Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Hidden Trauma in Women's Health: Breaking Free from a Power-Over System with Elise Loehnen

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

If you've ever felt pressure to be the "good girl," you're not the only one. Dr. Mindy has heard from thousands of women who feel exhausted by the pressure to be agreeable, accommodating, and selfless. Many women were taught that being good meant putting everyone else first. But over time, that pattern often leads to resentment, burnout, and a deep disconnection from your own voice. That's why Dr. Mindy invited writer and cultural critic Elise Loehnen to join her for this conversation. Elise is the former Chief Content Officer of goop and the New York Times bestselling author of On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. Through her writing and podcast Pulling the Thread, Elise explores the cultural expectations that shape women's lives and how those expectations influence our relationships, emotions, and sense of identity. In this conversation, Dr. Mindy and Elise unpack the invisible rules women have been taught to live by for generations. They explore why women were conditioned to suppress emotions like anger and envy, how people-pleasing shows up in female friendships, and why learning to trust your intuition is one of the most important skills a woman can develop. In this episode, you'll learn how to: -Reconnect with your intuition and inner authority -Understand the cultural conditioning shaping women's behavior -Recognize how suppressed emotions impact your health -Navigate female friendships with more awareness -Step out of people-pleasing patterns -Reclaim your voice and authenticity For any woman who feels like she has been living by expectations that don't truly belong to her, this conversation offers a new perspective. It helps you understand where those patterns came from and how to begin trusting yourself again. For more resources related to today's episode, visit the podcast episode page: https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep330  Connect with Dr. Mindy: Join Reset Academy Watch the episodes on YouTube Follow Dr. Mindy on Instagram Subscribe to Dr. Mindy's newsletter for tools and research on fasting, hormones, and metabolic health Connect with Elise Loehnen: Podcast: Pulling the Thread Instagram: @eliseloehnen Book: On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

On this episode of The Resetter podcast, I bring you Elise Lonen. Now, Elise, let's talk about her. This is a fun conversation. She is the author, New York Times bestselling author, of a book called On Our Best Behavior. She also has a beautiful podcast called Pulling the Thread. Now, trigger warning, I'm just going to let you know that we talk all about the Patriarch and its influence on women.

Now, before you click off, I want you just to think this through. Because if you've been following me over the last several months, specifically, I've been bringing a lot of conversations forward about what we're all witnessing, what we're all seeing both here in America and across the world, which is a power over system that has destroyed children, has destroyed men, has kept us stuck in a capitalistic thinking, thinking and whether you are seeing that or not, I think it's important that we are all aware of how this power over culture has conditioned us to think about ourselves. So let's use dieting

as an example. So many of us want to lose weight and be a certain size so we can be loved and we can feel worthy. But do we actually know what the appropriate size is for everybody? Does everybody need to be a size two? Maybe you're healthy at a size 10. So what we're going to do in this conversation is we're going to start to unwind what I call the power over infection. The way that we think about ourselves has been conditioned by a culture

that has an expectation of how women should show up. This was Carol Gilligan's work that I wrote about in Age Like a Girl, that we have been taught to behave, we've been taught to perform in a certain way, to look a certain way, and to achieve in a certain way. And if there's anything that this moment in time offers us, this horrible moment in time,

it offers us the opportunity to start to create a power together culture. And so Elise and I are going to begin that conversation here. This is not a political discussion. This is a discussion of how every human on this planet can thrive, how we can heal as a collective species called humans. And I love the depth of this conversation. I guarantee you there are going to be parts of it that are going to trigger you. They're going to make you mad.

There's parts of it that you're going to cry and you're going to laugh. But what I hope is you come out of this discussion with a deeper understanding of why you think the way you think and why you operate in this culture the way you operate. And I share the stories in here. I'm not going to say it in the intro, but I share the stories of this own inquiry that I'm going through as I'm starting to realize that my thinking even had been conditioned by a power over culture. So this is an opportunity to go deep with your healing. If you love it, send it to your mother, your sister, to other women, to the men that are really supporting women right now. But it was a necessary conversation to bring forward. And I know many of you are going to find so much peace in what we say.

And you're going to come out of this conversation with action if you're feeling troubled right now. And you don't know where to go with all the trauma and the lying and the hatred and the judgment that's going on. on our news feed and on our news shows and you're overwhelmed. This is the conversation for you because Elise and I will give you hope, I promise. So as always, I hope this helps. I think where I want to start this discussion is in some of the statistics around women's health that has haunted me for a long time. And I definitely have a holistic approach to health.

and I know that the statistics I'm about to read to you are not because women were eating improperly. We're not because they didn't get the right fasting length. It aren't happening because they didn't get the right workout plan, but it's because of the ecosystem of the culture that they have been raised in. And here are the statistics. And you probably know some of them. First, we know that 80% of autoimmune conditions happen to women. And when you break down what an autoimmune condition is, it's the immune system turning on itself.

And I have a theory on that. Second, women are five to ten times more likely to develop thyroid problems. And we know the thyroid is actually in front of the vocal courts. We also know one of my most favorite statistics is that the vocal. cords themselves and the cervix originally started from the same tissue and then separated in utero. Fascinating. We also know that we are two times more likely to develop depression.

We are three times more likely to develop migraines. And we are two times more likely to develop gallstones, which also has an interesting point. And the reason I want to start here is what I know about a female. body is that she is always responding to her environment. Whatever environment she puts herself in, our amazing body is going to calibrate to that environment. So this year, when the Epstein files were released, I made a conscious decision to go into parts of it and try to understand it as best as I could. And what I discovered in there was several things.

One, I was shocked at what the web of the patriarch has done to keep its power. Second thing I was shocked at was how the sex trafficking ring, in order to harm children, had to infiltrate every single industry, from the beauty industry to Hollywood, to the university system, to science, which I've been quoting for over a decade on all of my videos. I was like, what? It has infiltrated into all of those areas. And perhaps the moment that I broke was when I saw that one of the worst players of this whole sex trafficking warring was Les Wexner, who founded Abercrombie and Fitch and Victoria's Secret.

and my little 13-year-old brain snapped on that day and basically said, I judged myself against those Victoria's Secret models. I didn't understand at 13, 14, and 15 why my tomboy body didn't look like those women that were shown to be the most beautiful. And then I made the dots, that connected the dots, and realized, oh, oh my God, I have been living with an understanding about myself that was curated by a pedophile, a rapist, and a cannibalist. That's who infected my brain? And it has been a liberating moment.

And so I wanted to bring you here to talk about the patriarch and how, I know it's a big topic. And how it has influenced us and what it means in this day as women, are waking up everywhere and seeing how horrific we have been manipulated. Yeah. So can we start there? Let's start there. Let's talk about what it even means, right? Because when I wrote my first book, which is called Oner Best Behavior, I wrote this chapter

called The Brief History of the Patriarchy because what I found is in my conversations with friends and on podcasts, we would all be saying, you know, the patriarchy, the patriarchy, and treating it a bit like a boogeyman. And I wanted to understand sort of who is it, what is it, who runs it? Is it like Oz? Is it Mitch McConnell? Is it Les West Wexner? Like who's behind the curtain architecting this system?

And then I also was somewhat operating under the assumption that it's the way that it had always been, because that's how it's been sold to us, is this natural reality that where men are stronger and more dominant and therefore belong at the top of this pyramid and the rest of us belong at the bottom. And so I started there and it was fascinating because of course it's not a foregone conclusion. I would also say there's no real evidence of a matriarchy, nor would we want sort of a dominant oppressive hierarchy based on women oppressing and suppressing other people, right? Right.

