Episodios

  • Stacey Lindsay: This Life, Your Life, Belongs to You

    Stacey Lindsay: This Life, Your Life, Belongs to You
    Apr 1 2026
    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 herselfThe reckoning with having contributed to the very narratives she is now questioning — the binary thinking, the patriarchal ideals, the capitalism she helped fuelHer mother’s story — the warning she gave Stacey at fifteen, the life she couldn’t hold onto, and what witnessing that didThe invisible inner prison — what patriarchal conditioning actually feels like from the inside, not as a definition but as a lived experienceWhy ambition isn’t disappearing — it’s being redirected, and the difference mattersWork that becomes extractive, and what it means to build boundaries not to do less but to protect what actually feeds youThe 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 accidentalMoney, worth, and sweat equity — the conversation women have been conditioned out of havingRelationships she stayed in longer than she should have and what she would tell her younger self nowSocial media and the subtle, relentless ways it erodes self-trustWhat the writing process actually looked like and why finishing this book required the same faith she is asking her readers to findThe 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 carrySteph Jagger — women’s coach and writer who introduced Stacey to the concept of the Autumn Queen as the missing archetypeDené Logan — author, therapist, and ...
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    1 h y 14 m
  • Franziska Gonder: Leadership That Heals the World

    Franziska Gonder: Leadership That Heals the World
    Mar 25 2026
    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 pressureHow 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 awareLeadership that extracts vs. leadership that heals — why belonging, safety, and dignity are not soft ideals but the actual foundations of high performance and organizational cultureThe 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 daySomatic 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 developmentAI, creative friction, and human connection — why removing friction from our work may be removing the very thing that makes it oursWhat she calls Team Human — and why she believes we are on the cusp of a rise in relational intelligence, authentic community, and human gatheringThe season of life she is navigating right now — messy, meaningful, and fully inhabitedAnd 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
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    1 h y 13 m
  • Asma Khan: I Came Out Glistening Like Gold

    Asma Khan: I Came Out Glistening Like Gold
    Mar 18 2026

    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
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    1 h y 11 m
  • Esosa Osa: Who Tells Your Story Decides Your Future — On Disinformation, Narrative Power, and Work That's Good

    Esosa Osa: Who Tells Your Story Decides Your Future — On Disinformation, Narrative Power, and Work That's Good
    Mar 11 2026

    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
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Regulation Before Revelation: Solo Reflections on Rest, Attention, and Discerning What’s True

    Regulation Before Revelation: Solo Reflections on Rest, Attention, and Discerning What’s True
    Mar 4 2026

    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.

    Episodes referenced in this episode
    • 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
    Upcoming Offerings from The Truth Is

    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

    Credits
    • 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
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    32 m
  • Jiore Craig: Dark Hope and the Work of World-Building

    Jiore Craig: Dark Hope and the Work of World-Building
    Feb 25 2026

    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.

    In this episode:
    • 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
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    1 h y 9 m
  • Nahid de Belgeonne: The Culture of Self-Improvement and the Loss of Self

    Nahid de Belgeonne: The Culture of Self-Improvement and the Loss of Self
    Feb 18 2026

    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
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    1 h y 17 m
  • Cindy Scharkey: On Permission for Pleasure — and Why You’re Worthy of It

    Cindy Scharkey: On Permission for Pleasure — and Why You’re Worthy of It
    Feb 11 2026

    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
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    56 m