The Way Forward

3 days until this FREE livestream event begins! Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rgZP4nsLRiGFTssq8ypHDQ#/registration

Join us tonight at 7pm ET for the premiere of episode Ep 259: Why Killing Your Ego Is The Only Way to Really Heal with Kyle Cease The identity you built was just a solution to trauma. Kyle Cease is a transformational teacher, former touring comedian with two #1 Comedy Central specials, New York Times bestselling author, and creator of the Evolving Out Loud global community. He has coached over 16,000 people through his talks, retreats, online programs, and one-on-one. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO0uBZE3hv4 If this episode resonates, The Way Forward is how you support the work—and find others near you already living it: https://thewayfwrd.com/join

Does it go into clarity and resolve, or into the same collective blame you're frustrated about being on the receiving end of? Those who profit off of division and chaos, and the government, which stands to gain more power and more control through "bringing order" to increasing division and chaos, want nothing more than for us to be at each other's throats across all lines—race, religion, political affiliation, gender, etc. So don't fall for it. Despite differences in race, religion, political affiliation, gender, etc., the overwhelming majority of people are good people who really want the same things.

If a white man randomly murdered and tried to behead a black man sitting on a park bench minding his own business, it would be national news everywhere. There would be protests in the streets. Everyone would be screaming about how evil white people are. A black man randomly murdered and tried to behead a white man sitting on a park bench minding his own business near where I live, and our local news stations have barely covered it. Happened in Round Rock, TX a few days ago. And no, I'm not suggesting white people should be protesting in the streets and claiming that all black people are evil. That's absurd. MOST people, irrespective of race or color, are good people in my experience. I'm simply pointing out the crazy, obvious double standard here. So why might this be happening? White people have been conditioned to believe we are inherently racist and evil, and should be guilty for who we are. And that is fucking absurd. Black people have been conditioned to hate white people, to blame white people for their problems, to think they'll always be at a disadvantage because of white people. And that is also fucking absurd. No motive has been released in the Round Rock case, and I'm not claiming to know what was in that man's head. This isn't about this one act. It's about a broader pattern. When a culture spends more energy conditioning one group of people to see themselves and others through the lens of collective racial guilt, while another group is conditioned into collective hatred towards another group, you get the racial tension we're experiencing now. Strip away individual accountability and morality at home, replace it with a story about which group owes which group, and you shouldn't be surprised when some people stop seeing individuals in front of them at all. By remaining relatively quiet on the examples of black people killing white people (or black people killing black people), and by making a concerted effort to blast the examples of white people killing black people in our faces, it reinforces the exact conditioning I mentioned above. This is a loop. White people are shown story after story of white-on-black violence and how white people are the problem, reinforcing the message that they should feel collective guilt for who they are. Black people are shown far less of the reverse—and separately, are steeped in a narrative that their problems are caused by white people—reinforcing a sense of grievance and blame aimed outward. One is guilt about your own group's supposed nature. The other is blame directed at someone else's group. But they feed the same wheel: the guilt makes one side flinch from calling anything out, the blame makes the other side feel justified in resentment, and the coverage patterns that produce both just keep confirming each story to the people primed to hear it. Round and round it goes. The way you get off that wheel isn't more coverage in the "right" direction, and it isn't swapping which group gets to feel guilty or which group gets to place blame. It's stepping outside the loop entirely: recognizing that the overwhelming majority of people, in every group, are good, and choosing individual accountability over both of those traps. If you're carrying guilt for things you didn't do because of a group you happen to belong to, put it down. If you're carrying blame toward a group instead of dealing with your own choices and circumstances, put that down too. Both are ways of handing your sense of self over to something outside your control. Taking responsibility for your own actions, your own reactions, your own life is the only thing that actually breaks the cycle. A person who owns their own life isn't useful fuel for either the guilt story or the grievance story. A lot of white people are watching this pattern play out and are understandably frustrated. Noticing a double standard isn't racism, and neither is being frustrated about it. The frustration itself isn't the problem. Where you let it go from there is the fork in the road.

Hope to see you in Chicago October 2 & 3! I’ll be speaking alongside Dr. Andy Kaufman, Eileen McKusick, Dr. Larry Palevsky, Liev Dalton and more! More importantly, I’m stoked to hang out with like-minded people! https://www.insideoutholistichealth4u.com/about-1-1

None of this is a one off failure; this is systemic. The psychiatrist who cleared her to leave McLean Hospital weeks before the killings had never treated a single case of postpartum psychosis in over 20 years of practice, ran through the standard diagnostic checklist without ever attempting to figure out what was actually happening (shocking, I know), didn’t bother pulling her records, and sent her home with more psychiatric medication anyway. Multiple providers, dozens of prescriptions, and not one person was holding the full picture, nor were any of them attempting to get to the root of the issue, and instead blindly outsourcing to the pharmaceutical overlords. This was a system that failed her long before that day. None of this tells us what was in Lindsay Clancy’s mind on January 24, 2023. That’s not for me to decide. But the research is real, the settlements are real, and what I watched happen to someone I love is very real. When a person is cycled through 13 different psych drugs in 4 months with nobody tracking the full picture, the medication itself, the companies that create it, and the practitioners who prescribe it, deserve as much scrutiny as anything else in this case.

