The Truth Is with Kathryn Flaschner – Details, episodes & analysis

This episode first aired in December 2025. We're bringing it back because it's one that stays with you.

What if the clarity you’re looking for isn’t “out there” at all, but already inside you — waiting for the moment it comes into view?

In this conversation, NYT bestselling author and adventurer Jedidiah Jenkins sits down with us to talk about revelation, habituation, aging, and what it means to build a life you’re actually comfortable being yourself in.

Jed talks about how his books — from To Shake the Sleeping Self through Mother, Nature and now his upcoming fourth — trace the long arc of becoming, moving through the mother wound, his religious upbringing, and the early experiences that sharpened his curiosity. He shares why he sees revelation as the moment when previously collected pieces finally organize into clarity, and how trusting the authority of his own questions has guided his life and work.

We talk through:

• Revelation vs. information — why most “aha” moments are old truths finally landing in the right order
• Habituation and the hedonic treadmill — how we get used to everything, even the life we once wanted, and how Jed disrupts that pattern
• How he now makes sense of the 30-year-old who biked from Oregon to Patagonia — and the life that opened because of it
• How his first three books became a trilogy of healing the mother wound
• Why living fully as yourself quietly liberates other people to do the same
• His eight-week, no-phone sabbatical in rural Colorado during the election — and what surfaced when the noise stopped
• Why he believes many of us are one sabbatical away from a breakthrough
• Entering the “youngest old person” season of life and finding a beginner’s mindset again in midlife

We also talk about the truth of the moment — how naming what’s real as it arises becomes its own form of presence — and how Jed has had to rebuild his sense of truth from the inside out after growing up inside a religious system that defined it for him. He reflects on learning to trust the authority of his own questions, and why that practice continues to shape his life and his work.

And yes — we talk about the leaf.
The one Kathryn caught during a silent walk at Jed’s retreat, the one that never touched the ground. Jed wrote on it: What falls will feed the new. It becomes a quiet throughline for this conversation about clarity, courage, and letting what’s no longer true fall away so something more honest can grow.

More from Jedidiah Jenkins:
• Website — www.jedidiahjenkins.com
• Instagram — @jedidiahjenkins
• Substack — jedidiahjenkins.substack.com
• Forthcoming fourth book — out fall 2026 (fun sneak peek at the process mentioned in the episode)

Connect with The Truth Is:
🎥 Watch the full conversation on YouTube → @thetruthis_pod
📸 Follow on Instagram → @thetruthis_podcast

Credits
Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
Edited by Dan Croll
Music by Will Savino
Visual Identity by Sarah Gainer & Jonathan Bush
Advised by Natalie Tulloch

Kate Boyer is a Los Angeles-based stunt woman and actor who has built her career one leap at a time — literally. She grew up in Philadelphia with an explorer's mindset, found her way to martial arts young, and eventually packed everything into a Honda Civic and drove cross-country with a vision. What she found on the other side of that move became the foundation of a decade-plus career in film and television, doubling for actors and executing the kind of work that demands total trust in yourself and the people around you.

Kathryn has known Kate through their shared world as actors, and has watched up close what it looks like to build a self-led life in one of the most uncertain industries there is. This conversation is about the posture you have to take to do that — not waiting for the golden ticket, but deciding what the next move is and going. Kate is beginning to bring that practice to other artists, helping them find the clarity to do the same.

In this conversation:

• Growing up in Philly and the explorer's mindset that never left
• Discovering stunt work as an expression of art — and what it demands emotionally
• The Honda Civic move to LA and learning to listen to your inner voice
• Why fear is a muscle, not a wall
• The feeling on the other side of doing something you were afraid to do
• What it means to bring your truth into a room rather than perform what you think is wanted
• Building toward work that serves other artists

Follow Kate: Instagram The Truth Is: Instagram | Video production and editing by Anton LaPlume. Music by Will Savino. Visual identity by Sarah Gainor and Jonathan Bush. Guidance and advising by Natalie Tulloch.

