How Gen X is Taking on Menopause with Stacy London

Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following, we break those rules, and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier, and more self expressed. I'm your host, Erin Keating.

Today, I talked to Stacy London, who you may know from TLC's show, What Not to Wear, where she would turn regular slobs into fashionistas week after week, episode after episode, year after year. Today, Stacy is a menopause activist, and she's working to change the conversation around women and aging. She's so well spoken on this subject, she knows so much, and she's been deep in the trenches with people who have been innovating in the thinking and medicine and treatment around menopause. We talked about how Gen X is at the forefront of this revolution and how little actual medical research and science there is around women's bodies that really needs to change and how representation of older women in media is changing, but not fast enough for my taste. We covered COVID isolation and the need for connection and community IRL. She's super smart and she had a lot to say. And I think you'll find this a really relevant and fascinating conversation. Take a listen.

Stacy London is best known as the co host of the iconic TLC show, What Not to Wear, of which I was a super fan. And used to record and fast forward through to the makeover parts. You may have seen her on the today's show or the Oprah show, and you may already own her book, "The Truth About Style", which is a New York times bestseller in a big and fascinating career pivot that we're going to talk about today.

In 2020, she co founded state of menopause, a non hormonal product line for those experiencing some menopausal symptoms due to her own debilitating experience with menopause. She sunset that brand in 2023, recognizing the need to focus on education and healthcare advocacy. Amen for those in midlife and menopause. She's an advisor to women's health and perimenopause and menopause focused companies and she has a new project, a media platform that's dedicated to these issues and that's going to debut this year. That is all the information you need to know to start this conversation with Stacy London. Welcome to Hotter Than Ever.

Stacy: Thank you so much for having me, Erin. I'm thrilled to be here. I love that intro and it just makes me laugh. I mean, it feels like in some ways it says so many things about what I've done. And in other ways, there've been so many things in between, it's hard to say

Erin: I know a bio is a weird vehicle.

Stacy: And I feel like we should update our bios like at least once a month, you know what I mean? I just feel like I'm like, yeah, that media project is sort of a project. But I don't know if it's directly related to media now. Like, I don't even know how to describe some of the things that I'm doing. But you know what? I absolutely believe in the idea that if you take a step, the path appears. And that has pretty much been the ruling mantra of my life. And it's sort of taken me to all of the places that I've been, that you've mentioned so far.

Erin: Amazing. I mean, that's what this podcast is about. This podcast is about figuring out how to be happy over 40, figuring out how to live a self determined life, make your own rules, do things your own way, and separating yourself from sort of cultural expectations of like how women and especially older women are supposed to be. Because I think we're so much more than what we're depicted as.

Stacy: I mean, it goes without saying, I have a couple of things to say about that. One, this is not just about fighting cultural expectation. It's about fighting the internalized cultural expectation that you think that you are less valuable after 40, that you believe what you have been taught explicitly or implicitly. There's a lot of unlearning that we have to do after 40 and particularly now. Particularly at this stage of life, particularly at this moment in history. I absolutely believe that Gen X is the last generation that is going to suffer the kind of stigma and shame around aging that earlier generations have experienced.

I think we got here and we were like, what the fuck. Like what? Why is there no information about health care? Why is there no information about how to do this in a way where it's not about being trendy? It is about being relevant. We're not giving up the spotlight for younger generations were sharing it. And I think that Gen X is wholly responsible for this change in. You don't get pushed out at a certain age. You're not set out to pasture just because let's say you go through menopause and you're no longer biologically able to have children. That does not mean you are past your expiration date.

What is past excessive expiration date is this idea that aging, particularly women do not have value in society. If now more than ever, I think we have value. I think we have extreme value and that value around experience and wisdom has to be recognized. For how valuable it is. This is not a game of, look, we're not in woolly mammoth, saber toothed tiger days in terms of sociobiology where yes. Of course we prized youth, youth was fertility. That was the continuation of the human race. We are well past that culturally and societally. And we have got to start looking at the kind of contributions that women over 40 are making. And also the way in which we are able to shed cultural expectations and really find in unbelievable sense of freedom in this transition.

The more you're you fear aging, the harder it's going to be, right? You got to lean in. And I think it took me a long time to realize that I'm going to be 55 this year and I feel better than I have felt in years and years and years. I went into perimenopause in four when I was 47 and I lost my shit. I really did. I was like, what is happening to me?

Erin: What did that look like Stacy?

Stacy: Well, you know, it was mood. I was super depressed, super anxious. I, the phone stopped ringing, I wasn't working as much and I started to feel like I equated my worth with my value career wise, I would look in the mirror and be like, I don't look like myself anymore.

