The Sacred Speaks

What happens when a life built around success, intelligence, and achievement is no longer able to hold the deeper questions beginning to move through you?

Tom Morgan spent years in finance, including time on Wall Street, he achieved an ideal that our culture presents as success, before undergoing a spontaneous spiritual opening filled with synchronicities and an altered sense of reality. What followed was a two-year descent into severe depression, intrusive inner voices, isolation, and suicidality. Tom describes this period as a descent into hell, understood as the experience of profound separation from himself, his family, and the world around him.

In this conversation, Tom and John explore the uncertain territory between spiritual awakening and psychological crisis. Tom shares how ketamine, writing, disciplined routines, and the work of Carl Jung and Iain McGilchrist helped him begin rebuilding his life. He also discusses the experiences that led him to create Leading Edge, a community organized around openness, transformation, building, creating, meaningful relationships, the mystical, and the human need for modern initiatory containers.

The conversation moves through active imagination, synchronicity, precognition, money and meaning, fatherhood, authenticity, and the relationship between trauma, love, and psi phenomena. At the center of the episode is a question that reaches beyond Tom’s personal story: What kinds of communities do human beings need in order to survive periods of disorientation and allow a different life to emerge? What does our culture need to transform? His answer is found in the number that anthropologists have offered as the ideal community. One hundred and fifty people.

Learn more about Tom Morgan and Leading Edge:

https://theleading-edge.org

Learn more about John Price, The Sacred Speaks, and Open Gate:

https://www.drjohnwprice.com

Content note: This episode includes candid discussion of severe depression, intrusive thoughts, mental health diagnosis, and suicidality.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Guest Introduction

01:58 The Open Gate Community

03:53 Tom Joins the Conversation

05:07 What Is Moving Through Tom Now

07:57 Early Life and a Career in Finance

10:57 Spiritual Opening and Synchronicity

14:51 The Descent Into Hell

16:48 Damnation and Intrusive Inner Voices

29:59 Isolation and the Edge of Suicide

33:43 Psychosis or Spiritual Experience?

38:25 Ketamine and the Turning Point

39:46 Rebuilding Through Structure and Routine

41:46 The Synchronicity That Funded Tom’s Writing

43:14 Honesty and the Transformational Container

47:26 How Disclosure Changes Reality

51:59 AI as a Dialogue With Mystery

56:06 Earth School and Symbolic Living

1:00:04 Movies as Spiritual Mirrors

1:03:39 Jung, McGilchrist, and Curiosity

1:09:49 The Biology of Goal-Directedness

1:11:55 Curiosity as a Movement Toward Wholeness

1:14:16 Bliss, Utility, and Contribution

1:15:47 Precognition and Presentiment

1:21:23 Trauma, Love, and Psi

1:23:22 AI as an Emissary and a Tool

1:26:41 Success and the Shift Into the Second Half of Life

1:29:07 Integrating Money and Meaning

1:36:07 Demons, Dissociation, and Active Imagination

1:39:53 Building Leading Edge

1:43:25 Community as an Antidote to Separation

1:44:22 Gratitude and Closing

What happens when someone who has spent nearly his entire life understanding code, data, and technological systems begins questioning the nature of reality itself?

In this episode Dr. John Price is joined by Brett Hurt who began programming at seven years old and went on to become one of Austin’s most successful technology entrepreneurs. He founded Coremetrics, acquired by IBM for $300 million, and Bazaarvoice, which became a billion-dollar public company. Most recently, he co-founded and led data.world before its acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025.

But after decades of building companies and achieving extraordinary financial success, Brett found himself moving toward a very different set of questions.

A series of psychedelic experiences, including one he describes as an encounter with God, initiated what Brett calls his Soul Quest. He read more than 85 books in 18 months, exploring consciousness, post-materialist science, spirituality, ancient wisdom, and the nature of reality. That exploration eventually became his USA TODAY bestselling book, Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All.