Stacey Lindsay is a journalist and author whose work has always centered on one thing — creating the conditions for people to tell the truth. As a girl, she watched Diane Sawyer, Maria Shriver, and Christiane Amanpour on the news and felt the thread pulling her toward that work. Years later she took the risk to follow it. Her early career as a journalist took her out into the field — everything from covering tornados in Oklahoma to driving through southeast Kansas talking to farmers and veterans. She has spent her life listening to other people’s truths. This book is the first time she turned the journalism on herself.

What she noticed as a journalist, and then as a woman entering her forties, was a gap. A season of life where women are releasing what hasn’t been working, questioning the lies they’ve been carrying about their worth, their lives, their possibilities. A season that didn’t have enough honest storytelling around it. She writes about feeling a “perpetual homesickness for my own truth” and that feels like the wound underneath this book. The reason she had to write it. The writing became the healing and the road back to truth.

What struck me and what I keep returning to through the arc of this season is how this book invites us past the surface of concepts we hear constantly but rarely interrogate fully. Patriarchy. Worth. Identity. Stacey’s journalism takes us deeper, so we can actually reckon with our own liberation.

Reading this book felt like meeting a collective of women who had challenged the status quo, with each story Stacey pulls together as a paradigm-shifting reimagining of what is possible in our lifetimes.

What she built is not a self-help book. It is not a how-to. It is something rarer. A mirror held up by a journalist who has spent her whole career in the room when people finally say the thing they haven’t said out loud before. And this time, one of those people was her.

Her mother told her at fifteen: don’t lose your identity. Never lose your identity. What Stacey witnessed in the years that followed became the quiet center of everything she built. This book feels like a dedication and a calling to awaken what has remained unlived.

This conversation goes into the territory this show was made for — what it costs to contort yourself to fit the stories you were handed, what starts to shift when you stop, and what becomes possible on the other side of that reckoning. For Stacey, for the women in this book, and for all of us who recognize ourselves in it.

We talk about:

• Her formation as a journalist and the career she built before she turned the lens on herself
• The reckoning with having contributed to the very narratives she is now questioning — the binary thinking, the patriarchal ideals, the capitalism she helped fuel
• Her mother’s story — the warning she gave Stacey at fifteen, the life she couldn’t hold onto, and what witnessing that did
• The invisible inner prison — what patriarchal conditioning actually feels like from the inside, not as a definition but as a lived experience
• Why ambition isn’t disappearing — it’s being redirected, and the difference matters
• Work that becomes extractive, and what it means to build boundaries not to do less but to protect what actually feeds you
• The Autumn Queen — the mythological archetype missing from our storytelling, the one that lives between mother and crone, and why its absence has been anything but accidental
• Money, worth, and sweat equity — the conversation women have been conditioned out of having
• Relationships she stayed in longer than she should have and what she would tell her younger self now
• Social media and the subtle, relentless ways it erodes self-trust
• What the writing process actually looked like and why finishing this book required the same faith she is asking her readers to find
• The season of life she is in right now, and why taking care of herself is the most important thing she can do for everyone she loves

ABOUT STACEY LINDSAY

Stacey Lindsay is a multimedia journalist, writer, and editor whose work has spanned television, radio, print, and digital media. Known for her warm, empathetic approach, she has interviewed hundreds of public figures and civilians on topics like spirituality, health, civics, politics, identity, art, sexuality, women’s equality, and work. Her upcoming book, BEING 40: The Decade of Letting Go—and Embracing Who We Are, is out May 5th.

Instagram: @stacylindsey

Substack: Andi

Pre-order BEING 40: Bookshop.org or wherever books are sold — audio, e-book, and physical editions available

Stacey recommends buying from an indie bookstore or Bookshop.org if you can.

MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE: 

• Valerie Reign — coined Patriarchal Stress Disorder and the concept of the invisible inner prison women carry
• Steph Jagger — women’s coach and writer who introduced Stacey to the concept of the Autumn Queen as the missing archetype
• Dené Logan — author, therapist, and facilitator who names this phase the Enchantress — a season of deep embodied knowing and return to self
• Julia Cameron — The Artist’s Way and the practice of morning pages
• Adrienne Rich — “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we were drenched, we cannot know ourselves”

CONNECT WITH THE TRUTH IS

Instagram: @thetruthispodcast

YouTube: @thetruthis_pod

Substack: Kathryn Flaschner

CREDITS

Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner

Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume

Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com

Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush

Advised by Natalie Tulloch

Topics: midlife women, reinvention, women’s identity, female ambition, patriarchal conditioning, women and work, self-worth

There are conversations that inform you. And then there are conversations that return you to yourself. Lucky for us, this one does both.

Franziska Gonder arrived on this show as what I can only describe as a missing puzzle piece — for my own understanding and for the inquiry this season has been journeying us toward. Guest after guest this season has been pulling a thread about what it means to live true to ourselves, to hear ourselves beneath the noise, to create our lives from that place.

Franzi is the person who arrived this season with something I hadn't encountered in quite this way before — work that holds the wisdom of the body, the culture we are navigating, the organizations we inhabit, and the seasons of life we move through, all at once.

Franziska Gonder is a global somatic leadership coach and founder of Leadership That Heals. She works with high-achieving leaders and founders across industries — boardrooms, venture capital, organizations in crisis. What drew her to this work was a curiosity she developed inside the work itself. As she was advising leaders and organizations, she began to notice something — there was the work people were doing, and then there was how they were doing it. The patterns under pressure. The emotional life nobody was naming. And when she started creating space for those conversations, people told her: this is it. This is what I need. She followed that thread all the way here. And her own life — the losses, the reckonings, the long journey back to her own body — became inseparable from the methodology she built.

Her work is an exhale. A return. The basics. The kind of simplicity that turns out to be the most sophisticated thing in the room.

In this conversation we go somewhere I haven't gone on this show before — she guides me through a somatic experience in real time. And what surfaced for me in those few minutes is something that may seem subtle, but left me speechless. That the wisdom I was looking for was already here — all I needed was the guidance and the space to turn my attention and curiosity inward.

That, it turns out, is also the whole point of this show.

We talk about:

• The relationship with choice — what it actually means to lead your own life, reclaim your agency, and stop being driven by external pressure
• How the nervous system of a leader shapes the nervous system of an entire team — and what becomes possible when leadership is regulated, present, and emotionally aware
• Leadership that extracts vs. leadership that heals — why belonging, safety, and dignity are not soft ideals but the actual foundations of high performance and organizational culture
• The cost of performing the role at work — the emotional debt, the switching cost, and the slow trauma of leaving parts of yourself out day after day
• Somatic intelligence and somatic leadership — what it means to lead from the body, not just the mind, and why this is the missing piece in how we think about leadership development
• AI, creative friction, and human connection — why removing friction from our work may be removing the very thing that makes it ours
• What she calls Team Human — and why she believes we are on the cusp of a rise in relational intelligence, authentic community, and human gathering
• The season of life she is navigating right now — messy, meaningful, and fully inhabited
• And what she knows now about healing, leadership, and belonging to yourself that she couldn't have known when she was still on the other side of it

About Franziska Gonder

Franziska Gonder is a global somatic leadership coach and founder of Leadership That Heals. She works with high-achieving leaders, founders, and executives across industries, guiding them through the inner transformation that allows them to lead with more clarity, less chaos, and a nervous system that is finally on their side. She lives in Portugal with her husband and three sons.

Connect with Franziska 

Website: franziskagonder.com 

Instagram: @franziskagonder 

Substack: Leadership That Heals the World

Connect with The Truth Is 

Instagram: @thetruthispodcast 

YouTube: @thetruthis_pod 

Substack: Kathryn Flaschner

Credits 

Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner 

Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume 

Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com 

Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush 

Advised by Natalie Tulloch

The first time I heard Asma Khan speak, I was sitting in the back of an auditorium in Los Angeles at a crossroads in my life. I didn't know who she was before that day. By the time she finished, something in me had shifted. 

