Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

speaker

1,089 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 3 Jun

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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Planet Money · A trip to the magic mushroom megachurch · 24 Jan 2026 podcast

He'd done his research, understood things like the Myers test of religious sincerity.

In fact, this was in some ways the point.

He welcomed the chance to stand up against the law, to help defend the religious right to do all of this.

And so by the very next day, Dave was serving sacrament again.

And rather than put Zydor out of non-business, Dave says the raid actually made them a national news story.

So the raid ended up kind of catapulting the church into the public eye in some way.

No raid, no megachurch.

Pretty soon, Zydor's membership started to take off.

And I should say, this is the point where Zydor really becomes an outlier in the world of psychedelic churches.

Unlike other prominent psychedelic churches that make prospective members do interviews and tests to double-check their mental and physical health and steeping them in church theology, Zydor's barrier to entry is relatively low.

Just a form agreement stating that you believe in their doctrine and that you're not a cop, along with a $10 initiation fee and $5 a month after that.

Now, $5 may not sound like that much, but after the raid, Zydor's membership exploded.

Over 135,000 members have come through the church at this point.

These days, Dave estimates about 4,000 members come into the church to get sacrament each month.

That means a minimum of $20,000 a month in membership fees.

And if each of those members donates, say, $60 a visit, multiplied over the year, that's several million dollars in revenue.

And all that scale has raised some eyebrows.

how do you respond when, when people say, you know, well, this just looks like a way to make a lot of money on otherwise extremely kind of controlled illicit substances.

Dave says for those who think he's some sort of fungal kingpin, the margins are slimmer than they may appear.

Dave's got a lot of costs to cover.

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