In this conversation, we begin with the seven-year-old who discovered coding and explore how computer science shaped Brett’s way of seeing the world. We talk about entrepreneurship, failure, self-doubt, wealth, and the “scarcity operating system” that helped drive his success. We then move into the psychedelic experiences that disrupted his understanding of reality and his subsequent investigation into consciousness, science, and spirituality.

We also explore the hard problem of consciousness, whether intelligence and consciousness are actually the same thing, what AI may reveal about being human, and how education must change when information becomes nearly instantaneous. And we examine Brett’s central argument that love can conquer fear, including a deeper question: What if fear is not simply something to overcome, but something that can tell us what matters?

This is a conversation about technology, but underneath it is a conversation about the human being creating the technology: what forms us, what drives us, what our systems cannot measure, and what happens when the worldview that helped us succeed can no longer contain our experience.

Brett Hurt is a serial technology entrepreneur, investor, USA TODAY bestselling author, and CEO of Love Conquers Fear. Alongside his wife, Debra, he co-leads Hurt Family Investments, which has backed more than 150 startups and 50 venture funds.

Topics include: computer science and coding, AI and consciousness, psychedelics and mystical experience, the nature of reality,

entrepreneurship and self-doubt, wealth and success, fear and love, education in the age of AI, post-materialist science, and the limits of what data can tell us about being human.

https://www.loveconquersfear.org

Simon Yugler has spent time inside traditions ranging from Aboriginal Australia to the Shipibo lineage in Peru. Most of us will only ever read about experiences like that. I admire the ground he's stood on, and what it has done to his worldview.

Simon is a depth psychotherapist, psychedelic facilitator, educator, and the author of Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair — and his central conviction is that psychedelics are not primarily a mental health intervention. They are initiatory and speak to the soul.

At twenty, he traveled to an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, Australia, and was changed by what he encountered there. He went on to apprentice within the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition in the Peruvian Amazon, spending six weeks inside a lineage that didn't reconstruct its transmission from texts. He completed his master's at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where his thesis explored the loss of male initiation rites in Western culture and what the medicine might restore. Today he trains facilitators, runs men's groups, and continues his healing work with individual.

In this conversation, Simon walks inside what he calls mythopoetics — the practice of helping people find the mythic story inside their experience and carry it home. We get into what myth actually means, what archetypes are doing inside psychedelic experience, and why Jungian depth psychology sees what the neuroscience frameworks are blind to.

We also talk about what the medicine gets right. Simon offers a moving case study: a man who, during a psilocybin retreat, rediscovered his own goodness and a genuine encounter with soul.

And we hold the critique. A six-month facilitator training is not a substitute for years of depth work. The medicalization box is too small — and, as Simon puts it, the alien always gets out.

In this conversation:

Mythopoetics and what myth actually is

What living Indigenous traditions carry that Western therapy lost and can't get back from books

The male initiation crisis and the loneliness epidemic

What the medicine reveals that slow depth work cannot reach

A case study in rediscovering one's own goodness

Why the initiatory can't be regulated and why it never will be

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and Show Intro

00:47 Housekeeping and Links

02:57 Meet Simon

05:57 Mythopoetic Approach Explained

07:32 What Myth Really Means

10:20 Archetypes and Psyche

14:16 Simon's Origin Story

16:57 Australia and Indigenous Reality

23:23 Apprenticeship and Lineage

26:16 Western vs. Psychedelic Training

30:32 Why Psychedelics

36:44 Roots and Calling to Heal

38:41 Therapy Spark Moment

39:33 Choosing Pacifica

41:17 Lineage and Early Openings

43:14 Men's Work Thesis Roots

45:07 Why Men Need Gathering

48:40 Loneliness, Grief, and Soul

53:15 Psychedelic Healing Story

58:41 What Psychedelic Work Gets Right

1:04:32 Critique: The Medicalization Box

1:06:41 The Alien Always Gets Out

1:08:22 Closing: Book and Where to Find Simon

Find Simon:

simonyugler.com

simonyugler.substack.com

The Sacred Speaks:

www.drjohnwprice.com

youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

instagram.com/thesacredspeaks

facebook.com/thesacredspeaks

Theme music: Modern Nations — modernnationsmusic.com

Robert Forte has been at every major inflection point of the psychedelic movement for half a century, and he is skeptical of where it is going. That skepticism, coming from someone who knew Wasson, Hofmann, Grof, and Eliade personally.