You know, my face is changing. I really don't recognize myself. My body is changing. I can't stop it from changing. And I don't feel like myself and I feel helpless. I do not know what to do about it. And nobody ever mentioned, hey, all of this emotional upheaval that you're feeling or all of these physical changes are actually related to hormonal changes in your body. Just like puberty, just like what happens in pregnancy and postpartum. Nobody ever said that to me. So I thought, Oh, am I slowly like. Losing my mind. Am I at the point where--

Erin: Or is this just what aging is? is this just what it feels like to be an older woman? Right, but were you asking yourself that question? 

Stacy: Yes. And I actually even remember saying to my girlfriend, I need help. I don't know how to do this with grace. I don't believe in aging gracefully, but I didn't know how not to fall apart over it. I didn't know what to do when I pretty much looked the same from 27 to 47. And then all of a sudden I didn't look like me anymore, you know? And all of a sudden, even if I hadn't gained weight, clothes didn't fit me the same way. Everything, body weight redistribution. There were all of these things that I felt. This is what happens when you get old. You're absolutely right. That's what I thought.

And there was nobody to explain to me that this is actually a biological process that I believe is really part and parcel of mother nature's fail safe to get us to sit up and reevaluate who we want to be now and in the future and let go of who we were. And if you're not able to do that, no matter how hard it feels, then you get stuck in this. I wish that I was younger than I am kind of -- 

Erin: Right, and this sort of longing for what was. 

Stacy: right, right. And that, that does not allow you to appreciate what is and what can be.

And there is a waste.

Erin:  It's a waste of energy and time and it's not possible. We can't go back.

Stacy: Exactly, why did anti aging become a marketing ploy? How can you be anti something that you cannot stop? How can you be against something that you have no way of controlling? And this, as a marketing scheme, really pissed me off. I'll tell you, when I started to talk about menopause, when I acquired State of Menopause and became a co founder of that company, that was well before I understood that the people who were coming to the site, we were having millions of people coming to the site and not very much conversion. It dawned on me, oh my God, menopause is not about whether or not a face, you need a new face oil. You know what I mean?

I can understand why skincare and why hair care became an issue. It was a great way to raise consciousness about menopause because the beauty industry, it thrives on our insecurities, but menopause is so much bigger than that and it deserves more than that. So I shut the company because I was like, I've never lied to a client or a customer or an audience member ever in my life, right? If you don't look at no, in fact, your trade, I'll be the one to tell you 

Erin: To find a way to be direct with kindness. 

Stacy: Exactly. And so I was like, this is not going to serve anybody but me. And yes, of course, I, you know, I'd love to make money, but I want to make money doing something good for people, not selling people bullshit. So I closed the company when I realized that menopause is actually, you know, there's the physical aspect of this. There's the medical attention that is required, whether that is integrative medicine or hormone therapy or what's coming out of pharma now that's non hormonal solutions. There's also this big emotional piece, right?

And whether you have experienced periods of depression or anxiety or rage before in your life, This is still going to come as a surprise, right? And not everybody experiences this, but there's a huge emotional upheaval, one, because of what is happening to us physiologically. And then, on top of that, you have all these external stressors. You may be dealing with elder care and child care, or empty nest syndrome and dying parents. You are between 45 and 55. Scientific American did a study and said that women between 45 and 55 are at the lowest point of happiness, highest rate of depression, highest rate of divorce, highest rate of decreased earning potential. I do not think that these things are by accident. I think it is because we have been ignoring the actual effects of menopause. And instead we've been going through this bullshit kind of cultural cliche of, She's having a midlife crisis. She's being put out to pasture. This is just the tough bumps in the road when that's right.

Erin: And that's how it is for women. That's how it is for women as they age. That's right. I feel like if you go to a doctor conventionally, you go to a doctor and you say, I'm experiencing all these symptoms, you know, is this perimenopause? Is this menopause? The response conventionally is that's just what happens to women. Where's the fucking science? Where's the treatment? Where is the, where's the care?

Stacy: You bring up the biggest issue in this stage of life. The reason that there is, you know, well, that's just the way it is, is because there was a WHI study done in 2002 that was really bad data. But what came out of it was that hormone therapy causes cancer.

Is dangerous. And it's very dangerous and all doctors because they believed it and patients believed it. Everybody stopped prescribing hormones and a lot of people who could have benefited from hormone therapy did not get it. They stopped teaching menopause in medical school because there was no solution for menopause. So it was like, well, just suck it up.

Erin: Well, just pretend like there's not a problem because there's not a solution.

Stacy: Exactly right. And this is where the real issue is. When you say to me, where's the science? Where's the research? Well, that's the problem. There has been no science or research behind this stage of life since then. And that really fucked us up. because that was historically one of the biggest studies that has done such damage to women's health. And now we're finding that actual hormone therapy has a ton of benefits. That's not to say that everybody can take hormones. There are risks for some people, but a much smaller part of the population than was originally thought.

