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

There's rent for the church and a separate house where they do high dosage ceremonies.

He's got payroll.

He says at least half of the money Zydor takes in goes to supplying all that marijuana and mushrooms and DMT from secure suppliers and then doing potency and quality control testing.

Dave likes to say Zydor is kind of caught between the cops and the robbers.

Just like marijuana dispensaries, the church can't use the normal banking system because they're dealing with federally outlawed substances.

The whole place runs on cash.

Dave says the money from the church does afford him a comfortable life.

It means he doesn't have to work several days a week that he can instead spend with his young son.

Without a forensic dive into Dave's finances, we can't know for sure.

But it doesn't seem like he's splashing out, given how much attention that would draw, and the fact that the police have already confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff from the church.

Dave says that in addition to doing charitable churchy things like toy drives, a portion of this money also goes to other psychedelic churches, helping them prepare for their legal tangles with the government.

Which gets to the strange collective limbo that all of these churches are in at this moment.

When it comes to mushrooms, at least, the U.S.

is a legal patchwork.

There are these legal islands of relative safety, places like Oakland and Seattle that have decriminalized mushrooms.

That means that local governments have directed their law enforcement to treat mushroom crimes as their lowest priority.

And in those places, it's become relatively easy to get these substances, with or without a church.

But that doesn't mean churches are in the clear.

For example, in Zydor's case, there were ultimately no charges filed after that raid.

But Dave says he never recovered the things that were taken.

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