The goop Podcast

“Courage is not an absence of fear,” says Mellody Hobson, co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments. “It’s overcoming it.” Hobson, who experienced financial instability throughout her childhood, set out to understand money. And once she did, she decided to spread that knowledge to help others feel financially empowered. Hobson believes in the power of women: When we surrender our dreams of being rescued by someone else, we realize how powerful we can become. She also believes that diversity isn’t just “the right thing to do.” Creating and fostering a more diverse workplace, where your conference rooms reflect the world outside, is the smart thing to do. Together with Loehnen, Hobson explores how we can see, understand, and embrace difference—and at the same time, not allow difference to influence how we consider a person. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

Sophia Bush—actor, activist, and host of the podcast Work in Progress—joined Elise Loehnen on stage at the last In goop Health summit of the year. “You’re very often reduced to the thing that’s the least interesting about you,” Bush said, “because it makes other people feel comfortable when they’re in the presence of successful women.” It can be scary to leave the box that other people put you in. It can be intimidating to use your voice or platform for social change. And it can be challenging to really listen to people you disagree with. But Bush proves that this is all also thrilling, important, and incredibly rewarding. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“I felt empty and alone,” says Demi Moore, “but oddly not lonely.” The actor and author of the new memoir Inside Out joins GP to talk about what happened after the things she had been hiding from “came spilling out.” Moore describes the process of becoming vulnerable and learning to identify the misperceptions we hold against ourselves and others. One of the biggest traps, says Moore, is needing to place blame. This can keep us from accountability, from forgiveness, from moving on. There is so much meaning to be found in our lives when we back away from binary thinking and allow ourselves to feel compassion for how complex we all are. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“How are you going to live your life in a way that is kind, and loving, and honest, and with integrity?” asks Sarah Hurwitz, former speechwriter for Michelle and Barack Obama and author of Here All Along. In her new book, Hurwitz rediscovered Judaism for herself, and today she shares some of the principles and traditions that could help anyone to create a more fulfilling life. She talks about different ways to feel spiritual, what it really means to tell the truth, and what she’s learned about gossiping. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

GP met functional medicine practitioner Alejandro Junger in 2007, and her journey into wellness was forever changed because of it. Junger, who founded the twenty-one-day Clean Program and wrote the bestselling book Clean, has a new seven-day detox protocol and accompanying book, Clean 7. And now he’s sitting down with GP to share what he’s learned about detoxification, intermittent fasting, and maneuvering around the modern inventions that tend to disrupt our body’s digestive processes and overall health. “We’re living in this interesting point in time where people want agency over their health,” says GP. Junger is the one of the healers helping us to make the most of it. (For more on Junger, listen to his goopfellas podcast episode on the roots of inflammation and head to The goop Podcast hub.)

