Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen – Details, episodes & analysis

“Living on fire is really a metaphor for figuring out two things,” says Shannon Watts. “What is limiting you. And what is calling you.” Watts spent 11 years as the full-time volunteer lead of Moms Demand Action, which she founded. Now, as she puts it, Watts continues to summon the audacity of other women. Today, she shares so many useful life nuggets from her new book, Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“You're going to find a lot of people doing their best, revealing how beautiful and strange we are, and how remarkable we can be,” says Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and founder of On Being Krista Tippett. In this conversation, Tippett shares where we might turn for more hope and pleasure, and how she thinks about what shapes our presence in the world. For the show notes, head over to my Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For April’s guest-less episode, I’m looking back on the wild ride that was this month, and trying to make sense of this period of contemplation in my life. I share a few realizations I’ve had about: uncertainty (involving Phil Stutz’s “evil wedding cake” theory); betrayal (involving a special tarot reading with Mark Horn); whether or not I have faith that the universe will support me (involving a group workshop on what women want); and what we’re meant to be doing here (involving a gondola ride with Chelsea Handler). I also answer a couple of listener questions about how I manage my time, and my research and creative processes. For the show notes, head over to my Substack.== Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I think what's interesting about healing, psychological healing, is there's always a narrative that helps. So sometimes when you go to therapy, and you tell a story, and in the story, you locate your despair, and it's a knot, and then with the therapist, you work through the knot, you feel better. And was all the pain really attendant to that knot? Or did you just kind of load up that knot with some of the despair that comes from being alive and then you kind of work through it and that story helps you live life better. And I think that's true also this idea of how we look at the different personality states and we can name them and we can give them ages and it's a story that helps us understand ourselves.” So says Akiva Goldsman, an Oscar, Golden Globe, and WGA-Award winning screenwriter whose credits include A Beautiful Mind, The Client, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Practical Magic, Cinderella Man, I Am Legend, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Insurgent, and I, Robot. He’s on Pulling the Thread today, though, to talk about Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller starring Tom Holland and Amanda Seyfried on which he was both the writer and the showrunner. So first, some warnings: Yes, there are spoilers, though in my opinion, nothing that will markedly change your experience of watching the show. In fact, knowing the back story made it easier for me to get through the first, very stressful episode. (It gets easier, and by episode three, I was riveted.) And also, a trigger warning: The Crowded Room and our conversation today explore childhood sexual abuse, which is also part of Akiva’s personal history. MORE FROM AKIVA GOLDSMAN: “The Crowded Room” on Apple TV+ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I think it's really important for, you know, people to realize that you can totally be an absolutely excellent parent of a traumatized child and the trauma had nothing to do with you and you couldn't possibly have prevented it. So I think, you know, assuming that there is trauma in somebody's addiction history, which is not always the case, but if there is, you should not immediately assume that it was bad parenting because sure, that could be the case sometimes, but again, there's so many different ways that people can be traumatized by so many different people. And it's also the case that so much of addiction has to do with people's temperament that will set them up for things. So, if you are incredibly sensitive to stimuli, something that wouldn't traumatize someone else might traumatize you. And again, that's not your parents fault. That's just how you were born.” So says Maia Szalavitz, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and author of two fantastic books about addiction. Her New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain, tells the story of her own heroin and cocaine addiction as a student at Columbia University in the ‘80s—she was expelled for dealing and barely escaped prison time—woven together with the decades of work she’s done as a journalist in the addiction space after entering recovery in her early ‘20s. In it, Maia offers a compelling case for why addiction should be thought of as a learning disability, in part because so many people “grow out of it.”  Maia’s latest book—Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction—taught me so much and challenged so many of the stories about addiction I was holding onto. Ultimately, it’s an optimistic book in the face of what feels like an overwhelming cultural challenge, a challenge that only seems to get worse every month—Maia explains why we’re trending in this direction, and more importantly, what we can do to shift our collective fate toward recovery. And what an expanded idea of recovery might mean.  