What does 23 years of marriage still look like when you catch each other smiling from across the room? Ronnie and Liz Lee sit down together, a rare double guest on the show, to talk about what makes their partnership work.

They met as friends at Columbia College, bonded over mahjong and basketball in her dorm room, and reconnected years later at one of Ronnie's East Campus house parties. Liz recommends Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings and Mistborn for weekend reading, while Ronnie has moved on to UFO podcasts and reruns of Alone. They also tell the story of building a backyard volleyball court just so their family of four could play together.

Ronnie and Liz talk about mutual respect, feeling fully accepted, and staying curious with each other instead of trying to change one another. They talk through how joy and happiness do not have to be opposites, and how the small, ordinary parts of a life together (chores, coffee in bed, slow Saturday mornings) matter as much as any big moment.

Plus: Ronnie's daily gratitude practice, and the lesson he learned on hundreds of miles of recruiting road trips with his youngest son.

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What if the smile you give the world could finally match the one you feel inside? That's the question a middle school journal entry planted in Angie Sanders long before she had words for it.

Angie talks with Matt about the children's book "Have You Filled a Bucket Today" and the idea that every person carries an invisible bucket that our words and actions either fill or drain, herself included. She and Matt trade notes on Jonathan Haidt's image of the elephant and its rider, her treadmill habit of watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and the ten minute guided dance she does behind a closed door every morning.

Underneath the laughs, this conversation is about staying steady when life tries to knock you off balance. Angie and Matt dig into humility, choosing curiosity over assumption with the people closest to you, and the strange habit we all have of cutting out the very things that help us most the moment life gets hard.

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What does it look like to live a full, unhurried life, and to keep planting trees you will never sit under the shade of? Wendell Berry, the farmer, novelist, and poet, died this year at 92, and Matt brings back returning guest Brandon Hoops for a special tribute episode.

Brandon first found Wendell Berry through a college roommate and never stopped reading, he now owns more books by Wendell Berry than by any other author. He talks about growing up on Nebraska farmland with his grandfather, how Wendell Berry captured that same slow, rooted life in novels like Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, and The Memory of Old Jack, and the time he mailed Wendell Berry a book to sign as a wedding gift for a friend.

Together Matt and Brandon dig into what made Wendell Berry different, a man who turned down literary fame in New York for sixty years on a Kentucky farm, wrote about "membership" and community instead of individualism, and treated slowing down as a discipline rather than an accident. They talk about his fiction, his Sunday walking poems, and the idea of practicing resurrection, planting something good even when you will never see it grow.

Plus: what Wendell Berry said about his own faith when a reporter pushed him for a final word of wisdom.

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What does it take to find real joy in a Wendy's parking lot in Lebanon, Missouri? For Cole Stoecklein, it started as a lucky ritual on drives to Mizzou and turned into something closer to superstition.

Cole talks about growing up between Minneapolis and Bentonville, Arkansas, and how being one of the smallest kids in his class pushed him toward golf, a sport he first learned alongside his dad's friends and later fell back in love with at Mizzou. Along the way is the story of that Wendy's, the cherry vanilla Dr Pepper that became part of the ritual, and how his wife Morgan finally called an end to it.

Matt and Cole dig into what happens when something you love turns into an obligation, and how small, ordinary things can carry real weight and meaning. They also talk through what Cole calls a joy gallery, a practice for holding onto gratitude and good memories, from his wedding day to watching his son George grow up.

Plus: Cole shares an idea he is still working through, a way of finding meaning in the hardest seasons of life, not just the easy ones.

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What do you do when you realize you have lost eight or ten hours to your phone in a single day? Nissi Kunjummen found out at a picnic table with friends, and the number staring back at her started something she is still working through.

Nissi grew up first generation American, with family roots in Kerala, India, where she still goes back every few years to sit with her grandparents and watch cricket. She talks about leaving home for the University of Missouri, using Instagram as a kind of visual journal since she was twenty, and how AI is reshaping the way she and Matt both think about creativity. These days she is also memorizing lines every night as the foreman in a local production of 12 Angry Jurors.

Matt and Nissi dig into why trying new things gets harder as we get older, even when nothing about our identity requires us to stop. There is something in here about feedback, about what people really mean when they say a talk ran too long, and about learning to feel your emotions instead of numbing out to avoid them.

Plus: the note from her director that made Nissi realize something in her performance had finally clicked.

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What if happiness wasn't a mood but a routine? Joe Ferling joins Matt to unpack the six daily disciplines that keep him grounded, and why joy only shows up for people who practice noticing it.