I watched this firsthand when my mom was cut off cold turkey, her symptoms went berserk. Again, hellish to witness, and I can’t fathom the firsthand experience my mother endured. This is what real, unmanaged withdrawal from these drugs looks like. Plus, there is a documented, legally proven pattern of the industry lying. GlaxoSmithKline paid $3 billion in 2012 to settle criminal and civil charges that included burying negative safety data on Paxil and pushing it on kids it was never proven safe for. The study behind that, “Study 329,” originally claimed Paxil was safe for teenagers. A fully independent re-analysis of the same raw data, years later, found the opposite: no real benefit, and a suicidality link that had been completely covered up. Harvard’s Irving Kirsch went further, analyzing the full trial data for major antidepressants, including data manufacturers never published, and found the difference between drug and placebo was minimal or nonexistent in roughly half of all studies. That literally means for half of these trials, the drug barely outperformed a sugar pill. And that’s not because researchers couldn’t find it, but rather because it wasn’t in the industry’s interest to publicize it. Another example is Prozac. Dr. David Graham, an FDA safety reviewer, found that Eli Lilly excluded 76 of 97 reported cases of suicidality from the post marketing safety data it submitted to the FDA, a finding he flagged in an internal FDA memo in 1990. Separately, past court litigation referenced an internal 1988 Lilly memo, showing the company’s own clinical trials found higher rates of suicide attempts, hostility, violence, and psychosis with Prozac compared to other antidepressants of that era. It gets even deeper than manipulated trials, though. The foundational premise millions of people were prescribed SSRIs under, that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, specifically low serotonin, was never actually proven. A 2022 review in Molecular Psychiatry, synthesizing decades of the highest quality research on the subject, found no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin at all. The lead researcher said plainly that patients should never have been told this, and that doing so kept people from making an informed choice about whether to take the drugs in the first place. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the public still believes the chemical imbalance story today. Tens of millions of prescriptions, and the story sold to justify them was never solid. So how many other psych drugs does this same lack of evidence apply to? How many other psych meds, prescribed to millions and millions of people, are built on premises that were never actually substantiated? I’d be willing to bet all of them. And it gets more disturbing when you factor in the rest of the picture: the substantial criminal record of the companies that make these drugs, the fact that the pharmaceutical industry itself pays for over 75% of the FDA’s drug review program, meaning the agency approving these drugs is funded by the companies whose drugs it’s approving, a well documented revolving door of employment between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies it oversees, and the fact that the FDA doesn’t run its own independent studies on the drugs it licenses, but rather reviews and approves based on the studies submitted by the very companies applying for approval. Then look at how Clancy herself was actually treated. Her nurse Rebecca Jollotta was told the drug Remeron was giving Lindsay intrusive thoughts. She didn’t ask what those thoughts were. She told her that was normal. Remeron carries the FDA’s own boxed warning for increased suicidal thoughts and behavior, and this was the response. Normal. WTF? Normalization now makes it okay? Additionally, her primary psychiatrist for 14 telehealth visits never pulled her full psychiatric records and just took her word for everything, and was “surprised” to learn she’d called a suicide hotline twice. Her own psychiatrist didn’t know.