But we came from an affiliate of world where we were doing life together and trying to survive, which inherently makes so much more sense, right? Like you're on the Savannah. It's not like, okay, Mindy, you dust, Elise, you caretake, and we're going to go be valiant hunters. That's not, there were no reified gender roles in that way. Beautiful. And as scientists have gone back into all of the evidence, it's, I can't remember the statistics off the top of my head, but in 60% of these tribes, women were hunting as well. We have the same wear

patterns. And in Cattlehic, which is modern-day turkey, when they look at that science, we all have the same amount of soot in our lungs. Men and women are essentially the same size, meaning that men at that point weren't preference with more protein, more calories. We weren't breeding ourselves to be larger or smaller. And so we were largely affiliative and just trying to make it happen. So patriarchy, it merges at different points

in different parts of the globe, but in sort of the beginning of Judeo-Christian patriarchy, it began with, and of course it was a woman who put this theory forward, and she was dismissed and largely reviled,

and then posthumously, people realize that the DNA evidence proved that she was right. Her name was Marietta Kumbutas. She was at UCLA and she said that there are there are these tribes that descended from the north, these warring tribes, mostly men, who descended on the people and largely replaced the DNA and enslaved women and children. So women as first property, children as first property, this is the beginning of patriarchy. Wow. And what year was that? This is like this is where you get different things, different, different metrics. But let's say it's like 5,000 BCE. Right. Right. So it's been a minute, but really. I was just going to say so it's been going on a long time. It's been a minute. But when you think about how long we have been on this planet, it's actually not that long. And it's certainly not, it doesn't cohere with who we know ourselves to be, which is.

Men are fully full of their own feminine when they let it come up. They're nurturing, they're caring, their internal, et cetera. Women are capable of being dominant and structured and wanting power in the world. So a lot of this is culture and not nature. Yeah. Although I do have to say, I've spent a lot of time understanding female physiology and I get a lot of questions from men like, when are you going to teach the men? And I'm like, look, I could probably spend my whole life just understanding the female body. And because we house a baby, we are so much more sensitive to our environments than men. And if you just look at it from a hormonal standpoint, men only make one hormone, testosterone, and then it converts into estrogen in their brain. So they really just

have to play by the rules of this one hormone. And testosterone isn't really. affected by cortisol the same way that female hormones are. Whereas the three sex hormones that drive a woman's body are estrogen progestrone and testosterone. And the outlier is progestrone and progestrone will perish in cortisol. And so I too have spent a lot of time thinking about the hunter-gatherer days and like, what was the female body like then? I agree that we, you know, have both men and women have this incredible nurturing instinct. And we have an incredible softness.

But my big concern is that from a physiological level, we don't respond to our environment in the same way. Because our hormones are always sensing for safety. They're always sensing to see if the reproductive cycle is in the real. right ecosystem for it to operate. And this is where we start breaking down. And is this, though, where we also get, like, our extreme durability where we, on ultra-autromarathons and in long distance running, we just crush men? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of it is because what's weird, I always, like in Fast Like a Girl, I said, okay, look, thank you for pointing that out, by the way. I didn't, I'm not letting that comment go. But, like, in estrogen and progesterone, I like to think of them

as like twin sisters. They look the same. We call them sex hormones, but they have vastly different personalities. And one of the things that I saw in my clinic a lot is that oftentimes I couldn't get a woman to heal herself because I was teaching her how to heal herself without involving her family,

without involving her husband. Because the ecosystem of her home, if it was toxic, it didn't matter what I gave her for food or for supple, or for detox, we had to get the ecosystem right. So I agree with you on one hand. We have this ability for men to have this really feminine energy, if we're going to call it that.

And we have the ability for women to have a very masculine energy. But I think the goal is humans for both sexes is to try to bring both together and in harmony. 100%. Yeah, to wholeness, right? And this individuation drive, this autonomy that is so often associated with men, separating, going out into the world is pointless when it's not rooted in relationship. And then conversely, when we left, we leave women sort of holding the bag on the relational realm and shame her or keep her from that individuation and separation and growth, we're missing a lot of that firepower in the world. world. That's right. And one of the things I have thought deeply about is if you wanted control over a woman or over, you know, any species or any sex or whatever, whatever you're trying to control,

you know, one of the greatest ways is to turn a person on their own body. So when we look at women, the messaging of the power over culture, and I think what's really important, I think a lot of people get turned away from the word patriarch. And I always keep saying it's not, Patriarch is not men. It is a power over culture. Yeah, it's a system. It's a system that has turned you against your own self.

Yes. Well, and I would argue that it's obviously, that women have largely learned how to survive and sometimes thrive within the system. Whereas I feel like, I mean, it's hard in this moment to make. make this argument, but the people who seem to really be struggling and suffering are men. When you look at deaths of despair, suicidality, like the lack of meaning and soul, it doesn't feel

good to be an oppressor, right? And so I think the psychic harm on boys and men is vast. And you look at the men who are perpetrating so much of this darkness on the rest of us. And I mean, that's a whole another conversation. I was going to say, they don't look like they're struggling. And yet it's like not enough. There's like an insatiability. There's a scarcity. There's like a vampire cannibalistic quality to all of these guys. They're not satisfied, right? Yeah. It's, it's, that's like a whole other thing. That's a whole other path. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I've heard a lot from my community and it's a large reason why I'm not just doing information and content on lifestyle and food and fasting. It's like I can't talk about that right now because what I hear a lot of women saying is

that they feel like it's just all right here under the chin. Like they've been holding on. They've been holding on. And now you fucked with the children and you just, my mama bear energy can't hold on anymore. And so as the veil of this. system is being pulled back, I feel as my responsibility of having people who follow me is like, okay, you're seeing how ugly it is. Now let's bring it to the individual level and start to feel like how do we express the rage? How do we heal together as women and men? What do we do now that we have

seen the patriarch in the ugliest form that I've ever seen? Yeah. And it's being revealed. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrifying. This is a terrible moment to be alive. And yet it's also, I think, extremely promising. And I have a lot of optimism because these systems have been operating for decades, forever. And they're perceptible to us, but they're not visible. And so now it's the exposure, like that veil, you just use that word. It's one of my favorite words, but that the curtain is being lifted and the shadow is being exposed and it gives us an opportunity to actually see what we're contending with and deal with it rather than sort of this like I think something really effed is happening but I don't know what it is and you're gaslighting me into thinking that I'm

crazy to watch all these conspiracy theorists be proven right is wild but this is the story of what it is to be a woman woman gaslit right for our whole ice like we know this Yeah. We know this. It's funny because I was interviewed on a podcast in the fall and one of the questions was, what conspiracy theory do you believe? And I was like, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. And now I'm like spouting off to my husband. Did you hear this? This is true. This is true. Like I have my full on tinfoil hat on. And I'm like, oh, everything's like, all the conspiracy theories are correct. Yeah. Well, they're always tethered. There's some chord of truth. And sometimes it might not be as bad. might be different, but I think that they're tethered generally to something that's very real,

you know? Yeah. So it gives that energy. What would you say to the woman right now who is just trying to breathe and survive as she takes in this information? I had a, again, I was just on a call with my membership group, and one woman shared and started crying, and she's like, I didn't know that I was feeling what I was feeling until this call. What do we say to those women that are like waking up to the systemic damage that

the patriarch is capable of doing and perhaps what it's doing to them? Yeah. So I think part of the reason that this is coming up and this is through sort of a more psychosperital lens, so it might work for some people and it might not. But I would argue that the shadow is emerging, not because it's winning, but because it's losing. And more light, more shadow. I think we have a far greater capacity to actually deal with this, see this, contend with this than we've ever had. So I think our capacity is there. I think this is, there's something about it coming out where it is, what it's been doing isn't working anymore, right? I think this is a net positive for all of us. Not like, oh my God, this must only be the tip of the iceberg.

