Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring was a director at a pharmaceutical company making close to $700,000 with a clear path to seven figures. He quit.

He had trained at Baylor, done a drug development fellowship at Janssen, and reviewed psychiatric drug safety data at the FDA. In 2020, he and his wife Marissa started TaperClinic.

Then he tells the story he rarely tells. Three coffees a day. Eight nicotine pouches. Eighty-hour weeks. He collapsed mid-shift and left the ER with hepatitis and fatty liver disease at 210 pounds. He was also taking Xanax to sleep. Today he runs the largest practice in the world, helping people come off psychiatric medication.

In this episode you'll learn:

• The three domains that decide your mental health, and the one almost everyone skips
• What to fix before you ever consider a prescription
• How these drugs were studied, and what your doctor is not telling you
• Why coming off too fast is what causes the damage
• What Dr. Josef changed instead of having his gallbladder removed
• Why he walked away from $700,000 and started over
• The motto he would put on a billboard in Times Square

Not medical advice. No one should change or stop a psychiatric medication without their prescriber.

You're at the top of your game and you still feel behind. Stacey Lindsay knows why.

She's interviewed hundreds of people. Gillian Anderson. Erin Brockovich. Reese Witherspoon. Jay Shetty. She's a journalist for Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper and Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, and she's usually the one getting people to tell the truth. In this episode, she turns it on herself.

Her new book BEING 40 makes the case that there comes a point where you put down the pressure of living by other people's opinions and expectations, and start living as who you actually are and always were. For her it was 40. For you it's whenever you notice the weight.

Because there is a weight, and you never chose to pick it up.

Stacey calls the source of it the invisible battle: the rules you absorbed before you were old enough to choose them. Be nice. Say yes. Don't take up space. Hit the milestones on time. Nobody hands it to you in one piece. It arrives one obligation at a time, starting around age six.

The reason you can't feel how heavy it's gotten is your threshold. Stacey says we just keep doing more, and more, and more, until it climbs so high we don't know where it ends. And it doesn't stop on its own. There's no point where your body tells you that's enough.

Here's the part that matters. None of this is a personal failure. You're not disorganized, undisciplined, or bad at boundaries. The system was built, and you were handed it. This isn't men versus women; it's a structure we all live inside. Stacey says once you see it, the rage comes first and the clarity comes right after. And what was built can be dismantled.

Put it down and your interior finally matches your exterior. You stop second-guessing. And you get the four things Stacey says every person she's ever interviewed is searching for.

She names all four. Then she gives us the four moves that get you out, starting today. One of them is to say no to something you've said yes to a million times. She's got three more.

And when I asked what her motto would say on the NASDAQ billboard in Times Square, she said: Your Life Belongs To You.

Not your boss's. Not your parents'. Not some random timeline. Yours.

Stacey spent twenty years getting other people to tell the truth and didn't think her own story was worth telling. Then she wrote it down, and it changed her. She's calmer, stronger, and, by her own account, finally letting herself soar. She'll also tell you she still worries about what people think, just much, much less.

Press play.

Connect with Stacey Lindsay

• Website: https://www.staceylindsay.com/
• Substack: https://staceylindsay.substack.com/ — insights from real women on work, love, sex, and identity.
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacey-lindsay-ab1b3330/
• The Sunday Paper: https://www.mariashriversundaypaper.com/author/staceylindsay/
• Book, BEING 40: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/747056/being-40-by-stacey-lindsay/

Monica Nassif grew up in a town of 600 people in Iowa, one of nine kids, raised to cook, clean, sew, and garden. She turned every one of those skills into Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day and Caldrea.

She started at age 43 out of a spare bedroom with maxed out credit cards, two daughters, and a backup plan to drive a UPS truck. She grew to 20,000 stores and sold both brands to the multi- billion dollar household cleaning empire, SC Johnson.

And Mrs. Meyer is real. She's Monica's mom, Thelma, who is 93 and still out in her garden tending to her geraniums.

In this episode, Monica takes us inside the messy business of building. The moment in a store in Atlanta that turned into a business plan on the plane home. Why she decided cleaning products should be personal care for the home. The decision to knock off her own successful brand before someone else could. And the investor who told her he hated consumer deals but liked her anyway, and became her greatest champion.

She also gets honest about her daughter's cancer diagnosis while she was building, and what her mother said that got her back to work. The two companies out of four that flopped, and what each one taught her. Why she kicked her own brand out of Target before Target could. And what it feels like eighteen years later to have sold her own mother.

Monica now sits on the board of Barkeeper's Friend, coaches early stage consumer brand founders, and just published her memoir, “I Bottled My Mother.”

Her motto: Bet on Yourself.

Connect With Monica

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-nassif-686876335/
• Website: monicanassif.com
• Book, “I Bottled My Mother”: available at Amazon, Walmart, and Target
• Recommended in this episode: The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine, and his new book, The Transformation Economy