“The work that I do helping people exit these groups, it isn’t about persuading them to leave,” says mental health counselor Steven Hassan. “It’s teaching them how the mind works, teaching them about social psychology and hypnosis, which helps them see whether or not they have been co-opted.” Hassan is a leading expert on mind control and hypnosis and the author of The Cult of Trump. For the past forty years, he’s drawn on his own experience as a former Moonie to help people step out of controll...
Oct 20, 2020•57 min
Brian Muraresku—author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name —spent twelve years entrenched in connecting the dots between the use of mind-altering drugs and the foundation of Christianity as we know it today. Many of us are familiar with the holy wine present at ancient religious celebrations. But what was actually in that wine? Was it anything like the wine we drink today? Muraresku says the evidence suggests it was very different—that the wine was routinely m...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 8 min
GP catches up with her friend Kate Hudson, and true to form, they cover a lot of ground. They talk about being girl moms, what it looks like to own your trauma, and how, at this stage in her life, Hudson creates sustaining relationships. “It’s not fun to work through the pain—it sucks. And it definitely feels like it’s easier to avoid it,” Hudson says. “But we know that the more you avoid it, the worse it festers.” They also chat about how she’s created authentic and successful brands (like Fabl...
Oct 13, 2020•42 min
“It’s the possibility of greater change that rejuvenates me,” says Michele Harper, MD. “That’s what makes it possible for me to keep going.” Harper is an emergency room physician who has worked as chief resident at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and in the emergency department at the VA medical center in Philadelphia. She is also the author of The Beauty in Breaking. Today, she joins host Elise Loehnen to share how she manages the emotional strain of being witness to so much suffering, what...
Oct 08, 2020•42 min
Author Toni Jensen joined us for the September edition of goop Book Club to talk about her first memoir, Carry , which traces her Métis roots, her childhood in rural Iowa, her closest relationships, and the classrooms she’s inhabited around the country as a student and a teacher. In this conversation with Elise Loehnen, Jensen talks about making peace with childhood trauma, her complex relationship with gun culture, the staggering injustices forced on Indigenous women, the stereotypes that preva...
Oct 06, 2020•49 min
Laura Wasser is a family law expert, a divorce attorney, and the founder of It’s Over Easy, a platform that provides tools to help families navigating divorce. She joins host Elise Loehnen to talk about how people can prepare for the best and the worst in a relationship, whether or not she thinks prenups serve a partnership, if the years she’s spent in this field have changed her views on marriage, and how she’s remained family with her exes. Wasser also shares her tips on what to look for in an...
Oct 01, 2020•44 min
David Sheff is a journalist and the author of the number one New York Times –bestselling book Beautiful Boy . Sheff joins us to talk about an incredible man and the subject of his latest book, The Buddhist on Death Row : Jarvis Jay Masters’s childhood was marred by severe trauma that sent him down a path of violence and into San Quentin. In 1990, while in prison, Masters was set up for the murder of a guard, which landed him on death row. On the recommendation of a criminal investigator working ...
Sep 29, 2020•52 min
Ambassador Susan Rice has had an impressive career in service and government as a diplomat, policy advisor, and public official. She served throughout the Clinton administration, becoming one of the nation’s youngest secretaries of state, and later, became one of President Obama’s most trusted advisors. After years of speaking on behalf of presidents and the country, Rice finally shares her incredible story, in her own words, in her book Tough Love —and today, in her conversation with GP. One of...
Sep 24, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Many people find it difficult to exercise self-compassion, in part because we fear that being tender with ourselves will make us lose our edge. But Kristin Neff, PhD—who wrote Self-Compassion and The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook and is steeped in the field’s research—says that couldn’t be further from the truth: “Here’s the thing with self-compassion—our goals are just as high. But when we fail to meet our goals, we’re more likely to pick ourselves up and try again.” Today, Neff explains the...
Sep 22, 2020•43 min
“Each of us, in our own infinite precious particularity, will be led to what’s to be done next in our own time and space,” says Cynthia Bourgeault. The modern-day mystic and Episcopal priest is the author of several brilliant books, including Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm . Today, she joins us to discuss a question that comes forth for many of us at some point: Are we all just irrelevant specs? Does our life actually have meaning? According to Bourgeault, while hu...