Forte brings a rare formation to this conversation: graduate training in religious studies at the University of Chicago under Mircea Eliade, decades of work with the foundational figures in psychedelic scholarship, phenomenological site work in Greece, and the republication of The Road to Eleusis — the thesis that seeded the most popular book in the current psychedelic renaissance. He is a historian of religion who has lived inside the territory he studies.

This conversation opens with a Sufi tale about "changed waters" — a story about what happens when an entire culture shifts its baseline of perception and the one person who held onto the old water eventually drinks the new, because the loneliness of being different became unbearable. Forte has used this story to frame his entire body of work.

From there we move through his formation: a childhood mystical experience by a stream, a turning point in a Columbia lecture hall when a professor wrote R. Gordon Wasson on the chalkboard, and the life that followed. We explore the mystery traditions and what secrecy actually protected, the difference between psychedelics as cultural healing and psychedelics as weapon, and the documented record — MKUltra, media promotion, Huxley's dark warnings, and an account linking JFK's alleged psilocybin experience to his 1963 peace speech. We close on what Forte considers the essential question for this moment: how do we cultivate virtue and discernment when the sacred is being commercialized faster than it can be integrated?

In this conversation:

The Sufi tale of the changed waters — and what it names about modern spiritual confusion

The mystery traditions: what secrecy was protecting, and what its loss costs

Forte's formation — Wasson, Hofmann, Eliade, Grof, and what it means to have received a living transmission

The phenomenology of Eleusis: site work, The Road to Eleusis, and the Mysteries as lived encounter

Psychedelics as both healing and weapon: MKUltra, media, and the politics of altered states

JFK, psilocybin, and the 1963 peace speech

Huxley's warning — and whether we are watching it come true

What virtue and discernment look like when the sacred meets the market

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

05:54 Greek Mysteries and Lineage

09:41 Sufi Tale: When the Waters Change

12:00 Amnesia and the Extremes of Religion

16:23 Childhood: The Mystical Stream

22:15 LSD, Democracy, and TM

26:00 Soma, Wasson, and the Calling

30:31 Psychedelic History: Light and Shadow

34:34 Mystery Schools: Secrecy and Stages

43:50 Jung, the Road to Eleusis

50:10 Why Cultures Need Initiation

52:37 From Weapon to Sacrament

53:59 Kennedy's Psychedelic Turn

56:13 The Peace Speech and Its Fallout

1:00:58 MKUltra and the Acid Hype

1:08:18 Huxley's Dark Warning

1:16:26 Eleusis and Power

1:35:58 Virtue and Discernment

1:38:46 Where to Find Robert

Find Robert:

www.alteredstatesofamerica.net

alteredstatesofamerica.substack.com

The Sacred Speaks:

www.drjohnwprice.com

youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

instagram.com/thesacredspeaks

facebook.com/thesacredspeaks

Brought to you by The Center for Healing Arts and Sciences — thecenterforhas.com

Theme music: Modern Nations — modernnationsmusic.com

In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father.

Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture.

John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime.

The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.

Connect with Dr. Susan Schwartz

Website: susanschwartzphd.com

Instagram: instagram.com/susanschwartzphd

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanschwartzphd

Academia: independent.academia.edu/susanschwartz1

Jung Studies: jungstudies.net/author/seschwartz/

Website for John

drjohnwprice.com

WATCH:

YouTube for The Sacred Speaks

youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

Instagram:

instagram.com/thesacredspeaks

@thesacredspeaks

Facebook:

facebook.com/thesacredspeaks

Brought to you by:

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Theme music provided by:

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In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price returns to a conversation with Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, professor at the University of Amsterdam and one of the foremost scholars of Western esotericism. Their first conversation opened into the history of Hermetic spirituality. This one goes further. Hanegraaff's new book, Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge, reframes the entire question: esotericism is not a tradition to be catalogued. It is what the West threw out.

