Good Life Project

Most of us think good decisions happen in the moment. Shane Parrish says they’re already decided before you sit down. And most of them end up being bad, because you waited too long to make them good.

Shane Parrish spent years inside Canadian intelligence, making real-time decisions where the stakes were other people's lives, long before he founded Farnam Street and The Knowledge Project podcast. He's the author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, and has quietly become the person elite investors, athletes, and Silicon Valley leaders turn to when a single decision carries outsized weight.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why the position you're in before a decision matters more than the decision itself, and how Warren Buffett almost never finds himself in a bad one
• The four hidden "defaults" that hijack your thinking before you notice
• The three-word phrase Shane uses with his own kids to defuse an argument before it escalates
• Why "doing your best" almost never happens in the hour it counts, and what actually determines the outcome
• A simple night-before, morning-after trick for spotting the blind spots in any decision you're about to make

Whatever season of life you're in, this conversation will change how you see the ordinary moments that quietly decide everything else.

You can find Shane at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Angela Duckworth to talk about why the advice to just make the best of your situation might be exactly backwards, and how the people and things within arm's reach are quietly shaping who you become before you ever get a say. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Priya Parker comes back to argue that the fights you're avoiding aren't threatening your closest relationships; they're the only thing that can save them.

Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor who has spent two decades helping churches, companies, and families fight better, not less. She's the acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering and her new book, The Art of Fighting, and she's spent her career inside the rooms where groups either fall apart or find their way back to each other.

What you'll explore:

• Why "conflict is not sin," and how a moral hangover from that idea keeps good relationships stuck in surface-level peace
• The concept of "relational longing," the pulse underneath a fight that tells you whether it's worth having
• Priya's three-phase framework for a healthy fight, and the one question that unlocks the middle phase
• The "we're not a" clause: a phrase to listen for that reveals what a group is actually trying to become
• Why giant sequoias can't reproduce without fire, and what that means for families, teams, and marriages that go decades without a real disagreement

If you've been mistaking distance for peace, this conversation is an invitation to find out what's actually still alive underneath.

You can find Priya at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Shane Parrish to talk about why the way most of us make big decisions is quietly working against us, and the small, repeatable shifts that can change that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy decisions, and why nearly 40% of a woman's life happens after menopause even begins. It's less a symptom checklist than a new starting point for the next several decades.

What you'll explore:

• The gas-tank way to picture where you actually are between reproductive years and menopause
• Why symptom severity has almost nothing to do with how "together" you otherwise are
• The difference between the "symptom bucket" and the "longevity bucket" in deciding on hormone therapy
• Why perimenopause itself splits into an early, mid, and late phase, and why the late phase is the window with the most protective upside for starting hormones
• What the SWAN study found about how menopause symptoms differ by race, and why that matters long-term

If you've been treating menopause as a phase to survive rather than a stage to prepare for, this resets the starting point.

You can find Jessica at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Priya Parker to talk about why conflict, handled well, might be one of the things that makes your closest relationships stronger instead of weaker, and what most of us get backwards about the moment right before it happens. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain health.

Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood has spent his career studying what actually predicts a declining brain, and the answer has almost nothing to do with age. It's what happens the day you stop being challenged, especially the day you retire. This week: why the smartest, most accomplished people you know may be the ones most at risk, and the two-part check you can run at your next doctor's visit that sets the stage for the next fifty years.

What you'll explore:

• Why age-specific dementia rates have quietly been falling for decades, even as headlines warn of a coming epidemic
• The real difference between forgetting a name (a retrieval problem) and never actually experiencing it in the first place (an encoding problem), and why only one of those predicts dementia
• Tommy's 3S model: stimulus, supply, and support, the framework he uses to make sense of everything that keeps a brain sharp
• The truth about brain games, and what really works to keep your brain primed with age
• Why the most educated, highest-achieving people often face the steepest cognitive drop right after they stop working
• The exact numbers to get checked at your next doctor's visit if you're in your 40s or 50s

If you're standing at the edge of any major life transition, or supporting a parent who is, this conversation will change how you think about what actually protects your mind.

You can find Tommy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Jessica Shepherd, alongside guest host Karen Walrond, to talk about why so much of what we've been told about menopause is either outdated or flat wrong, and what personalized care for this stage of life can actually look like. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better.

Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where her research spans sleep's relationship to cognitive function, cardiometabolic health, and long-term brain health. She's published more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, co-authored Sleep for Success!, and her work is exactly the kind of research most of us never hear about until someone frames it the way she does here.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why sleep really does shift around age 38 to 40, and what that shift does and doesn't mean for you
• The neuroscience discovery of the brain's overnight "wash cycle," and what Dr. Robbins's own eight-year study found about sleep complaints and dementia risk
• Why jumping your bedtime back an hour almost never works, and the fifteen-minute method that does
• The at-home test Jonathan didn't realize he'd already run on himself
• The "sleep divorce" reframe one of Dr. Robbins's patients calls a "sleep marriage," and what it means for couples

If you've quietly decided your sleep is just what it is at this stage of life, this conversation will change what you think is actually possible tonight.

You can find Rebecca at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Tommy Wood to talk about what the research actually shows about keeping your brain sharp across decades, including which levers matter most, what's mostly noise, and what you can realistically start tomorrow, whether you're 45 or 65. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Midlife Design Lab: I'm opening up an intimate retreat with me and a small, curated group in Boulder, CO (Oct 24-25, 2026), followed by 3 months of virtual group coaching. A few weeks back, I shared something I'd been building for myself, and the response blew me away, so spots are limited and I expect them to fill fast. If this calls to you, apply here.

