The Goop Podcast

In partnership with our friends at Ketel One Botanical There’s a lot we misunderstand about empathy, says Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of The War for Kindness. Which is good.In this episode, he’s talking with Elise about empathetic distress—why empathy doesn’t always mean taking on the pain or struggle of someone else, and why being empathic can be a joyous experience. He explains what keeps us from this kind of empathy and connection: often shame. And he teaches us about finding a language for our feelings: “The people who can name their emotions are also most effective at working with them.” His take-home point? Empathy isn’t something we are born with; it’s something we build. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Elizabeth Gilbert—beloved author of City of Girls; Eat, Pray, Love;and Big Magic—opened up In goop Health Los Angeles with GP. We cried. We laughed. They talked about creativity, spirituality, grief, and mothering. “I think of creativity as a relationship—not between self and self but between self and mystery,” says Gilbert. For Gilbert, the simplest way for us to connect with a force greater than ourselves is through creativity with a little c. (To be clear: This does not mean you need to be a writer or a self-described creative. There are a lot of ways to create in the world, which they get into.) Gilbert said one profound thing after another, but her perspective on the relationship between creativity and grief will stick with us forever. Creativity, Gilbert teaches, can get us through some hard moments. It can be a path to learning how to love, care, and mother ourselves. And it can help us find those strange jewels that the universe has buried within us. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn mo

What drives people to change, to heal, to reinvent themselves? On goopfellas, two friends who have become familiar with unlikely personal transformations have raw conversations with people who have experienced profound shifts in perspective and well-being.  Together, functional medicine practitioner Will Cole, DC, and chef Seamus Mullen get at the catalysts that bring people out of their dark night and into their purpose.  Each of their goopfellas guests- from athletes to actors to authors- is different.  But you'll likely see pieces of yourself in all their conversations, reflected in every one of their challenges.  New episodes every Wednesday.  Subscribe now and never miss an episode. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“What you appreciate, appreciates,” says Lynne Twist, global activist and author of The Soul of Money. What she means: When we let go of what we don’t really need, we find the freedom to turn our attention toward what we already have. Twist joined our chief content officer Elise Loehnen at our last In goop Health in Los Angeles for a conversation about our money culture—how it was created, why we buy into, the ways its failing to serve us, and how we can change it. Most of us, Twist finds, regardless of how much wealth we’ve amassed, have a strained relationship with money—which, often isn’t really about money. She tells us about the three toxic myths of scarcity and redefines our sense of prosperity and abundance. Having “enough” is not an amount, Twist says, but a state of being. She’s helping us all get there. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https:/

GP walked into one of Eddie Stern’s Ashtanga yoga classes in the village twenty years ago, and he changed her life forever. Since then, they’ve become good friends (Stern officiated GP’s wedding last year). In this intimate chat, they talk about those early days—when yoga was weird, when celebrities were sweating it out together at his school, when the consciousness in the culture shifted. They talk about Stern’s brilliant new book, One Simple Thing; the science behind yoga and breath; how emotions express themselves through the body; freeing ourselves (from ourselves); and building in a pause when we’re prone to freak out. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub and The Breathing App.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I was done with being a sick person,” says Seamus Mullen, award-winning New York City chef, cookbook author, avid cyclist—and cohost of our newest podcast, goopfellas. For several years, Mullen was in chronic pain. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, the medicine he relied on to suppress his symptoms often made him sick, and he became dependent on opioids. He was, he’ll tell you, chronically angry. After nearly dying in the hospital, Mullen realized he’d been given another chance. With that chance, he decided he needed to change his mind, stop seeing himself as a victim, and find a way to take whatever autonomy possible over his health. He found a functional medicine doctor (Frank Lipman) who became the quarterback in his healing process and bit by bit, Mullen reversed his illness. Today, he’s talking with his friend and our chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, about his extraordinary comeback story—which he would say isn’t really remarkable at all. “My journey is the same journey as millions of oth

