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 that runs a cult runs a marriage, an activist movement, a political party, a society. Dissociation is the operating system. Mimicry is the mask. The pathology of the leader becomes the blueprint of the whole. Underneath all of it, Mark argues for the unfashionable thing — that authenticity is a dying breed, that the only real antidote is returning to your own feeling, your own stillness, your own discernment. The conversation ends in hope, earned the hard way.

(00:00) Cold Open

(00:37) Opening Conversation

(02:26) Show Start

(03:14) Narcissist's Playbook Film

(08:47) Defining Narcissism / Interviewing Narcissists

(13:34) Trauma or Choice

(20:14) Narcissistic Injury

(23:29) Power and Politics

(27:56) Psychopath Acting Tricks

(34:30) Facing Inner Rage

(36:35) Cults and Low Vibe Policing

(42:45) Healing Means Feeling

(47:48) Devices Kill Stillness

(56:49) Does Abuse Catalyze Growth?

(01:03:35) Forces Of Disconnection / Collectivism As Psyop

(01:11:20) Activism And Selective Outrage

(01:19:53) Trigger Words And Radioactivity

GUEST LINKS

Mark Vicente → https://markvicente.com/

The Narcissist’s Playbook (film) → https://www.narcissistsplaybook.com/

WTF is on My Mind (podcast / Instaguru series) → https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7

Instagram → https://instagram.com/markvicente

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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 inside geoengineering territory, and Just Look Up, a documentary that just won Best Feature Documentary at the Santa Monica International Film Festival. The conversation lives in the territory underneath the film. Ariana names the activist’s trap directly — how unrelenting attention on the shadow can poison the nervous system of the people most committed to waking others up — and offers the mantra that kept her in the fight without destroying her: play is protection. We talk about the nocebo as placebo’s evil twin, nervous system regulation as the actual dividing line between healthy advocacy and ideological self-destruction, the ego path versus the soul path, and why she eventually laid down the sword and let the softness return. Underneath all of it is the simple truth she keeps coming back to: truth feels good. It doesn’t feel heavy.

(00:00) Cold Open

(00:36) Opening Conversation

(03:06) Show Start (Health Awakening & Medical Doubts)

(06:53) From Medicine to Filmmaking

(08:38) Monsanto Roundup Trials Story

(10:55) Corporate Capture Explained

(20:08) Why the World Feels Inverted

(24:57) Nocebo and Truther Burnout

(31:36) “Playfulness is protection…”

(42:02) “Just Look Up” Documentary

(47:33) Meeting Filmmaker w/ Same Birth Chart

(51:00) Geoengineering Explained (Contrails)

(59:26) Whistleblowers & Fuel / Cloud Seeding & Fires

(01:08:51) Intuition Over Certainty

(01:13:24) Film Reception and Release

(01:19:37) Next Film on Cleansing

GUEST LINKS

Website: https://justlookupfilm.com/

Instagram: @arianavictorfilm — https://www.instagram.com/arianavictorfilm/

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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 platitudes that gloss over reality instead of meeting it; the body as the warehouse of self-knowledge; and anger, when reclaimed, as one of the most generative forces a human being has access to. The spiritual assignment is becoming yourself — the lifelong work of knowing who you actually are and living in congruence with what you find.

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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 director of an ashram before the new age yoga world wore him out. He landed in Costa Rica, where for nearly two decades he built domes, taught regenerative agriculture, partook in fifty-plus ayahuasca journeys, studied true sidereal astrology with John Lamb Lash, and found the work that now anchors his life: biochar.

The conversation moves the way Topher’s mind moves, between cosmology and concrete, between Wilhelm Reich’s writing on why we build idols just to slay them and the chemistry of why a 2,000-degree kiln in the Missouri Ozarks turns hardwood waste into the most stable carbon you can put in soil. We get into the suppressed Christ archetype hidden in Ophiuchus, why the distinction between self and other is the actual purpose of incarnation, what ten years inside the ayahuasca world taught him about variability over devotion, and why the carbon they trained us to fear is the same carbon our bodies and our land are starving for. Hard-won wisdom, earned the only way it ever gets earned.