Hanegraaff has spent decades mapping the archive of what official Western culture could not contain, magic, alchemy, gnosis, visionary experience, and asking what those exclusions reveal about the culture that made them. The conversation opens, perhaps unexpectedly, with music. Hanegraaff describes how early encounters with sound became his first experience of altered states and shaped his life's work. The scholarly and the experiential are not separate for him. They never were.

The episode builds toward his concept of the "Greater West," a geographical, cultural, and historical frame encompassing the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and North Africa, and the global expansion that followed 1492. At the center of this history is the anti-idolatry polemic. The monotheistic prohibition against images did not remain a theological dispute. It became a template: a way of naming, marginalizing, and eventually exterminating whatever could be labeled pagan, superstitious, or primitive. What began inside Europe was later exported to every culture the colonial project reached. The logic that condemned the idol condemned the person holding it.

The episode closes with Rilke. What Hanegraaff calls "counter-normative" experience, the visionary, the numinous, the strange encounter that doesn't resolve into explanation, is not a curiosity at the margins of Western thought. It is the part that was deliberately buried. This conversation is an act of recovery.

Key Takeaways:

Esotericism is defined by exclusion rather than content. It is what Western culture rejected, not a unified tradition or school of thought.

The "Greater West" expands the map of Western culture to include Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African roots, and the global reach of colonialism after 1492.

Anti-idolatry polemics produced a reusable template for cultural rejection later applied to the spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples during colonial expansion.

The Reformation and Enlightenment did not end the purge of magic and superstition but accelerated it, removing even the possibility of enchantment from the official picture of reality.

Counter-normative experiences, altered states, synchronicities, visions, deserve serious intellectual engagement rather than dismissal. The West forgot them deliberately. Remembering them is a scholarly and a moral act.

00:00 Welcome and Episode Setup

04:11 Guest and Book Spotlight

07:48 Remembering the Rejected West

08:35 Music as Gnosis Gateway

20:58 Alitheia and Unconcealing Reality

24:32 Defining theGreater West

39:05 Paganism and Christianity’s Roots

42:31 Christian Shadow Projection

44:15 Pagan Roots in Islam

47:02 Idolatry and Monotheism

52:26 Magic as Demon Worship

54:03 Reformation to Enlightenment Purge

59:54 Colonial Template Exported

01:04:06Racism and Extermination Logic

01:09:07 Reconstructing the West

01:15:37 Counter Normality and Weirdness

01:19:09 Rilke Quote and Closing

Website for John

http://www.drjohnwprice.com

WATCH:

YouTube for The Sacred Speaks

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/

@thesacredspeaks

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Brought to you by:

https://www.thecenterforhas.com

Theme music provided by:

http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

Does consciousness survive death? Investigative journalist Leslie Kean has spent two decades following the evidence, from Pentagon UFO reports to physical mediums in the UK. In this episode, she and John Price explore what happens when rigorous investigation meets phenomena that refuse to fit inside a materialist frame.

Kean describes her path from Zen practice and investigative journalism through the pivotal 1999 French UFO report, to the landmark 2017 New York Times Pentagon UFO story (with Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper). She explains her evidence-based approach in Surviving Death: near-death experiences, children's verifiable past-life memories, and physical mediumship, including her experiences with UK medium Stewart Alexander.

The conversation moves through non-local consciousness, ontological shock, the reduction of fear that comes with encountering this material directly, shifts in modern journalism, and open questions connecting UFO phenomena to afterlife research.

