1325: Matriarchy | Skeptical Sunday

1325: Matriarchy | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Jessica Wynn. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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That'll [00:01:00] help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today on Skeptical Sunday, we are talking about matriarchy. Not patriarchy, the word you hear all the time on the internet. We're talking about matriarchy.

Now, I know you're thinking this is either about dunking on feminism or building some kinda shrine to it, but the actual story here is so much more complicated. I don't actually know what a matriarchy looks like globally, but I do know what it looks like when I lose an argument at home. Now, to help me think through it is writer and researcher Jessica Wynn.

Okay, so let's not start with a definition because I think definitions are where this conversation kinda goes to die. So let's start with a place. Is there an actual matriarchy somewhere on Earth right now?

Jessica Wynn: There are places routinely described that way, like the millions of Minangkabau people in West Sumatra, Indonesia.

They are the largest matrilineal society on Earth. Property passes through the [00:02:00] mother, the family name comes from the mother, women control land and inheritance, and when you marry, the husband moves into the wife's family home.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that sounds pretty matriarchal.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But is the land and namesake thing, is that just performative, or does this mean women kinda run everything?

Jessica Wynn: So men hold most of the formal political and religious roles. So Islamic law operates alongside customary law, and in both systems, men have significant authority. Women control the property, but often not the decisions happening on the property.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so the women own everything, and the men, it kinda sounds like they run everything.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, that's right.

Jordan Harbinger: And this is considered the world's largest matriarchy.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, but by journalists who visit and see property passing through women and make the claims without digging further. So the people who actually live there are sometimes baffled by the label.

Jordan Harbinger: Are there other societies, or is this kinda where it ends these days?

Jessica Wynn: Well, [00:03:00] there's the Khasi in northeastern India. They're also matrilineal. Name, property, and clan identity all come through the mother.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Jessica Wynn: The youngest daughter typically inherits the family home, and women are central to the household, and they do hold high status.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, and the men?

Jessica Wynn: The men there have religious and political authority, but they don't seem content with this agreement because there's actually a men's rights movement among the Khasi.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Jessica Wynn: You know, so it's a group called the Synkhong Hympeitimi. They're organized specifically to push back against what they see as men being marginalized by matrilineal inheritance.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. I probably shouldn't have laughed, but hold on. So this so-called matriarchy has men in charge of religion and politics, and the, those men are complaining.

So that's, like, optics.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, which tells you something about the gap between what it looks like from the outside and what's really happening on the inside. So a society can look progressive on [00:04:00] paper, while the day-to-day experience is still pretty constrained or even oppressive.

Jordan Harbinger: This kinda reminds me of a Vice News piece from a few years ago.

So my friend is a journalist who used to be at Vice, Isabelle Jung, and she interviewed this, I think he was, like, an Afghan member of parliament, about women's rights. And the man wouldn't look at her at all, of course, and he would stop her questioning, and then she pressed him on something a little bit, like, in a very polite way, and he basically tells the translator, "It sounds like she wants to have her nose cut off for being so insolent," or something like that.

Yes. And they subtitle it. And it's just... Have you seen this? It's actually crazy.

Jessica Wynn: It's wild. Oh, I remember it for sure. I mean-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah ...

Jessica Wynn: it's a wild clip.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Nothing says, "No, we take women seriously," like threatening to mutilate the reporter mid-interview.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, he just proved her point by shutting down the interview.

It was wild.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, exactly. Having a woman question him and question his authority or whatever he perceived, that was just too much. And the minute guys like that feel like they're on the [00:05:00] losing end of a gender gap, even a hint of imbalance, it's suddenly, "Hey, we should consider equity." The word fairness shows up real fast when the shoe's on the other foot.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's impressive, actually. Perspective changes very quickly when the dynamic shifts. There's also the Borribke of Costa Rica, and they're organized through matrilineal clans, so women are the only ones who can inherit land and the only ones permitted to prepare the certain cacao for sacred ceremonies, which is a really significant ritual role in their society.

Jordan Harbinger: So women control land and the sacred substance. Yeah, that sounds like real power, at least in that society.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and it is. But still, the highest spiritual authority, the shaman, is a role exclusive to men, and only men perform funeral rites. So women hold the land, and they do sacred daily work- While men hold the roles that carry the most prestige and respect.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so it sounds like women have the [00:06:00] responsibility, and men, in some ways, have the glory here. And y- you know me, I'm not, like, a hardcore feminist guy. I have people listening right now who v- are maybe surprised by this, but this is what it sounds like to me. I, I can't say I'm surprised, because it seems like optics are important in these systems.

Is there anywhere it actually flips and goes the other way, where women genuinely hold both the resources and the prestige?

Jessica Wynn: There's one more case that's worth looking at, and it's probably the most misunderstood. So the Mosuo in southwestern China, near the Tibetan border, their society is often called the last matriarchy.

So the household is led by a senior woman, usually the grandmother. Children take the mother's name, they stay in her household, and inheritance passes through the female line. Women run the domestic economy and take on work that, in many cultures, is reserved for men.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that all tracks so far. So where does it get complicated?

Jessica Wynn: So the relationship structure is what's complicated. The Mosuo practice what's called axia. [00:07:00] Translated, it means walking marriages.

Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.

Jessica Wynn: So a woman and man decide, by mutual consent, to be together, but they don't ever live together. They don't merge finances, and there's no formal contract. The man literally walks to the woman's house at night and goes back to his own family home each morning.

Jordan Harbinger: How romantic. Structural sleepovers. This is basically how my high school relationships worked, just with better organization and probably they didn't have to keep it a secret from their parents. I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I don't know if they're sneaking in and out of windows like my high school boyfriend, but it's just how normal life works for them.