(00:00) Why Is Carbon Demonized?

(00:41) Yerasimos Opening

(02:46) Meet Topher Gardner

(06:56) Costa Rica Calling

(09:29) Bodywork And Ayurveda

(12:20) Ayahuasca vs Peyote

(17:54) True Sidereal Astrology

(24:57) Purpose And Boundaries

(41:07) Human Design Origins

(46:48) Egoic Manifester Clarity

(49:18) The Truth About Idol Worshippers

(56:52) Biochar Origins

(01:06:21) Kilns & Production Scale / Soil Carbon Vs Fertilizer

(01:12:41) Feeding Biochar to Animals

(01:17:11) Planting Mixing and Top Dressing

(01:21:56) New Products & 3rd Party Verification

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Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/

Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

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Build your digital home with Atlas → https://atlasdigital.world/

CONNECT WITH TOPHER

Black Gold Biochar → https://blackgoldbiochar.com/

Topher HQ → https://topherhq.com/

Podcast → Biocharisma

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 knowledge without the inner discipline to metabolize it just produces louder, more articulate versions of the same lost person. David brings it into the language of intellectual self-defense, the partner of physical self-defense, both built on a self-valuation most people never develop. They name why the alternative community plateaus into tourism, and what it costs to choose your own path against the chorus telling you not to.

Truth against the world.

(00:00) Episode Teaser

(00:37) Opening Conversation

(03:24) Show Start

(04:16) What Unslaved Means

(08:52) David On Sovereignty

(14:26) Why Long Form Matters

(20:18) Unslaved Community And Censorship

(25:09) Psychic Immunity Explained

(35:51) Discernment And Sharing Truth

(43:24) Mystery School Milestone

(47:56) Keeping the Dojo Neutral

(54:01) Courage to Say No

(59:43) 2020 Aftermath Reflections

(01:09:13) Avoiding Alt Community Traps

(01:19:12) Solitude in a Noisy World

(01:25:18) Tourists And Worthiness

(01:37:50) Justice And Evil Origins

(01:48:12) Media Pacification Tricks

Guest Link

Unslaved: https://unslaved.com

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Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/

Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

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Build your digital home with Atlas → https://atlasdigital.world/

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 now warns against, through public termination and media smears, to a betrayal letter from inside her own family. We explore the pivot from fighting freedom to creating it, the home birth that rewrote her relationship to her body, and a vulnerable, never-before-shared reckoning with her role in routine circumcision. The foundation of the world begins in the womb — and every act of self-trust flows from whether we claimed that moment or handed it away.

(00:00) Slandered in the Media

(00:32) Opening Conversation

(01:42) Meet Kristen

(02:42) Motherhood Sparks Awakening

(06:44) Seeing Vaccine Harm in NICU

(16:01) COVID Hospital Restrictions

(20:39) Betrayal Becomes Calling

(31:33) Reclaiming Birth at Home

(37:31) How Hospitals Took Over

(42:15) Peace Begins At Birth

(45:34) Fathers In The Birth Space

(52:47) Fear Culture Around Babies

(56:11) Canada Vs US on Freedom

(58:32) Reclaiming Birth Conference (Why In-Person Matters)

(01:06:49) Circumcision (A Nurse’s Perspective)

(01:20:27) Reclaiming Birth Evolution

Guest Links

Reclaiming Birth Conference [Discount code: HFTT15]

Website

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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 alchemy of moving from victim to creator. We talk about soul sickness as a cultural diagnosis, the inner child as the keys to freedom, and the Gene Keys as a map from shadow into gift. Christopher names what he’s stepping into next: a healing community in the Pacific Northwest he’s been envisioning for fifteen years, and the abandonment wound that surfaces when you say yes to the call again.

