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

In this episode of What is a Good Life, host Mark McCartney sits down with Lior Steinberg, a Rotterdam-based urban planner and co-founder of Humankind, a multidisciplinary team working toward urban happiness for all. Lior is also the author of the children's book The Car That Wanted to Be a Bike. Together they unpack why so many cities remain trapped in car-centric design decades after urbanist Jane Jacobs first warned against it.

They talk about the "sidewalk ballet," how children's toys teach us to want cars, the surprising parallel between car culture and cigarette smoking, Barcelona's superblocks, and why trees are the best climate technology we already have. 

This is a thought-provoking conversation on how often change feels impossible until it is here.

For more of Lior Steinberg's work:
Humankind: https://www.humankind.city/
Personal Website: https://steinberg.nu/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liorsteinberg/

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 mean to live a truly meaningful life and why do so many of us feel an emptiness even at the height of our success?

In this episode, Mark sits down with Kadam Adam Starr, who has been an international teacher of meditation and Buddhism for over 20 years and is the principal teacher at Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre in Dublin. Adam walked away from a corporate media career in 2005 to pursue a different kind of question. What began as a planned year or two away became a complete reorientation of his life.

Together they explore the emptiness that often arrives in our late twenties and early thirties, the difference between fleeting pleasure and genuine peace of mind, and why Adam came to realise that the problem was never his career - it was how badly out of balance he'd become. They talk about the shift from an ego-driven life to one grounded in compassion, what a three-month silent retreat revealed about our shared humanity, and how living from a peaceful mind and a good heart can make life feel radically more simple.

This is a conversation about self-knowledge, the attention economy, meeting difficult people with friendship rather than judgment, and the realisation that a good life may come down to how we choose to show up each day.

For more of Kadam Adam Starr's work:
Tara Kadampa Meditation Centre: https://meditateinireland.com/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/tara_kadampa_meditation_centre/

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

Dr. Karen L. Jacob is a clinical psychologist, Program Director of the Gunderson Residence at McLean Hospital, and Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. She specialises in the assessment and treatment of personality disorders, with particular expertise in borderline personality disorder. In this conversation Karen talks about growing up with a love of art, spending four years after college searching for work that actually meant something, the influence of a father who treated the underserved his entire career, and what drew her unexpectedly to specialising in personality disorders. We also discuss a New Year's resolution with her husband that changed how she parents and how she works.

It's a conversation about what it looks like to build a meaningful life with joy, and staying open to a path that keeps surprising you.

For more of Dr. Karen L. Jacob's work:
Profile: https://www.mcleanhospital.org/profile/karen-jacob

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, Dan talks with Mark about trading 80-90 hour work weeks and a self-medicating lifestyle in London for the forests and lakes of northern Sweden. He shares how his father's death became a turning point, how cold water swimming became a doorway back into his body, and how a small group of friends turned a Sunday morning dip into a movement. The conversation explores trust, surrender, community, and what it means to dissolve the "thick border" between yourself and the world.

Dan Allen-Hörnfeldt is Chairman of Umeå Kallbad, a community swimming and sauna association recently named one of Sweden's best places to visit in 2026, and Head of Nature for People at Rewilding Sweden. A former GB triathlete, he spent fifteen years in restaurants and pubs, winning two Michelin Bib Gourmands and twice being named London's Best Pub, before building a nationally recognised restaurant in northern Sweden with his wife. He has also competed at an elite level in open-water and ice swimming, including a podium finish at the Ice Swimming World Cup.

Learn more about Dan Allen-Hörnfeldt's work:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danallenhornfeldt/
Umeå: https://umeakallbad.se/

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