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You can have a genuinely excellent self-care practice, the meditation, the training, the tracked sleep, the nutrition, and still be using every bit of it to avoid the one question that actually needed asking.

In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, everything, ended in a stress-induced medical diagnosis at the exact moment I'd have called myself the most dialed-in version of my life. 

Turns out, you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life. 

So, today, we’re exploring:

• The real distinction between self-care that restores you and self-care that just makes a misaligned life more bearable, or worse, hides what actually needs your true attention.
• Three 90-second tests, duration, imagination, intensity, that tell you honestly which one you're running
• The five places structural misalignment hides in midlife, including the "cumulative weight" version almost nobody names
• Why subtraction, not another practice, is usually the actual fix
• A six-move menu for making one concrete structural change in the next 30 days

If your practice has been working harder for smaller returns lately, this conversation will tell you whether that's a regulation problem or a fit problem, and what to do about either one.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Mentioned in this episode: How to Finally Have the Talk You’ve Been Avoiding.

Next week, next week we're sitting down with Dr. Rebecca Robbins to talk about why the sleep advice most of us are following was built for a body and a schedule most of us don't actually have anymore. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've been calling it a loneliness epidemic and treating it like a mental health problem. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way says that's the wrong diagnosis, and she has almost 40 years of data on teenage boys to make her case.

Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has made her one of the go-to voices on loneliness, connection, and what's actually driving rising rates of depression, anxiety, and violence among young men, along with similar struggles with girls. And, these all tend to follow us well into adulthood. Her latest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why mental health is a symptom, not the root problem, and what Way calls "social health" instead
• The moment, around age 15, when boys start hiding their feelings in public
• Why boys learn to sacrifice the relationship to protect themselves, and girls learn to sacrifice themselves to protect the relationship
• The dinner-table questions that build real closeness instead of shutting kids down
• A simple, almost embarrassingly doable practice Way uses with total strangers to rebuild a sense of belonging

Whether you're raising a teenager, trying to figure out why your own friendships have gone thin, or just wondering why everyone feels so alone lately, this conversation reframes the whole question.

You can find Niobe at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, it's just me, flying solo, to talk about the self-care trap: the difference between practices that actually help you thrive, and ones that just help you tolerate a life that no longer fits. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn't have to mean anything?

Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people's grief and her own. She's the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every wellness cliché about turning pain into purpose.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family's
• "Gray grief": a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural script
• The difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what's still there when it's gone)
• Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst days
• How her family held onto hope through her aunt's most devastating loss, and what happened after

If you've ever felt ashamed for not finding the silver lining in something genuinely hard, this conversation is your permission to put that pressure down.

You can find Marisa at: Website | Instagram | Holding Both Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Niobe Way to talk about why so many of us feel lonelier than ever even when we're surrounded by people, and what decades of research say is actually driving it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For decades, migraine was explained to patients as a blood vessel problem: swelling, throbbing, treat it by shrinking things back down. That explanation is mostly a myth, and it may be part of why so many older treatments never worked.

Dr. Fred Cohen is medical director of Headache Intervention and an assistant professor of medicine and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He's one of the few headache specialists in the country trained in both internal medicine and headache medicine, has over 40 publications in journals including The Lancet and Cephalalgia, and has lived with migraine himself since his teens.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why migraine is a neuroinflammatory condition, not a vascular one, and why some medical schools still teach the outdated version
• The "broken thermostat" phenomenon of chronic sensitization, and how untreated migraine can convince your brain that constant pain is normal
• Why only about 30% of people with migraine ever experience aura, and the surprising range of ways it can actually show up
• The current treatment landscape, from triptans to CGRP therapies, Botox, neuromodulation devices, and what's coming next
• Why Dr. Cohen calls this the golden age of headache medicine, and what that means if you gave up on treatment years ago

If migraine has ever made you feel like your body was working against you, or like you'd already tried everything, this conversation will change how you see both.

You can find Fred at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Marisa Renee Lee to talk about why the tidy stories we tell ourselves about grief and resilience tend to fall apart, and what it actually looks like to build a life around pain instead of waiting to get past it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You know that feeling, like you’re forever running behind in work and life? That you’ll never finally be “there,” or be able to relax and enjoy things. Like the days are just collapsing into each other? Welcome to the wacky world of time anxiety. You are not alone. 

Chris Guillebeau has spent fifteen years writing about the questions that keep smart, capable people stuck. He is back on the show to talk about his new book, Time Anxiety, the clearest thing he has written yet on why "get up an hour earlier" backfires and what actually helps.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why your brain is chronically wrong about how much time anything takes, and the fifteen-minute fix for chronic lateness
• The eighth day exercise, a way to find out what you actually want to do with your time by imagining a day with zero obligation to anyone else
• The traffic light method for working with your real energy instead of fighting it
• Why swapping the word "productive" for "valuable" changes how a day feels
• The shame so many caretakers feel about carving out time for themselves, and the answer Gretchen Rubin gave Chris that changed how he thinks about it

If you've ever felt like your calendar is lying to you about how much time you have, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Chris at: Website | A Year of Mental Health Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Fred Cohen to talk about why almost everything you've been told about migraines is outdated, and what the science actually says about treating them. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.