About Leslie Kean

Investigative journalist. Author of Surviving Death and UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Her 2017 NYT Pentagon UFO investigation was one of the most-read articles in Times history. Zen practitioner for over 30 years.

Key Takeaways

Kean describes an evidence-first approach to phenomena dismissed by mainstream science, grounding investigation in verifiable cases rather than belief.

Non-local consciousness is framed as a working hypothesis supported by NDEs, past-life memories, and mediumship research.

The 2017 NYT Pentagon UFO story catalyzed a cultural shift, connecting investigative journalism to ontological disruption.

Ontological shock surfaces as lived experience: the moment when the worldview cracks, and what integration looks like after.

Kean's encounters with physical medium Stewart Alexander raise questions that challenge even sympathetic investigators.

Timestamps

(00:00) Welcome and Guest Intro

(01:15) Housekeeping and Links

(02:27) Workshops and Community

(04:02) Does Consciousness Survive Death?

(06:22) Non-Local Consciousness

(10:22) How a French UFO Report Changed Leslie's Career

(13:06) The Pentagon UFO Story in the New York Times

(20:56) Handling Ridicule and Maintaining Rigor

(26:15) Ectoplasm and Physical Mediums: Stewart Alexander

(30:03) Evidence Before Transformation

(32:30) Children's Past Life Memories

(34:25) Writing as Investigation

(36:28) Reincarnation and NDE Research

(38:04) The Shoe on the Ledge: A Famous NDE Case

(40:07) Explaining the Unexplainable

(45:15) Journalism and Evidence Standards

(49:54) Why Podcasts Reach Where Print Cannot

(55:12) Integration and the Non-Local Mind

(01:01:00) Ontological Shock: When Your Worldview Breaks

(01:06:33) Being Touched by a Physical Medium

(01:11:14) Evidence Versus Direct Experience

(01:11:55) Why We Survive Death

(01:14:19) How This Evidence Transforms Belief

(01:16:52) Humility Over Certainty

(01:20:29) Beyond Religion Through Evidence

(01:22:55) UFOs and Afterlife Research: Connected?

(01:26:36) Meaningful Work and Gratitude

(01:28:54) Documenting the Impossible

(01:33:42) Closing Reflections

Explore more at Alethia, John's Substack: https://drjohnwprice.substack.com

Connect with Leslie Kean: lesliekean.com

Website: http://www.drjohnwprice.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Brought to you by: https://www.thecenterforhas.com

Theme music: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Timothy Morton, philosopher, writer, and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, for a wide-ranging conversation about hell, ontology, and what it means to live without an "outside."

Morton is the author of Hell, along with numerous works on ecology, object-oriented ontology, and the entanglement of human and nonhuman worlds. Together, John and Morton explore hell not as an afterlife destination but as a lived condition of felt distance from the divine and deep entanglement with the biosphere.

This conversation moves through ontology and how things exist, the critique of holism and mastery as tied to fascism and colonial habits of thought, the distinction between panic and grief as pathways to change, and why mystery, irony, and hesitation may be the most honest responses to reality. Morton frames social media as a continuation of 18th-century politics of sensibility, critiques metaphysics of presence and gnostic hierarchies, and suggests that paradise is not elsewhere but something we build inside hell.

Rather than offering resolution, this episode invites listeners into an uncomfortable and generative encounter with the structures we inhabit without seeing.

Key Takeaways:

Timothy Morton defines ontology as how things exist and argues that our deepest assumptions about reality shape everything from ecology to politics.

The conversation frames holism and mastery as colonial and fascist habits of thought, suggesting that ecology requires giving up the fantasy of total comprehension.

Morton distinguishes panic from grief, proposing that panic is an ontological shock when our worldview cracks, while grief is the doorway through.

The interview explores hell as an embodied, cultural structure rather than a metaphysical location, and suggests irony, hesitation, and mystery as reality signals.

Morton reads William Blake as a poet of infinite narrators and weaponized gentleness, connecting the Lamb and the Tiger to questions of presence and paradox.