And now we're looking at the benefits of hormone therapy, post menopause, right? For bone health or cardiac health or cognitive health. And this is not just about menopause. This is about becoming middle aged and recognizing that these are the kinds of things you need to know about your health so that you have a long health span, that your longevity means that you're going to be healthy at 85.

Erin: Not like bedridden, right? Cause who cares if you have a long life, if you're, if you're bedridden for the last 10 years of it, you know, we have a, in my family, we have a longevity gene. My mom is 80. My aunt just passed away at 93 and she was traveling and doing everything up until six months before she died. And so what I talked to my mom about is like so fucking lucky. She's so lucky, but what she does is work with her doctor to care for her longevity and so that you can have the best quality of life [00:14:00] possible because that's, it feels clear that genetically, that's kind of how we're wired. But I don't know that we think about aging in that way. The stats are always about how old's the oldest person, right? Not like what was their life like? 

Stacy: No, I'm going to disagree with you. I think that conversation is really changing. I think this is the reason we're talking about Blue Zones and we're studying them because we're not just looking at how long people live, we're looking at how long people live well. And that is sort of the new conversation. It started with menopause, that's not where it's ending. It is becoming a conversation about how the choices that we make in midlife are going to affect the back end of our lives, how we get more out of them, how we get to enjoy the things we love. For longer, how we get to be stronger.

Like, for example, we know that strength training is exceedingly important for bone health. And I wish somebody had told me in my thirties, cause I would have started much earlier, but bone health. Now, when I think about strength training, I don't think about like, Oh, I need to be cut or I want to lose 10 pounds. I want to be able to walk when I'm 85, I don't want to fall and break a hip. And when you think about it in those terms, we're kind of readjusting our perspective in terms of what aging means and the agency that we have around getting older better. That is something that I don't think has ever been in the conversation before.

Erin: No, I think that's right. I think that's right. And it's not surprising to me, given the characteristics of Gen X, that we are the ones that are taking this on. I mean, first of all, we're the in between, right? We can communicate with the older people, we can communicate with the younger people. But we also have always had this sort of sense of natural skepticism, of independent, I can take this on and solve this, I'm adaptable.

Nobody's going to take care of me, so I got to take care of myself.

Stacy: I got to take care of me, exactly. And I would say that is the big thing about this whole discussion around menopause, nobody was taking care of us and hell if we were going to let that happen. I think that once we realized there is no information out there. This is such a stigmatized topic because it is so conflated with aging and women remember are not allowed to age. Men get more distinguished, more handsome. Isn't that wonderful? Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, right? All through this patriarchal lens, Gen X really said, wait a second, how are we looking at this through a health perspective, not a beauty perspective, not a societal value perspective? What are we doing to secure our health in a way that is going to make our individual lives better, right? Culture changes when an individual decides to take agency over their choices. And if we're all able to make better choices about our health, then you can't say you're old at 40 because we won't be acting that way. We won't look that way. We already are. 

Erin: Right, we already aren't. I mean, I think the first time that I ran into the like, Oh, there's actually no science about women's bodies is when I was trying to get pregnant and going through fertility stuff. It's a similar thing where I went to a practice that didn't take insurance that was full of these genius women doctors. And they're like, let's try this, let's try that. Anecdotally, this works, I'm like, where's the fucking science? And they're like, well, we know what we've learned from our practice. We probably have more expertise from what we've tried than what the studies say, and I was shocked by that.

Stacy: Yeah, it's also because a lot of the studies haven't been done, and remember, people say they, they would prefer to see female doctors about female physiology, but these same female doctors have been taught patriarchal medicine. It wasn't until 1993. that women were required to be in any kind of research, scientific testing 1993. Before that, everything was just translated from what they found out about men. They were like, well, women are kind of like small men, but our physiology is so different.

Erin: I want to, I really want to dig into this because this is such a piece of bullshit. So studies on drugs and studies on treatments were done. With groups of men that there were no women required and the assumption was yes, 1993, the year before I graduated from college. 

Stacy: Yeah, women were not required for medical scientific studies until 1993. And before that, the assumption was women's bodies are just like small little men. And the fact is female physiology is so much more complicated than male physiology. And you know what? That's the reason when it comes to fertility or menopause, we don't have any answers because if men didn't go through it, then it wasn't studied. And that is what's starting to change.

I know, I'm sure you've heard that Dr. Jill Biden and President Biden both announced the Women's Health Initiative, which is really centered around more research for women in midlife. They want to work on lots of things for female physiology, but part of that, and part of the reason that I don't think that menopause is the whole discussion here is because once you go down that rabbit hole, you realize that the issue is we just don't have enough research independently about female physiology. And when I say women here, I'm not talking about how you identify. I'm just talking about having a uterus, having ovaries, having parts that men do not have that actually affect all parts of our body, right? Hormones behave differently in female physiology.