Sep 17, 2020•51 min
Jay Shetty, author of the new book Think Like a Monk , is in part known as a former monk. Now, he serves as a coach, helping people identify and live out their purpose. He joined GP to talk about why many of us have never really spent time by ourselves, with ourselves—and what can happen when we do. Shetty has a different way of thinking about compassion for self and compassion for others; and it involves not devaluing or belittling pain. He also has a clarifying way of looking at the fine line ...
Sep 15, 2020•55 min
“I grew up with this intense fear of failure,” says Cathy Park Hong. “And in retrospect, I can understand why my parents instilled that in me—because for them, there was no safety net.” Hong is a writer, a professor at Rutgers-Newark University, and the author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning . It’s a book about family, identity, culture, and self-worth. Hong joins us today to talk about the parts of the Asian American experience that are often left out of the mainstream. She talks...
Sep 10, 2020•43 min
“There is so much hurt that doesn’t have to remain unhealed,” says Molly Howes, PhD. “A good apology can go the distance to lessen that pain.” Howes is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist and the author of A Good Apology: Four Steps to Make Things Right . Many of us are bad at apologizing, which according to Howes, is not for lack of care, but because we may have a misunderstanding of what it takes to make both parties feel whole. Howes says a good apology requires listening rather than just...
Sep 08, 2020•47 min
“Most of the diseases that we experience are not inevitable,” says Bruce Lanphear, MD. “They’re preventable.” Lanphear is a clinician scientist at the Child & Family Research Institute, BC Children’s Hospital, and a professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He’s spent the majority of his career exploring how environmental factors like toxic chemicals, pollutants, and contaminants can impact our health. Today, he explains the challenges of proving ca...
Sep 03, 2020•47 min
We often view moments of serendipity, or happy accidents, as situations that we play no part in and can't control or influence. But author Christian Busch, PhD, believes that luck may not always be circumstantial—and that by training ourselves to see something in the unexpected, we can make those accidents more meaningful. Which is the subject of his book, The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck . Busch is the director of the Global Economy Program at New York Universi...
Sep 01, 2020•39 min
You’ve probably been fed the myth that your life will generally follow a linear path, with maybe a midlife crisis and a few other upheavals thrown in along the way. But in reality, you’ve probably experienced more big transitions, or “lifequakes,” as author Bruce Feiler calls them. For his book Life Is in the Transitions , Feiler spent a year exploring how people move through these moments. What he learned is that although the changes can be unpredictable, there are patterns to be found in how w...
Aug 27, 2020•42 min
Gordon Neufeld is a developmental psychologist and the author of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers . In his forty-plus years studying child development, a few common threads have emerged. According to Neufeld, parents tend to be hyperfocused on socializing their children in order for them to be well liked and have plenty of friends. This good intention can cause children to become peer-attached—meaning they look to their peers instead of the adults in their lives f...
Aug 25, 2020•44 min
GP talks with her friend Cameron Diaz about the best part of turning forty, what affects our capacity to be intimate, taking responsibility for who you are, and the launch of Avaline, Diaz’s organic wine line. Diaz explains why she pivoted away from her acting career, what happened after she decided to start over, and how she learned a surprising amount about herself in the early days of her relationship with her husband. “In my forties, I realized I need to be quicker to identify the things I s...
Aug 20, 2020•40 min
In the medical community, miraculous recoveries are typically dismissed as flukes and outliers. Because they can’t be explained within the constructs of typical modern care, they end up in the dustbin. But some doctors, like today’s guest Jeffrey Rediger, MD, believe that this is a grave mistake and that our insistence on clinging to old systems and beliefs leaves much lifesaving science out. Rediger, who is on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and is the director of McLean Hospital SE, has ...
Aug 18, 2020•47 min
Tom Philpott is a veteran journalist, a former farmer, and the current food and agriculture correspondent for Mother Jones . Philpott has spent years researching how and why American agriculture has gone so disastrously wrong and all the ways our political and economic infrastructure exacerbated its downfall. But as grim as the situation is now, Philpott believes there is much to be hopeful about—including the many farmers and communities who are paving the way for change and laying the groundwo...