In some senses, I'm sure that that's true. And then also, I don't think it's a harbinger of things to come. I think something eternal and old is being exposed so that it can be healed. Right. And then I think what I've come to understand about myself is I have a very fast cognitive brain. and like probably most of the women in your world, my fear response is fawn and I am really good at putting things away for processing later. And because of that, there's like a bit of a disconnect for me that I've started to understand, which is I don't make any proclamations about how I feel about

whatever is happening for a while because I process my emotions in a much slow. lower way. And that's been really helpful for me. I think it's a survival mechanism. I can keep going. I can stay calm. And as you know, those emotions that might get stored in our hips or wherever do need to be tended to. And so I have massively ramped up my self-care, and whether it's time for walks, time to sit outside, energy healing, which to me is just a moment to get quiet and let things emerge. And it's not a nice to have. It's an essential charging mechanism for me and sort of like an emotional sump dump for

anyone who has an RV. Well, don't have an RV, but I get what you're saying. I'm sure there's some RV lovers out there. Oh, that was good. Oh, my God. So what I heard you say is, and again, I think this is so important for, because there are going to be women listening that don't know are struggling to navigate is you paused and you reprioritized. And one of the things you've reprioritized is movement and caring for your body. Did I hear that right?

Correct. So, yeah, that sort of emotional. hygiene, going to bed, taking an hour to go for a walk, not a strenuous walk. Again, I'm trying to, I don't need to like spike my cortisol. Just a chat with a friend. I have, I work with a bunch of amazing energy, ideal in energy healers, but some really powerful energy healers who I can feel sort of at a distance. There are group healings that you can join. It's amazing. It's amazing. to me. I've like hosted some of those. People will be like, I don't know what's going to happen. It's 50 women on a Zoom. And then suddenly they're like sobbing and feel things popping and throat

chakras exploding. And that might be too far outside of the realm of the physical. But even just that time. Sometimes you just need the time. Well, let's let's unpack that for a moment. Because Because this is patriarchal thinking too. And I hope everybody, like, listening, I keep calling the patriarchal thinking like an infection. It's like an infection. It's like infected us. And it's very contagious. We whispered into each other's ears.

It's like, it's, and we model it for each other, right? Yeah. And we compete against each other and we turn on each other because of it. And one of the things that I've always done in my own personal life is be able to hold a traditional allopathic approach to health care with a holistic natural approach. And I have found it really helpful to integrate the both of them. I remember when my kids were little, I actually got a team of all different kinds of healers together to be a support system for me with them because I knew that I might be blinded in certain areas. So I had a very, very conservative pediatrician.

and I had an energy healer on the other end of the spectrum, and I had a wide variety in between. And when they were struggling, I would go to all of those different healers, and I would ask their opinion, and then I would use my motherly intuitive sense to decide which was best. So I'm making this point for the listeners that what I just heard is perhaps in this moment where healthcare is also a power over system that we might want to open our minds to how we can heal energy and trauma in our bodies in a way that wasn't traditionally acceptable or isn't traditionally acceptable. And I think what you just described is so beautiful and magical.

My father is a Mayo trained physician. My mom is a nurse. I grew up typing dictation in my dad's office and serving trays in the hospital cafeteria. And I love Western medicine. And, you know, when I was diagnosed with lymphocytococytocytitis and couldn't figure out what my gastro couldn't figure out what to do without creating more, you know, he was like, I don't want to unleash steroids yet. It was an energy healer who resolved this in a day. And when I told my dad, he was like, you know, whatever works.

I'm not going to argue with the fact that suddenly you're revived. But I think it's not a binary. Right? It's both and it's using our own intuition, our own bodies as a way to say like, this feels resonant and this less so. Or I'm going to do this over here because I think it helps and I like it. Right? And it feels nurturing and loving and calm.

Yeah. And it's going, right. It's a great. And maybe it's fun. Maybe it's fun. Oh, God. So fun. What if we did something that was fun and calming and healing and maybe didn't have like pages of science behind it?

But it actually is an energy that could be beneficial to us. And I think like when I talk to sort of the energy healers who are brilliant in their own right, and they talk about sort of the resonance of these moments. And we can think about this political moment. And the regardless of where you sit on the political. spectrum, the hatred of this administration is at the same resonance, unfortunately, as some of the violence that they're propagating on women, children, immigrants, right? And it's really hard to not meet them at that particular resonance level. And yet at the same time, it's like, well,

what are you powering in the world? I don't actually want to be powering hate. I want to be empowering something that is much a much different vibration, much higher vibrational level. And similarly, when we think about these power over constructs, fear is debilitating. And I think to your point, very easy to put hypervigilant women into fear. I spend most of my life in fear. But the more we can climb our way, manage it, acknowledge it, I'm feeling really scared. and then climb back up the stronger we are and the more the more endurance we have, I think, for what's ahead.

So what I heard with this is we can't stay in the same energy that they're in or we all go down. We all, it's quicksand. It's like, it is quicksand. And, yeah, we can get stuck. we can become what we are against. And so in this moment, it's like, what are we for? And how can we gather ourselves and each other to that level? And like, we are untouchable at that level.

I think we are incredibly safe at that level. And what about the, I've heard a lot of people talk about their parents and that their parents are at home watching Fox News. and are getting a very different story than if they're watching another news channel and vice versa. Like people are, I mean, I have to, every Tuesday morning, I call my mom and hear what Rachel Maddow had to tell her every Monday night. My dad loves Rachel Maddo. He, yes, this is a constant in my life too. And she tells me things that I'm like, mom, you might want to do a little more research on that.

maybe you should listen to something more than just Rachel, Matt out. Like, we have, you know, we have decided what camp we're in. And that camp, I do believe that the human brain is built for tribalism. And so we're like, this is my tribe. This is my belief system. This is what they say is going on. And so it becomes very easy to turn at the person who's in a different tribe who's like, no, that's not what's going on.

This is what's going on. And now we're in that combative frequency that you're talking about, which is the frequency that they, you know, our administration has created here in America. And I have a worldwide audience. And unfortunately, we're just spreading it across, I mean, fascism. It's happening in a lot of places. It's everywhere. Yeah.

I think it's coming up, again, across the globe, because it's an energy that wants to be resolved and healed. And it's this extreme polarity and it is binary, right? It's us versus them, good versus. is bad and it's very fixed and it's very against and it keeps us stuck again at that level of whatever it is that we are standing against and so I think this moment calls not to litigate everything with our Trump loving uncle but to look for the common ground and to create cognitive dissonance right so this is the tool from Loretta Ross and it's I can't remember it's like her uncle

Charlie rule or something she's an amazing activist who had you know she's a victim of sexual assault she um has rehabilitated members of the KKK she's worked with incarcerated rapists like she is like next level Mensa Jedi and she wrote this book called Calling In and Her point is that I don't think she refers to it as cognitive dissonance, but essentially it's like, hey, Aunt Jill, I know you to be the sort of person who would give your own life to save a trapped cat. You know, like you would do anything to save a child, right? And what I'm hearing is not consonant. It does not cohere with who I know you to be, which is someone who loves people. So can you explain how you got from here to there, right? That's beautiful. It's not

beautiful. Yeah. And there's that you can create enough cognitive dissonance where someone's like, yeah, that is my self image. I do think of myself as like a really loving person who would do anything for a neighbor. And it just enough, it's enough friction without where they can start to think, right? Yeah. You know what that does? Yeah. Yeah. I, You know, I just, I love question asking because the way the brain works is you flip between your prefrontal cortex and your amygdala. And the amygdala gets locked into fear. And if you try to come at somebody without a question asking, you're really talking to their fear

center. But the minute you ask a question, you move them out of the fear center into the place of hope and possibility into the prefrontal cortex. Yeah. And I think it, in her experience, it gives people a chance just to stop. like get out of the autopilot of whatever they've been programmed with because we're all just carrying these stories around and then repeating them right these worldviews this this tribalistic mentality and so when you sort of confront people with like the dissonance created by who they

feel themselves to be it opens up an actual conversation that's beautiful yeah and so it's all about like her work is all about you know she would say with most people there is significant amount of just overlap, the then diagram of shared interests. We really are so much more aligned than this government would have us believe in the way that it's marketed to us. But if you actually strip the political languaging or the political affiliations away from it, most of us, we have a supermajority around the environment. We have a super majority around common sense gun laws. we have a super majority around immigration. Right.

