David Hodges – god, mushrooms and law.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dave Hodges.

Dave is the founder of the Church of Ambrosia, a psychedelic church in Oakland, California, known for its use of mushrooms as sacraments. With over 125,000 members, Dave is one of the most outspoken advocates for entheogens as religious tools and has pioneered breakthrough dose work for spiritual insight, healing, and consciousness exploration.

We touch upon topics of:

• Founding a psychedelic church and early raids (01:24–03:29)
• Legal challenges and city pushback (04:01–06:04)
• Psychedelics as religious sacraments (06:24–07:34)
• Understanding the soul and afterlife (07:38–08:35)
• What is a breakthrough dose and how it’s calculated (09:15–12:37)
• Dangers of overdose and gradual dosing (12:46–13:52)
• Origins of religion through mushrooms (14:36–15:47)
• Aliens, dimensions, and God (17:04–20:38)
• What it’s like running a psychedelic church (21:04–22:05)
• Safe environments and the “God’s Sitters” project (22:12–24:40)
• Can the soul get lost? (25:34–26:40)
• Church leadership, books, and the Book of Ambrosia (26:46–29:25)
• Encounters with dark entities during ceremonies (30:09–32:31)
• The war on drugs and financial incentives (33:08–40:16)
• Legal battles and how the church fights back (40:29–41:24)
• Who comes to the church and why (42:05–43:18)
• Business model and sacrament contributions (44:03–44:39)
• Dave’s vision for humanity and the soul (45:02–46:01)
• Risks and special conditions (48:01–49:27)
• Integration practices and audio journaling (49:42–51:59)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Dave Hodges at ambrosia.church, zydedoor.com, or follow him on Instagram at @davehemp420.

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Dave Hodges: One ape tried the mushrooms and this first experience by this first ape was the first time that we knew there was anything more to this existence. The first lesson from that first ceremony was one of language. My focus is really on mushrooms, but it’s really true for just about everything is they affect the border between this world and the next a microdose.

It’s like putting a little crack in that wall at a normal dose. It’s like poking a hole and the more. You do the larger, the hole at the breakthrough dose is like taking a sledgehammer and knocking down that wall. The first stage of overdose is you don’t remember what you did. So if you don’t remember what you did, why’d you do it?

You definitely went too Deep tips for all of this work is to make sure that you let go and you accept whatever’s happening. If you feel like you’re dead instead of freaking out, oh no, I’m dead. What do I do? You just have to accept, but, okay, I’m dead. So what’s next? You’re goal is more powerful than anything else.

Your soul wants to come back. The goal is to get you to actually truly connect with it. It is more powerful than any shaman. It is what will guide you back to your body as long as you truly accept you are it. And you came here for a reason.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly of today. Have an interview with Dave Hodge, Dave Hodges, or Dave Hodges. Hodges. Okay, Dave Hodges. Dave Hodges is known for his advocacy of antigenic plants as religious sacraments. He’s a founder of Church of Ambrosia.

Dave regularly consumes between 15 to 25 grams of dried mushrooms in a single session, aiming to deepen his understanding of consciousness and the divine. Dave has been actively involved in legal efforts to protect the use of antigenic plants as sacraments. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat.

At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Dave. Welcome to the show.

Dave Hodges: Hey, thanks for having me.

Sam Believ: Actually we are. We’re having a retreat right now and one of the visitors we were chatting and he mentioned that recently.

No. There was stuff happening in, in US that they were cracking down on churches and stuff like that. So that’s why, that’s how I found you. It was just a few days ago and it’s pretty cool that we’re on a call now. That’s the beauty of, modern day and internet. But before we get into all this juicy stuff tell us about your story.

Like how does one become a leader of a psychedelic church?

Dave Hodges: It’s a long story, but in short, we started as a cannabis church. And, I’d had a deep relationship with cannabis for a very long time. And shortly after we opened up Oakland passed the lowest priority for antigenic plants.

And the one that was calling to me was the mushroom. I had never done mushrooms at the time, so I had to learn what they were before the church could provide them. There’s a whole path I talk about that they took me on from doing a five gram heroic dose and then moving my way up in a very quick matter from five to 10 to 15, to 20 to 30 grams in a single dose.

