Here For The Truth

Joel & Yerasimos
  • 4.7 (38)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

In a world awash with propaganda, censorship, and spiritual confusion, Here For The Truth is a refuge for critical thinkers and seekers of authenticity. Hosted by Joel Rafidi and Yerasimos, this podcast cuts through the noise to explore psychology, philosophy, spirituality, health, freedom, and the human condition with honesty and depth. Through raw, unfiltered conversations with thought leaders, researchers, and free thinkers from around the world, Here For The Truth challenges collective narratives and invites you to reclaim your mind, body, and the essence of what makes you who you are. If you’re tired of surface-level conversations and ready to confront reality with depth and courage—this is your weekly listen. Subscribe, follow, and join the movement of those willing to see, think, and live differently. https://hereforthetruth.com

  1. 1 day ago

    Ep 307 - Joel & Yerasimos | Become Someone First

    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 your own desires, the truth-seeker community that becomes its own herd, and the envy that surfaces when you watch someone else stop asking permission to live. The conversation moves through Rand's virtue of selfishness, Jung's safe road, and the heroic act of individuation. How much longer are you going to wait? 00:00 The Cost of Not Being You 00:46 RATH Academy Announcement 04:13 Show Start - Defining Self vs Herd 06:59 Yerasimos on Belonging 11:31 Family Roots and Identity / Breaking Free from Expectations 18:15 Raising Kids and Individuation 26:31 Altruism and Weaponized Morality 33:25 People Pleasing and Boundaries 40:24 Benevolence Versus Malevolence 46:16 Are Truth Seekers Part of a Herd? 52:04 Heroism Of Individualism 56:14 Crabs In A Bucket 01:01:26 Shine And Take Action 01:04:42 Sobriety And Self Inventory Links RATH Academy — the next container is now open. A year in, we're continuing: six months of high-touch coaching with Joel, Yerasimos, and Sophie, built on Rise Above The Herd as the foundation — now running on a brand-new interactive platform. The next cohort starts September 1st. 15 spots, by application. Apply for RATH Academy → https://riseabovetheherd.co/academy Connect With Us Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/Follow us on Instagram → https://instagram.com/areyouhereforthetruthJoin our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/friendsWatch All Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

  2. 19 July

    Ep 306 - Jared Pickard | Cultivating a Biodynamic Life

    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 wildfires two days after it finally penciled. What he found in the ashes is the heart of this conversation: that biodynamic farming is less a technique than a practice occurring inside the person — rhythm over force, presence over striving, a life tended the way you’d tend living soil. He mistook the vehicle for the dream once. The dream was always nature, and the ground beneath his feet. (00:00) From Wall Street to Farming (00:32) Opening Conversation (01:50) Show Start (02:58) Jared’s Hero’s Journey (13:51) Clean Food Obsession (20:14) Jared’s Quitting Story (33:08) Napa Hotel Dream (38:22) The Wildfire Story (49:03) Ease vs Struggle (52:46) Love And Long Distance / Italy Proposal Vision (56:18) Finding Steiner Biodynamics (01:06:19) Biodynamics vs Organic (01:18:21) Preps And Quartz Spray Guest Links Website: beherefarm.com Instagram: @beherejared Instagram (Farm): @beherefarm Connect with Us Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Follow us on Instagram → https://instagram.com/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/friends/ Watch All Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

  3. 12 July

    Ep 305 - Kyree Oliver | Don't Die Empty

    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 precision of someone who has watched a man die with four people at his funeral after making half a billion dollars in his life, and coached young men into the conversation they've been avoiding with themselves for years. A grounded, unflinching argument for slowing down long enough to build the life you'd actually want to have lived. (00:00) ‘Love Vs Respect’ Opener (00:37) Opening Conversation (03:11) Show Start (04:17) Kyree’s Childhood Turning Point (08:09) Football Hazing And Breaking Point (13:12) 1000 Interviews Obsession (18:31) Dying Empty Lesson (23:49) What Is Success For Men (29:31) Why Masculinity Coaches Are Needed (39:55) Temptation, Grounding / Uncomfortable Self Questions (44:49) ‘Toxic Fuel’ Explained (51:03) Late Night Truths (57:11) Healthy Fuel North Star (01:01:23) Nature and Legacy Thinking (01:06:38) Fatherhood and Purpose (01:08:41) Marketing That Hits Home (01:13:19) Authenticity and Red Flags (01:18:44) Trust Over Time Guest Links Website: https://www.kyree.com/ Instagram: https://instagram.com/kyree Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kyreeoliver1994 Connect with Us Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Follow us on Instagram → https://instagram.com/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/friends/ Watch All Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

  4. 5 July

    Ep 304 - Mark Vicente | The Narcissist’s Playbook

    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 CONNECT WITH US Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Follow us on Instagram → https://instagram.com/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/friends/ Watch All Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/

  5. 28 June

    Ep 303 - Ariana Victor | Just Look Up

    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/ CONNECT WITH US Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/ Join our free Telegram community → https://t.me/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/fott/

  6. 21 June

    Ep 302 - Joel & Yerasimos | Spiritual Lies

    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. CONNECT WITH US Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/ Join our free Telegram community → https://t.me/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/fott/ Build your digital home with Atlas → https://atlasdigital.world/

  7. 14 June

    Ep 301 - Topher Gardner | Boundaries, Biochar & the Slaying of Idols

    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 CONNECT WITH US Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/ Join our free Telegram community → https://t.me/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/friends 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

  8. 7 June

    Ep 300 - Michael Tsarion & David Whitehead | Truth Against the World

    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 Connect with Us Start the Free 7-Day Self-Esteem Reset → https://selfesteemreset.com/ Watch Our Episodes → https://hereforthetruth.com/episodes/ Join our free Telegram community → https://t.me/areyouhereforthetruth Join our membership Friends of the Truth → https://hereforthetruth.com/fott/ Build your digital home with Atlas → https://atlasdigital.world/

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4.7
out of 5
38 Ratings

About

In a world awash with propaganda, censorship, and spiritual confusion, Here For The Truth is a refuge for critical thinkers and seekers of authenticity. Hosted by Joel Rafidi and Yerasimos, this podcast cuts through the noise to explore psychology, philosophy, spirituality, health, freedom, and the human condition with honesty and depth. Through raw, unfiltered conversations with thought leaders, researchers, and free thinkers from around the world, Here For The Truth challenges collective narratives and invites you to reclaim your mind, body, and the essence of what makes you who you are. If you’re tired of surface-level conversations and ready to confront reality with depth and courage—this is your weekly listen. Subscribe, follow, and join the movement of those willing to see, think, and live differently. https://hereforthetruth.com

Information

  • Creator
    Joel & Yerasimos
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    317
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Here For The Truth

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