I know one thing for certain about this Lindsay Clancy trial, and I say this based on my own direct experience watching my mother suffer for years under a fistful of psychotropic medications: Nowhere near enough attention is being paid to the fact that Lindsay Clancy was cycled on and off 13 different psychotropic medications in an absurdly short window of time. For years, I watched my own mother suffer tremendously. I would never wish what my siblings and I, nor what my mother, experienced on anyone. It was hell. She didn’t sleep for days on end, didn’t eat, screamed that it felt like her skin was burning off, screamed that it felt like her brain was being zapped, sat in front of her bathroom mirror staring wide eyed without saying anything, hallucinated that she was 13 years old and I was her father, saw demons and shadowy figures in the room, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and attempted to end her life more than once. These drugs don’t just fail to fix people. They mask symptoms, manufacture new ones, and in some cases push people toward harming themselves or someone else—and the industry that profits from them has spent decades making sure the general public doesn’t fully grasp how often that happens. They rip people apart psychologically and physically. They rip families apart, too. I’m not on “team Lindsay” or “team Patrick,” and I don’t know what happened in that house. But the medication piece keeps getting drowned out by true crime theorizing. In the 4 months before the killings, Clancy was pumped through 13 different psychiatric medications, with over 30 total prescriptions as doses got yanked up, down, and swapped, by multiple providers who never once compared notes with each other. The publicly available data backs this up, and they’re not “fringe” in any sense: The FDA’s own 2006 review of 372 antidepressant trials (nearly 100,000 people) found a 2.3x jump in suicidality risk for patients under 25. That’s why every antidepressant in America now carries a black box warning. A 2015 Swedish national study found SSRI users aged 15-24 were convicted of violent crimes at more than 5x the rate of non users (3.3% vs 0.6%). Sertraline in particular stood out among the top-prescribed SSRIs. Roughly 1 in 4 American women is currently on some form of psychiatric medication, per the CDC’s own newest data, nearly double the rate for men. This isn’t a fringe issue at all. It’s mainstream medicine, quietly, on a massive scale. And the problems with rapid switching or cold stopping these drugs, exactly what happened to Clancy, isn’t a fringe theory: Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome is very real and can, at a minimum, trigger brain zaps, insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal ideation within days of stopping. Benzodiazepine withdrawal is one of the most dangerous withdrawal syndromes in all of medicine, capable of triggering, at a minimum, rebound psychosis, seizures, and severe agitation. I watched that happen to my own mother. Cross tapering (stopping one drug abruptly while starting another) can stack withdrawal from the first on top of side effects from the second, leaving a person destabilized from both directions at once. According to the medical system’s own ideas, psychiatric medications typically take 4-6 weeks just to reach full effect, and many require slow, deliberate tapering over weeks specifically to avoid destabilizing the nervous system. Going through 13 drugs in that same window means many of them never had time to even show whether they were “working” (which is a loaded, problematic idea, in and of itself…) before being swapped again. 13 different medications in 4 months is not normal, cautious psychiatric care, or at least it shouldn’t be. But it probably is relatively normal. And that’s the problem: it’s pure pharmacological, psychological chaos, and nobody bats an eye because this is just how the system runs. The body and brain were in a constant state of adjustment, withdrawal, or both, without ever reaching a stable baseline.

Join us tonight at 7pm ET for the premiere of episode Ep 258: How Losing Everything Heals Your Body & Mind with Brian Costello When Brian Costello lost everything he was able to understand what true healing is. Brian Costello is the author of The Primordial Code, a former CrossFit gym owner, and a multi-time national beach sprinting champion who rebuilt his life from rock bottom into something he never planned for. His brother Danny also gets real time here. Danny was vaccine-injured at 18 months and spent 20 years without a voice, but at age five he had a dream that his answer would come in the form of a board… You’ll want to hear this one! Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKhkfQmssb0

Free event. Register here!: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rgZP4nsLRiGFTssq8ypHDQ#/registration ————————— Two hundred and fifty years ago, the world heard a declaration: freedom is not a privilege to be granted. It is a birthright. It was a powerful idea. But it was never the whole story. Because true freedom isn’t only found in a document, a flag, or a nation. It’s found in a body that moves without pain. In a community that governs itself with integrity. In a soul that knows its connection to something greater. This July, as America turns 250, we’re not just marking what was proclaimed. We’re showing you what freedom actually looks like, lived out loud. Freedom: 250 & Beyond is a free three-day livestream drawing from years of footage from Confluence, one of the most remarkable gatherings happening in America today. A living, breathing proof of concept that the world our hearts know is possible is already being built. Join people across the country for three days of conversations, stories, and moments that will remind you: you were born free. And you still are. What to Expect Each day of Freedom: 250 & Beyond is built around a different theme, featuring six sessions of curated mainstage talks drawn from past Confluence gatherings.

Interviewing Catherine Austin Fitts today. Any questions you’d like me to ask?

Hey, Confluencers! We’re in the beginning stages of planning our 5th edition, April 22-26, 2027! 🎉 We’d like to hear feedback from YOU. What would you like to see us offer as part of our 5th edition? Feel free to frame your feedback as a certain vibe, more of something, less of something, a particular speaker or musician, or really anything! We ask that you reply directly to this post, and that you keep replies to each other at a minimum so we can track feedback. See you in April!