(00:00) Peace Corps Intro

(00:34) Opening Conversation

(06:47) Show Start

(08:04) Corporate Life To Calling

(11:29) Near Death Experience

(17:14) Peace Corps Mission Work

(19:35) Returning Home Culture Shock

(21:31) Breathwork Awakening

(26:38) Sonic Breathwork Modality

(29:44) Plant Medicine Insights

(33:34) Family Healing And Compassion

(37:51) Constellations And Sovereignty

(43:38) Gene Keys

(49:48) Breath Meets DNA

(01:03:06) Abandonment and Big Move

(01:08:01) Vision for Community

(01:17:37) Relationships as Dojo

Guest Links

Website: https://christopheraugust.co

Book: Master Your Breath, Transform Your Life

App: Beats in Breath

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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 why the truth-seeker community is especially exposed, how chronic low-grade threat overwhelms the body until there’s nowhere left to discharge it, and why mistaking calm for regulated is itself a form of dysregulation. We move through healthy aggression and the safe expression of sympathetic charge, the entanglement of parts work with nervous system state, and what building capacity looks like inside a family carrying a collective nervous system pulse of its own. Slow is fast, Sophie says. The relationship with your own physiology gets built in moments most people are too impatient to honor.

(00:00) Regulation Redefined

(00:40) Opening Conversation

(01:38) Show Start

(04:36) Truth Seeker Freeze & Polyvagal Basics

(09:12) Functional Freeze Explained

(15:29) Modern Life Triggers

(22:08) Healthy Nervous System

(35:55) From Freeze to Freedom

(38:12) Healthy Aggression Outlets

(46:30) The Monk Study

(51:28) Sympathetic vs Dorsal Types

(58:22) Appropriate Response Defined

(01:10:03) Repair Self Respect

(01:17:21) Nervous System And Parts

(01:20:36) Winnie The Pooh Psychology

(01:24:39) Shadow And Projection

(01:35:19) AI Movie Archetypes

GUEST LINK

Website — sophiefletcherphd.com

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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 of financial collapse where DoorDash shifts became part of his rebuilding. That stretch, along with a series of synchronicities, ultimately led him out of an 11-year marriage. Underneath all of it is what we go straight at: the tendency to outsource authority — to a church, a guru, a chart, a card…anything that claims to tell you who you are. Taylor speaks to what it actually takes to stand on your own when the structures you leaned on fall away, why the ego isn’t something to crush, and why most expansion isn’t something you force. Your life is already trying to come through you. The work is to stop getting in the way.

(00:00) Reality as a Mirror

(00:36) Opening Conversation

(02:00) Show Start

(03:31) Growing Up Mormon

(13:51) Marriage and Addiction Cycle

(18:38) Startup Success to Rock Bottom

(22:21) Ayahuasca Awakening

(32:07) Seeking Gurus and Pedestals

(33:44) Portugal Surrender Experiment & Marriage Crossroads

(38:25) Spirituality Without Performance

(42:06) Astrology and Heart Darkness

(46:43) Cloud Atlas Synchronicity / Divorce & Confession

(52:46) Bali Decision and Self Doubt

(56:36) Outsourcing Truth to Gurus

(01:03:39) The Aftermath

(01:11:08) Ego as Sacred Temple

(01:17:14) Chosen One Paradox

(01:24:26) Union of Opposites

(01:35:27) Revealing Not Learning / Nonlocal Consciousness Void

(01:41:02) Education Means ‘To Bring Forth’

(01:58:08) Light Footed Enlightenment

GUEST LINKS

Instagram — @iamtaylorperkins

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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 to make different choices, the timelines we collapse and create with each one, the thermostat of self-concept that quietly calibrates the life we end up living. Fortune favors the bold…and the bolder act, almost always, is the smaller one, made today, in the direction of who you actually are.

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