“You don’t want to live on someone else’s fumes,” says Lisa Brennan-Jobs, author of Small Fry, abestselling memoir about growing up in Silicon Valley as the daughter of artist Chrisann Brennan and Apple legend Steve Jobs. Today, Brennan-Jobs and Elise Loehnen talk about the complicated feelings that often arise when we look back at our past—and about how we can sit with and process those feelings. They talk about learning to see our parents—and any human—as human, as multidimensional, as both good and flawed. “It’s hard for people to live their value system sometimes,” says Brennan-Jobs. But that doesn’t erase all the moments when they do. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“When you put on your clothes, how do you feel?” asks Ingrid Fetell Lee, designer and author of the brilliantly researched book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. Fetell Lee sits down with Elise Loehnen to explore how different sensory experiences can help us tap into our joy again. They talk about why we, as a society, tend to devalue sensory experiences and label anything that is bright and colorful as frivolous. Fetell Lee shares some fascinating studies, science, and stories that connect our physical senses to our behavior and thought patterns. And she shares the simple tools that we can all use to make our lives a little more vibrant. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“There are more and more academics and scientists becoming interested in matters that have to do with consciousness,” says Leslie Kean, journalist and author of Surviving Death. Kean joins chief content officer Elise Loehnen to talk about life’s greatest mysteries and the mounting evidence suggesting that consciousness is much bigger than our brains. They talk about how biology and spiritual meaning can and do coexist and what we can learn from psychic mediums. Kean shares fascinating stories about reincarnation and near-death experiences as well as a little bit about her coverage of UFOs (which she also wrote a book about). “The more I learn,” Kean says, “the more I realize how much I don’t know.” (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“I was fully stuck in this neurotic paradox,” says life coach Sasha Heinz, who has a PhD in developmental psychology. That paradox might be familiar: “I do what I don’t want to do, and I don’t do what I want to do.” In this episode, Heinz sits down with Elise Loehnen (who happens to be an old friend) to talk about breaking free from mental blocks. Our thoughts, Heinz reminds us, are optional. And typically the thing between us and the outcome we want is a mind-set gap. Heinz shows us that we don’t always have to react to life—that we have the capability to create our future, and even to blow our own minds. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“There is a source energy that runs through all of us that animates us,” says Jill Blakeway, acupuncturist and author of Energy Medicine. Today, Blakeway joins Elise Loehnen to talk about the integration of Eastern and Western medicine and what she’s come to understand about the power of acupuncture and different forms of energy healing. She explains what happens when our qi is blocked—dysfunction—and how we rebalance the body and the mind (often in relation to each other). And she shares incredible stories of healing and extraordinary studies (one about a machine that reacts to human thought) that will fascinate both believers and skeptics. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

Our cohosts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elise Loehnen, sit down with Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor—coauthors of She Said and the New York Times investigative journalists who won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Harvey Weinstein. As part of their research, Twohey and Kantor interviewed many women, GP among them. Today, these four women are having a different kind of conversation and reflecting on the stories behind the story. Their intimate back-and-forth is a poignant reminder of why we need to create and protect a culture in which we are all able to voice the truth. “I just want people to know that the powerful don’t always win, that facts can prevail, that stories matter,” says Kantor. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“There’s a space between people that we just have to take a risk and just leap and see how we can connect,” says Joel Salinas, Harvard Medical School neurologist and author of Mirror Touch. Salinas has mirror-touch synesthesia: He explains to host Elise Loehnen that he perceives his senses as mixed (i.e., he hears colors) and that he’s able to feel the physical and emotional sensations of other people—as if they are happening to him. Which is: wild. Loehnen asks him how this has changed his understanding of empathy and the ways we connect with other people. And he teaches us why we need boundaries—and how to set them. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“So much of the healing that can come to us, we can create for ourselves,” says James Gordon, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Transformation. Gordon is the founder and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a clinical professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown University. His work is redefining the way we think of trauma, which affects everyone over the course of a lifetime—physically, mentally, emotionally. Gordon takes us through a variety of healing techniques (from soft-belly breathing to something called autogenic training). And he shares the joy of what happens when we allow ourselves to cry, to laugh, to dance. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“We set quarter-lifers up to fail,” says psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock, “and then we make fun of them.” In her practice (called Quarter-Life Counseling), Byock primarily sees people in their twenties and thirties. Today, she sits down with chief content officer Elise Loehnen—a childhood friend—to talk about the universal experience of becoming an adult and trying to figure out who you are in the world. She explains what we’ve misunderstood about millennials—and every generation of young people that has come before them. And how we can all better grapple with the questions, both logical and spiritual, that tend to present themselves at quarter-life. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)

“The world isn’t so evil as people assume,” says Joel Stein, journalist, funnyman, and author of In Defense of Elitism. Stein joins chief content officer Elise Loehnen to talk about what he uncovered when he decided to investigate why people vote the way they do. And how he came to understand where people with very different voting behaviors were coming from. He explains his take on elitism, why a democracy doesn’t have to work best to be worth fighting for, and why he believes “there’s a healthy revolutionary attitude about questioning the people in power.” (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)