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, can you imagine knocking on the door like, "Hi. Oh, hi, yes, I'm here to bang your daughter."

Jessica Wynn: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: I'll be- I'm here

Jessica Wynn: for my nightly...

Jordan Harbinger: I'll leave in the morning. It's also funny that the guy basically does the walk of shame back to his mom's house in the morning. Just like...

Jessica Wynn: Well, that's us putting our Western- Yeah

high school idea into it. I mean, I think it's less walk of shame and more of just their marital commute,

Jordan Harbinger: I guess. Sure, sure. So the [00:08:00] matriarchy is built on booty calls. Who knew? Okay, it really is the lineage that's the unit and not the couple. That's the big difference I'm hearing here.

Jessica Wynn: Right, and anthropologists call it something closer to serial monogamy.

You know, it can be short-term or lifelong, and the relationship can end if either person decides it's over. And what's interesting to me is there's relatively little social drama around all of this.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. And what happens if the couple has kids?

Jessica Wynn: Children are raised entirely in the mother's household, so the primary male figure in a child's life is usually the maternal uncle, not the biological father.

The father can be involved by agreement, but he's not the central paternal presence.

Jordan Harbinger: So this system operates Quite a bit outside of what we're used to. I'm impressed that it's unbothered by the norms in most other places. Wrap your head around this. You're a man in this society, and you're raising your sister's or whatever kids as their father figure, and you [00:09:00] might even have your own kids, but you're not really a big deal in their life.

Their mother's brother is.

Jessica Wynn: Right. You're just the guy who comes over after they go to bed, I

Jordan Harbinger: guess. Yeah, you're like a sperm donor or whatever. But the thing is, and I think about that, and I'm assuming guys listening right now are thinking about that, and they're like, "Oh, I don't really know that about that.

I, I don't really like how that feels." But to them, it's completely normal, and it might be... It's, it's a non-issue for those guys. So I don't know. It, it is hard to wrap my mind around this 'cause it's, we're so immersed in the current system that we have. It just is so different.

Jessica Wynn: I think it's hard for a lot of people even close to them to wrap their mind around it.

The Mosuo aren't frozen in time, and they're under real pressure from the state government.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you know what? That makes sense. You'd have to build a legal system around this. Like, who gets custody when this relationship breaks up? And it doesn't make sense to give the father 50% custody. It's like, what are you doing?

I don't want... No. Those are... Let her and the uncle raise them. I don't want anything to do with... Right. Like, I'm, I'll come over and hang out. I don't... What do you mean chi- child support? No, that's not my responsibility. I mean, that's just a totally different [00:10:00] game. So when you say pressure from the state, what exactly do you mean?

The government is against marriage by booty call, or what?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, pretty much. China's legal and economic systems are built around nuclear families and formal marriage, and the Mosuo system doesn't fit neatly into that. They don't have any kind of contract when they get these walking marriages put in place, so there's a constant push towards standardizing these, their practices.

Plus, the Mosuo are heavily marketed as the last matriarchy, which causes this huge influx of tourists expecting to see something exotic- Mm-hmm ... going on.

Jordan Harbinger: So this is, the whole system becomes a spectacle and has a bit of an audience.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, right, and that can start to reshape how the system is practiced.

But even with that, the core structure holds, so women anchor the household and the economy. I mean, the men aren't powerless, but their roles are more specific. They tend to have authority in areas like ritual and funerals and [00:11:00] the killing of animals, like certain community decisions, but the domestic and economic center of gravity is unmistakably female.

Women run it, and that's the part that's hard to wrap your head around if you come from a system where marriage is the foundation of everything.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. No, that is structurally highly unique. I mean, I can already hear some men saying, "Hey, this sounds great. No pressure to be the provider or a traditional family man," and they get to have sex on the regular still, right?

It seems like the system could've been developed on behalf of men, but it still gets called a matriarchy because of who's in control of the resources, I guess.

Jessica Wynn: That's the misunderstanding. So it's not no responsibility. It's just a different responsibility. So men are still deeply involved in family life, but just in their own household as brothers and uncles, not as husbands and nuclear fathers.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay. So you don't get to opt out, you just play a different role. Yeah. Okay.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Responsibility doesn't disappear, it's just [00:12:00] redistributed. And it's worth noticing something across all of these examples.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. What's the through line?

Jessica Wynn: So in every case, women hold significant structural power over the property, inheritance, land, and the lineage.

But in every case, the men retain the prestigious roles, the ritual authority, the formal political positions. So yeah, women get the property and the work, but men keep the ceremony and the title.

Jordan Harbinger: So in the most famous matriarchies on Earth, the women have the burden and the men still have the prestige.

Wow.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah. Which raises the question, what are we even looking for when we say matriarchy? Because that word is doing about six different jobs at once.

Jordan Harbinger: And it's being paid, what is it, 80 cents on the dollar for all of them?

Jessica Wynn: Exactly. So I mean, but let's actually sort this out, because the distinctions matter enormously, and I think the definitions will make sense now that we've seen some real examples.

So first you have [00:13:00] matrilineal societies. These are the societies about descent and inheritance, like your family name and property. They all get traced through the mother. That tells you how a society organizes families. It does not tell you who holds power.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, okay. That's an important caveat. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's a crucial caveat.

Then you have matrilocal societies. This is when a couple marries, the husband moves into the wife's family home. Again, this is all about structure, not authority.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah. My trainer moved in with his wife in her house, so I guess I can tell him he's part of a matrilocal-

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, he's matrilocal.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There you go.

So this guy moves in with her family, insert every mother-in-law joke ever told, but it doesn't necessarily mean women are shaping how power actually works.

Jessica Wynn: And then there's matrifocal, which are households centered around the mother as the primary social and emotional anchor. This brings women high status, and they often wield a lot of influence.

