Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“The NRA and gun owners then signified, you know, the sort of comradery, responsibility, safety, sort of a bygone, I don't know, sort of an Americana, right? The Campbell soup can sort of Americana. I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about the impending demise of the Republic, or how evil every Democrat was, or how we should hate our neighbors, or how we should arm ourselves for an eventual civil war or an insurrection. That was never, that was never a part of my upbringing.” 

So says Ryan Busse, author of GUNFIGHT: MY BATTLE AGAINST THE INDUSTRY THAT RADICALIZED AMERICA. Busse, who spent decades running gun sales for Kimber in Whitefish, Montana, which focused, until recently, on crafting hunting rifles and other firearms for sportsmen, quit his job last year after he realized that his dreams of transforming the gun industry from inside—or at least being a consistent voice of reason and morality—were fantasy. He watched as the industry he used to love became increasingly toxic, distorted, and militant.

In his book, which is a fascinating look at the forces within the NRA and the way they’ve radicalized America, he deftly explains all the reasons we are where we are today: Where our children are forced to practice active shooter drills at school, and where other kids—like 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse—can buy a semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle and kill two people while wounding another. And then be acquitted for self-defense. As he argues, we are on the brink of a Civil War with gun-owning, far Right militants. I know we’re scared, and he believes we have every reason to be.

Like Busse, I’m also from Montana, and know many people who hunt—growing up, guns were present but never abundant. Now, responsible gun owners are being pushed aside by militant couch commandos, who are desperate, to quote Busse, “to shoot a democrat.” 

While Busse is no longer in the industry, he is firmly in the movement for common sense gun laws, arguing that our best chance for reform is to bring hunters and sportsmen on-side. As he explains, it can be done—and we can bring the NRA to its knees. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Exploring the cultural connection to guns…(12:12)
• Hate, conspiracy, national tragedies and gun sales…(16:56)
• Profiting off of fear…(32:06)
• What do we do?...(40:04)

MORE FROM RYAN BUSSE

Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America

Ryan Busse's Website

Follow Ryan on Twitter and on Instagram

DIG DEEPER:

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - Michael Pollan

FBI background checks, a proxy for gun sales, surged in 2020 - The Economist, January 2021

GET INVOLVED:

Mom’s Demand Action

Everytown for Gun Safety

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Since she was a little girl, Carissa Schumacher has always seen and spoken to dead people. She pushed all of that aside, went to Brown and got her Neuroscience Degree, tried to have a normal life and career, and then Spirit made the call and she put that down and started working as an empathic intuitive and forensic psychic medium. She led retreats in Sedona, and worked with clients around the world, including doing a lot of pro bono work on crimes. This was all well and good until October 2019, around the time when I first met her. When Carissa was little an angelic presence told her she would be a channel for Yeshua of Nazareth, which she didn't think about much at the time. She wasn't raised in a religious household, she didn't even know what it meant. But then Yeshau “birthed” in her channel.

This means that while she was leading a retreat in Sedona, Yeshua took over her body, and voice, and gave a transmission, or a teaching. Yeshua, as you might've guessed, is Jesus. If it sounds wild, it is. I have been in the presence of Carissa while she's channeling Yeshua many times now. And it is unlike anything I've ever experienced before. I would say that it's incredible, but they've also been some of the most grounded moments of my life. Yeshua is funny, brilliant, kind—an ascended master like Buddha or Lao Tzu. And as he talks, you can feel the codex is of energy behind his words. The transmissions also are not particularly religious. If that makes sense, as he has remarked, he never wanted a church in his name. And the Bible is a series of stories. Some that are instructive, some that are parables, many told by people who never knew him.

Last year. He asked Carissa to turn on her recorder for several days and he brought forth The Freedom Transmissions, a series of teachings about the year that we just experienced, plus how to move forward. It is a beautiful book you can open and flip to almost any page and find something of resonance and need. In today's conversation, we talk about The Freedom Transmissions, as well as other moments from Yeshua transmissions I've heard over the years, including about the one thing that humans actually own, which is time. We talk about co-creation. We talk about the true definition of atonement, and we talk about the idea of freedom and how hard it is to make the leap from the cage. As she says, she is not Yeshua, just one of his channels and a student alongside the rest of us, but she still has a brilliant mind. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Connecting to consciousness to change the world…(17:10)
• Repentance, humility, and perfection…(38:01)
• Out of servitude through suffering, into servitude through joy…(47:56) 
• Planting seeds of faith, forgiveness, and freedom…(1:07:49)

MORE FROM CARISSA:

The Book’s Website

The Freedom Transmissions

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Heather McGhee is a designer of, and advocate for, solutions to inequality in America. We discuss her New York Times bestselling book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, in which she seeks to push us all past zero-sum thinking, or the idea that if you get something you want or need, it must mean that I get less. In fact, she points to numerous examples throughout history that show how this framework has made our society more cruel and poorer than it otherwise might be. Heather pushes us to recognize the fingerprints of racism in all of our core dysfunctions, from climate change, to the roots of the financial crisis, to the ongoing fight for universal healthcare. 