“Before I can change your mind, I need to understand where your mind is,” says pro negotiator Daniel Shapiro. The founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, Shapiro has advised all sorts of people and organizations through conflict: families, CEOS, heads of state, Fortune 500 companies. He’s found that every conflict has a few things in common: Two sides typically get into conflict when they don’t feel appreciated by the other. And the way out of conflict is a dance that moves you toward a deeper understanding of the other side, which, Shapiro explains, “can really unlock emotional deadbolts in a relationship.” In this episode, Shapiro takes our chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, through one of her own wife-husband conflicts. They talk about accommodators versus confronters, what healthy confrontation looks like, how to deal (or not) with someone who is completely mired in conflict, how to set boundaries, and why the trivial is not trivial. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“The way people think will affect their health in a big way,” says Apostolos Lekkos, DO. As a physician, Lekkos splits his time between emergency medicine and a private practice in Santa Monica, California, where his patients think of him as a secret weapon (sorry for sharing!). Western medicine really works in the emergency room, Lekkos says. But when it comes to preventive care, chronic conditions, and optimizing health, he believes the system is broken. In this chat with Elise Loehnen (a patient and friend), Lekkos breaks down his functional approach to well-being. They talk about genetic testing and regulating genes that influence cholesterol, mood, and disease. They talk about nutrition testing and supplements. They talk about leaky gut, autoimmunity, what to eat—and how to take power over your own health wherever you are on the spectrum. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about

Two decades ago, GP read Anatomy of the Spirit for the first time. It’s a book she’s returned to again and again over the years. And now she’s met its incredibly wise author: Caroline Myss joined GP on stage at In goop Health for a conversation on the mind-body-spirit connection. There, GP asked Myss about being a medical intuitive (Myss says we’re all born medically intuitive), the difference between intuition and hypochondria, how the chakras correspond to health and dis-ease, and how we can speak the truth—to ourselves. When we don’t, Myss says, we end up creating false narratives: “Then you’re going to live a lie. It takes a lot of effort to live a lie.” And at the very end of their chat: Myss tells GP the one thing that she believes is the most powerful tool we have for healing. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Part of the reason why humans suffer is that we don’t honor the expression of these so-called weak emotions—meaning sadness, fear, and shame,” says psychiatrist Will Siu. In this moving conversation with new friend and goop chief content officer Elise Loehnen, Siu takes us through his experiences with loneliness and depression—both personally and as a clinician. Siu is educated by way of UC Irvine, UCLA medical school, the NIH, Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital. In other words: He’s a person that society deemed successful—and yet as he vulnerably explains, he still struggled. Today, Siu shares paths toward healing and connection, including what he’s learned from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, or as he puts it, psychedelic-assisted humanity. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kim John Payne’s work focuses on the feeling of overwhelm that a lot of us walk around with today. As an educator, school consultant, and family counselor, Payne helps people simplify their lives (which he writes about in Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids). People often misunderstand what it means to have a balanced life, says Payne. They’ll tell him that they’d like more time to be creative and to connect with others, and that they’d love to stop overscheduling their kids—but that’s not the world we live in and thus it’s unrealistic and unproductive. In Payne’s mind, this is a major misjudgment. We prepare our kids and ourselves for a world that is far more structured than it is today and than it will be tomorrow. In this chat, Payne makes a case against child-centered homes and shows us how to create the value-centered homes that he believes could change the culture for all of us. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more a

“We've turned ourselves just into these consumers,” says David de Rothschild. “We've lost sight of the fact that we're citizens.” De Rothschild, who calls himself an “optimistic pessimist” is a world adventurer and environmental activist. He once set sail across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, riding on a 60-foot catamaran built from thousands of reclaimed plastic bottles. You might think he’d tell us to give up all our material desires and wants—but he has them, too. And his most profound advice starts here: Be willing to unlearn, to move from fear to curiosity, to remember the magic of nature. It’s possible, he believes, to engineer ourselves out of our mess, to reimagine profit, to reframe companies as communities, and to reclaim our role as citizens of the world. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