Still not the same as [00:14:00] political authority or any formal power, though.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So we've got a bunch of things that kinda look like matriarchy, but aren't actually even the same thing at all.

Jessica Wynn: Which leaves us with matriarchy proper. So this would mean women hold primary political, social, and moral authority.

All formal power structures are female dominated. The problem here is that this kind of society is extremely hard to find. Well,

Jordan Harbinger: okay, hard to find because it doesn't exist, or what?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, well, there's a few possibilities, one being that pure matriarchy might not exist, or it's possible we've been looking for the wrong thing when we say matriarchy, or maybe the historical record we're using wasn't written by people interested in recognizing matriarchy when and if it did ever exist.

Jordan Harbinger: But that's three different conclusions. So do we know which one might be the truth? I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. All three might be partially true, which is really [00:15:00] uncomfortable.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. But why does this definition mess even really matter? Because I feel like in popular conversation, you know, you just say matriarchy, everyone just nods.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It matters because the confusion distorts real societies. So from the Minangkabau in Indonesia or the Khasi in northeastern India, they're constantly being misrepresented. A Western journalist visits, sees property passing through women and the family name coming from the mother, and then writes a piece about the world's largest matriarchy.

People there read it and think, "That's not what's happening here at all." They might be flattered, but they are bewildered.

Jordan Harbinger: So this is sort of amateur armchair sociology rom- or anthropology romanticizing a different culture.

Jessica Wynn: Kind of, but a lot of them are professionals.

Jordan Harbinger: That should know better. Not

Jessica Wynn: really armchair, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: That, yeah.

Jessica Wynn: But on the other side, you have anthropologists with a very strict checklist on matriarchy, and this means women must hold formal political power. So they look at a place like Minangkabau, see men [00:16:00] in many official political and religious roles, and conclude that it's not a matriarchy, but that misses how power actually functions in that society.

Jordan Harbinger: So we're, uh, we're measuring this with the wrong tools, and we get the wrong answers.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, exactly. It's applying a Western framework, what power is supposed to look like, and using that to judge a system that may be organized very differently, and that's why these debates about matriarchy just go in circles, people arguing from different definitions without realizing they're not talking about the same thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so did matriarchy ever exist? Was there a prehistoric golden age where women ran everything someplace before men showed up and invented bureaucracy?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, people really like to think this. This is actually a claim with a very specific origin. It was formalized in 1861 by a Swiss scholar, Johann Jakob Bachofen.

Maybe not formalized, maybe invented is a better word for his theory.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and in [00:17:00] 1861, so this isn't exactly ancient wisdom from some papyrus scroll. Right. Like, this is a 19th century man with a theory.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, so it's just this Victorian guy, Bachofen, argued that early human societies were organized around women and motherhood.

And that over time, they evolved into patriarchy, which he saw as a more advanced stage of civilization.

Jordan Harbinger: Ooh, bold claim. Okay. Yeah. So the guy who invented the idea of prehistoric matriarchy thought patriarchy was a good upgrade. Right. Nice.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. He thought it was- Uh-huh ... more advanced, yeah. And that detail gets lost every time the theory gets reused.

So later, Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher and co-author of The Communist Manifesto- Right ... he connected the idea of matriarchy to capitalism. Well,

Jordan Harbinger: of course he did, but okay. Of

Jessica Wynn: course. He argued that the overthrow of what he called mother right, which basically meaning inheritance and family lineage passing through women, was the first major defeat of women.[00:18:00]

So he saw matriarchy's disappearance as linked to the rise of private property and class society. Then, in the 1970s and '80s, parts of the feminist spirituality movement reshaped the whole thing into a story about a lost golden age of peace and goddess worship that was violently destroyed by patriarchy.

Jordan Harbinger: But that's the version people remember, some lost peaceful world before, I don't know, men ruined it. I mean, I've heard that story a bunch. I kinda get the appeal, but I don't know.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, but there's pretty much no evidence this prehistoric matriarchy actually happened. So the idea circulated widely in feminist organizing.

Gloria Steinem talked about this. It spread in neo-pagan communities, in academic conferences, and on network television. So the images of a prehistoric world where women were revered, society was peaceful and ecological, and men hadn't yet ruined everything. What's interesting is that the most [00:19:00] rigorous takedown of this peaceful matriarchal world narrative comes from a feminist scholar.

Her name's Cynthia Eller. She wrote a book called The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, and it's genuinely one of the most carefully argued deconstructions of this cherished belief that I've ever read.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel like you're making enemies. So all right, what does she say? For

Jessica Wynn: sure. I know people are going to say how anti-feminist I am.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: But her core argument is that the evidence offered for prehistoric matriarchy simply doesn't support the claim, and her evidence is strong. You know, you have female figurines found at archaeological sites, goddess imagery in ancient art, burial patterns suggesting high status for some women. That all feels really empowering, but Eller says, "Look, finding a statue of a woman does not tell you women ran the government.

Finding goddess worship doesn't tell you women held political authority." So spiritual [00:20:00] symbolism and public governance are very different things, and a male god is worshiped in most traditions, and that hasn't stopped- Most men from being excluded from power.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good point.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and then Eller makes a second argument that I think is even more interesting and more genuinely feminist.

She argues the myth of matriarchal prehistory is actually bad for feminism, even though it may feel empowering.

Jordan Harbinger: That feels counterintuitive. Why is the idea of a society run by women bad for feminism again?

Jessica Wynn: Because of what it assumes women are, right? In these stories of the matriarchal golden age, it always looks the same, peaceful, nurturing, communal, close to nature.

Women are cast as caregivers, consensus builders, and life-givers. And Eller's point is, yes, that might sound empowering, and it flips the valuation, but it keeps the stereotype. So the same [00:21:00] traits that have been used to exclude women from power are now being used to justify it.

