What is a Good Life?

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 community a collective voice. She is also the driving force behind Buy Back Brixton, a community-led campaign to bring Brixton Village and Market Row into community ownership.

Kat takes us from a childhood spent pondering honesty on her bedroom windowsill to the struggles of traders working seven days a week with nothing to show for it. She explains why honesty with yourself is the foundation of everything else, how fear and love sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, and why a £50 million buy back vision appeared as the path she had to take. She also shares what makes Brixton so special: belonging, freedom and a community that steps in for one another.

This episode is incredibly inspiring for standing up and doing what you feel has to be done – regardless of whether you have done it before. Something our world needs more of right now.

If you'd like to support the campaign please check out:
Buy Back Brixton: https://buybackbrixton.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/btcassociation/

For more from Mark McCartney:
The Podcast's Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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's first artists, astronomers, and storytellers in Africa. This is a conversation about holding onto our humanity as a way of meeting the broken bones of the world.

Nikkolas Smith is an Artivist, #1 NYT Bestseller picture book creator, and Hollywood film illustrator and concept artist (Sinners, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, Space Jam II). He is the author/illustrator of the USA TODAY Bestselling The Artivist, and the illustrator of The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a #1 NYT Bestseller, as well as Black Panther Wakanda Forever: The Courage To Dream and A Change is Gonna Come. His picture book The History of We is a 2026 Sibert Honor Book and winner of the 2026 Jane Addams Children's Book Award. As a Black illustrator, Nikkolas is focused on creating captivating art that can spark important conversations in today's world and inspire meaningful change toward social justice and equity.

You can learn more about Nikkolas' work at www.NIKKOLAS.art

For more from Mark McCartney:
The Podcast's Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 in the west of Ireland led him to found Build School. We talk about learned helplessness, why he stopped building other people's houses to teach them to build their own, and how impact shapes his life. This is an inspiring conversation about building your own capabilities and committing more fully to your life.

Harrison Gardner is an author, broadcaster and builder based on the west coast of Ireland. He presents Build Your Own Home on RTÉ, has written three books on self-building and the housing crisis, and hosts The Tools at Hand, a podcast about people who use whatever they have to hand to build exactly what they need. It all traces back to one belief: people don't need permission or expertise to fix what's broken around them. He's also Chairperson and co-founder of Common Knowledge, a social enterprise sharing practical skills with everyone.

You can learn more about Harrison's work at www.harrisongardner.net

For more from Mark McCartney:
The Podcast's Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 nightmare revealed a core family wound, and the five keys of Courting the Dream. We talk about ritual as a way of honoring insight, the healing power of dream groups, and why she believes psyche doesn't end at the limits of our own bodies. A beautiful, grounded conversation about listening to the wisdom already moving through us.

Toko-pa Turner is a Canadian author and dreamworker whose work explores the reciprocity between psyche and nature. Her first book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, has been translated into ten languages and received the 2018 Gold Nautilus Award and the Gold Readers' Favorite Award. Her most recent book, The Dreaming Way: Courting the Wisdom of Dreams, is a depth-oriented guide to dreamwork and winner of the 2025 Gold Nautilus Award.

Her course, The Dream Lodge, begins September 22nd: https://toko-pa.com/product/dream-lodge-sept-2026/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 consumption. We talk about the question at the centre of her life and work – borrowed from a Mary Oliver poem – and how it shifted from a career question into something much bigger. We explore the difference between understanding the climate crisis intellectually and actually feeling it, the significance of our attention on each other, and what people across Ireland said when asked what makes a good life. 

For more of Laura's work:
Good Life 2030 project: https://www.goodlife2030.earth/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauracostello11/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 into his work rather than choosing one. We explore his early discomfort with money and marketing, some past-life memories that changed how he thinks about death, and a period of burnout that clarified what he actually wanted to be doing. We close, as always, on his thoughts as to what makes a good life.

If you're trying to integrate different parts of yourself into your work and want a fresh perspective on how to do it, this is really worth a listen.

For more of Ewan's work:
Website: https://www.ewantownhead.com
Book: https://www.ewantownhead.com/book/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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, digital, and spiritual lenses. It is a really thought provoking and stirring conversation that left me optimistic about finding connection and intimacy in the places we'd least expect it.

For more of OONA's work:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/made.by.oona/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 talks about the seven-year-old girl who slept alone in a cave and never lost her sense of mission, why fear is a construction we choose to believe, how she learned to read the land through a herd of wild cattle, surviving a near-fatal fall in Tasmania that left her crawling out of a gorge with a broken shoulder, and the grief that followed her mother's sudden death. This is a conversation about instinct, consciousness, and what it means to build a life from the inside out.

Sarah is a force of curiosity and nature and it was both a joy and inspiration to sit with her.

For more of Sarah Marquis' work:
Website: https://www.sarahmarquis.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/explorer_sarahmarquis/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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? Miriam, the first female editor-in-chief of WirtschaftsWoche and former State Secretary for Media and International Affairs in North Rhine-Westphalia, opens up about a burnout that became a life-altering depression, the vulnerability of turning her private writing into her bestselling book Letter to My Life, and why she believes embodied experience — not intelligence — is what truly separates us from machines. It is a conversation about identity, friction, kindness, and what it takes to live a quiet, honest life.

For more of Dr. Miriam Meckel's work:
ada learning: https://www.join-ada.com/en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meckel/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩

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 communist East Germany, in a family where fear was something you lived with, not something you spoke about. He spent years trying to work through it - through therapy, yoga, and psychedelics, and eventually through improv and clown theatre. Along the way, we get into a teaching moment that tested everything he'd learned, and why a plastic clown nose turned out to teach him more about truth than theory ever did.

This episode is for anyone who wants to reconsider their relationship with fear.

For more from Ralf Wetzel:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralf-wetzel-3a742011/

For more from Mark McCartney:
Newsletter: https://www.whatisagood.life/
Website: https://www.mmcleadership.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mccartney-14b0161b4/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ ⁨@whatisagoodlife3875⁩