All in the intent to understand what mushrooms were and what religion is, where religion came from in the first place. Since that point, which was back in 2019 at least three to four times a year, I still do the breakthrough dose work myself. The church now has over 125,000 members, and those are all people who have physically come in the church to get cannabis mushrooms or DMT from us.

But it’s been a wild journey to say the least.

Sam Believ: How do you fit 125,000 people? What kind of church do you have?

Dave Hodges: We, that’s what we need actually. We need a much bigger building. The church exists as a physical location where people can get their sacrament, but we’re much bigger than that.

We have been looking for a larger home for quite some time, and I’m sure eventually we’ll find it. But what happened was we were raided in 2019. Or actually 2020, early 2020. And from that point we went from 20,000 members to now over 125. So we’ve just exploded in ways that we couldn’t imagined really all because we got rated by the local pd.

Sam Believ: That’s basically a perfect example of what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. It’s like you got some publicity,

Dave Hodges: yeah. Before that, we were all word of mouth, so you didn’t know unless you knew. And after we were raided, the cat was out of the bag and there was a bunch of articles talking about how we shut down, even though we opened the next day.

All the articles said, we shut down and people still found us.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I’m glad. But you’re not shut down right now. You’re still on it.

Dave Hodges: Yep. Yeah, we had a. We did recently shut down our San Francisco location. That was the beginning of this year. The problem was the city was, they weren’t doing any criminal charges, but what they kept doing was making up problems that we had with the building.

What started with a sliding glass door on the second story building that went to nowhere, which, I agree that didn’t need to be there, but that was also not a problem in the building. Since the building was built until we moved in, and then as soon as we moved in, people were just gonna fly out that sliding glass door.

And you know that started a process that ended up we ended up spending somewhere near a half a million dollars to try to get that building up to speed before we decided we just couldn’t spend anymore.

Sam Believ: So it is suspicious that they tried to obviously find an issue to close you down on or make you stop.

Stop functioning. What do you think that is? Who, who is, who’s that? Who is that going against you and most importantly, why?

Dave Hodges: As far as we could tell, it was actually somebody in the planning department. We’re not sure exactly who, it was we, when you deal with government. Officials.

There’s so many different levels of them and there’s so many different problems with them. It’s really hard to say where exactly it came from, but generally you expect the cops to have something to do with it or law enforcement. But the law enforcement in San Francisco actually really liked us. We, that we had worked together with them to do.

Try to control some chaos in at Hippie Hill on four 20 and we regularly provided them video footage of things that were happening around our building. So the cops were actually not the problem. It was more somebody in the planning department who just was absolutely sure that we needed to go and they were gonna figure out how to do it.

Sam Believ: Any guess is why?

Dave Hodges: Prejudice. There’s a lot of people that don’t look at us as a real church in their eyes and don’t believe that these sacred tools are the real access to anything. And instead, it’s just a bunch of people that wanna do drugs.

Sam Believ: Let’s talk about the, that, plant medicines as sacraments.

How do you think, how do you think they help, yeah.

Dave Hodges: Yeah. The way I talk about really all psychedelics, my focus is really on mushrooms, but it’s really true for just about everything is they affect the border between this world and the next. At a microdose, it’s like putting a little crack in that wall at a normal dose.

It’s like poking a hole. The more you do, the larger the whole at the breakthrough dose, it’s like taking a sledgehammer and knocking down that wall and the first thing on the other side is your soul. So if you’re looking for healing, if you’re looking to understand why you went through something, if you’re looking to understand questions like why I’m here, what happens after I die?

Your soul knows all those answers and it’s a matter of being able to get in touch with that. To us, this is really. The true form of what religion should be is going in and seeking the answers yourself.

Sam Believ: What happens after we die? What have you found so far?

Dave Hodges: That’s a long story. I could talk for a while and it really all depends. We have that. Yeah. But our souls are something that lives outside of space and time and they the way I like to describe it is like a octopus with an unlimited number of tentacles and each time it dips a tentacle into space and time, it becomes one of us.

So what happens after we die really depends on whether that’s where the journey stops for that tentacle. There’s much more to this existence. But the goal, if you’ve accomplished what you came to do and you’ve completed your life with the goals that the octopus put you here to do, you just become part of it again, and then it dips into another space and time.

Sam Believ: That’s a good way to explain it. Yeah. That’s something that I’ve gathered something similar as well. I know souls coming in, having fun and then going back somewhere and that it’s. It’s not the end, it’s just the beginning.