That's what's so wild. It's like we all got had. People in their minds think, well, there's like this, the right is super extreme and the left is super extreme. And there are those elements of those parties. But when you actually take something like immigration and researchers map what we actually believe, it's just, it's a hill in the middle. It's not two cliffs on either side. Yeah. So we're not actually, it's a perception of polarity that we keep feeding rather than puncturing it and saying, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, don't you, I think this, you know. Yeah. Like the greatest thing we could do is actually try to figure out how to all get along. That would be the, that would be the way in which we could soften the moment is what I hear. And we do get along. Like you, you know, before we started taping, we were talking about the five. and the palisades, right?

In those moments, and you look at Minneapolis, you look at how much love people have for their neighbors. It's not like I was like, hey, neighbor, my neighbor loves Trump, actually, my direct neighbor. Am I, are we still in his, we have a key to his house because he can't hear, like getting him out of the house in the middle of a fire evacuation? Of course.

Like, you know, there aren't, it's not an issue, right? That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is something for, and I'll share a story that a very good friend of mine, one of the, and full transparency, one of the things that was really hard for me in all this election was how many of my friends in the alternative health space decided to support Maha. These are my friends. And I tried to talk to them. I was like, what do you guys think about the environment? What do you think about women's rights? And they're like, he's not going to do anything with that. I'm like, yeah, he is. And look at exactly. what he's doing. And I had so many friendships that I was just crushed. I was like, he's not, you guys don't, you're being played. You have to see how deeply you're being played. And then last week they were all up in arms about the glyphosate ruling. And I'm like, I told you, I told you. But one of the, you know, and you want to go to I told you. They're definitely, and I, but yet I'm back

at, I know that emotion is not good for my body. That, that gotcha or that resentment or that hatred actually we can see that it suppresses the immune system. It mixes it up. Could be why we have 80% of autoimmune caused to women. But I have one friend who was a Maha supporter that called me after the Epstein files were released this last go and said, can I say something? And I really need you to be gentle with me as I tell you. And I said, yep, I'm here.

And she said, I'm really regretting voting for Trump. And I said, tell me what's going through your mind. And she's like, I just got swept up in the chronic disease and food die. And I just thought RFK Jr. was going to do all of that. And now I see that there's a bigger picture. And she and I had had actually a discussion right after the election, like a week after the election. And she said, do you want to talk? And I'm like, I'm too upset right now to talk.

And so, but what we ended up doing is having the most beautiful, because I didn't shame her, because I didn't yell back at her, I just said, tell me what you're thinking, because it's helpful for me to understand the thought process you went through. And we ended up, you know what we ended up doing was for days we would send each other messages. And I would say, tell me, tell me what you think about gun laws. I'm really, I'm really, you know, I'm an anti-gun person. I've never wasn't raised in a violent household. My parents actually, my mom quit her teaching job in L.A. at Marlboro, an all-girls school there, so that she could go and gather with another group of moms to stop nuclear war. And I remember her sitting us down and saying, we've got to do this now.

So I was raised in a family that was always looking through that lens of how do we collectively support. So when I look at somebody like Trump or I look at somebody like RFK Jr., I see issues. I don't see a holistic point of view, and I see issues that are important to them to make more money. She had never been trained to think like that. She had never thought of it through that way. And I think that is a big issue that I think we all need to learn how to critically think again. And also just understand, right? Because it's interesting.

I was on a call this morning about messaging around the environment, and I was listening to some of the participants who were, it became very blue state, red state, and a little holier than now. And a lot of assumptions. And I'm from Montana, right? So I grew up in a different, very different type of gun culture, but where people are subsistence, hunters, and there's this deep respect and reverence, which I think is more honorable, honestly, to look your deer in the eye than to, like, buy. Saran Wrap meet at the farmer's market.

I don't know where this came from, right? Yeah. But I was just listening to the conversation. I was like, you guys, the word conservation is part of the idea of conservatism. And when you guys talk about the environment

as though, and you create this like somehow red state people don't care, some of the greatest stewards of the land that I know who are non indigenous are rural people who care deeply about watersheds and access to land and these are allies here. They're on the front lines of what's happening on their ranches and in their farms.

And yet we continue to sort of stride or make it this anti rather than saying, I know we agree here. Like we want to protect what we love. We're being monocropped out. This is about industry, than individual action. Anyway, it just made me think of that in the context of Maha, which was, I mean, I was devastated. I'm still devastated as an early participant in wellness culture, which to me was like all about women, right? And then it was taken over and capitalized and commercialized by these men who just become dominant.

I will tell you, I got in the whole biohacking world. and it got so brocultory that I couldn't attend anymore. And I kept saying, y'all, we can't hack a woman's body. We have to harmonize with it. And nobody wanted to hear that. And it got so like, you know, the bros all lifting each other up. And then the women, the women acting like bros also became a part of that. Yeah.

I don't know if you read it, but I did this series in my newsletter about ending the manal in health, which was essentially all about this. Like, when did this happen? Specifically, Huberman and Atea. And you're of a size and status that these guys, you might be one of the women that they would have on their show. But also, like, these men, I did an audit of all of these shows. And, um, Huberman at that point had only ever had eight women on his show. It's like 11% of their guests. They're citing the research of women. And as you know, women are earning more MDs. They're earning more biomedical PhDs. There's no pipeline problem. There's no issue outside of who we see as an expert.

And then to have these two guys, one who has a PhD in ophthalmology or the whatever. Optimology. He's an ophthalmologist teacher. He wasn't even in clinical practice. He teaches at Stanford medical practice. Talking about like dentistry, oral health and talking about hormones. And I mean, it was, but my issue or why I wrote the piece was like, I know that their audience is potentially mostly women.

And we don't realize, we're not conscious of the way that we are continually supporting and platforming and upholding these systems that suggest men are the experts. And when they would have women on, it would be, okay, Mindy, you come on and talk about this women's thing. Right. Sex, relationships, hormones. Although they started to move in on the hormone stuff because I think they realized menopause is a big business. And so then they started doing their tete-a-tete's about menopause. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. But I was like, this is batch it, considering that this whole enterprise of wellness,

started to center this side conversation outside of the halls of power for women to be like, what's happening to you? Is this happening to you? Like who's paying attention to us? So on the Huberman-A-Tia thing, I want to talk about that for a moment because me and several other friends who are, you know, everything from nutritionists to MDs to, you know, energy healers, we all were like, what the hell? Why are we sitting for two and a half? hours listening to these two men talk about women's hormones. Why aren't they inviting women on? And the question that I want to bring forward, because I also read your most recent post on the, well, on the death of the guru, you called it the end of the guru energy.

Guru energy, yes. Yeah. So why do we do that? That's what I want to know. And I just want to to say one last thing on the Huberman thing, I watched that hit piece come out around how he was sleeping with five different women who all thought they were in a monogamous relationship. They email me all the time for the record. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. So I watched that and then I watched my friends, my colleagues one by one get invited on and they're like, Huberman invited me on and I'm like, he's doing, he's doing recon. He's making sure that he's rehabilitating. his reputation. I remember turning to my husband and saying, here's what I want to tell you. If he invites me on, don't let me go. Don't let me get sucked into. I will not show up because what

he's doing is trying to rehab his. So I want to understand why the female brain is so quick to give over our power to the bro wellness or bro culture or the doctor in the doctor room. Why do we do that? Yeah, give away our sovereignty. I mean, we were chatting about this before we started recording. But when you look at the pioneering research of Carol Gilligan, who's still teaching, she was in her 90s at Harvard, and she wrote in a different voice. And when she came on the scene, all the developmental psychologists not only were men, but they had only ever studied white middle class boys. So this is Colberg.