And if you're looking back, Yes, we're the ones who carry the babies. I'm like, well, you know, even if you just take it from that, right, even if it's so basic, it's so basic. So now we're starting to see big changes. We're starting to see doctors like Dr. Sharon Malone or Dr. Jen Gunter really stand up to the plate and start talking about the fact that you cannot talk about female physiology without an understanding of what is actually happening.

And we can't create new therapies or, you know, ways of dealing with female physiological issues without having more research on how they actually behave in the first place. And that's exhausting. That's exhausting to fight for, that's exhausting to hear, and it's what I think most women have really had to deal with in terms of the medical community for most of their lives.

Erin: And it's so interesting because obviously, there's lots of medicine to make your dick get hard because there's a market for that, right, that male scientists identified, and they were like, let's spend a huge amount of money on this capitalist enterprise that is, is pharma, right. But we get ignored in what gets prioritized by the sort of market driven research.

Stacy: I'm confused by it. Not just market driven research. Okay, I mean, who sits on the FDA? Let's just look at that first. I don't think it's a lot of women. I don't even think it's a lot of people of color. So when you say that Viagra was approved in six months, really, Viagra trials were not about erections, it was not about erectile dysfunction. It was about cardiac health. They found that as a side effect, Viagra worked for erectile dysfunction.

Erin: I was making a lot of assumptions.

Stacy: Yes, you're making assumptions, but so did I, right? Now there's another drug that my friend Cindy created, amazing drug called Addy, which is for female libido that took her 10.

fucking years to get through the FDA. And then they tried to take it off the market because women's pleasure is not considered valuable. It's just not, especially when you're talking about anything that is sexual or look, women have been taught to be afraid and feel fear living in their own bodies.

We're afraid of getting our period. We're afraid of a difficult pregnancy. We're afraid of postpartum. We're afraid of menopause. Everything about us has been taught to be fearful, not to seek out pleasure, not to do things that are proactive for ourselves. That's why I also think right now you're seeing this huge spike in sexual wellness in people going out and trying vibrators or new drugs or all sorts of things, because we realize how unfair it is for women not to be able to experience the same kind of pleasure that men have always felt entitled to.

Erin: Right, it's been privileged for them. I recently went to a sex toy convention just to see what was called the vibe expo. And it was so normalized, it was so normalized. And I did an episode about it, but it was like, wow, this is just normal people talking about pleasure selling products for pleasure. Like this, that felt very new to me that felt very fresh to me. And it's very much aligned with how I want to live. The back half of my life, I don't want to disregard my pleasure. I don't want to ignore my body. I don't want to just be an achieving head. You know what I mean? I feel like for so many years, so many of us, especially those of us who have pursued career intensely, where we had to live is neck up and the rest of us is sort of like an adjunct to that or a vehicle for that. And it's so unfair. It's so much loss.

Stacy: Yeah, so much loss. And I agree with that, but I don't think that what you're saying right now, all of these things that you, how you want to live the back half of your life or the back nine, whatever we want to call it. 

Erin: The second spring, I heard someone call it, which I think sounds a little too flowery.

Stacy: Listen, in the 17th century, they used to call hot flashes, hot blooms and I think that's way cooler than hot flashes, but I don't think that it's by accident that these conversations are happening right now. I think it is this kind of cultural revolution that we are starting to see that women in particular are leading that Gen X women in particular are leading because they got to this stage of life and they're like, well, I don't look like fucking Edith Bunker, right? I thought she was in her seventies when I was a kid. She was 47 when she played Edith Bunker. I am older than her now.

We think about the Golden Girls. Like, let me tell you, they're in their fifties, right? Hairstyles make a big difference. Rue McClanahan was in her fifties. Remember that meme that went around? Rue McClanahan was 50 and JLo was 50 on a poll at the Superbowl.

Erin: Yes, a hundred percent.

Stacy: Also, the, the generation that benefits from real health knowledge that we didn't have before. We know that walking 10,000 steps a day helps. We know that smoking is bad. We know that drinking is bad. We know that sitting is bad. We know that, you know, strength training is helpful. We know all these other things about supplements that are good for us. Things that we didn't know even 40 years ago, 30 years ago, right? It's changing.

We're also the beneficiaries of the biggest technological revolutions in cosmetic dermatology. We don't look our age and so age consequently means something very different doesn't mean it's not going to happen, but how it's going to happen and the way that you're going to be able to manage that transition. You have a lot more tools available to you than you had before, and nobody should have a helmet haircut. Just, just saying.