Free event. Register here!: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rgZP4nsLRiGFTssq8ypHDQ#/registration Swipe to see the daily schedule! ————————— Two hundred and fifty years ago, the world heard a declaration: freedom is not a privilege to be granted. It is a birthright. It was a powerful idea. But it was never the whole story. Because true freedom isn’t only found in a document, a flag, or a nation. It’s found in a body that moves without pain. In a community that governs itself with integrity. In a soul that knows its connection to something greater. This July, as America turns 250, we’re not just marking what was proclaimed. We’re showing you what freedom actually looks like, lived out loud. Freedom: 250 & Beyond is a free three-day livestream drawing from years of footage from Confluence, one of the most remarkable gatherings happening in America today. A living, breathing proof of concept that the world our hearts know is possible is already being built. Join people across the country for three days of conversations, stories, and moments that will remind you: you were born free. And you still are. What to Expect Each day of Freedom: 250 & Beyond is built around a different theme, featuring six sessions of curated mainstage talks drawn from past Confluence gatherings.

My DJ set from this year’s Confluence is up on YouTube! If you like house music—especially Tech House, Latin House, Healing House, and Melodic House, you’ll love this: https://youtu.be/zY7X-yU_UO4?is=o4FUVWwjFJrFdmJ9

My DJ set from this year’s Confluence is up on SoundCloud! If you like house music—especially Tech House, Latin House, Healing House, and Melodic House, you’ll love this: https://on.soundcloud.com/e7VvXurjhdAbgNZ1if

Join us tonight at 7pm ET for the premiere of episode Ep 257: The Richest Families in America Paid to Rewrite History | The Archivist (Co-Hosted by Topher Gardner) America’s history was completely rewritten, and no one is talking about it. My guest in this episode is known online as The Archivist, an independent researcher who spends his time reading newspapers from the 1700s through the early 1900s and archiving what the accepted history books left out. If the history you were handed has started to feel thin, this one gives you something real to explore. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7NztAoUGRk

Join us tonight at 7pm ET for the premiere of episode 256: What They Don't Tell You About Data Centers, Water Control & Mass Surveillance with Clayton Tucker Data centers and flock cameras are damaging our society in ways that most people can’t even think of. My guest today is Clayton Tucker: Lampasas rancher, Secretary of the Texas Farmers Union, and candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner running to halt AI data center expansion statewide. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4OuXr8LWLk If this episode resonates, The Way Forward is how you support the work—and find others near you already living it: https://thewayfwrd.com/join

Join us tonight at 7pm ET for the premiere of episode 255: How You Can Become Self Sufficient Without Owning Land with Curtis Stone Can you live a sovereign lifestyle while making six figures on a small piece of land? That’s exactly what Curtis Stone has done. Curtis is the author of The Urban Farmer and founder of Freedom Farmers. He lives off-grid in southern British Columbia with his two kids, and has spent almost two decades teaching people to grow food, find land, and build self-sufficient lives. Most homesteading content skips the ugly part, Curtis doesn't. He talks about collapsing from exhaustion, failures that outnumbered wins ten to one, and realizing paralysis by analysis is the biggest thing standing between people and food. He shares why he thinks Phoenix is one of the worst places to be if the shit hits the fan, and his eleven scales of permanence for evaluating land. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w3fWKIx-9Y&t=886s

I’ve polled over 3,000 of my followers at this point, asking: “You’ve found your health & freedom people online, but are you struggling to find health & freedom community in person?” 94% of respondents voted “Yes.” Clearly this is a massive problem. Social media and digital platforms have allowed holistic health & freedom minded men and women to learn about all of the problems with government, food systems, modern medicine, and more, and it’s allowed us to learn information that leads to a more true, healthy, and free life, if embodied and applied. It’s also helped us to connect with people from all over the world. But there’s a huge piece missing… One of the biggest predictors for health and longevity is the quality of our relationships. For so many of us, when we look to our immediate surroundings, we’re desperately struggling to form deep, quality relationships because we’re struggling to find others in our area who just “get it.” So what do we do? We turn back to our devices and social media platforms for a sense of validation and a semblance of community. Or, for some, we spend all of our time going to every health & freedom event possible, just to get a taste of what it’s like to be around others who get it. Both avenues are mostly unsustainable, and oftentimes they don’t lead to lasting, local, day-to-day relationships. So we’ve developed a solution for that problem. TheWayFwrd.com is an unincorporated, private based membership organization that allows you to easily connect with other like-minded men and women—as well as farms, schools, practitioners, and more—locally, no matter where you are across the world. Our platform includes an easy-to-use map that allows you to type in your zip/postal code and easily locate health & freedom oriented people, farms, practitioners, alternative schools, and more in your local area. We have members across the world doing regular meetups, finding aligned businesses, finding new jobs, and even some finding romantic partners. We wholeheartedly believe the next step to expand the health & freedom movement across the world is via connecting locally, in person, with others who get it. And our platform is designed to help with that.