MORE FROM MAIA SZALAVITZ: Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding Addiction The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog Read Maia on The New York Times Maia’s Website Follow Maia on X Further Listening on Pulling the Thread: PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery” PART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., “Breaking the Addiction Binary” ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture” TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness” BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“As you grow older, your brain is able to keep rewiring all the time. And so we have this impression that the flexibility of the brain decreases as you get older. But in fact, it's just because your brain's job is just to figure out how to get by in the world and do a good job in the world. And once you've figured most things out, like, oh, these are different kinds of personalities, and this is how I need to do something at work, and this is how I use email and phone and whatever, then your brain does less changing only because it has successfully done its job, and it doesn't need to keep changing. The brain changes when there's surprise, when there's something that happened that it wasn't expecting, then it changes up. So, you still have plenty of plasticity even when you're 90 years old. It's just that most people aren't using it at that point because they say, Oh, I got it. I know how things work.” So says David Eagleman, renowned neuroscientist, podcast host, and the author of many bestselling books about consciousness and the brain—along with more than 120 academic publications. Besides his perch as a neuroscientist at Stanford University, David is the co-founder of two venture-backed companies, including Neosensory, which is a pioneering wrist device that enables the deaf to hear. Yep, that’s right. David is fascinating, and hopefully this conversation lives up to his capacity: We discuss the malleability of the brain to adjust to its inputs, the roots of synesthesia, how those who are born blind and deaf can now use touch to see and hear, and why we dream. Ultimately, we explore just how it happens that a brain trapped in a dark vault can create the vibrancy of our existence. David is a TED speaker, a Guggenheim Fellow, and serves on several boards, including the American Brain Foundation and the The Long Now Foundation. He is the Chief Scientific Advisor for the Mind Science Foundation, and the winner of Claude Shannon Luminary Award from Bell Labs and the McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication. What’s cooler? He has served as the scientific advisor to several television shows (including Westworld and Perception). Ironically—considering we both host podcasts and David is a neuroscientist—we had some technical difficulties during our conversation, but the hope is that this is not perceptible to you!  MORE FROM DAVID EAGLEMAN: Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain The Brain: The Story of You Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives David’s Podcast: “Inner Cosmos” David’s Website Follow David on Instagram David’s Company: Neosensory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I want to say that it's not just some idea about suffering, it's also a function of social and economic systems that are deliberately weaponizing an individualized view of suffering as a technique, as a strategy. I found across eras and eras and eras in the book is that addiction supply industries, which is what one scholar calls them, like the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, they constantly come back to this hyper individualization in saying, you know, like, the problem is not in the bottle, the problems in the person. If so many people can drink, quote unquote normally, that means the problem is really with these sick people over here. And that happened with tobacco. And then very directly and deliberately, things like the processed food industry and other modern addiction supply industries have used the same language.” So says Carl Erik Fisher, an addiction psychiatrist, bioethics scholar, author, and person in recovery. Carl is also an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he teaches law, ethics, and policy relating to psychiatry and neuroscience, particularly where they converge with substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors. He hosts a podcast called Flourishing After Addiction and is launching a Substack, where he’ll organize his thinking around treatment paths and modalities. Most pertinent to our conversation today, he’s the author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction, which is a fascinating deep dive into our long cultural fascination with addictive substances, interlaced with his own story, and stories from his practice: In fact, the book opens in Bellevue where Carl is not functioning as a doctor—in this case, he’s the patient, after suffering an addiction-induced manic episode that put him into recovery. Carl is brilliant and kind, and also fluent in all the prevailing science about addictive behavior…science that hasn’t really ruled the day until recent years. Instead, the addiction space has been one of binaries—you’re compulsive, or you exercise choice; you’re normal, or an addict; you have no control to stop, or you have all the control and refuse to use it; and on and on and on. MORE FROM CARL ERIK FISHER: The Urge: Our History of Addiction Carl’s Podcast: Flourishing After Addiction Carl’s Website Follow Carl on Instagram Carl’s Newsletter Carl’s Substack Further Listening on Pulling the Thread: PART 1: Holly Whitaker, “Reimagining Recovery” ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture” TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness” BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“I think what one of the things that's interesting to me is like when we think about what causes distress and a life that goes awry, there's so much attention to different causes, but the way that the story, or the diagnosis, or the