Aug 13, 2020•56 min
Dolly Chugh is a psychologist and professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU. She studies how—and why—most of us, however well-intended, are still prone to race and gender bias, as well as what she calls “bounded ethicality,” which are the systemic, unethical behaviors we engage in without awareness. For example, Chugh believes that being an ally isn’t about being a “good” person—and that our singular focus on goodness is a big part of the problem. Instead, she says, we should be constantl...
Aug 11, 2020•53 min
Mark Wolynn is the director of the Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. The focus of his work is healing trauma. Wolynn believes that the traumas of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents can live on in us—particularly if they are unresolved. If you’re triggered by something and can’t figure out why, Wolynn says the answer might lie in your family history. He wrote a book about it, called It Didn’t Start with You. Today, Wolynn talks with host Elise Loehnen about the ...
Aug 06, 2020•50 min
David Wallace-Wells is a lifelong New Yorker. He is not a lifelong environmentalist—“at all,” he says. He came of age in the ’90s, drank a lot of “that development, globalization, neoliberal Kool-Aid and really felt the world was getting better and richer.” But learning more about climate change scrambled a lot of his assumptions about the world and our place in it. Today, Wallace-Wells is a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine and the author of the critically acclaimed number one Ne...
Aug 04, 2020•51 min
“That taboo dark energy around our sexuality can be a place of great expansion,” says somatic sexologist andeducator Jaiya, who has spent the last two decades studying what turns people on. Jaiya developed something called the Erotic Blueprint, an arousal map that reveals your specific erotic language—sensual, sexual, kinky, energetic, or shapeshifter. She explains how we can discover our own language, better understand a partner’s language, and use this road map to embrace and fulfill our desir...
Jul 30, 2020•58 min
“When you push people to be colorblind, not only are you pushing them to not see color; you’re pushing them to not see the harm that comes from color,” says Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD. Eberhardt is a social psychologist, a Stanford professor, and the author of Biased , a thoroughly researched, compelling, and comprehensive book on uncovering prejudice and addressing it. Everyone is affected by racial bias, says Eberhardt, but you can learn to override it. Today, she shares critical facts, tools, an...
Jul 28, 2020•58 min
“The urge to absolve oneself is a kind of low-level thing where we’re trying to get away from our own complicity,” says psychiatrist Mark Epstein, MD. Epstein is the author of Advice Not Given , and his work lies at the intersection of Buddhism and psychotherapy. Today, he’s teaching us about what motivates people and what happens when we let guilt guide our decision-making. He also teaches us about coping with feelings of isolation, confronting complicity, working our way back to the present wh...
Jul 23, 2020•49 min
“Whatever is emerging, we want to help people explore it and experience it,” says Rick Doblin. GP interviewed the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) about the impact MDMA-assisted psychotherapy may have on PTSD, eating disorders, alcoholism, and other forms of trauma. Doblin explains the landscape of psychedelic research, how it’s changed, and how close we may be to making MDMA-assisted psychotherapy a legal prescription treatment f...
Jul 21, 2020•55 min
“The more logical you are in your approach to your sleep, the more you’re going to screw it up,” says sleep specialist Rafael Pelayo, MD. Pelayo is a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine and the author of the forthcoming book How to Sleep , which will be published in December 2020. Today, Pelayo answers our most pressing sleep questions: What’s really happening when we’re dreaming? Why do we sleep? Can we catch up on slee...
Jul 16, 2020•50 min
“If you get to some of the fundamental issues that are causing the unrest, you don’t need these Band-Aids,” says Julie Holland, a psychiatrist who specializes in psychopharmacology. Holland is the author of Weekends at Bellevue , Moody Bitches , and most recently, Good Chemistry . Today, she’s explaining the science of connection—with self, with partners, with family, with the cosmos. Holland has researched and studied what good chemistry looks like in the body and how someone can develop it usi...
Jul 14, 2020•53 min
“We have all these mini minds that interact all the time,” says Richard Schwartz, PhD, the founder of the Internal Family Systems Institute. Schwartz believes that different subpersonalities—which he calls parts—make up the capital- S Self. In his audiobook Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts, Schwartz explains how traumas (minor or major) can cause certain parts to deviate from their natural state. He also explains why people cast different parts of themselves into certain roles, which he identif...
Jul 09, 2020•50 min