Erin: Right, and we don't look like grannies in our fifties. I mean, it's so hilarious to me, you know, you want to talk about representation. I mean, after 40 in the media, the representation of women drops off precipitously. So we don't even see ourselves reflected. We get the Grace and Frankie's of the world, that's one show with two actresses that have been confirmed as the avatars of aging for women in America. And they're in their fucking eighties. Where are the women in their fifties and sixties and seventies? Like, where is this representation?

Because we see after twenties and thirties, which is lots of women, lots of beautiful women in the media. We see men in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, great going gangbusters representation of their stories, but our stories are missing the science is missing and our stories are missing. I think it's changing, but it's not changing fast enough.

Stacy: I spoke at the Milken Institute about this very thing about representation. And also I think that Gina Davis's organization is really doing a lot of incredible, incredible work. But one of the things that I do think is it is changing. And, um, you know, it's why Jennifer Coolidge got to be Jennifer Coolidge in White Lotus, right? She's 61 years old, but the cultural phenomenon of that role and of her position really started to change things.

Michelle Yeoh, what Jamie Lee Curtis is doing, you're starting to see her posting, she's going to be in the next season of White Lotus. I mean, there is more representation coming.

Erin: And we have Mike White to thank for all of that.

Stacy: Yeah, I know we have Mike White. I mean, listen, of course, the white man, right. But there you go. But one of the things that I also think is really important is that like, look, Angela Bassett. Even the way Taraji P. Henson has been talking about aging, there are so many different people out there. Halle Berry has just started this new company for menopause called Reeseman. There are people, Naomi Watts is a great example as well. I mean, I'm, now I'm sort of just rattling them off.

Erin: No, I love it because I think also there's a lot of women in Hollywood who are investing in this world.

Stacy: Right, no question and I think you're going to see more and more and more of it. And I think, you know, I always think things happen in scripted before they happen in reality. Now it used to be the other way around. Something would happen in reality and you'd find a scripted version of it, but what we're seeing in scripted is also moving into reality. Look, you don't think there's going to be a Golden Bachelorette soon? Come on. You know, everybody loved the Golden Bachelor, it's par for the course.

We want to see these heartwarming stories about people who are reinventing themselves after living one life. You know, if cats have nine lives, like you don't think we've got more than one in us, come on. To me, it's coming. It's like the tsunami is coming. It may be a little slow. It may be a little far out right now, but I do believe it's coming. And I think of course, entertainment is always where you're getting the highest profile of things. And that's how we wind up having things sort of trickle down and normalizing culture. But I remember in 2012, I did, I wrote an article about this for Refinery29. It was the age of age, right? In 2012, Julia Roberts was the model for Givenchy and Joan Didion was the model for Celine and Cher was the model for Marc Jacobs and Charlotte Rampling was the model for, I can't remember, but somebody else, right? You just had all these women of a certain age, right? And that was one season. And everybody did it and then everybody stopped. And I'm like--

Erin: It's like plus size, right? Like it's a similar thing. We are aging. We have bodies that are larger than a size two in reality every day of our lives, but the fashion industry decides to celebrate that for one season. 

Stacy: In the same way, I will tell you in the last 10 years, I would say that body positivity, especially in America has become a much more of a part and parcel discussion in fashion. Christian Siriano had a huge, huge contribution to make when it came to really creating. high fashion for plus size. And, and I think he deserves the credit. But I think that generally speaking, we're starting to see body positivity as more of the norm than the exception. What I think we're not seeing is age as part of the norm and not the exception. It becomes I'm like age isn't a trend guys. You can't just say it's cool one season, cause we're all getting old.

It's wonderful the way they just did Maggie Smith, but she's of a much older age. Like you were talking about Grace and Frankie. Where are the women in the middle? Where are the 45 to 70 year old women in everyday life on billboards in Times Square? Where are they? But I believe I truly believe that they are coming. And I think when you see people like Kate Winslet, who are doing public service announcements about not wanting to be airbrushed about fighting for that as a law, community in Britain and also doing videos where she takes up all of her makeup and she talks about like, we're normal people.

Even celebrities go home and watch TV and sit on the couch and fart. It's about kind of normalizing what this process is. You know, yes, fine, glamour, Hollywood, we've got the age of Ozempic. You've got all these things that celebrities have available to them that the general public doesn't have. But in general, I think strides are being made to normalize our life experience generally. And that is coming from younger generations. Just as you said, Gen X can speak to older people and we can speak to younger people. And when you see what younger millennials and Gen Z, what their value system is, it's changing the way we're going to think about ours. 

Erin: I think that's so right. I worked at Snapchat for six years and my audience was Gen Z and I found it so heartening who they are. I found it so inspiring who they are because they have new thoughts about identity. They have new thoughts about gender. They have new thoughts about relationships. They are less hung up on all of these, this categorization and taxonomy. They are really hung up on language in a way that I think might not be that helpful. But I was very inspired by their idealism, by their activism and by their outspokenness and their willingness to say, yeah, we live on social media and you can criticize us for that. But you created that for us, and we're going to use it to speak our truth and we're going to use it to connect.