This is all the systems of morality and these life stages. where we move from egocentric to ethnocentric, et cetera, were all only based on boys. And when she got on the scene in the 80s, and she was like, what about girls? Like there's one entrance in the index about girls, which says, like, girls have a slightly different take, truly. And so she started studying the psychological development of girls,

and she wrote this book called In a Different Voice, and I think it's sold close to a million copies. She couldn't get it published. I actually quoted it in my recent book, Age Like a Girl, and I sent her a copy. I found her and sent her a copy. She's amazing. But what she found, and then one of her students

is this woman, Niobe Way, who went on to study boys, but in a very different, very powerful way than what's sort of the Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway version of it. But what they came, where their work comes together is that at a certain age, I think it's 11 for girls, they come to say, I don't know.

And for boys at around age 8, they say, I don't care. And so there's this disconnection that happens from our own knowing that's acculturated into us. I think we can agree that's not a biological imperative. Where suddenly girls are like, I will be subservient to other people's knowing about me. And I see myself as being in certain. to the world, whereas boys see themselves as being in the world. And there's some sort of psychic break that happens. And I think our job as women now, as we grow ourselves up, is to get back to that. And of course we know. And I think one of the other things that's a massive wound that we need to heal, that only we can heal, is this inherent. And I go into this in a lot of depth and on our

best behavior in the chapter about envy. But I think we have so much undiagnosed wanting in our lives because we subjugate what we want to other people's needs that most of us don't have any real GPS on what we want. And it comes to us as envy, but we don't know that that's what's happening. So we're like, I don't feel comfortable. This woman is making me uncomfortable. Who does she think she is? And we don't know. We're not conscious. Like, oh, my God, Mindy has a podcast and I want to have a podcast. and I want to have a podcast. And so it's said, it's like, I don't like Mindy. She rubs me the wrong way.

Who does she think she is? She does not have that good. Whatever the variation is. And so I think we have a lot of trouble as women seeing other women as experts if we ourselves feel expert and yet unexpressed. And so there's something about projecting it onto a male expert that's more comforting to our own egos, I think, that has to do with our own unlived lives. I mean, it's a theory.

Fascinating. But I think it's a source of a lot of this women on women, like why we're just so not that comfortable with it and why we prefer a man. Right. You know, it's interesting. A lot of my friends, we've had discussions about when we were younger. We actually enjoyed playing with the boys more than the girls. Yeah.

And I've heard more. women say, yeah, I really liked hanging out with guys because the girls, I just, we weren't synergized. We have so many, like, if there was anything that I think you could do that would be in service to humanity, we can work together on this. I think there's, like, massive. And when I go around and I talk about my work and I'm with groups of women, there's so much deep love and reverence for women up close and so much distrust and hatred from afar.

and when I talk to women, and it comes up in conversations about the patriarchy, because often it's flattened to be like, the men, the men, the men. And then when you actually get into conversation with women and you're like, name the men who have been patriarchal towards you and caused harm. There's always some. Usually they're bigger cultural figures, right, like president or Epstein or someone like that. But often all they want to talk about are the women who have hurt them. them, betrayed them, stabbed them in the back, denied them an opportunity, been really covertly aggressive, gossipy, back-sabby. The way that our anger is conditioned to come out of us, which is not overtly, not in direct conflict, but is more in like, let's all gang up, let's all, you know,

this is like the queen's-mean wannabes. So we got to heal it. Yeah, how do we heal that? Because, you know, it's interesting. I did, after the Epstein file thing, I called my friend Sarah Sezal. She used to go by Sarah Godfrey. Yeah, of course. I love her. Yeah, she's amazing. So I was like, hey, we got to have a conversation about this. I'm proud of her. I feel like she's really been, I'm really proud of her. Yeah, you should be. She's really a spectacular human. And she's really like, she's the first to like break apart her Harvard MD and tell you, there were downfalls of that degree. And she's got a very holistic lens. Like she is just a beautiful woman. So yeah, she deserves all that she gets all the beauty that gets sent her way.

But I went to, I went to my Instagram to talk about this conversation that I had just had with Sarah and about the Peter Attia and the Deepak and the culture that the podcasting wellness culture. And I was really shocked at how many women in the comments said to me, yeah, and the mean girl. that keep coming after both you and me. And I was like, what? And one woman went on to say how some of the women in the health space that have large audiences when they made a comment on their, and now socials is a very tricky spot. So we've done this in our own comments.

If it gets really ugly, sometimes you have to hide things because everybody fights with each other. But this woman said that she had brought up a comment to a very big wellness female influencer who then went ahead and deleted her comment. And it brought forward in my mind, and Sarah and I talked about it as like, what about this mean girl culture that even as adults seems to permeate? And I love the, I always like understanding things. So you really gave me a sense of where its root might be. And that leads me to how do we change that? Because if there's anything women need right now, it's each other. Yeah. Well, I think that what happens is, you know, I mentioned a couple times that this is an unconscious process. So like envy, for example, you see someone who has something or is doing something that you want because we're conditioned to think that envy is bad or gross. Like we don't have a relationship with it. So we can't say, oh, I think I'm really envious. Men have a much easier relationship with that. So you say, I feel really uncomfortable and bad.

She is making me feel bad. It is her fault. So I need to deprecate her, strike her, make her go away. But really, if you say, why am I, if we can become more conscious and more present, going back to earlier in our conversation, what is this feeling? What am I feeling? What is it trying to tell me or teach me? And we can start to excavate it. Even like, am I envious?

Like she's clearly irritating me. She's pushing on a dream maybe I have for myself. She has something that I want. Yeah. You start to get to the gold, which is your soul saying like, you want that. Go get that. So like in my own life, you know, I've ghostwritten 15 books or something. I've lost track.

I, you know, was the chief content officer at Goop for a long time. I co-hosted that podcast. I've stood behind. That's not the first time that I've sort of stood behind. a brand or a more famous person. I much prefer that. I'm very comfortable in that role. And then as I started working on our best behavior,

it started with envy because I would find myself deprecating people, writers typically. Like, how did her book, like, why are people liking that book so much? It's not that good. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And would hear myself and be like, what are you, what's happening? And manage to slow myself down enough to excavate it. it and say, that's envy, babe, you know, you want that. You want to write your own book. You want to

have your own podcast. You want to stand for yourself. And we're doing whatever we can to get your attention and flag this for you by tormenting you with envy. But this is what it is. It's so helpful. Super helpful. As we start to get better at that, Lacey Phillips has this concept called expanders, which is when you're trying to create something or grow something in your life, you identify the people who have it and then you model yourself after them. It's a way of making envy really obvious and overt. I think it starts to really take the temperature down in terms of because what also happens with women, understandably, is like scarcity flares, right? So because this is modeled to us, there's only room for one, maybe.

Maybe there's two. Like, Mindy, you can't be friends with Sarah because you have the same audience and only one of you can do well, right? That's what we are trained to believe. And so when you feel envy, it's like, well, if she has it, I can't have it too. So I need to destroy her. I need to dethrone her. Fascinating.

And instead, men are not conditioned in the same way. So speaking of the Atea and Huberman and Tim Ferriss and all these bros, as I did this audit and I was watching what they were doing, I'm like, oh, I see what they're doing. They're all just trafficking each other in this massive circle jerk. And they have something and then they run each other's shows. They're not at all concerned about stealing each other's audiences. And guess what? They're taking over because scarcity is a myth.

