Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life.

Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper, Small Great Things, and Wish You Were Here. Her new one, Hollow Bones, arrives right around the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and centers on a woman whose entire career is built on preparing for catastrophe, who gets blindsided anyway. For three decades, Picoult has done her research by climbing all the way inside other people's lives, including people whose beliefs she can barely stand to sit across from, and a good part of this conversation is about how and why she does that, how it impacts her own life, beliefs, and approach to storytelling. We explore:

• What thirty years of living inside other people's heads has actually cost her, including the nightly ritual one narrator forced on her before she could face her own family
• The moment in an interview when she had to leave the room, splash water on her face, and decide which version of herself was walking back in
• One finding from her research on lying that explains why a small untruth gets harder to take back the longer you hold onto it
• Why one of her books landed on the most banned book in America list last year, and how she responded
• Where the line actually sits between sugarcoating your own life and bending the truth to protect someone you love, and what tends to happen to people who never find it

If you have ever told a gentler version of the truth to protect somebody you love, this conversation will sit with you for a while.

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

Next week, it's just me, and I want to talk about something that's been on my mind: the moments in our lives that end without us ever knowing they were the last ones. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or 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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Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends.

Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participants read identical biographies, differing only in one line, single or married, the single people who said they were happy were assumed to be exaggerating. The married people were taken at their word.

Bella is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard) and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Her TEDx talk on what no one tells you about single people has been watched more than 1.8 million times, and The Atlantic has called her America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She's been writing the Living Single blog at Psychology Today since 2008, and she founded the Foundation for the Empowerment of Single People.

In this conversation, Jonathan and Bella dig into what her research, drawn from more than 20,000 people across over 100 countries, actually shows about who thrives alone, who doesn't, and why the cultural story about both gets it backwards.

In this one, you'll hear about the single sentence Bella clipped from a newspaper column in 1992 that started her whole body of work. You'll hear why she believes solitude and loneliness are separated by exactly one thing, not personality, not introversion, but choice. You'll hear the surprising story of what actually happened to single-at-heart people during pandemic lockdown, when isolation should have driven them straight into relationships. You'll hear why married people tend to become more insular over time, and what that quietly costs them later in life. And you'll hear the real story behind a bike accident, a hospital, and forty-nine people who showed up.

If you've ever loved your own company more than you're supposed to admit, or if you've ever wondered whether your relationships would survive without one person at the center of them, this conversation will change how you think about both.

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

Next week, we're sitting down with bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to talk about how she steps inside the minds of people whose lives look nothing like her own, and why that kind of empathy might be one of the most undervalued skills we have.

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.

Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the results rattled her enough to send her on a curiosity tour, looking for answers that had nothing to do with biology.

What she found became her new book, Your Turn, a reframing of the years between 50 and 75 as a third turn, the part of life where, against every expectation, a hidden surge of energy and purpose becomes possible. In this conversation, Jonathan and Allison get into the moment a lab technician's offhand comment sent her into a spiral, the recurring dream that a professional dream analyst helped her decode, and the real reason she finally stepped away from the newsroom rhythm she'd built her 25-year identity around.

You'll hear how she distinguishes passion from purpose from simply mattering, and why one of those three actually shows up in your bloodwork. You'll hear the real stories behind her "curiosity tour," including a retired police officer who found her purpose as the last person walking a community 5K, and a scientist who left a powerful research job to pull invasive vines off trees in her own neighborhood. And you'll hear the simple, repeatable patterns Allison found across dozens of women from all walks of life who made real pivots, one that starts by going inward before it ever asks you to go outward.

If you've ever wondered whether the pull toward something different in your life is real or just restlessness, this conversation offers something rare: actual evidence, and actual permission.

You can find Allison at: It's Your Turn Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Bella DePaulo to talk about what it actually means to be single at heart, and why some of the deepest, most authentic lives being lived right now aren't built around a partner at all.

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.