“We must stop the siloed thinking that racism is great for white people and bad for people of color,” Heather says, “if you pull that thread, that’s exactly the same zero sum logic racists hold, that progress for people of color has to come at the expense of white people, that we are at odds, fighting over crumbs…there has to be a better paradigm of mutual benefit.” The Sum of Us is a story of why “drained pool politics”—an idea named after the fact that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, many towns chose to fill in their public pools and lose access to this social good rather than integrate them and share them with Black people—is costing everyone, in ongoing ways. She offers that with multiracial coalitions we can subvert fear mongering about an equitable society and fight for a more prosperous nation for all. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Chronicling the disappearance of public goods and the retreat from public life following the New Deal (Approx. 8:26)
• Investigating the roots of zero sum thinking, finding fingerprints of racism in all of our core disfunction (Approx. 35:22)
• Fighting for solidarity dividends (Approx. 36:35)

MORE FROM HEATHER MCGHEE

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together 

Heather McGhee's Website

Follow Heather on Twitter and on Instagram

HEATHER’S PICKS:

Floodlines - The Story of an Unnatural Disaster Hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

The City We Became - N. K. Jemisin

DIG DEEPER:

Support for Government Guaranteed Job and Standard of Living by Demographic Group - the ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior

Which racial/ethnic groups care most about climate change? - Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

2021 Voting Laws Round Up - the Brennan Center for Justice

GET INVOLVED:

Check Your Voter Registration Status, Register to Vote, Find Your Polling Place, and more

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“We are living in a world that primes us all for the problem of addiction. So even though some people come into this world more vulnerable than others, simply being alive in the world today has made us all vulnerable to the problem of addiction,” so says our guest today, Dr. Anna Lembke. Dr. Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. An expert in all things addiction, Dr. Lembke has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries; she sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various Congressional Committees, and does so all while maintaining a thriving clinical practice. 

On today’s episode, we discuss her instant New York Times Bestseller, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, which explores the many faces of addiction. Dr. Lembke notes that addiction is a spectrum disorder, and though we often attempt to otherize “addicts”, the exact same mental machinery engaged in so-called severe addiction is engaged in the compulsive over-consumption that afflicts many of us. We discuss the way in which our brain is wired to balance pleasure and pain and how to know when our consumption has crossed from healthy, recreational use to addictive, maladaptive use. Finally, Dr. Lembke leaves us with some strategies for recalibrating our neural-balance, including the perhaps counterintuitive remedy of exposing ourselves to pain in order to treat our pain. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Identifying the risk factors for addiction…(5:53)
• The balance between pleasure and pain…(11:45)
• The Dopamine Guideposts…(18:49) 
• Finding healing stories and re-calibrating the neuro-plasticity of the brain…(28:21)

MORE FROM ANNA LEMBKE:

Anna Lembke's Website

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop

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“I think it's very important to mention also, Elise, that even if a woman feels permission to be angry, that anger is such a tricky mischievous emotion that it's so difficult to know what our anger means or what to do with it. So we may know that we’re angry and anger activates us to, to act, to take a position, to do something, but our anger does not tell us what the real issue is, who is responsible for what, what is the best way to proceed with our anger…” So says psychotherapist Dr. Harriet Lerner. Lerner is known and beloved for her many best-selling books about women, family systems, and relationships, including the classic Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships, which we explore in today's episode. 

Lerner believes that anger is an essential, but oftentimes misunderstood and mismanaged emotion. She set out to write Dance of Anger to tackle female anger specifically, of which nothing had been written at that time. When women are discouraged from discussing their anger, she tells us, they lose a sense of self, as the pain of our anger preserves our dignity. We discuss the stereotype of the unloving, unlovable, and destructive angry woman, and the way in which female anger is only deemed acceptable when it is on the behalf of others.

