Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. What does it mean to live a good life? And how can we do that? We'll explore those questions on this episode as we talk with two Notre Dame philosophy professors

who've written this fabulous guide for examining the quality and meaning of one's own life.

Our guest are Megan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko, whose new book is called The Good Life Method,

reasoning through the big questions of happiness, faith, and meaning. Thank you both so much for

joining us. Thank you for having us. Tell us how and why you decided to write the book.

Yeah, so the book is actually based on a course that Megan and I teach here at Notre Dame,

and we've been teaching it for about seven years.

And when we started teaching it, you know, the idea was we think philosophy is relevant for everybody.

But I think a lot of times, you know, just for whatever reason, it's seen as sort of an academic discipline.

It's abstract. It's not really relatable.

And so, you know, we designed, of course, here at Notre Dame, based on that conviction,

based on the thought that, you know, if you think really hard about big questions, like, you know,

whether it makes sense to have faith as part of your life, whether you think God exists,

whether, you know, you think you should spend all of

your time and effort in a life that's action-packed and busy or, you know, all of these sort of

big philosophical questions that, you know, from the time of Plato and Aristotle up to the

present philosophers have been thinking about and worrying about, you know, if you want to take

those and

use those as a way of interrogating and asking questions about how you can structure your own life

so that, you know, you can lead a happy, meaningful life. And so that's what we've done,

you know, with our students for for many years here. And just based on the response, we thought, you know, this is this is a

sort of message that we think a lot of people would be interested in hearing. And as we've

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