scientist, the Atlantic, Discover, and more. Her articles and books have been turned into TV programs in the US, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Bulgaria, Germany and Poland, and reprinted around the globe from Oman and Dubai to Australia and Singapore. S...

Al Roker is a co-anchor of NBC’s Today, an Emmy-award winning journalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. He has been at NBC for 40 years and he's the celebrated host of the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. He is also a host on SiriusXM's Off the Rails and the owner of production company Al Roker Entertainment, Inc. He recently starred in Broadway's Waitress. What many people don’t...

As a physician with specialties in addiction medicine and psychiatry who has spent her career focusing on stigma reduction and health equity, Nzinga Harrison is uniquely positioned to help people navigate the stress of current events including from opioid crisis and COVID to racial violence and systemic injustice and move from thinking to action with the goal of improving health and society. Dr. H...

This conversation is different, it’s actually two conversations recorded four-months apart. Be sure to keep listening after our guest, Nicholas Palmquist, answers what is usually my final question. The dialogue after is powerful. Palmquist is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer who has toured the world, performed and choreographed for stage, TV, Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, The Tonys, a...

Gay Hendricks exploded onto the human potential scene in 2009 with his mega New York Times bestselling book, The Big Leap , where he introduced the concept of the upper limit problems and the zone of genius, which he’s now re-envisioned as a spiral of genius. These ideas, along with tools to help work with them, were based on decades of clinical application and explained so much about why, even wh...

Starting as an unpaid intern at The Moth when it was still a local storytelling group in New York City, Lea Thau rose up to become the Executive & Creative Director, where she remained for a decade. During her time there, she co-created The Moth Podcast and The Moth Radio Hour, helping to launch the "brand" into a global phenomenon. Thau has since become a Peabody Award-winning producer a...