Jordan Harbinger: So if the premise is the same, w- you know, women are naturally nurturing, it doesn't matter if the conclusion is that they should be subordinate or that they should rule.

It's just the same box with a nicer label.

Jessica Wynn: Right, and the assumption goes completely unchallenged, that women are all about care and emotion, and men are about reason and hierarchy. Historically, that assumption has done a lot more harm than good because it frames women as submissive and men as dominant.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so the empowering myth of matriarchal prehistory is, in a weird way, running on the same operating system as the thing that it's pushing back against.

Jessica Wynn: That's exactly her argument, and she goes further, saying that this myth didn't originate in feminism. The myth was originally created by men, Bachofen, Engels, and their intellectual heirs, who thought of matriarchy as something humanity had correctly outgrown.

Jen Harbinger: Savage.

Jessica Wynn: So the [00:22:00] feminist version is a later reinterpretation, not the original idea.

Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back.

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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. I feel like I'm getting... I'm taking, like, Women's Studies 102 right now on this episode of the show. I was not expecting this. Okay, so that's a pretty devastating critique, though. So even the origin story comes from guys who thought, "Hey, good thing we moved past that nonsense.

Am I right, guys?" But the argument that there's no evidence for prehistoric matriarchy, it really depends on the historical record, and I think we should be at least a little bit skeptical about whose record that is because Who wrote the record, right? Who decided what counted as [00:25:00] authority and what was worth documenting?

Some... Jess, I'm picturing old sort of British guys with monocles that, I don't know, hunt quail with those long rifles and wear those smoking jackets. And they're like, "Well, look at this statue of a woman. Clearly they exalted women, and also they're savages, so of course the women were running things.

Anyway, write that down in your little book about why brown people are bad and our culture is superior."

Jessica Wynn: And women are- Yeah ... submissive. You're not far off probably because, of course, who wrote it? The answer is largely men from patriarchal societies, and they're working with their own assumptions about what power looks like, and those assumptions were not neutral.

Jordan Harbinger: So what assumptions are we talking about?

Jessica Wynn: Okay, so this is documented. It's not speculative. So when European colonial administrators, the ones you're imagining, arrived in West Africa among the Akan in what's now Ghana, they encountered societies where women held real political authority. There were female chiefs, female [00:26:00] councils, female religious leaders.

But when it came time to negotiate and sign treaties and establish colonial governance, they just couldn't process it. Europeans dealt almost exclusively with men because that's what authority looked like to them. The women's political roles were simply not legible to them, so they gave no respect to female power.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so they couldn't see it 'cause they weren't looking for it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, the women's authority wasn't always invisible, but it was often treated as irrelevant, and over time, that selective recognition reshaped the actual power structure itself. So for the Europeans, acknowledging matriarchy would have complicated the story they were telling about the progress of civilization and who was qualified to govern, and the male-designated authorities gained real power that the female authorities had previously held, and the colonial records showed a patriarchal society because the colonizers had created a [00:27:00] more patriarchal society by only recognizing male authority and only communicating with men.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.

Jessica Wynn: Behind the scenes, the women were quietly like, "No, no, no, this is what you should do."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this is so interesting. This is really extraordinary. So they didn't just misread the system. They actually helped change it by refusing to recognize it as it was. But then quietly, the men were running to the women to confirm what they should do.

If I'm a British guy or a Dutch colonizing some place in Africa a couple of hundred years ago, I roll in, and I'm like, "All right, I need to speak to the man in charge." And it's like, "That would be me." And I'm like, "Nah, miss, I want to talk to your husband," or whatever, right, equivalent of that is, because I can't imagine I'd be dealing with this lady.

So she's like, "Ah, okay, fine." So she goes and finds someone she trusts, and she's like, "Hey, you need to be the face of this 'cause they're only going to talk with you. They don't want to deal with me." And then- I don't know, 5,000 years goes by or, I don't know, a few decades, and that guy's actually the one in charge because he's the only one who can do trade or negotiate treaties or set up business or anything like [00:28:00] that with the Brits or the Dutch, and they're the ones who have all the resources that are funneling into this place.

So basically, it just de facto becomes men in the government running things. That's really... Wow. I guess I didn't see that coming, but it makes perfect sense.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it makes sense that it's just a little bit depressing, right? A

Jordan Harbinger: little

Jessica Wynn: bit. But you see the same pattern with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Iroquois Nations in North America.

The European historical records show male chiefs making decisions and signing treaties. What those records fail to mention is that those male chiefs were selected by senior women, the clan mothers, and they could be removed by them. So the women's authority was real and structurally embedded, but it was invisible to European observers who were looking for a chief who looked like a chief.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like, "Uh, excuse me, ma'am, can I speak to your husband?" And it's like, "He doesn't make any decisions. What are you talking about?" "He's over there wearing a headdress. He's busy. He's my arm [00:29:00] candy. Look, you already- it's me you want to deal with." Yeah, okay. So the, the women in power were smart enough to basically know that dealing with Europeans meant the visible authority needed to be a guy.

That's so interesting.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. And if you only document the kind of authority you recognize, like titles and formal leaders, then you miss how power actually functions.

Jordan Harbinger: So when Eller, who you mentioned before, says, "Hey, there's no evidence for matriarchies," she's not really wrong, but at the same time, the archives, they have these significant blind spots because certain evidence was basically ignored or erased.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, Eller would probably push back on that and say, even accounting for biased records, there's still no solid evidence for a prehistoric matriarchy, and she's probably right about that. Sorry to disappoint everybody.

Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

Jessica Wynn: But absence of evidence in a biased record isn't proof something didn't exist, and it's not proof it did.

