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:
thecenterforhas.com
Theme music provided by:
modernnationsmusic.com