And of course there's damage being done on social media, but there's also a lot of really empowered, inspiring young people who are saying, like, fuck your ideas of gender, fuck your ideas of who I should sleep with and if I should sleep with anybody, like, they really lit me up in terms of an audience to program for as a development executive, which is what I was there because I felt like they were really open to hearing a wide range of stories and they wanted their stories represented as well because they're the most diverse generation ever. 

Stacy: Sure, and I think even if you're looking at what happened with Black Lives Matter, right, we are finally taking on real systemic issues that have been really beneath the surface, if not visible to everybody, now completely visible. We're taking those systemic structures on and trying to figure out how to dismantle them. And that that is race, that is gender, that is sexuality. That is all of these things. So why is it that this hasn't happened for age for women and for age, right? And single out women again because of historically not having enough medical research to really understand how to best take care of ourselves. So why is it we have not only dismantled the age, you know, curse. It's also that like, why are we looking at medicine and healthcare through this patriarchal lens? It's so deep rooted that we are really going to have to rip everything up to get it right. And that's what we're starting to see the destruction of old systems so that new ones can be built in their place. And so I'm hopeful.

Erin: I really love your optimism, Stacy, because I sometimes feel like there's a lot of conversations about this stuff happening, but like, let's follow the money. Like, where is the investment happening and who is willing to invest? I just feel like everything needs to move so much bigger and so much faster to have as much impact as it needs to have.

Stacy: I don't disagree.

Erin: There's so many of us. You know, we're 25 percent of the population, women over 40, like it's a shocking statistic, but it's also like, yeah, what do you think happens?

Stacy: But you know, a friend of mine said this to me yesterday, and this is why I can have optimism and frustration sort of at the same time, right? I mean, there's optimism in this regard. There's a lot about what is going on in the world that is like heart wrenching and feels like it's on fire. And it makes me worry for younger generations that there's even going to be a world here, right? But when I think about what we're talking about, when I think about how are we giving agency to women who don't realize that they have it?

My friend, Natalie said this to me yesterday. She was like, you know, what's missing is the switchboard, we don't know how to connect the audiences who need these resources to the resources themselves. That's the disconnect. And instead of marketing them as product, because we're also now, we're also cynical about, you know, what's being sold to us. We are not actually taking away this idea of marketing and saying, here is how we give you agency. What you choose to do with it is up to you. But here are the products available to you. Pure services available to you. Here are doctors available to you. Here are research funds that you can contribute to.

We're not connecting the dots in a way where the people who want this change are able to activate this change because there are people doing this, but I say this all the time about menopause. I feel like there are 300 people, we're in like an echo chamber, we're the ones always talking about it, but that doesn't mean that somebody in Boise, Idaho knows what I'm talking about when I'm like, Hey, did you know that there's this thing that you can take for hot flashes that doesn't have hormones in it? You know, things like that.

Erin: Yes, I think that's right. And there's all the more opportunity and it's all the more challenging because of the fragmentation of the media that we create and consume now, right?

Stacy: And that's self confirming bias, right?

Erin: Right, the echo chamber of the listeners of Hotter Than Ever, I think a lot of the listeners to this conversation are hip to this conversation. But I hope a number of people who are listening are not hip to this conversation and that they get awakened to the possibility there might be solutions that they don't know about yet. And how do we, and how do we amplify all of these conversations that you and I know are happening so that more people can feel better for longer?

Stacy: Yes. I mean, that is the ultimate goal, and what I hope is that Melissa French or Maureen Jobs, or Mackenzie Scott is listening to this podcast and thinks I'm gonna to donate $500 million to women's health research. I'm gonna donate a hundred million dollars to a program that is accessible to everybody that's free information and free potential products, or something like that. That's what I'm hoping for because I really do believe that women of exceptional wealth that we are seeing at this stage of life, they are investing in lots of important things. But this is something that nobody has stepped up to the plate to do. That's what I'm waiting to see. If I was a gazillionaire, that's exactly where I would put my money.

Erin: Right, So any female Warren Buffett's out there, any people with access to massive generational wealth, any people who have been wildly successful in business, what do you want your contribution to be to the quality of life for women? You know, as we head into these incredibly exciting, I believe free and fertile years where we can actually live lives that don't look like. Any generation before us.

Stacy: Amen. I don't, I couldn't say it any better.

Erin:  That's the conversation that I'm here for and I love your advocacy and your passion and how informed you are about all of this stuff. So tell us about what your media platform is or isn't going to be. 