So the honest answer here is we just don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is [00:30:00] not a satisfying answer. Right. So that leaves us in an uncomfortable place. There's a lot of time left to kill, so I hope you got more.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, intellectual honesty sometimes requires sitting with this uncertainty.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: So the temptation, of course, is to fill that uncertainty with a story that feels good, a golden age, a lost harmony, but we don't need that story.

The case for a more balanced society with gender equality- Doesn't depend on whether women were in charge 10,000 years ago. It stands on its own.

Jordan Harbinger: So is there anywhere we can actually look for evidence of genuinely different ways of organizing society? Because we could probably use some options.

Jessica Wynn: Absolutely. I mean, instead of looking at myths and archeological guesswork, we can look at living societies. Yeah. Places that exist right now that have been directly studied by anthropologists who can actually go there, ask questions, and measure outcomes.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, actual data. Always a risky move. So okay, what do we find?

Jessica Wynn: So there's a lot of variation. Matrilineal [00:31:00] systems, matrifocal systems, and hybrid structures which don't fit neatly into any category, they all exist, and one of the most comprehensive attempts to study this globally comes from the work of a German scholar. Her name is Heide Göttner-Abendroth. She spent decades documenting what she calls matriarchal societies across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

And this is based on field research, not myth or speculation, and her work focuses on living cultures, none of this prehistoric guesswork.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so she's pushing back on Eller, who says there's basically no real evidence for matriarchy.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Well, she's pushing back on the idea that we should throw the whole concept out, but here's where it gets complicated.

Her definition of matriarchy is very different from what most people have in mind. So Abendroth is not describing female domination. She's describing societies that are matrilineal, egalitarian, and just organized [00:32:00] around care, consensus, and redistribution. So in other words, not women on top, but a system that isn't built around domination at all.

Jordan Harbinger: Which sounds great, but is that really matriarchy?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, that's the central tension in her work, right? Mm-hmm. So mainstream anthropologists and other critics argue she's redefining the term so broadly that it loses analytical meaning. So if matriarchy just means a relatively egalitarian society where women have high status, then you find a lot of nice societies where women have high status, and you can call them matriarchies.

But if the definition is that elastic, you know, what work is that word actually doing?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, it's kinda like calling every pleasant neighborhood a utopia. The word loses all meaning, stops meaning anything specific.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, and her response is that the old definition was already biased toward patriarchal assumptions.

So if you define matriarchy as female domination, you're just [00:33:00] importing the logic of patriarchy into the definition of its supposed alternative. You're assuming power must mean domination.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, but what if the thing you're looking for is a society that- Doesn't organize itself around domination at all, for example.

Yeah, what word do you use for that?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, maybe that's the real question, right? Not who's on top, but whether the system is organized around dominance as its central principle in the first place. We do need a new word, but first we have to figure out what kind of framework we should be working in because we're using the wrong one.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is either profound insight or a very convenient way to avoid being wrong. I guess. I think it might be both. So these ideas of, like, sharing and redistribution, care, prioritizing community well-being, that doesn't sound anthropological. It sounds like something economists argue about today.

Jessica Wynn: Oh, yeah.

Economists are definitely arguing, and scholars make similar points about how modern economies systematically [00:34:00] undervalue care work, like raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining social bonds, because none of that shows up in the GDP.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah.

Jessica Wynn: And the result is economies that are very good at accumulating capital and very bad at producing human flourishing.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So w- yeah, because we measure what's easy and not necessarily what matters.

Jessica Wynn: Correct. You know, not perfect, not utopian, and there are functioning societies where redistribution, not accumulation, is the central organizing principle. So whether you call them matriarchal or not, it's almost secondary. The important point is that alternatives exist, and they have measurable effects.

You know, if we go back to the Mosuo, there was a research team in the 2010s that looked at specifically health outcomes across the Mosuo communities in China. So what makes this useful is that there are both matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo villages, [00:35:00] so researchers can compare the health outcomes within the same culture.

The primary variable is the social structure. And across over 1,000 participants, they measured biomarkers like C-reactive protein and things, which indicates chronic inflammation and blood pressure, and they found that women in matrilineal communities had significantly lower rates of both.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so are you- Are we saying husbands make women sick?

Because I've been blaming the kids this whole time. I might owe Jenna a pretty significant retraction.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. Yeah, you might, or a massage or something.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: You know, what I'm saying is that the studies show in patrilineal communities, about 8% of women showed elevated inflammation. In matrilineal communities, that dropped to 3.6%, so less than half.

Hypertension showed a similar pattern. It was like 33% of women in patrilineal villages had high blood pressure. Compared to [00:36:00] 26% in matrilineal ones. That's a big difference.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So something about that structure is protective to your-

Jessica Wynn: Yes ...

Jordan Harbinger: heart and body somehow. I don't think a lot of women listening are going to be shocked by these findings at all, though.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, ladies. The data shows a strong correlation between men in power and your health, and the part that really landed for researchers is women in matrilineal communities, they weren't just healthier than women in patrilineal ones, they were on average healthier than men in their own communities.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

You know, this reminds me of those stats. Have you ever seen stats on, like, what happens to men when they get divorced and how their life and quality and health changes, and what happens to women when they get divorced, and they're... Basically, the spoiler is this: everyone takes a lifestyle hit because you don't have maybe a shared income or, or the pooled resources or the man being a higher earner, whatever it is.

But the women, their stress level goes way down and they live longer, and the guys, like, die early, basically. I mean, I shouldn't laugh about that 'cause it's sad, but yeah, it's a very [00:37:00] similar directional data. I can see the merch now, matriarchy makes women healthier than men. I mean, that's, that's a pretty crazy conclusion here.

Jessica Wynn: It is, and it, a lot of it too has to do with what you're raised to think is normal, like if you need a partner or not, but the data shows a strong relationship, sure, but it doesn't prove a single cause, so don't get too hard on yourself, guys. What the researchers point to are two factors, autonomy and social support.

The matrilineal structure creates conditions for both.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and the men, what happened to the men in the matrilineal communities health-wise? Because if you empower the women and they gain benefits, but the men take a health hit, half the population still loses, right? It's sort of zero sum-ish.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah, I mean, that's what makes this finding significant.

There's no strong evidence of a major health penalty for men, so differences are really small. The men in the matrilineal villages had a hypertension rate about [00:38:00] one percentage point higher than men in the patrilineal villages, so it's a very small difference.

Jordan Harbinger: So no one is getting crushed under the matriarchal boot.

Disappointing for some people out there, I'm sure. Does the current system, does it cost men anything in terms of what their lives look like? Because I feel like one of the things that doesn't get examined in discussions of patriarchy versus... It's so funny. I never say that word. It just sounds funny to me when I say it.

Of patriarchy versus alternatives. So what are men actually experiencing under the current system, and w- what might they experience differently?

Jessica Wynn: Well, the question is important because this isn't a man-hating conversation. I want to be really clear. It connects to something important about what men in Mosuo communities actually report.

So anthropologists who've spent time in these communities describe men as largely content, including men who are aware of the more patriarchal alternatives available elsewhere in China. Their identity isn't organized around being a [00:39:00] provider or a head of household or an authority figure. It's organized around kinship and craft and community.

Jordan Harbinger: And that sounds appealing compared to the pressure a lot of men face in more traditional systems. Be the provider, be in charge, don't fall apart, don't cry in front of your wife 'cause your mom passed away. That's weak.

Jessica Wynn: Right. You have to be the breadwinner, and yeah, all of those pressures. And this is where Erich Fromm, who's a mid-20th century German social psychologist, is useful.

So his basic argument is that rigid hierarchical societies push people into two roles, domination or submission.

Jordan Harbinger: Fun options, both.

Jessica Wynn: Depends what you're into, I guess, but yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: No, no kink shaming on Skeptical Sunday.

Jessica Wynn: And men typically get pushed toward the dominance role, but even when that works, it comes with a cost, right?

Men experience emotional isolation, all these pressures, and a really narrow version of what you're allowed to be.

Jordan Harbinger: So you win the game, [00:40:00] but it's a pretty bleak prize.

Jessica Wynn: Sure. You know, you get the status, but you lose access to vulnerability, like you said, crying in front of people, genuine dependence on others, and all the things that actually make people feel connected.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's not really power then, it's pressure.

Jessica Wynn: I mean, that's the trade. And crucially, Fromm's key point is that this isn't biology. Men aren't inherently dominant.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh.

Jessica Wynn: Women aren't inherently submissive. These are patterns created by social arrangements, which means they can change. And when you look at a place like the Mosuo where male identity isn't built around dominance or provision in the same way, men seem, by most accounts, fine and content even.

Jordan Harbinger: Less man as job description.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, exactly, less pressure to perform a role that cuts you off from half of yourself, and that points to something bigger than matriarchy verse patriarchy.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is?

Jessica Wynn: I mean, this question, it [00:41:00] really isn't about gender. It's about what any society loses when it organizes itself around dominance as a first principle.

So men lose access to care and vulnerability. Women lose access to authority and autonomy. Everyone loses something. And the data from societies that organize differently, you know, they're not perfect, but they're different, suggest those losses don't have to be inevitable.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so you don't need some sort of prehistoric matriarchal golden age to make the argument.

Jessica Wynn: You really don't. And leaning on one actually weakens the case because then people argue about the history instead of engaging with the reality in front of them.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay, so if it existed before, we're recovering something. Not trying something new. But this gets tricky, I think, because we've been talking about women like that's one experience, you know?

And I've heard, again, I'm Women's Studies 102 over here. Like, it's not one thing to just be, like, a woman in the world, you know? You- there's all kinds of [00:42:00] stuff that intersects with that.

Jessica Wynn: Right, and you can say the same thing for men. I mean, just look at your friend group, you know? There's some women are more masculine than some of your guy friends.

That's just how it is. And there's a scholar named Kimberle Crenshaw. She makes this essential point with her theory on intersectionality. So gender doesn't operate alone. It interacts with race and class and culture. So a Black woman's experience of patriarchy, it's not patriarchy plus racism. It's a different experience entirely, and it's shaped by how all those forces interact.

Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back.

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Now for [00:45:00] the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

Now we're in Women's Studies 201 and it- Yeah. ... it's starting to... So even a matriarchy could still be terrible for some women- Yeah ... I suppose, right? A society that centers women's authority could still be really unequal. So it doesn't mean equity all around. It's not automatically a happy ending.

So when we talk about matriarchy as an alternative to patriarchy, we need to ask- Matriarchy for whom?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. I mean, and history gives us examples of that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Look at parts of the suffrage movement in the United States that centered around white women's rights while excluding all the others.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a good point, and we should also remember that societies with different structures are not happening in a vacuum either.

Jessica Wynn: Right. Yeah, this isn't a controlled experiment. There are real societies with a lot of forces acting on it at once.

Jordan Harbinger: So the thing we think of as isolating, so this matrilineal structure or whatever, it's not ever isolated, and it can't be in 2026 anyways, I suppose.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, of course, which that also doesn't invalidate the findings, but it [00:46:00] does mean we should be careful about how much we claim the findings prove.

Jordan Harbinger: I think there's a risk in a conversation framed as Skeptical Sunday matriarchy that the audience might hear, like, matriarchy is fake. So what are we actually skeptical of here?

Jessica Wynn: So we are well-justified in being skeptical of the idea of this prehistoric golden age of matriarchy. The evidence just isn't there as much as so many people want it to be.

And we should be skeptical of the idea that matriarchy is just this mirror image idea of patriarchy with women dominating men because that just imports the same logic. It assumes these fixed biological traits that men and women are naturally wired in a certain way, and we're justified in being skeptical of these biological stereotypes in either direction.

So women are not naturally more nurturing. Men are not naturally more dominant. Those claims just don't hold up. These are patterns produced by social arrangements, and [00:47:00] social arrangements can change.

Jordan Harbinger: Men are from Mars, women are from a better marketing team.

Jessica Wynn: Right. And that idea is seductive, right? So you see it all the time in sci-fi.

These matriarchal worlds are shown one of two ways, either hyper peaceful and harmonious utopias or just as violent and hierarchical as patriarchy but with women in charge.

Jordan Harbinger: So even when we imagine something different, we just repaint the same system. That's kind of-

Jessica Wynn: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: I guess funny is not the right word, but you know what I mean.

Jessica Wynn: Ironic maybe. I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. But-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, let's go with that ...

Jessica Wynn: we're still defining power as domination. You see versions of this in things like Wonder Woman's a good example. You know, she comes from this isolated, idealized female society, and there's darker depictions of her world where it's basically patriarchy flipped, but in both cases it's still built on the same assumption that power means domination.

Sometimes it just dresses sexier.

Jordan Harbinger: And it has a cool plane. So we're just distorting the idea of which gender is in [00:48:00] charge, not what they're in charge of.

Jessica Wynn: Right. We're still working inside the same framework. So different ways of organizing society exist, and they have real effects on people's lives. That part is well-documented.

Jordan Harbinger: Which is a sign the framework is the problem, not the society. Okay. Right. So the goal is not flipping the hierarchy. It's asking- Whether hierarchy itself is the right model and who should be on top.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it might not look like anyone on top. You know, there's different ways to be on top, I guess. A society based on equity might look like systems organized solely around care, reciprocity, and support, not domination.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's not a gender swap, it's a different structure.

Jessica Wynn: Right, which means this doesn't have to be a fight. It can be a question about what actually works.

Jordan Harbinger: So we did not find a lost matriarchal utopia or evidence that women ran the world 10,000 years ago. It's just much less satisfying, but I guess more useful.

And the way [00:49:00] we organize society is not fixed, right? We're choosing it, whether we admit to that or not, and we should make the choices that make people healthier, more connected, and more human.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, we should. I agree completely. And I think the word matriarchy may be doing a disservice because, as well as the word patriarchy, because it immediately puts people into a gender war.

Is it accumulation, hierarchy, and dominance, or is it care, consensus, redistribution? You know, those are genuinely different options, and the evidence from societies that lean toward the second set of values suggests tentatively, carefully, that people in those societies across genders tend to do better by various measures of well-being.

Jordan Harbinger: And calling that matriarchy, that might, may be both accurate in some structural sense but also misleading in terms of what it actually means for the people living in it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, keep considering the Mosuo. They have their own vocabulary for their own arrangements. But Westerners come along and impose a [00:50:00] category that comes loaded with a whole set of Western assumptions about what power is and what gender means, and we've applied it to a society that may be organized around fundamentally different premises.

Jordan Harbinger: Did you come across any sort of non-binary gender systems, or are we stuck in the two-lane matriarchy-patriarchy highway?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, I mean, this is a crucial point. So some societies don't organize around a strict male-female binary at all, and when that's the case, calling something female-led can miss the entire structure.

Jordan Harbinger: It makes sense that if people occupy other genders and roles, then the category of matriarchy is simply, it's just not the right tool.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, it's just another sign that the framework needs revision rather than the evidence needs to be squeezed into that framework that exists and really isn't working.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, well, the conversation has to change completely. It seems almost impossible to talk about this in a non-binary way. I'm almost being cheeky because it's like we're trying to wrap our heads around female-led society, and I'm [00:51:00] like, "Aha, what if we throw another wrench in there?" I don't know. Again, this is like women's studies/some sort of woke college class that I'm trying to f- f- sift through here.

We have to be looking at power dynamics in society as I can't believe I'm about to say this, but gender fluid. So what is the vocabulary for that is what we have to figure out.

Jessica Wynn: We could lean into some kind of genderless archy, I guess, you

Jordan Harbinger: know? Sure. How about Barbie archy? Not the movie, not the female version of the doll, but you know how they have that smooth, featureless Ken doll situation down there with no confusing parts?

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, a private, partless philosophy. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's what I'm going for.

Jessica Wynn: I'm for it. You know, if we could take gender out of the equation, there might be more equity. I grew up playing in an orchestra, and when you would audition for things, they changed it so that it wasn't the men getting all the good seats in the orchestra, and there [00:52:00] were really specific rules.

The judges would sit, and the, you would perform behind some kind of barrier. They couldn't see you, and so the big rule if you were a woman was mostly don't wear shoes at all.

Jordan Harbinger: They can tell when you walk over 'cause of your heels. Yeah.

Jessica Wynn: Mm-hmm. They could tell by what shoes you were wearing, so it was this really particular thing of, "Oh my gosh, like I have to wear soft-soled shoes for my audition.

Otherwise, they'll know I'm a woman," and how horrible that would be. Don't wear any

Jordan Harbinger: perfume or anything.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, so it's like imagine if we could run political campaigns and not know if the person was male or female. How would that change who we voted for? Things like that, but I like what you're thinking about, this genderless ideas, but I think it's all a bit more nuanced in reality.

Jordan Harbinger: So how did that... Did it work? Did they end up with like a 50/50-ish split in the orchestra?

Jessica Wynn: It was upsetting how much it worked, how many more women got seats in the orchestras, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay. Just curious. I think it's hard for people to not look [00:53:00] at the matriarchy/patriarchy conversation as taking sides.

I mean, right now a lot of people probably find themselves uncomfortable with some of what we're talking about. It can be that way. I mean, I'm a little bit like, "Oh, sheesh, I've used the word patriarchy more than I have in my entire life during the past hour."

Jessica Wynn: Right. The vocabulary is uncomfortable, you know, but it doesn't have to be.

I think the vocabulary is uncomfortable because the definitions are pretty wishy-washy. You know, we can treat it as a question and work out solutions that bring more balance. Different societies, they've tried different arrangements. Some of those arrangements produce better outcomes by measurable standards.

Some of them don't, but we can study that without Turning it into some manifesto

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so matriarchal societies are not a blueprint. That's just data, which means change is possible, I suppose. I mean, the health outcome thing is no joke. That's crazy.

Jessica Wynn: And ignoring that has real consequences. So if increasing women's autonomy is linked to better health outcomes, and we dismiss it out of discomfort, we're [00:54:00] choosing ideology over evidence.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, people are doing a lot of that these days. But what else are we missing by framing the debate incorrectly, in your opinion?

Jessica Wynn: Well, for one, I mean, we touched on it earlier, but what these systems cost men. So conversations about feminism, you know, we want all these allies, but we also need to include what masculinity does.

It causes emotional isolation. It does mean shorter lifespans, higher suicide rates. Those are separate issues, but they come from the same structures that disadvantage women. They're just the other side of the same coin.

Jordan Harbinger: And the matriarchy conversation almost never really goes there.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, because it's framed as a conversation about women's liberation, which it is, but it points at something bigger, a social arrangement that probably doesn't look like women on top any more than it looks like men on top.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm trying to not be a 12-year-old boy here- ... in this episode specifically. Right, okay, and just to be clear, when [00:55:00] we say women on... Yeah, uh, let's keep it scientific. How's that?

Jessica Wynn: Okay. Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Don't say reverse cowgirl, Jordan. Don't say it.

Jessica Wynn: I, I knew that's what you wanted to say. I knew it.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh-huh. So

Jessica Wynn: what we're really talking about is something that doesn't organize itself around domination at all.

Building something like that is a project that benefits men as much as women.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, and the project doesn't need to dig up some weird golden age of feminist Amazon w- whatever- Right. ... with pyramids to justify it.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah. It just needs honest observation, intellectual humility, and the willingness to look at what human beings are actually capable of when they're not being told that hierarchy is the only option.

Jordan Harbinger: The problem is so many people are turned off by an egalitarian society, and they, they want more resources than everybody else, people in that society. I don't mean people listening to this going to be annoyed that there's a society that's equal. I just mean living in a society like that, they want that hierarchy.

Jessica Wynn: They want to be [00:56:00] better than other people. I know. I mean, now we're getting into the philosophy of power being applied and whatever social norms we're raised in, so that might be a conversation for another episode maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: Maybe. I don't know. This is like, it's weird because it's not a woke episode, but I feel like somehow it is because we're talking about these topics that I just, we never actually talk about anywhere.

When I was talking about this topic with you pre-show, no resources came up easily. That wasn't something ridiculous or sci-fi based. So well, we managed to talk about matriarchy on Mother's Day without anybody storming off. Cool. That might be the most successful family dynamic we will have all day. So-

Happy Mother's Day, everybody. Call your mom. She's earned it. Thanks so much, Jess.

Jessica Wynn: Yeah, ask her who's on top.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. As- Oh,

Jessica Wynn: God.

Jordan Harbinger: You heard it from her, not me. At least you said it, not me. Thanks, Jess, and thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me Jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

[00:57:00] Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Jessica is on her substacks, Between the Lines and Where Shadows Linger. We'll link to those in the show notes. Her work is on Instagram @nevermetjessicas.

And this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked, so consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

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We'll spend hours optimizing diets, [00:58:00] workouts, and morning routines, then sit in rooms with air bad enough to quietly wreck our focus, mood, and sleep. After the L.A. wildfires, air quality expert Mike Feldstein saw just how toxic invisible can get and why fear, misinformation, and neglect are making it worse.

JHS Trailer: My background was in wildfire remediation, floods, hurricane cleanup. So my career was traveling around to Hurricane Harvey and California wildfires. Like, wherever the most toxic disasters were, that's where I would go. The reason that I got into Jasper, making these air scrubbers, is because the machines that we would use on the job site were these big, large, industrial machines, and when you would compare that to the little air purifiers in the store, I was able to see, like, these little things don't work.

Basically, let's make the world's first air scrubber designed for your home. So now I'm kind of on a mission to just talk about air quality. Anyone who's thinking about water and hasn't thought about air, my mission for the next 20 years is to increase people's awareness of the air that you breathe. In the mold industry, they have two sayings.

One is the mold rush, and the other one is [00:59:00] mold is gold. A lot of people get triggered by mold, but it's become a very fear-induced industry because there is a dark side of the mold industry. Not everybody's a bad actor, but you have to be quite careful when you're navigating it. People often go into debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, rip their homes apart- move into apartments or homes that were moldier than their first home and debt and stress, and then they get much more sick.

So I've been seeing this increasing at a large scale. And that's why as a mold remediation guy, how would we do mold removal? We'd remove the physical mold and we would scrub the air. It was very simple. The average indoor air is five to 10 times dirtier than outside. When you turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, your body can heal itself if you get out of the way.

Jordan Harbinger: If you think clean air is a given, check out episode 1246 with Mike Feldstein. It might completely change how you think about the air you're breathing right now.