She spoke truth — about her own life and about the world we live in — in a way that felt like an earthquake of permission.

Asma Khan is an Indian-born British restaurateur, cookbook author, and one of the most singular voices in the world right now. Her restaurant Darjeeling Express, in the heart of London's Soho, is home to one of the world's only all-female kitchens — staffed entirely by South Asian immigrant women, home cooks, never professionally trained, many of them second daughters, much like Asma herself. She was the first British chef profiled on Netflix's Chef's Table. She is a Time 100 Most Influential Person, a UN World Food Programme Chef Advocate, and holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from King's College London. Her third cookbook, Monsoon, was released last year.

She is a woman who came to know herself underneath every layer of assumption her culture placed on her — and created her life from that place with such conviction that it changed what was possible for the women and communities around her. Her story is personal and it is political and it is spiritual — and it is one of the most complete examples I have encountered of what this show is all about.

In this conversation we bring her story into the territory this show was made for — what it means to come to know yourself underneath everything you were told you should be, and to create your life with integrity and courage from that place.

We talk about:

• Being born a second daughter in a culture that marked that as a disappointment — and the sister who held the flickering flame
• The loneliness of London, the return to her family's recipes, and what she was building before she knew she was building it
• The Sufi water philosophy that guided her — scarring every hurdle so the women who came after her could just flow
• Why cooking has become a combat sport — and what she built instead
• The economic worthiness of her matriarchal model 
• The PhD in constitutional law she didn't use conventionally — and why Darjeeling Express may be her most constitutional act
• The industry reckoning happening right now — the silence, the victims, and her conviction that change is possible
• What it means to be powerful, successful, and compassionate all at once
• The season of transition she is in right now — hanging on and letting go, autumn before the spring
• And a passage from her favorite book, Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, that feels like the whole conversation in a few lines: Say not I have found the truth, but rather I have found a truth. Say not I have found the path of the soul. Say rather I have met the soul walking upon my path.

Connect with Asma Khan Order Monsoon Instagram: @asma_khan_darjeeling Darjeeling Express: darjeeling-express.com

Connect with The Truth Is Instagram: @thetruthispodcast YouTube: @thetruthis_pod 

Credits Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner, Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume, Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com, Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush, Advised by Natalie Tulloch

The information around us has never been more abundant. The truth has never been harder to find.

Not because we've gotten less intelligent. But because the systems shaping what we see, believe, and repeat were not designed with our discernment in mind.

In this episode of The Truth Is, I sit down with Esosa Osa — founder and CEO of Onyx Impact, former Deputy Executive Director of Fair Fight Action, and one of the most clear-eyed thinkers I've encountered on what it actually takes to protect your relationship to truth in this moment.

We talk about:

• How disinformation actually works — and why repetition is its most powerful tool
• Why our brains are not built to resist what the current information environment is designed to do
• Why there is no such thing as an unbiased AI — and what that means for all of us
• What it looks like to build narrative power when you can't trust the existing infrastructure to tell your story
• Aisha — what it is, why it exists, and what it represents about who gets to shape the future
• What it means to keep doing the work when the work is hard

This episode sits at the intersection of everything this show is about — the stories we inherit, the systems that shape what feels true, and what it takes to reclaim authorship of your own narrative. Except this time, the stakes are not just personal. They're collective.

Who tells your story decides your future.

About Esosa Osa

Esosa began her career in finance at BlackRock before moving into democracy work — serving as Campaign Manager for a top 2018 U.S. Congressional election, Senior Advisor to Stacey Abrams' gubernatorial campaign, and Deputy Executive Director of Fair Fight Action, where she led pro-democracy reform efforts focused on combating disinformation. She is now the founder and CEO of Onyx Impact — a nonprofit working to understand and counter disinformation targeting Black communities — and the creator of Aisha, an AI trained on Black news, history, and culture.