Joe walks through his morning routine: journaling, meditation, prayer, a daily walk, reading, and intentional learning. He talks about quitting social media back in college, the "what else" technique he learned from his boss to get past surface level conversations, and the calendar reminder he set every other Thursday just to appreciate his wife. He also shares how Kobe Bryant's approach to learning from wins, not just losses, changed how he reflects on his own life.

Matt and Joe get into why curiosity might be the most undervalued skill we have, how the internet trains us to have opinions before we have information, and why keeping some disciplines private protects them from turning into performance. It's a conversation about building a life on purpose, one small habit at a time.

Plus: the story behind why Joe's kids yell "Kobe!" when they take a shot, and it has nothing to do with Kobe Bryant.

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Is it possible to spend hours fly fishing and catch nothing, and still call it one of the best days you've had? Nate Johnson thinks so, and he explains why the process matters more than the outcome.

Nate grew up in Cupertino during the early days of Silicon Valley, the son of Nebraska farm kids whose family found their way west when Ford laid his father off in the 1970s. He talks about fly fishing at Bennett Springs, working through a jigsaw puzzle on his dining room table, losing his dad in the crowd at a Dave Matthews concert only to find him four feet from the stage, and coaching his daughter's softball team. He and Matt also compare notes on being introverts who still crave connection, and on raising three strong willed daughters.

Nate's throughline is simple: he finds more joy in the process than the result, whether that is practicing guitar, reading the water on a river, or watching a teammate grow over a season. He talks about the shift from chasing career  toward chasing legacy, and how the people around him have become his real measure of a good life.

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What happens when a farm kid grows up, gets an office job, and still can't sit still? Sara Kraus found a way to keep both worlds close.

Sara grew up driving a combine and crossing the highway in a pickup at age six, and now raises her own two daughters, ages 9 and 11, on ten acres with mini horses, goats, and chickens. She talks about learning to laugh (and not laugh) at the right moments, like the time her daughter snapped her dad's golf club mid swing, and about the family's habit of piling into the yard on three zero turn mowers, including helping a widowed neighbor keep her lawn mowed.

Matt and Sara talk about what joy looks like when it's not chased but built into small, ordinary choices: smiling at a stranger, listening to your kid teach you volleyball, choosing to have fun even when things are heavy. It's a conversation about staying present in two very different worlds at once.

Plus: a text message Matt received right before recording, from a friend sitting bedside with his dying father, that reframes what it means to hold joy and grief together.

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What would you do differently if you knew you'd regret not doing it? Natasha Rader has built her whole life around that question, and the answer involves more backflips, belly laughs, and jump scares than you might expect.

Natasha tells Matt about the no-regrets mindset that kicked in when her first daughter was born, the sisterly bond between her girls (including a spelling joke about B-U-T that nearly ended one of them), and the Bushman suit she bought her dad to carry on their family tradition of scaring each other senseless. There's also a blow-up slip and slide on a hill, a bucket-list dream of slip-and-slide kickball, and a Mizzou season ticket neighbor known simply as the "run the ball" guy.

Underneath the fun is real wisdom about presence. Natasha, a self-described planner and perfectionist, shares how she learned to stop forcing every moment to be a Hallmark memory and started just being with her kids, and why the choices we still have matter more than the control we don't.

Plus: the half-day exercise Natasha did beside the water to sort her real joys from the artificial ones, and why one thing she loved got crossed off the list.

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What do you do when the thing you have chased for four years keeps coming back as a bunch of nothing? For Matt Landis, the answer found him on a bluff in the fall of 2022, mid run, worn down and crying, finally praying.

He and his wife, Ashley, had spent four years trying to have a child, and within about a week of that prayer she was pregnant. Their son Truman, now turning three, goes by True, which is its own kind of poetry for a man whose whole life cracked open with something true. Matt also runs the way he believes, all in, logging his first 50K at 31 and then 104 miles at a backyard ultra this past March, finally crossing the 100-mile mark he had chased for six years, powered by a worship playlist he built off K-Love and artists like Phil Wickham.

Here is the thing about Matt Landis. He is an all-in guy, and you find your life when you give it away. He and Matt Gordon, who happen to share a first name, trade notes on the strangely parallel ways they each came to faith, one on a running trail and one in a lawn chair with a novel. They get into why a dead faith usually means a faith left unstoked, how the discipline that carries you through a hundred-mile night is the same discipline that keeps a marriage alive, and why getting on the floor with your kids instead of hiding from the noise can become the best hour of your week.

Plus: the surprising number of running metaphors hiding in the Bible, and the questionable foot-based hack one dad swears got his picky toddler to eat.

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