And women, meanwhile, I don't know if this has been your experience. but as I've brought stuff into the world, the women who are who I would think would be my greatest allies and what we're trying to accomplish are the ones who couldn't even throw up an Instagram story. Oh. Right? Yeah. It's real.

It's real. I have, I mean, letting people in on what happens, there is a lot of nepotism of like, hey, I'll support your book. You support mine. Yeah. And you start to see people, like who people are when you go to make an act. ask and they won't support you. Yeah.

And meanwhile, it's like so much of it is scarcity and it's understandable. But once you know what it is, you're like, okay, but we're, we're sustaining this, actually. We're keeping it tight and small by insisting that there's not enough for all of us and that we can't win. And by doing that, like, we're not modeling what this looks like, all this women, supporting women hashtag stuff that we don't actually stand behind. We're actually powering something very different in the.

the world. So I think there needs to be a massive healing. I think we need to feel comfortable naming it, saying it, talking about it, examining it, and just getting more comfortable. Like, oh, I am envious, or your success feels like an indictment on my success, or I would never allow myself to do that. And I want to blame all these other factors for why I haven't done it, but really I haven't done it because, like, I haven't done it. And that's hard. It's hard when you realize. that, yeah, that you haven't done it. It's even harder when you know you want it and you don't know how to get it. Yeah.

So I think I think. Or you won't do what's required, really, right? Yes, agreed, agreed. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I have such a different lens on books now because I did three books in three years. Oh, my God, you're an animal.

Well, I'm stupid. So I'm now on a book hiatus maybe for the rest of my life. And I just, you know, you get sucked into, oh, who wants me? me, where am I going to go? And the next thing you know, I'm on planes and I'm flying around the world to all these, because all these people want me. And it mentally broke me. And now I sit back and I watch women that are engaged in that energy. And I catch myself, I do have my moments where I'm like, oh, wow, that's really cool what they're doing. Let's use Mel Robbins as an example. She's a wonderful human. I've been on her podcast. She's just, you know, there's a lot of great

attributes. And then I go and I'm like, wait a second, she got, she's going in for an Emmy. She's going to get an Emmy. You can even, you can get an Emmy. And then, and then like, you know, my husband's like, or a golden glove. What did she get? She got a golden glove. Or she was up for a golden globe. And then it hit me. I was like, there is no fucking way at this point in my life at 56 years old after I have given my life over to three books in three years that I would ever want to do what is needed to get a golden glove. Yeah. I'm like, so you, so that you, I think envy has two sides to it, which is, yes, you want

it, but then you have to ask yourself if you're willing to put in the effort. Yeah. Requires a lot of tradeoffs, right? Yeah. I have the same conversation with myself all the time where I'm like, why am I not, why is my podcast not bigger? And, and then I'm like, because I'm just honestly not willing to do what's required to do it, which I think also requires selling yourself out, be.

a certain amount of time and energy. And it's interesting, too, like even the restraint that you were making sure that you exhibited that you were asking your husband, like, if Huberman calls, like, I am a no, remind me, like, do not let me betray my own integrity here. Because that's also required, right, to do what these guys do. And it's partly why we're in such a quagmire, because I see it all the time with experts. where I'm like, really? Like, you're doing that show and lending your credibility to that show.

And then you understand the cognitive process on their part where they're like, well, I'm bringing this audience really good information. And if it's not me, it's someone, you just start to see all the cognitive loops, twists and turns that we put ourselves through and just the self-justifying, the lying to ourselves about what we're really up to. which is fine, as long as we're honest with ourselves. But I think the honesty is the piece I'm pulling out from this because I think it's hard to be honest with yourself when the emotion your experiences is one that's negative.

Yes. Which leads me to an emotion that many people don't like to see in women, which is anger and rage. And I want to talk about that for a moment because this idea that I've been hearing from a lot of women where they just feel like, you hurt the babies? I can't do this anymore. I can't wrap myself up to please a culture that is willing to hurt babies. What do I do now? And so what I'm seeing is a lot of women that are looking for rage outlets.

And I would love to discuss, like, what are those? And I'll share with you just a brief thing that last week I actually went into a psychedelic journey. and a part of my journey was, I don't even know how, you know, time is very weird in those journeys, but it was screaming my head off. And I have never had something feel so good in my life. And I have, there has been a level of happiness that has filled me since I allowed myself that opportunity to rage. And I don't even know if I was raging about my own life or about generous, felt like it was,

I was raging for generations of women, but it made me realize there needs to be an outlet for women around rage. Yes. And I think what you just said is so profound on so many levels because, well, first, I think it's, it's like, it's going to a rage room, it's screaming into a pillow, it's screaming in the shower, it's screaming in your car, it's breaking things. It's like putting on, you know, gloves and like getting into the ring and expressing. I think what happens, I think that there are a few things that we get confused about with anger, which is one, it has to be justified and two, it needs a story. And that three, it needs, it's a vital energy for taking action in the world. And I think to start with the last one, it's not. You don't need to be enraged to recycle, right? You don't need to be enraged to do a loving thing. It's, again, I think it goes back to like what you're powering in the world. So, All to say, anger is vital, essential. It shows us where our boundaries are.

It delineates our needs. It says, do not tread on me. It wakes us up. But you don't have to sustain it in order to take sustained action in the world. And I think the more important thing is to process it. I had a wild experience with anger. I was at a spiritual retreat, which ended up being about anger. But this is before that.

And I just started to feel enraged. There was no content. There was no story. Nothing had happened. I was so uncomfortable. I had to get down on the ground because I thought I was becoming nauseous. I was alive with anger for two days. I couldn't sleep.

Again, it was a bit like a psychedelic experience. Right. Yeah. There was no content. And then this energy healer, Uta Opitz, who I work with all the time now, took me into the woods. And I could feel it. Speaking of some pump. I could feel her opening chakras and this release, this discharge of this anger.

But I felt like I was having the experience so that I would be like, this is all of this anger that you've just stuck in your body. And now we're going to get it out and clear you out. And you are not allowed to do that anymore. Like store it. You're not allowed to store it anymore. No. So you feel it.

It might take a minute. You express it. You can vent it. You can vent it if you want, but that's not so productive. It's mostly you got to move it. You got to move it. Scream it, push it, walk it, run it, dance it, shake it out. On my call today, somebody said, I like to do angry gardening.

Yes. Where you pull the weeds out and you scream and yell as you're, I'm like, I never thought of using gardening as an anger tool. It doesn't have to be directed at anyone else. In fact, that's not safe. That's not the right use for it. There's a Marshall Rosenberg who's passed, but nonviolent communication. Oh, yeah. Yeah, where he's like, instead you say, like, I'm angry because I am needing to come home to a clean house and not a destroyed kitchen.

And that that creates enough space between you and whoever is maybe destroying the kitchen that they can say, I respect that need and I will do better without feeling attacked or put into fear. So that's a good trick. Yeah, I like a nonviolent communication. I remember studying that when my kids were little as just a form of communication. It's a good classic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that in a long time.

What, you know, when we're looking at this moment, it's so hard because so many things are coming at us that make make us feel angry and powerless. And so how do we help the woman who's just, you know, listening to this, her friends maybe don't speak like this language that you and I are speaking. She's just trying to navigate this moment so that she can move forward. And I'll tell you the one thing that I've really been saying to all my friends, my family, my staff is like, we can't look away. Like you can't go, oh, that's really hard to, I can't look at it because I do believe we need to look at it and then back away from it and then look at it and back away from it. Because if we don't look at it, then this oppression of women is going to continue. But what, because I think like you, like it's a catalytic moment.

There's, we can, we can alchemize the pain that we have right now. So what are we going to do with that? But what do I do if I'm alone? My family isn't watching the news. They don't understand what's going on. Like how do I take this fertile ground and start to change history and create a power together culture, not a power over culture? Yeah.