Connect with Esosa + Onyx Impact

Website: onyximpact.org 

Digital Green Book: digitalgreenbook.org 

Blackout Report: blackoutreport.org 

Instagram: @theonyximpact

Connect with The Truth Is

Instagram: @thetruthispodcast 

YouTube: @thetruthis_pod

Credits

Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner 

Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume 

Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com 

Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush 

Advised by Natalie Tulloch

Over the past month on The Truth Is, I’ve had conversations about rest, nervous system regulation, pleasure, and the systems shaping our attention. After stepping back and looking at them together, I realized they were all circling the same question:

Why is it so difficult to access what’s actually true for us?

This episode is a pause to process what’s emerging across the season.

For most of my life, I believed that knowing myself required more effort — more thinking, more strategy, more trying to get it right. What I’m starting to see, through these conversations and through my own life, is that the opposite may be true.

Accessing what’s true often requires space. Space to rest. Space to feel. Space to process our lives as they’re actually happening.

But the culture many of us live inside of makes that space difficult to find. Hustle culture rewards exhaustion. Information ecosystems compete constantly for our attention. Certainty is broadcast everywhere, often louder than curiosity.

Across recent episodes, my guests have offered different doorways into the same realization:

• Rest can be a return to ourselves
• Regulation in the body often precedes clarity in the mind
• Permission to feel is essential for knowing what we actually want
• Reclaiming our attention may be one of the most important acts of agency available to us

This episode also reflects on a line from The Big Short, attributed to Mark Twain:

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

In a world saturated with certainty — algorithms, feeds, institutions, opinions — discernment becomes harder and more necessary at the same time. 

The work, as I see it right now, is not withdrawing from the world. It’s creating enough distance from the noise to decide where our attention and energy actually belong.

I close this conversation with an idea my recent guest Jiore Craig calls “dark hope.” 

When systems begin to fracture, the path forward can look surprisingly simple and human: Reconnect. Pay attention to what’s real. Build lives and communities rooted in truth rather than external authority. 

And maybe start by ending this year with more real friends than you started it with.

• Sam Bianchini — Rest as a Return to Self: On Ritual, Worthiness, and Remembering
• Cindy Sharkey — On Permission for Pleasure — and Why You’re Worthy of It
• Nahid de Belgeonne — The Culture of Self-Improvement and the Loss of Self
• Jiore Craig — Dark Hope and the Work of World-Building
• Jedidiah Jenkins —  The Authority of Your Own Questions

Part of what I’m building through The Truth Is are spaces where these conversations can continue beyond the podcast.

One of those is a retreat experience I’m developing in partnership with my guest from earlier this season, Sarah Spoto, and her community, Badii. We’re gathering early input from this community as we shape the experience. If you’d like to share what would make a retreat like this meaningful for you, you can add your thoughts at this link below:

Share input on the retreat experience: Early Access

I’m also launching a small cohort experience called Calibration, designed for people who want space to process where they are and discern their next step from a place that feels true.

Connect with The Truth Is on Instagram: 

@thetruthis_podcast

@kathrynflaschner

• Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
• Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume
• Edited by Dan Croll
• Music by Will Savino — https://wsavino.com
• Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush
• Advised by Natalie Tulloch

The present moment doesn’t just feel noisy. It feels disorienting. 

Not because we’ve become less thoughtful, but because we’re living inside systems that reward reaction over reflection — systems that pull at our nervous systems all day long and quietly influence what starts to feel obvious, urgent, or true. 

In this episode of The Truth Is, I sit down with strategist Jiore Craig to explore what it takes to reclaim agency inside an environment like this — and what becomes possible when we shift from endless reaction to intentional world-building. 

Jiore has spent her career inside political strategy and public opinion, with a front-row seat to how amplification becomes belief — how what rises in a feed begins to feel like consensus. She’s watched social media move from connection and organizing to optimization and extraction. And she’s seen how public debate often gets stuck in the wrong frame: “free speech vs. censorship,” when the deeper issue is design, incentives, and control. 

This conversation isn’t alarmist. It’s an invitation to take responsibility for where we place our attention — and what we choose to build.