Lerner leaves us with tips for beginning to work through our anger productively, starting with moving toward assertive self-definition without asking for permission, and ultimately becoming careful observers of our own role in the patterns that keep us stuck in anger so that we may make positive, lasting change on our own behalf. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The importance of anger…(5:25)
• Are you a nice lady or a bitch…(9:00)
• Working through anger productively…(21:40) 
• Moving towards self definition…(36:36)

MORE FROM HARRIET LERNER:

Harriet Lerner's Website

The Dance Of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Pattern of Intimate Relationships

The Dance Of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate

The Dance Of Intimacy: A Woman's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships

The Dance Of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to Be Your Best and Bravest Self

The Dance Of Deception: A Guide to Authenticity and Truth-Telling in Women's Relationships

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Our guest today is Dr. Riane Eisler, social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist, attorney and internationally bestselling author of many notable classics, including Sacred Pleasure and The Chalice and the Blade, which I read recently and LOVED—while it came out in the ‘80s, it is incredibly prescient—prophetic really—and more relevant than ever. In it, and all of her books, Riane explores the ways in which hierarchies of dominance—which are NOT our natural state—inform how we live now. “What we’ve been told is simply a false story of our past, of our present, and most importantly today, the possibilities for our future,” she explains. Dr. Eisler joins me today to discuss her newest work, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. In the book, Eisler implores us to awaken to the notion that injustice, inequality, violence, and domination do not tell the full story of human possibility. “We humans were really wired more for partnership than for domination,” she says. Guided by the ethos of partnership, Dr. Eisler’s work challenges each of us to play a role in the construction of a more equitable, more sustainable, and less violent world through investment in human infrastructure and a dedication to raising future generations by different scripts and constructs than those given to us. People’s minds can be changed, she reminds us, but a change in consciousness starts with the knowledge that there are different, better, possibilities.  

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Exploring caring economics, human infrastructure, and the alienation of caring labor (Approx. 5:09)
• The partnership model and the fight against sticky myths of domination (Approx. 11:00)
• Replumbing our dysfunctional operating system (Approx. 29:35)

MORE FROM RIANE EISLER:

Riane's Website

Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future

The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future

The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics

The Power of Partnership: Sevens Relationships That Will Change Your Life

Breaking Out of the Domination Trance: Building Foundations for a Safe, Equitable, Caring World

RIANE’S PICKS:

My Octopus Teacher - Netflix, 2020

Grandfather's Garden: Some Bedtime Stories for Little and Big Folk - David Loye

DIG DEEPER

More on Partnership Systems and the Partnerism Movement

Courses in Partnership - Changing Our Story, Changing Our Lives

Sexual Dimorphism in European Upper Paleolithic Cave Art - Dean Snow, Society for American Archaeology, 2013 

A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science - David Noble, 2013

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“Before our boys have learned to read, they have already read the stoic code of masculinity and are conforming to it.” says Terry Real, world-renowned family therapist, speaker, best-selling author and founder of the Relational Life Institute, where he offers workshops for couples, individuals, parents and therapists. He is also a dear friend. While he’s best known for his couples work, decades ago, he wrote the landmark book on male depression, which I cannot recommend enough. It’s called, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, and with it, Real established himself as one of the most respected voices in the treatment of men and the healing of their relationships with the world. In this episode, we talk about why depression is “illegal” for men, the cultural programming of boys, and forced detachment in the name of autonomy. Our culture of individualism, Real says, has done as much damage as our culture of patriarchy—leaving men little room for the type of connection and relationality that we humans live for. He leaves us with the steps for deprogramming ourselves from patriarchal thinking and parenting as well as the ways in which we can support the men in our lives in service of deeper connection and the pursuit of greater relational joy. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• Exploring Terry’s theory of male depression…(2:30)
• The cultural programming of boys…(12:50)
• Active trauma, passive trauma, and the severing of connection in the name of autonomy …(19:50) 
• Icarus syndrome and learning to find relational joy…(37:08)

MORE FROM TERRY REAL:

Terry's Website

I Don't Want To Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

How Can I Get Through To You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

The New Rules Of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work

Take Terry's Online Course - Staying in Love: The Art of Fierce Intimacy

DIG DEEPER:

Find an RLT Certified Therapist Near You 

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Our guest today is Dr. Sara Gottfried - a Harvard educated doctor, scientist, researcher, mother, and seeker with 25 years of experience practicing precision, functional, and integrative medicine. Gottfried specializes in root cause analysis, as she firmly believes that the greatest health transformations unfold when you address the root cause of illness, not simply the signs. She is the author of three New York Times best selling books focused on healing our cells, and our souls. 