Well, I think one of the functions of isolation and individualism is that it's all on you and it's all on me and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. When it's, that's kind of a lie. So I don't know if you've ever encountered Rabbi Steve leader, but he's a beautiful thinker. And I remember talking to him, this is many years ago, but sort of in a similar sort of straight, like, I don't know what to do. And he was like, Elise, you tend the garden that you can reach. And I think that it was such profound advice. And speaking of the gardener in your group, right?

It's you take care of your family. You take care of your home and your land. You take care of your neighbors. You volunteer. Maybe you volunteer at the food bank and you pack vegetable boxes. You volunteer at a shelter. There are a million ways, right? In Minneapolis, we're watching that collective action and mutual aid just come to life in

such a stunning and beautiful way where people are mobilizing, organizing, showing up. So I think there's ways to fortify those actions with financial resources, or you just like take care of the people who are on our doorstep. There's so much need. And I think it's like you think of it as like all of us as little spiders, like building our little webs together and creating this fortifying where we start to feel our power again.

which is really mostly felt in our impact on each other's lives and being in service in each other's lives. And you just start to like feel yourself again, you know, in like what it means to power love. You know what your last statement reminded me of is 9-11. I remember, you know, in my clinic, my clinic was in Silicon Valley and there was a lot of high-performing people that were always in a hurry. And it was like need to get in and get out. Right. And so, but after 9-11, everybody wanted to sit in the lobby and talk to each other. And people were so polite and took care of each other. And it was like we all were in this collective country grief at that moment. And I'm thinking, as you were talking, that the difference between that moment and this moment is that the messaging has pulled us apart as people in this country. And when I listen to you

talk about, you know, just the kindness you can give a neighbor who, who doesn't agree with your political beliefs, that's what's required of us right now is the way I heard that. Yes. And that was like small sustaining relationships, which I think keep us all on our feet and keep us all engaged. And like it matters. I think we need to also see the impact of our power in the world.

And it doesn't need to be sort of just rage posting. It's like, what can I actually do? the physical action of it, I think is really important. Every morning when I drive my kids to school, there's a woman on a Kentor with a trash bag, and she's just like, she picks up trash every morning on her morning walk. And, you know, I bless her as I drive past. It's such a beautiful service, and it just like warms my heart. And, you know, stuff like that. It sounds twee and simple, but I think it is. And I think when you see other people doing that, too, you're like, Like, that is some beautiful tending.

And it's moving every day to see that. Do you think, you know, I'm an optimist and I'm going to continue to fight for a power together world, do you think in our lifetime we will start to see that kind of culture manifest? Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally optimistic. I think this is so painful. We're watching what we love being dismembered, dismantled, and destroyed.

and but yet and yet we're also like it kind of didn't work like that was like a kind of a bad system right for everyone everyone right like and we wouldn't have had the heart to take it down to the studs or the desire and so I think we're going to see an incredible opportunity to remodel our world with weight in systems that are more fair more free more free more loving. So I'm excited to see the visionaries emerge who will guide us through that. And I think what's also happening in this, and maybe this is just me, but I feel like we, this guru energy writ large of like, these people are just going to take care of this. And now it's like, actually, do not give away your sovereignty. And not like, it's all on us. Oh, man, but like, oh, we inherently are

quite powerful. I think the other thing that's going to happen and has to happen. And in my book, like the central thesis is that women are conditioned and programmed to perform goodness in the world while men are conditioned and programmed to perform power. And I think for a lot of women, we feel like power is kryptonite and we don't want to have anything to do with it because it is corrosive, corrupting, raping, pillaging, oppressing. And, it hasn't been modeled for us outside of this dominator patriarchal system in a way that makes us want to have anything to do with it. So I think we simultaneously are like, we need power, but like I don't want it. I don't want to have anything to do with it. Right? It's really true. And so

I think part of what's going to happen is that we have to figure out what this looks like in a way that hasn't been expressed or maybe it's only been expressed in pockets here and there. and get behind each other as we move towards power in a non-patriacal way. And of course, women can be like horribly patriarchal. Look at all the guard dogs of this administration. So it's not about, this is a different kind of power for men too. But it's held differently. And I don't know that we know what it looks like.

I was just because I say, do we have an example on the planet right now of power together? I mean, you look at some of the nations that were governed by women during COVID, for example, and just the much better outcomes and the more. those populations were centered, et cetera, like Justinda Arden or someone like that. Yeah, I heard her speak. She was amazing. You think about like Jane Goodall. You think about Robin Wall Kimmer. There are these women, I think, who are holding a vision for a different, like the next version of a conscious world. Some are no longer with us, obviously. So I think there are glimpses. I think that we're moving towards that. And we know what it feels like. It feels like

regenerative agriculture, right? Yeah. It feels like Patagonia. It feels like, let my people surf. Yes. And it feels like Apple before this administration. But I think we know it's possible. We just haven't quite seen it. We've been. We've only seen sort of the runaway capitalistic, scarcity-minded winner takes all. Yeah. You know what I've been trying to do? Epstein files and the men who wish they were in the Epstein files. That's my name for another class of men, right?

You know, who are like, I wish I had that much power that I would have, it's, you know. That's, I didn't even think about that. Like maybe some people were like, oh, I should have been in there. God, that's crazy. something I've been doing because I think I'm going to go back to the power over being an infection that I want to see where I've been infected. And so I've been, you know, looking at, even on as I'm scrolling Instagram, or which is the platform I use a lot, I just go, oh, look at that. There's power over. Oh, there it is. There's the infection. And then I'll scroll to another one like I saw this really

beautiful post this morning that I sent to a bunch of my friends about why God really is a woman. and the nurturing energy that a woman gives, you know, why don't we refer to God as a female essence? And I'm like, ooh, there's a more power together. And so everywhere I'm going right now so that I can unwind myself from the infection is really just, oh, that's power over, oh, there's power together. Oh, there's power over, there's power together. and so that I can train my brain to see the difference in the nuance of everyday life. I love that. I think we're waiting.

Like, I think even you sharing that is instructive, you know? If you are like, I'm just going to repost or like pull together examples. I think people don't know what it looks like, including myself to some extent. You know, I know sort of the power over power with, et cetera. And yet it's like as a concept, I'm like, okay, but then what does. that look like what is good power? What is relational power? What is it? I don't know that we've seen it. Okay. I'll tell you where we saw it recently. Is in the figure skaters. I was like jumping up and down. I'm like, did you just see what the gold medal woman did? She waited for the other woman

and then she lifted her up and celebrated the other woman from another country who got bronze celebrated her bronze win before she even celebrated her own gold medal win. Like, and then the three of them sat there like little school girls cheering each other on. And I even saw a situation where, I think it was Amber Glenn. She stood in front of a news camera that was trying to zone in on one of the figure skaters that had fallen and didn't do well. And the news camera was trying to get in. And she went right in front of the news camera to protect the woman. I mean, these are like 18, 19 year old girls, right? Or women. And, And I was like, there it is.

That is it. That's the energy. And this is why I'm like, we need to learn from little puzzle pieces. I have a new theory. And a friend of mine who will be listening to this podcast who's going to laugh when I say this. But I'm calling it the reverse puzzle hypothesis where when you do a puzzle, you put all the pieces out. You look at the front cover.

And you're like, this is what I'm building. And then you organize your pieces. I think right now what we're doing is we have to have conversations like this on what are we building, and then we need to reverse engineer that and go find the pieces. And so Alyssa Liu, the gold medal figure skater, she gave us a piece. She showed us how to celebrate your win and other women's win, and she showed us the power of rest and recovery. You know, when you talk about Jane Goodall, you know, Jane Goodall, showed us the piece of how important it is to honor every single species on the planet.

She gave us a piece and she just chose to go in with one specific piece. So I think right now in this time, I'm trying to gather pieces of what the power to gather culture would look like because we've never really fully lived in that culture. But what to me, the excitement that this moment has provided is now I think people are steady. But it's not going to be a plug and play. We need to go find the pieces and then start amplifying that. No, and I think it's exactly right. I think that's a beautiful metaphor because I think the systems that we have can no longer really be trusted. They need to be retooled and rebuilt, and whereas they might have been sort of like heavy infrastructure before, now we get to

construct them in new ways. And so I think it's like, what's the vision? And, exactly that. How do we achieve this rather than iterate our way towards something someday, but to actually. And so that's where I get excited, where I'm like, this is not fun, this moment. And I had this man, I don't know if you've ever encountered Jamil Zaki. He's a professor at Stanford. He wrote this book called The War in Kindness and Hope for Cynics. And essentially his point is that after sort of the robber baron era where we had similar levels of inequity, class inequity and whatnot, like it actually looks quite similar to this moment that we saw over the span of 20 years,

maybe, just like the most sweeping amount of progressive. It sort of built this version of our government, income tax, and the Food and Drug Administration, and all sorts of branches of government that we've come to. really rely on. And so I think we'll see something on the other side of this as well that will be a nod or at least sort of like the box of the puzzle pointing us towards what this looks like. And I'm excited. Yeah, me too. I know. Literally the two weeks I went into the Epstein, Epstein files, I had so many people tell me, what are you doing, Mindy? And I was like,

I want to understand this so we don't repeat it. There's, that's, we have. We have. to understand it so we don't repeat it. And it was literally, you know, maybe I should write a thank you to Les Wexter. Well, and it's like, it's such a horrible visceral experience. I haven't done it to the depth that you have, but I've definitely spent some time in there. And it's also like so banal, you know, and so dumb. And you're looking at these emails and you're like, what is happening? You know? Yes. It's, it's wild. And you're such a strong man. that you're going to harm children, like, okay, that's a big strong man, like what the take,

you're going to prey on the weakest of everybody on the planet? That's insane. So, yeah. Well, I'm super happy that I've met my optimistic match here. This is so fun. I don't think we talked enough about autoimmune disease. I have a lot of questions. Oh, you do. Oh, you do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what? I'm, you know, I'm a migraine disorder. Oh, so you're these statistics. Yes, yes. Well, you know what? I will say, and this kind of sums up everything that we're talking about, is I am a believer that the body keeps the score. And I do believe that we accumulate traumas throughout our life that start to play out in our health, especially as we age. And I can tell you that I've

spent so much time putting my health as a priority through the foods and movement and detoxing and all that that and where I've landed now is the greatest thing I can do for my body health is to understand my childhood and I've gone I'm I'm working with a therapist like I said I've been doing psychedelic journeys going into the programming of Mindy and how does that relate to not just the way I present in the world but to what my body has stored so when we look at autoimmune when we look at migraines, when we look at thyroid, every single thyroid patient I ever had, I always said, what do you need to express? What do you not saying?

And I think this is why I can't keep talking about food right now. It's too potent of a moment. We have to look at these conditions and see what we have repressed and how we can start to heal it. And so much of it comes through that childhood lens. Yeah. And I think to your point where you even open the conversation, because I think a lot of people get scared to do that work because they don't want to locate the blame on their parents,

or it's just too close. But culture is far more dominant than any familial structure. And so the way that you were programmed or I was programmed by the limited two and Victoria's Secret and the buckle, right, at the mall is deep. You can't parent. Your parents could never protect you from that. And then, of course, there's all the familial and direct stuff that we experience. But I don't think that we've done a good job historically of really wrestling with what all that cultural programming has done to shape who we think that we are. My feeling is that we've hit this really powerful moment, really powerful. And I love the way you say.

It's so painful. But as we know, so many things are beautiful that really get expressed out of pain. which is why this conversation became such an important one for me to have for my audience because I have watched women who eat perfectly, exercise perfectly, do everything perfectly, and her health is still off. And this is where we have to go into the nuance of conversations like we just had to see where the oppression happened, where you've pushed down the resentment because that is all going to show up at some point in your life.

whether it shows up as a symptom or it breaks a marriage apart or it shows up as an inability to launch your career. There's so much of that pushing down as women that we've had to do that is only hurting us and we need to let it out now. Yeah. Well, thank you for all your work in the world. No, thank you. No, this is fun. I've been a fan for a while. I listen to your podcast. I watch you on socials. I love what you stand for. Thank you. So I haven't fully, you know, gone into on our best behavior. So I'm going there next. Yeah. So, and I'm loving your substack, what you're doing over there. So we're more powerful together. So keep up. Yes, we are. I'm excited to know you. And I'm sure we'll like make some trouble together. Yeah, let's do that. That sounds great.

Yeah. So where are people, I know you're not, this is so funny because you're not promoting anything. But where do people find you? Like, what's your favorite socials that you dance around on? I mean, the place where I would love people to join me is probably on my podcast, pulling the thread, which is probably a really good compliment to yours. I don't really do physical wellness anymore, but it's spirituality and culture and sort of how that relationships, mental health, et cetera, and how that sort of lands in us. Yeah, and then I have my newsletter at my substack.

and I'm on Instagram at Elise Lunan. I do think, you know, for the audience listening, I really think we need to, and I've been saying this for a while, we need to train our brains to enjoy long format content like podcasts. We really need to get back to that and out of the 92nd little reels because that also is training us to think like everybody else and not like ourselves, whereas you can listen to a conversation like this and you can pull one thing out and go, okay, this works for me, but maybe these things don't work for me because you're seeing the conversation and more of a totality. Yeah. I was just talking to a friend about this too in the context of AI. And, you know,

we're all understandably worried, right? And she was like, how am I going to have a livelihood if people can just go to chat GPT? And I was like, well, you're offering, she's a podcaster. You're like, you're offering something much deeper. And also, I think that it will make us more human. But what you're describing, that cognitive firing, pulling threads, synthesizing, making connections, that's like our brain exercise, right? That is the most important thing we can do for our cognitive health, and we can't stop doing that. And I think that will become more human and more pronounced. Like we can't let AI do all of our processing for us. Yeah.

It's a great assistant on some arduous tasks. It is. Yeah. Yeah. But don't let it think for you. I don't think, and I think that's the problem with any social media or even a conversation like this. Like, you know, this is why I loved what you said, the end of the guru energy.

I tell my people all the time, I'm presenting information to you. You decide if it's right for you. You know how many, do you know how many, like, arguments I've had to, like, face where people are like, when should I, you know, this influencer says don't skip breakfast. And you say skip breakfast. and I don't know who to believe. I'm like, what do you think? And how does your body feel?

Yeah. I'm like, what? We're going to argue over her saying, don't skip breakfast, and me skip breakfast. Like, this is insane. So, but this is back at outsourcing. It's like, I love, I'm actually going to do a podcast or a YouTube video just on the death of the guru and how the guru culture, what it has cost women, not just financially, but physically. because I think another beautiful moment of the right now is that we don't know who to turn to

so guess what we can turn to ourselves ourselves this woman I work with Carissa who's the spiritual teacher but she says too and I think this is so helpful when we think about our knowing and our intuition she's like intuition it has two petals one is inspiration and two is discernment and And like within your intuitive mind, it is like that dual process of taking stuff in, that inspiration, and then exercising your discernment. And so it's exactly that. It's like, does this feel resonant, dissonant, doesn't feel good, not a bit of me. I watch some of a little violent.

He's a bit of me. I haven't geeked out on that yet. Oh, it's a scene. Okay. I just lost all credibility. Yeah, but it's okay. We can edit that one out. No, it doesn't.

You're like this sophisticated, like, author with all these, like, philosophical ideas. And then you throw that down. Carol Gilligan, love Ireland. British version. Oh, my God, so good. Well, thank you, Elise. I really appreciate the conversation. And I hope we have more.

This was really beautiful. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.