Stacy: So I'll tell you, it started as that, but I'm going to be honest with you. One of the things that I spent a lot of time doing last year was really looking at that whole switchboard problem. And originally I thought what we need is a site that sort of covers not just like news information, but Apps has that switchboard. You can type in the issues that you're concerned about, whether they're physical symptoms or you're looking for a doctor in your area or whatever and we act as that switchboard. The problem is that marketing doesn't work anymore, right? So we're oversaturated. So the idea of getting traffic to a site, even if it is one that is incredibly helpful is near impossible. And media is collapsing in on itself, right? Traditional media is.

Erin: Where I spent 20 years and where you did too. 

Stacy: Right, where I did too. So, you know, I went from magazines to television. Television is like on your own schedule. There's no such thing as a point in television. And how would you even choose what you're going to watch? Unless it's the super bowl, because you have 17,000 channels to choose from.

Erin: Yeah, it's a mess.

Stacy: Yeah, it's too hard. The kind of things that I want to get across, we need a megaphone for in a way that is not going to get across on a site. It is not going to get across in a newsletter. I mean, eventually that may be part of it, but what I really think and what I really believe that we need to be doing is actually much more grassroots. We need to be creating events around information, product, services, doctors, and connecting them to the actual public in a forward facing way. To have conventions, to have conferences, to have places where people can actually meet in real life, not sit on a zoom call and listen to somebody drone on about why estrogen is important instead of actually giving you the tools to decide what you want to do.

What I find most upsetting is that this part of the population has decision fatigue about what to do about her health before she is even made a choice because now she's so overwhelmed with information, there's no way to parse through it. There's nobody translating that for her. So my hope is that we can do this on the ground in real life with each other, because I think that the whole idea of sitting on zoom is becoming less and less appealing to people.

And the whole idea that you are influenced by marketing is coming to a close. I don't know how AI is going to play into that, but I feel like that's sort of the next. thing. We are going to have to figure out in real time how to do this with each other. And that also gives me hope because I think we need community, not just online community. I think we need real physical community. And the more that we can build that, the easier it is going to be for this particular age group to move things along, to push legislation along, to get what they want from the companies who make what they need. And that's my hope. 

Erin: I love that. And I think that's right. I think how to get people out of their houses and into communal spaces is then the question, right? Because it's so easy to not do it. It's so easy to not go.

Stacy: It's so easy. I mean, I say I have COVID hangover, you know, I had social anxiety before COVID. COVID was kind of bliss for me in the beginning because I was like, I don't have to be anywhere or do anything or I'm not responsible for anything, I don't have to achieve anything, It was kind of amazing. It just got dark, you know, obviously when people were really, really sick. There was that moment, those first two weeks when I did not realize that sort of the depth or the seriousness of the issue. No, none of us did. I felt this incredible sense of relief. And since we've had to kind of integrate back into society, I really have to push myself to get out there, to see people, to go to dinner, because I would much rather stay at home. I think 

Erin: I think we all would. I think that's something we're not talking about. People talk about the COVID hangover, the sort of cultural impact. But I do think it changed us on some level in a way that something that was already degrading, the sort of interpersonal social fabric, the, the being together in, in real time and space, that that was already being reduced by the impact of technology. And then COVID just put that on steroids. And so now we're all fighting these battles about like, how do I really want to leave my house? You know, to really want to go do that thing, like I got invited to a nice party this weekend. My boyfriend's kind of like, I don't know if I want to go, and I'm like, all right, that's fine. You know what I mean? Like I really do want to go, but I'll let his resistance dominate it because that means we'll stay home and watch a movie.

Stacy: Exactly. And my girlfriend and I are exactly the same way, want to be out there. We want to support the people that we love. We want to go out and see people. We want people to know we're rooting for them, but it's so much nicer to stay home on the couch and watch White Lotus or whatever it is. And I think that you're right. I think what happened was that you had this conflation of what happened during COVID and the rise of social media or the reliance on media and social media and digital technology during that time that has made it almost impossible for people to kind of pull back from that.

And the other thing, I don't know if you've noticed this, but I have noticed that so many women my age are suddenly being diagnosed with ADHD. And I don't think that's by accident either. Now, there are some people that would argue it's because you have some diminished executive functioning in the brain when you're going through menopause.

Dr. Lisa Musconi wrote a book about menopause and the brain, which I highly recommend. that that usually comes back post menopause. This diagnosis of ADHD where we are so scattered that we are almost paralyzed or that we can't retain information. I do not believe that everybody is suddenly has ADHD or that it was misdiagnosed.

Or look, maybe perhaps it was boys who had ADD when we were young and girls were kind of ignored. So we're catching up with that. But I really believe that if you tested it, any part of the population, anybody who is seeing the amount of images or taking in the amount of information that our brains were not built to do would see the same type of behavior. This idea that it's ADHD, it's no. I can't remember where I read this or a doctor told me that in a 24 hour news cycle, we see more images, our eyes see more images than our grandparents saw in their lifetime. Now, if that's true, how we're still working with prehistoric software here, you know, this whole idea of a neural link is no joke because we don't have any storage space left. Our brains are not meant to work this way.