Timestamps

(00:00) Welcome and Guest Intro

(01:26) Workshops and Community Updates

(03:38) Substack and Upcoming Book

(04:26) Jumping Straight Into the Recording

(05:34) Writing Without Forcing

(07:54) Why Hell and Ontology

(13:22) Ontology Explained Simply

(14:41) Holism and Fascism Critique

(18:53) Ecology Against Mastery

(23:02) Building Heaven in Hell

(25:22) Trauma and Meaning Saturation

(26:48) Mystery and Opacity of Truth

(33:01) Colonizer Mind and Worldviews

(39:00) Panic as Ontological Shock

(41:19) Panic Before Grief

(42:28) Mockery and Woke

(43:26) Grief Breaks Control

(44:24) Worldviews as Weapons

(45:52) Frog Versus Soldier

(49:02) Initiation and Identity Loss

(52:37) Phenomenology Explained

(56:46) Glitches and Consciousness

(58:44) Gods of Decay

(01:01:45) Evolution Without a Plan

(01:06:34) Trust Made of Mistrust

(01:08:29) Art as Emotional Poison

(01:12:27) Social Media Sensibility

(01:15:46) Irony Hesitation Reality

(01:18:47) Online Irony Lacks Democracy

(01:19:29) Blake Tiger Infinite Narrators

(01:23:02) Lamb Poem Weaponized Gentleness

(01:24:34) Hell as Flipped God Presence

(01:27:04) Buddhism Fixation and Bypass

(01:31:33) VIP Paranormal Double Speak

(01:36:37) Hell Not Just State of Mind

(01:39:35) Metaphysics Presence and Hierarchy

(01:50:32) Embodied Paradox as Divine

(01:52:28) Closing Reflections and Thanks

Connect with Timothy Morton

Rice University Faculty Page: Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University

Book: Hell by Timothy Morton

Website for John

http://www.drjohnwprice.com

WATCH:

YouTube for The Sacred Speaks

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Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/

@thesacredspeaks

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Brought to you by:

https://www.thecenterforhas.com

Theme music provided by:

http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, host Dr. John W Price sits down with mythologist and storyteller Dr. John Bucher, Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, to explore how story functions as a living force that shapes our lives, culture, and sense of meaning. They trace John's early "graduate degree in storytelling" in a small Texas video store, move through themes like the quest to come home, reconciliation with the father, and the "magical orphan," and show how our favorite films reveal the deep mythic patterns we're unconsciously living. The conversation dives into archetypes, subtext, AI as a new cultural story, the loss of shared myths in a hyper-individualized media landscape, and the possibility of a "collective heroic journey" where groups answer a shared call of desperation rather than a single hero saving the day. John also offers very practical tools for "telling a better story" in our own lives, from changing our information diet to small daily rituals that reorient us toward hope, connection, and agency.

Key Takeaways: John Bucher: Telling A Better Story

Stories and myths are the "operating system" of the human mind, shaping how we make sense of everything from traffic to transcendence.

What truly draws us into stories is not plot but theme, like coming home or reconciling with the father.

Our favorite movies quietly reveal our core genres, themes, and unresolved psychological material.

We are losing shared cultural stories, which contributes to loneliness and fragmentation.

Finding a "better story" starts locally: in our media diet, daily practices, and small collective actions.

Timestamps

(00:00) Meet Mythologist John Bucher

(00:58) Housekeeping

(03:45) The Storytelling Almanac & Why Story Matters

(05:52) East Texas Video Store as a Storytelling School

(09:36) Theme Over Plot (Homecoming & Other Motifs)

(12:56) Genre as a Mirror

(18:27) Cinderella, Hope, and "Telling a Better Story"

(20:45) So What Is Story?

