Good Life Project

When Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a friend gave him one piece of advice about his own prognosis that he still credits with how he's lived every day since.

Bryant Lin is a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and the Arts at Stanford, a fourth-generation physician who spent two decades in primary care before his own stage four diagnosis in 2024. He built a medical school class around his experience that drew coverage from the New York Times and CBS Mornings, and he's the author of Sunshine: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying.

In this conversation, you'll explore:
The advice from a fellow doctor that changed how Bryant thinks about his own prognosis, and why he stopped looking at the numbers everyone else obsesses over
A simple filter he now uses to decide which commitments are worth keeping, and what needs to go
Why he changed very little, even after learning how much less time he likely had
Why he chose to teach a Stanford class, narrating his own cancer journey, while going through chemo in real time
What a good life means, once you learn you have a lot less time to live it.

It's a conversation for anyone asking themselves what's actually worth their time, whether or not a doctor has given them a reason to ask.

You can find Bryant at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

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The most accomplished women in Terri Cole's therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound.

Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing.

What you'll explore in this conversation:
The question Terri's own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years of striving in a single sentence
Why the traits most likely to get you promoted are often the exact adaptations that keep you from enjoying any of it
The two behaviors that look identical on a Tuesday night on the couch and do opposite things to your nervous system
What Terri means when she says you need nothing from your father to heal this, including his apology, his participation, or his being alive
The fear that stops high achievers from starting this work, and her direct answer to whether healing costs you what you built

If you have built a life that looks right from the outside and quietly wondered why it does not feel like yours, this is the conversation about what is actually underneath that.

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

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The year-end review most of us attempt starts with goals and ends in self-criticism. Tiago Forte has run one every year since 2008, and he has come to treat goal setting as the last step of the process, almost an afterthought.

Tiago is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over twenty-five languages, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Through Forte Labs, he has taught this practice to more than ten thousand students in over seventy countries. He is also, by his own description, someone who resists self-reflection and does it anyway, which makes him unusually useful on the question of how to start.

The question Tiago offers the person whose year contained something they would rather not open, and the year his entire review became a single long walk
Why nearly everyone reaches for their work life first, and where he finds the actual source of most people's dissatisfaction
A daily capture habit with a name, and his sharp reason your AI-generated notes are the wrong raw material for it
Three signals he waits for in his own body before committing to anything big, and what he does when only two show up
Four principles built to stop a life review from turning into the performance review you dread

If you have ever closed out a year feeling like it went by without you, this is a conversation about getting some of it back.

You can find Tiago at: Website | Tiago's YouTube | Episode Transcript

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Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you.

Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it.

In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore:
The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it on
What to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday party
Why ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrong
How much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you can
The form of anxiety you're most embarrassed by, and the thing it has been quietly training you to do for other people

If you've spent years trying to get rid of the feeling, this is an invitation to stop fighting it and start setting the volume.

You can find Dr. Wendy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them.

With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will Find You, Harlan Coben is one of the most widely read storytellers on the planet. His new book, Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft, is both a memoir and a writing guide, because he can no longer separate the two. He is also, at this point, one of the most credible voices arguing that the creative work you keep postponing does not require a bigger life than the one you already have.

In this conversation, you'll explore:
The two-word question he has been asking since he was a kid, and how it turned a boring family hike into a global hit
Why he wrote three complete novels that nobody published, and flatly refuses to count them as failures
What incremental ambition means in practice, and the modest first goal he set that most writers today would be embarrassed to admit to
The two things fear does to people who want to make something, and the daily choice that decides which one you get
Why he tells every aspiring writer to stop talking about the book they're working on

If you've been waiting for more time, more proof, or more permission before you start the thing you keep circling, this one is likely to shorten the wait.

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

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