• Why hyper-personalized feeds fracture shared reality
• The real design problem behind the “free speech vs. censorship” debate
• How outrage and anxiety fuel the system
• The breakup analogy for how feeds keep us stuck
• Why agency requires responsibility
• “Make them earn it” — reclaiming your attention
• The difference between reacting and world-building
• “Dark hope” as the engine for this moment

Connect with Jiore: https://www.jiorecraig.com/ 

Connect with The Truth Is: @thetruthis_podcast

Credits

• Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
• Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume
• Edited by Dan Croll
• Music by Will Savino → wsavino.com
• Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush
• Advised by Natalie Tulloch

What does it actually mean to regulate in a world that feels increasingly dysregulated?

In this episode, I sit down with somatic movement educator and author Nahid de Belgeonne to explore the nervous system not as a self-improvement project, but as a doorway back to discernment.

Nahid is the creator of The Human Method™ and The Soothe Programme, a 12-week somatic approach designed for high-functioning people who are successful on the outside and quietly bracing on the inside. Before this work, she built her identity around composure, capability, and chronic motion. A near-death experience forced a reckoning. What emerged was a body-first understanding of regulation that challenges much of modern wellness culture.

We talk about:

• Why mistrusting the signals from your body makes you easier to manipulate
• The shift from “a brain with a body” to “a body with a brain”
• High-functioning collapse and how pushing harder becomes fused with identity
• How culture grooms us to turn back on ourselves
• Why you don’t “unlearn” patterns, you introduce new learning into the system
• Regulation as authorship, not obedience
• Staying human, engaged, and discerning in the context of late-stage capitalism and collective instability

This conversation is a continuation of a larger inquiry on this show: what does it mean to live truthfully underneath inherited assumptions about success, productivity, and worth?

If wellness has ever felt like another performance, this episode is for you.

Connect with Nahid

Substack: The Soothe Club
Instagram: @thehumanmethoduk
Programme: The Soothe Programme (12-week nervous system recalibration)

Connect with The Truth Is: @thetruthis_podcast

Credits

• Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
• Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume
• Edited by Dan Croll
• Music by Will Savino → wsavino.com
• Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush
• Advised by Natalie Tulloch

What would change if you believed you were worthy of pleasure?

In this episode of The Truth Is, I sit down with Cindy Scharkey — Registered Nurse, OB/GYN nurse, Certified Childbirth Educator, and host of the podcast and author of Permission for Pleasure. With nearly 40 years in women’s health, Cindy has witnessed how silence and shame shape women’s relationship with their bodies, sex, and desire.

Many women come to her with questions about sex and desire. What they often uncover is something deeper: a relationship with themselves that was never fully examined.

We talk about inherited narratives around purity, modesty, and worth. The belief that pleasure must be earned. Why what we call a “desire problem” is often a pleasure problem. And how difficult it can be to admit we were never taught to truly listen to our own bodies.

This conversation, and Cindy's work, goes beyond sex. It’s about permission — to feel, to listen, and to stay in relationship with yourself. And part of that practice is allowing what is present, without polishing it or performing.

At its core, this episode asks what happens when we stop living from inherited assumptions and start listening to what is actually true.

In this episode, we explore:

• The idea of a “pleasure crisis” — and what it feels like in real life
• Curiosity as a way back into relationship with your body
• Why what we call a “desire problem” may actually be a pleasure problem
• What happens when we override sensation — and what shifts when we listen
• The courage it takes to question what we were taught about sex and worth
• Permission not to manufacture meaning — but to be in the truth of the moment
• How pleasure, grief, and aliveness can coexist
• Small, embodied practices — from dancing naked to finding “sips of joy” — that keep us connected

Connect with Cindy: 

Website: www.cindyscharkey.com

Listen to her podcast: Permission for Pleasure

Explore her book: Permission for Pleasure

Follow Cindy on Instagram: @cindyscharkey

Connect with The Truth Is: @thetruthis_podcast

Credits

• Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
• Video Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume
• Edited by Dan Croll
• Music by Will Savino → wsavino.com
• Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush
• Advised by Natalie Tulloch