(23:49) Myth vs History: When Religion Literalizes Story

(29:13) Subtext, Symbol, and What's Unsaid

(31:56) Stepping Outside Old Stories, Grief, and Trying on New Identities

(37:48) Grace, identity & the 'fedora guy'

(39:21) AI as a cultural story

(41:06) Ritual and the last 'collective story'

(42:37) Beyond the Hero's Journey

(44:26) What we lose with curated, individualized media

(46:09) Addicted to hope: choosing a better collective future

(48:43) History & pop culture

(51:56) Why stories repeat

(54:19) What is an archetype?

(58:15) Back to AI: tool vs. threat

(01:06:55) Hearing the local call and joining the collective journey

(01:10:22) Practical antidotes to despair

(01:16:53) Closing gratitude & where to find John's work

Connect with John Bucher

Website: https://www.tellingabetterstory.com

Link hub (books, podcast, etc.): https://linktr.ee/tellingabetterstory

X (Twitter): https://x.com/johnkbucher

Instagram (personal): https://www.instagram.com/johnkbucher

Instagram (Telling a Better Story): https://www.instagram.com/tellingabetterstory

Joseph Campbell Foundation profile / team page: https://www.jcf.org/about-joseph-campbell-foundation/team

Pacifica Graduate Institute faculty page: https://www.pacifica.edu/faculty/john-bucher

"Learning to Tell a Better Story" YouTube interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLIOUw4dAB0

Connect with John Price

Website: http://www.drjohnwprice.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Brought to you by: https://www.thecenterforhas.com

Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John Price sits down with Molly Carroll, therapist, writer, and host of the podcast Cracking Open, for a searching conversation about intuition, rupture, and the cost of inner honesty.

Molly is the author of Trust Within: Letting Intuition Lead and Cracking Open. Her work grows out of lived dislocation, from moments when the life she was building no longer aligned with what she knew in her body. Together, John and Molly explore intuition not as a slogan or guarantee, but as a capacity that often becomes audible only after something in our lives refuses to continue as planned.

The conversation moves through engagement endings, grief, codependency, therapy, and the subtle tension between anxiety and knowing. It considers whether intuition steadies us or unsettles us, and whether following it restores coherence or quietly dismantles the identities we once relied upon.

Rather than offering formulaic guidance, this episode invites listeners into a more honest and discerning relationship with their own interior life.

Key Takeaways:

Molly Carroll describes the first “white picket fence dwindling moment” when she realized the life she planned (including an engagement) wasn’t the life she truly wanted.

The conversation frames intuition as a lived capacity shaped by rupture, grief, and risk rather than a simple gift or guarantee.

The hosts emphasize integration of experiences—personal, spiritual, and professional—rather than retreating from discomfort after rupture.

Molly recounts leaving an engagement with a fiancé visa in play, choosing honesty with herself over social expectations.

The interview situates therapy and healing arts as pathways to listen to deep truths, even when those truths disrupt established life scripts

Time-stamps

(00:00) Introduction and Guest Overview

(00:41) Housekeeping and Announcements

(02:44) Introducing Molly Carroll

(04:31) Molly's Journey and Intuition

(07:16) Cracking Open Moments

(11:28) The Role of Intuition and Personal Growth

(22:53) Victimhood and Personal Responsibility

(33:01) Connection and Compassion

(43:05) Exploring Emotional Expression

(43:53) The Healing Power of Tears

(46:32) Creating Space for Vulnerability

(49:20) Understanding Codependency

(52:57) Intuition vs. Codependency

(54:41) The Role of Intuition in Decision Making

(01:08:56) Money, Worth, and Intuition

(01:18:17) Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

Connect with Molly

Website https://molly-carroll.com/about/

Book https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Open-2nd-Molly-Carroll/dp/1320934374?keywords=cracking+open&qid=1572021083&sr=8-1

Website for John

http://www.drjohnwprice.com

WATCH:

YouTube for The Sacred Speaks

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/

@thesacredspeaks

Facebook:

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Brought to you by:

https://www.thecenterforhas.com

Theme music provided by:

http://www.modernnationsmusic.com