Today we discuss her most recent book Women, Food, and Hormones. Yes, we talked about all of those things, but we also explored the culture of weight and wellness, and why the scale is not always a predictor of our health. She took us through the intricacies of our metabolic function, and we together questioned whether the “perfect” body we have in our head even matches the body that allows us to function at our best. As she explains: “I feel like women are stuck. They're stuck between diet culture, which I think many of us reject this idea that we're supposed to be thinner, obedient, smaller, take up less space and have these unrealistic standards for how we're supposed to look. And then we also have the fat acceptance movement. And what I like to do is to position myself in the middle where the focus is on metabolic health.” She walks us through her protocol for hormone balance, opening up detoxification pathways, and even gives us a script for talking to our doctors and regaining agency when it comes to our health. Gottfried implores us to remember that we are deserving of support at any age, and that righteous indignation when it comes to our health can move mountains. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

Discussion of Diet Culture & Body Positivity: Approx. 5:24

Metabolic Health: Approx. 9:40

Importance of Testosterone for Women: Approx. 19:31

Wearables: Approx. 23:48

The Ketogenic Diet for Women: Approx. 28:34

Detox: Approx. 38:42

Discussion of Courageous Conversations with Doctors: Approx. 49:54

MORE FROM SARA GOTTFRIED, M.D.:

Women, Food, and Hormones

Dr. Sara Gottfried’s Website

Dutch Hormone Test

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“There's a fantasy in argument, in Lean In, or Girlboss style corporate feminism that says, once you have women in charge of your company, then your company is feminist, right. Your capitalist reforms can start and end with who has the corner offices. Right. Who's populating the executive suite. And so that's not even reforming capitalism, that's just trying to save it.”

So says Kyla Schuller, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women’s Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University. Today we dive into her heady new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, which takes on the numerous ways in which feminism, so narrowly framed around the issues of white women, has in turn marginalized the experiences of women of color for hundreds of years. And the title has double-meaning: Because even though white feminism has been problematic, it’s also painted white women into a corner, left wondering how we got here.

There have always been multiple kinds of feminism, Schuller says, a self-serving version dominated by white women, and an intersectional version dominated by women of color. White feminism, the mainstream feminist ideology, positions women as a redeemers, a salvific force whose mere presence in positions of power is enough to redeem that same power entirely. In sharp contrast, Schuller notes, intersectional feminism is an account of power, a place to interrogate the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, ability, and climate precarity coalesce to shape our lives. Only when we acknowledge these multiple, simultaneous identities, and come together across identity and power positions, will we form a strong enough political bloc to make enduring structural change. 

Episode Highlights

• Against the white woman as a civilizing force…(7:14)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe/Harriet Jacobs…(12:44)
• Alice Fletcher/Zitkala-sa…(27:07)
• Margaret Sanger, a eugenic feminist…(40:02)
• Betty Friedan/Pauli Murray…(49:28)
• Mainstream feminism and the optimization of women…(52:28)

More from Kyla Schuller  

Kyla Schuller’s Website

Buy her new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism

Read her first book, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century

Follow Kyla on Twitter

Dig Deeper

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs

American Indian Stories - Zitkala-sa

Writing by Pauli Murray

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittney Cooper

Intersectionality - Brittney Cooper, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory

The Nap Ministry - Rest is Resistance

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Jamie Wheal is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, a organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance, and most notably, he’s the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind. In his fascinating book, Wheal explores the perplexing intersection at which we find ourselves, each of us torn between the desire to save the world or to savor the world. “We as a generational cohort are coming of age where we simultaneously have more awareness of life...and at the same time understand our existential precariousness,” he says, “How on earth do we hold all this at the same time?” Our wide ranging discussion takes on the heady topics of healing, believing, and belonging 

and ends with Wheal sharing with us his ‘ten suggestions', a list of countermeasures to the fundamentalism, nihilism, and despair that threaten to swallow us whole. 

Episode Highlights

• To save the world or to savor the world…3:09
• Nihilism, suspicion and our meaning crisis…6:48
• Reclaiming our authority, healthy tribalism, and the ten suggestions…30:40

More from Jamie Wheal

Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

Jamie's Flow Genome Project - The Official Source for Peak Performance and Culture

Follow Jamie on Instagram

Dig Deeper

The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes - Moss, O'Connor - Queensland University of Technology

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