And I think that it is really causing a lot of disconnection. Between people in a way that, you know, if you feel like you've got your family, you've got your partner, you've got your friends that are all close enough and nuclear enough that that's enough for you, great. But I think that this is why loneliness is such an epidemic. This is why the surgeon general is talking about this. We are in a position of isolation that we've never had to experience in our lives. We feel connected. We're not connected. And I think what does that do to your brain? What does that do to your heart?

Erin: Right. Okay, so we're all gonna get together.

Stacy: So we're gonna get together. Big kumbaya.

Erin: Yeah, I don't about kumbaya, but like maybe a karaoke night would be fun. 

Stacy: There you go, karaoke night. I also, I make excellent martinis. But I really encourage your listeners to think about, what can you do? Could you have 10 people over to your house? Could you have five people over to your house? Could you have a night where you do karaoke? Could you all watch a movie together? Could you play fucking trivial pursuits? I don't care. But that idea of real life connection for our generation in particular, where we sort of sit on the fence between what was the industrial revolution and the technological revolution, we have to figure out how to best optimize what we have both physically, psychologically, emotionally, mentally, in terms of experience and wisdom to be able to navigate modern times. This is a difficult time. It is not an easy time and throw in the added tropes about aging or menopause or stigma or just what it means to be a woman. I mean, fuck that. We got to at least be able to chuck that one off the table. You know what I mean? Like that's small potatoes compared to like what we really need to deal with.

Erin: To the macro situation of the human race.

Stacy: Yeah, exactly. To the the macro situation.

Erin: Okay, I have asked everyone who's come on this podcast one question. And that question is a personal one, and it is, are there any deal terms in your personal life, in your own life and how you live, that you want to renegotiate? I think we live in a series of deals and agreements that we've made with ourselves and with other people. And is there anything that you feel like it's time to reopen those terms? 

Stacy: Well, I think that's something that I've been doing over the last five years. I think that the experience of perimenopause and how that kind of shattered me also made me realize like a lot of the coping mechanisms that I was using before do not work. They worked when I was a kid, they worked for whatever survival techniques you want to talk about or, you know, whatever. But at a certain point I was like, huh, there are people in my life that don't deserve to be here. I'm going to cut the fat. I'm going to start actually holding people to a standard that matters, not just because of who they are or that I'm trying to people please or that I want to get people to like me.

And I will say, some of that has actually been really eye opening to me. In the sense that it's, it started with the way I wanted to relate to people, but it's also become the way I think about less is more, right? I talk about this in style and in fashion all the time. Less is more. I am out of my acquisition phase, I have a garage sale all the time. I want to get rid of shit all the time. I want less and less and less. I want fewer pieces. I want fewer things. I want high quality, right? That's what I want in my life in general. I want fewer things, higher quality.

Fewer people, higher quality, you know, fewer spaces, higher quality, all of that, the way in which that I want to look at my life is I actually want to make things smaller, not bigger.

I am not of the mentality that she with the most toys when they die wins. I want my life to be so beautifully curated that everything about what I have around me, environmentally, interpersonally, feels like it was an intentional choice made by a grown up without fear and insecurity. None of this child based trauma shit, that all of my choices are made from a place of love, contentment, pride, and confidence.

Erin: Amen, sister. Oh, I love this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and talking, sharing your wisdom and expertise. And I wish you all the best in your next endeavor. I will be following closely and not fast forwarding through this [00:49:00] one.

Stacy: Well, don't forget, I'm probably going to call you when I'm in LA and be like, it's time for karaoke.

Erin: I'm in, I'm in, I got a good place downtown.

Stacy: Erin, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Erin: Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. Have you been listening to our weekly advice episodes? Have you been enjoying having more Hotter Than Ever in your podcast feed? Are there issues that you would like my very biased feedback on? Do you have like really specific questions about sex, relationships, intimacy, career, goal setting, pivots, transitions? Do you need permission to do something you already know you're going to do? I will give you that permission and a little bit of my two cents on the subject. How do I ask a question? I'm so glad you asked. DM us on Instagram @hotterthaneverpod or call and leave a voicemail or text your question to 323 844 2303. 323 844 2303 is that number again. I cannot wait to answer your question in a future episode.

Hotter Than Ever is produced by Erica Girard and PodKit Productions. Our associate producer is Melody Carey. Music is by Chris Keating with vocals by Issa Fernandez.

Come back next week. We are just getting started in these conversations about what it's like to be over 40 and how we can make our lives as sparkly and lit up and magical and sexy as possible. Ugh. All those things. Can't wait to talk more.