treatment interacts with our identity, I think, is not thought about as much. Like, the way that the very intervention itself changes our sense of who we are feels like it gets neglected. There's this sense that, you know, the diagnosis is describing something that is always solid and real and less thought given to like, well, how does that diagnosis interact with a mind? And how does the mind change knowing that the mind has been characterized this way?” You might recognize Rachel Aviv’s name from The New Yorker, where she’s been a staff writer for a decade, covering subjects like medical ethics, psychiatry, criminal justice, and education. She’s been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards twice, and in 2022 she won one for profile writing. In 2022, she also published Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In It, Aviv tells the story of four people and the treatment they underwent—or not—for their mental illness. It’s a gorgeously told, layered exploration of all that we don’t know about the brain and the mind, and how various treatment modalities restructure our lives—including the stories we tell about who we are. Okay, let’s get to our conversation. MORE FROM RACHEL AVIV: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us Read Rachel in The New Yorker Follow Rachel on X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“For years, I was asking myself whether or not I was an alcoholic versus really asking myself whether or not alcohol was actually providing any benefit to me. And for me, it was just like, This realization when I stopped drinking that I had been asking the wrong question for my whole drinking career and like, why are we not asking the question? We're just like, we're drinking, it's compulsory in our society. It's exceptional if you don't drink. And then it's also this very addictive drug that's marketed to us in a way that totally overrides our ability to like make rational choices around it. It's like the most socially accepted drug that you can use and like, we just don't have meaningful conversations or informed consent or any, you know, so for me, a huge part of me quitting drinking, which I did in 2013, it was this realization of Intellectually understanding I had been asking the wrong question which for me was a huge empowerment and part of the reason I was able to quit.” So says Holly Whitaker, author of the New York Times bestselling Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. I had heard about Holly long before I met her, primarily because she was disrupting recovery culture and many people did not like this. But the more I learned about her, the more I spoke to her, the more I witnessed her impact on culture, the more I was completely taken by both her brilliance and her willingness to say the things. Be warned: If you read her book, you’ll never think about alcohol again. In its pages, she recontextualizes the way we’ve been trained to normalize booze—and also the way the current recovery scene is shaped for the consciousness, and egos, of men. She’s created companies in the vein of a feminine-centered recovery, and it feels like she’s just getting started in the way we talk about addictive substances—and addiction. Those who struggle will find a lot of relief in her words, and I understand why.  MORE FROM HOLLY WHITAKER: Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol Holly’s Newsletter Holly’s Website Holly’s Podcast Follow Holly on Instagram Further Listening on Pulling the Thread: ADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., “Navigating an Addictive Culture” TRAUMA: Gabor Maté, M.D., “When Stress Becomes Illness” BINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, “Whose Pain Counts?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“If there is this part of you that you think is inferior, the weak spot, something you're ashamed of, etc., it's one of these things where if you believe it's true, there's a part of the human soul, we call it part X. It doesn't want you to have any kind of forward motion, doesn't like it, it wants to render your life failure. It wants you to never re change your potentials. And it wants you to hate yourself, which is the biggest thing. So, the genesis of the tools came from the idea, we have to be active about dealing with this.” So says Phil Stutz, the creator of the Tools. You might know Phil from his bestselling book of the same name, or its sequel Coming Alive. Or you might know him from the Netflix documentary Stutz, which is a profile of him as a beloved psychotherapist who doesn’t practice in a particularly traditional way. What you might not know is that Phil is actually a psychiatrist—he received his MD from NYU and then abandoned the standard approach, feeling like he wasn’t helping patients at all. He created The Tools for exactly that: To provide practices for people to move through life’s obstacles, rather than just listening to them talk about them. Ad nauseum. One of the things that I love most about Phil’s approach is the way in which he uses the spiritual, or what he calls “Higher Forces.” Foundationally, he believes that a beneficent universe will move in as soon as you put yourself in motion, unlocking creativity and growth. His latest book, Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, is a beautiful collection of essays about aging, hard times, and obstacles. It’s equal parts moving and practical, much like Phil himself.  MORE FROM PHIL STUTZ: Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You The Tools: Five Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower—and Inspire You To Live Life in Forward Motion Coming Alive: Four Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul’s Expression “Stutz” on Netflix The Tools Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices