Here For The Truth

Anthony Rispo came up on the progressive left — a gay man who found a home in an ideology that rewarded his grievance, teal hair and half-mohawk included. Then the pandemic, BLM, and the campus orthodoxy around him stopped adding up, and he read his way out. Now a writer, independent researcher, and Columbia psychology graduate studying cognitive neuroscience, he maps the wiring beneath our politics: identity fusion, moral co...

Mike Winner spent a decade DJing Hollywood clubs before turning toward the infrastructure of digital freedom — founder of WINNR Digital, co-founder of the decentralized internet Qortal, and co-founder of the Music & Sky festival. Returning for the first time since 2022, he brings a caution aimed squarely at his own community: purity spiraling, the habit of turning discernment into a cage where every meal, every device, an...

The binary was never the point. Individualism on one side, collectivism on the other — pick a jersey, join a team. But the line that actually matters runs somewhere else: between a person who has a self and a person who has dissolved into the group. In this episode, Joel and Yerasimos pull the threads on what collectivism is actually doing to the psyche — the altruistic programming that weaponizes moral guilt against yo...

Jared Pickard traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange until his soul, in his words, started screaming for something the city couldn’t give him — real connection with nature. He walked off the floor for an unpaid farming apprenticeship, spent a decade building Be Here Farm & Nature into a world-class hospitality dream on 300 acres of Napa-Sonoma mountaintop, and watched it burn to the ground in the 2020 wi...

Kyree Oliver is a former Division 1 lineman turned self-taught marketer and men's coach who, before he was 25, had already interviewed over 1,000 people — including 65 in the final weeks of their lives. The pattern he found in those rooms is what carries this whole conversation: most men are running on the wrong fuel, chasing the wrong definition of success, and the bill only comes due at the very end. Kyree brings the calm p...

Mark Vicente returns to the show — South African filmmaker, twelve-year NXIVM survivor, and one of the central whistleblowers in HBO’s The Vow — for a conversation timed to the release of his new documentary The Narcissist’s Playbook. Years of interviewing self-confessed narcissists, cult survivors, and clinicians have given Mark a clear lens on what most people sense but can’t name: the same pathology...

Ariana Victor is an investigative filmmaker whose first decade in this work has been one long act of refusal — at twenty, inside a treatment program for eating disorders, when a therapist took notes on her late-night creative sparks and reached for a bipolar diagnosis, she walked out and started asking harder questions. That refusal became a method: Carey Gillam’s Whitewash, the Bayer-Monsanto courtrooms, five years ins...

What if most of what we've been sold as spirituality is actually the opposite of it — a doctrine that calls self-erasure enlightenment, a path that asks you to amputate the parts of yourself most needed for a sovereign life? In this rap on authentic spirituality, Joel and Yerasimos name the territory directly: the new cage of asceticism, gnosticism, and the love-and-light bypass that disguises dissociation as awakening; the p...

Topher Gardner is the founder of Black Gold Biochar, a regenerative builder, a lifelong bodyworker, and a former Division I football kicker who has actually walked the path most spiritual seekers only theorize about. He played at Michigan State under Nick Saban, spent three more years in pro leagues, and rebuilt the body football broke through Rolfing and yoga. That work took him to southern India, where he served as operations dir...

Michael Tsarion and David Whitehead have appeared on Here for the Truth seventeen times between them. For the show's three hundredth episode, they sit down together with us for the first time — co-hosts of Unslaved, the long-form, ad-free platform Michael started in 2016 as the antidote to everything truth-seeking content had become.

The conversation circles Michael's signature concept of psychic immunity — that knowledg...

In this episode, we sit down with Kristen Nagle: former NICU nurse turned whistleblower and founder of Reclaiming Birth. Her story is the arc of a system insider who couldn't unsee what she was a part of — a hospital culture that worships intervention, a profession that pathologizes the female body, and a machine that punishes the nurses who name it. We trace her hero's journey from the injections she administered that she no...

In this episode, we sit down with Christopher August — breathwork facilitator, author, and co-founder of Beats and Breath — for a conversation that runs from a literal billboard to a near-death drowning on the Zambezi that seeded the mission he’s lived ever since. We trace his path from corporate tech and quiet despair into Peace Corps Tanzania, the medicine work that reopened his capacity to feel, and the slow al...

Sophie Fletcher, PhD, somatic nervous system practitioner and co-facilitator inside Rise Above the Herd, returns to Here for the Truth with a diagnosis for what’s quietly running through most of us: functional freeze. It looks nothing like collapse. You’re still showing up, doing the work, holding the relationships, but something inside has gone numb, and the modern world is engineered to keep it that way. Sophie traces...

Raised in a Mormon family where his mother prophesied at his birth that he’d one day lead the church, Taylor Perkins spent decades trying to live up to that identity — as a missionary, a husband at 20, and a tech founder by 28 — until it all began to unravel. We follow his path through years of religious shame and addiction, a five-cup ayahuasca ceremony that shook the foundation of what he believed, and a period ...

Joel and Yerasimos return from Confluence — five days in Bandera, Texas, with eleven hundred people and thirty-plus members of their own community — and unpack what only embodied gathering can teach: that touch, presence, and shared fire are not luxuries but necessities, and that digital connection is a thin slice of the long arc of being human. The conversation widens from there into agency itself — the courage t...

In this episode we bring together two returning guests who've never met — Nikhil Kale, founder of Asraya and creator of ACE, and Nathaniel Solace, filmmaker, transformational coach, and builder at the frontier of conscious AI — for a fierce conversation built to dismantle the technological black pill at the heart of the truth-and-freedom space. We go deep on agentic AI as amplifier rather than replacement, the collapse ...

In his first podcast appearance in years, Aubert Bastiat holds nothing back. A transformational coach, relationship mentor, and co-founder of Sacred Sons, Aubert sits down for one of the rawest, most unflinching conversations we’ve ever had, tracing the full arc of a life shaped by abandonment, addiction, spiritual awakening, and the very public dismantling of everything he built. We go deep into the father wound, the pattern...

In this episode, we sit down with Lishui Springford — earth scientist turned ecology professor, GNM practitioner since 2002, and host of the Mind Over Symptom podcast. Lishui makes the case that identity conflict sits at the root of all biological conflict — that every symptom, every pattern, every fear traces back to a single fracture: existential isolation, the felt experience of being severed from the source of your ...

What if the thing holding you back isn’t a lack of knowledge — but a refusal to act on what you already know? In this episode, we go straight at the endless healing loop — consuming book after book, modality after modality, while your actual life stays frozen in place. We unpack the difference between awareness and conscious choice, why sitting with one deep question can move the needle more than ten bestsellers, ...