P brought a couple friends—Demi Moore and Arianna Huffington—together for a chat at In goop Health in New York City. They talked a little bit about wellness routines and parenting advice. And a lot about how they’ve defined and redefined success throughout their lives and careers, which has sometimes required them to ditch society’s measuring stick. “I'm now convinced that failure is such an incredible way to build our resilience and to build our own inner strength,” said Huffington. “We won't be the same people without the failures along the way.” For Moore, the most important thing she thinks she’ll ever do in her life is the inner work. What does that look like? All three women weigh in. (See The goop Podcast hub for more.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I was craving the straight and narrow path that I had arbitrarily created for myself without really any experience to base it upon,” Valerie Jarrett says. “It’s just what I thought should make me happy.” And then Jarrett hit a wall. In this intimate chat with our chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, Jarrett shares the path she took from a law firm in Chicago to become Barack Obama’s senior advisor in the White House and family confidante. She talks about being a single mom and how she learned to admit when life was hard, ask for help, and stop trying to be so perfect. Her stories show a different, more adventurous, and hopeful way to build a life of purpose—however you define purpose in your own life. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub and Jarrett’s new book, Finding My Voice.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Wellness is not a state of mind,” Emily Nagoski says. “It is not coming to a place of loving yourself. Wellness is a state of action. It is the freedom to move through the natural cycles of the stress response.” Nagoski—author of Come As You Are—began her work as a sex educator and went on to earn an MS in counseling and a PhD in health behavior. Her new book, Burnout, explains why women experience burnout differently than men—and how we can all avoid it. This is one of those rare conversations about stress that didn’t make us…stressed. It did make us laugh. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I call shame the twenty-ton shield,” says Brené Brown. “It's a defense mechanism—very classic—that we carry in order to protect ourselves from getting hurt. But what it actually does is protect us from being seen.” Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, a New York Times–bestselling author (read her latest, Dare to Lead), and the star of a new Netflix special, The Call to Courage. In this chat, she and GP talk about courage, which Brown says is teachable and possible to cultivate only from a place of vulnerability. They talk about being perfectionists: “Where perfectionism is driving, your shame is riding shotgun,” says Brown. And they talk about empathy—as a tool for combating shame internally and for stepping beyond yourself to connect with and lead others. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Laura Day and Laura Lynne Jackson are renowned psychic mediums and friends. They both joined our chief content officer Elise Loehnen (another friend) at our last In goop Health summit. “Everybody thinks they need to come to someone like me or Laura to get their information,” said Jackson. “And the truth is you don't.” Day and Jackson work differently, but this is where they agree: Everybody has intuitive abilities, which routinely get dismissed. In this chat, they explain how to notice, listen to, test, and document your intuition so that you can use it as a tool to help you with your relationships, career, and daily routine. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The spiritual legend best known as Swamiji went to New Jersey—and so did our chief content officer Elise Loehnen. Swamiji created and runs the Vedanta Institute in Mumbai. Vedanta is the study of Vedic tests and translates to “the end of knowledge.” At the institute, and now throughout the world, his scholars explore why so many of us are so unhappy. In the world of Vedanta, they believe that there is a distinction between the mind and the intellect—and that the intellect should not be confused with intelligence. Because we do not exercise our intellects to control our minds, we are run by our likes and dislikes. We are controlled by our attachments and our emotions, the theory goes. How do we break free? Swamiji tells Elise—after taking her to the mat a couple of times. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.) To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“To be a helpable person seems counterintuitive,” says Bonnie St. John. “I’m the one-legged black woman. You know, I spent my whole life proving that I could do it all myself.” St. John is the first African American to ever win medals in winter Olympic competition, taking home a silver and two bronzes at the 1984 Paralympics. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. Earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Served in the White House as a director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton administration. “I was such a drive-yourself-until-you-drop person,” she says. Until she learned a different paradigm for high performance—one that was sustainable, with recoveries built in along the way. It’s not about pulling the throttle back, says St. John; when you follow her method, you’re able to do more. She calls it micro-resilience: “little hacks that have a big impact.” And in this episode, we get her favorite strategies and tools for changing pessimistic viewpoints, prioritizing, making decisions, workin

“We’ve wiped out 40 percent of biology on earth in just fifty years,” says Zach Bush, MD. “And yet that Mother Earth keeps reaching out saying: Are you sure you don't want to keep playing? Because we could have some fun together.” For Bush, the health of our soil microbiome is the single most potent factor determining how healthy—or unhealthy—we are. What makes Bush’s case particularly compelling is the unlikely path he took to realizing it: Bush is a board-certified physician with a background in internal medicine, endocrinology and metabolism, and hospice and palliative care. He thought he’d spend his whole life in academia, until a curveball took him to a nutrition center in rural Virginia. There, everything Bush “knew” about nutrition and the drivers of disease and medicine...broke. Slowly, he began to put together the pieces, which told a new story that felt both surprising and intuitive to him. Today, Bush shares that story, along with the steps we can take to move from chemical farming toward regenerat