Dave Hodges: It’s definitely not the end time is the illusion.

Sam Believ: You, I don’t think I’ve ever spoke to anyone who takes 30 grams of mushrooms.

I don’t think I ever went above four and a half. And it was a pretty difficult experience as well. So why so much? And what is the difference between a heroic dose and as you call it, a breakthrough dose?

Dave Hodges: So we, I actually don’t talk about grams anymore. In the testing that the church has done, we found a 80 times difference between potency of mushrooms.

So some mushrooms are 80 times stronger than others. You think you’re doing a gram of the weak ones and you do a gram of the strong ones. It’s the same as doing 80 grams of the mushrooms you’re used to. So now I really talk about. The potency of the mushrooms and how much psilocybin you’re actually consuming.

Back when I did my first doses and a lot of my original work, we hadn’t done a lot of testing and it’s really I don’t know how much psilocybin I was consuming back then. Definitely a very large amount. But the way I describe. Where the breakthrough dose starts.

So thi this is helpful in even people recalling their own experiences to try to understand how deep they’ve gone, because more than likely, either through ayahuasca or through mushrooms, you have reached this breakthrough state yourself. But where the breakthrough dose starts is what we call close eyes, strong visuals.

So your eyes are open. Everything looks pretty normal. You close your eyes and you see a lot of things, and from there, you we use a metric that’s a percentage of your body weight because that’s, that’s the other big thing that is lost in, when you’re talking about grams of mushrooms and, oh, I took this many grams, whereas I took that many grams.

There’s a factor relative to body weight where a person who is a hundred pounds and a person who are 300 pounds, they will experience the same dose completely differently. With the a hundred pound person experiencing it roughly three times what 300 pound person will. We talk about and on our website, Ambrosia Church, we have a calculator.

If you know the potency of your mushrooms, you have a batch that’s been tested where you can actually figure out where to go, but where that dose starts, as I said, is close eyed, strong visuals. By about 120% of your breakthrough dose. You get open-eyed visuals, but they’re transparent. Things are clearly in the room with you.

You see ’em all around you, but you can see through them by about 150% of your breakthrough dose. That’s where you see things as real as you and me. They’re standing in front of you. You can have sensations of touch, smell and you are either they are in the room with you or you are completely out of your body in another existence.

But for me, the benefit of this work, these really deep experiences when you have to work your way up, there there’s. A few dangers that I’ll get into a little later about doing too much too quickly. But when you do get into these spaces you get direct communication from your soul.

You experience things outside of this body. You can get questions answered. The deepest questions that any religion would try to answer except for this, is from direct experience versus some old book or somebody who told you.

Sam Believ: What percentages were, you have open eye visuals, but you don’t remember anything anymore and you’re forgot how to speak the language and you’re stuck in some mental loop

Dave Hodges: that, that’s like the exact next point that we should talk about.

We consider that to be an overdose so that the. The first stage of overdose is you don’t remember what you did, so if you don’t remember what you did, why’d you do it? You definitely went too deep. The second stage of overdose, which is more of a dangerous one, is where you do things like rip off your clothes and run down the street naked.

Now the thing about these higher realms is it’s much like bodybuilding. You wouldn’t just, you’ve never lifted weights before. You wouldn’t go and try to. Pick up 400 pounds, and if you did, you’d probably hurt yourself. There’s real importance of slowly working your way up until you’re comfortable going deeper, and as you do that, you’ll remember more and more.

But if somebody has never gone deep at all and then you even take ’em to the 120%, they’re not gonna recall a good chunk of their experience. They’ll recall some, but there’s really a strong importance to slowly work in your way up to these larger doses and giving yourself time to both process and your tolerance to fade before going into the next one.

Sam Believ: So you mentioned, getting the direct experience versus the old book. Do you believe the old books were written by someone who had the direct experience or not necessarily psychedelics?

Dave Hodges: Oh so the, the story of our religion. We actually had somebody who did a high dose and went back and lived a lifetime with the original apes, pre-human ancestors that discovered the mushrooms.

We actually tracked that back to about 2.6 million years ago when there was a great time of climate change where our prehuman ancestors were chased outta the forest in the grassland. This story that. You can find on our website and I talk about a lot is one where we found the mushrooms following a trail of bugs.

We, one ape tried the mushrooms and this first experience by this first ape was the first time that we knew there was anything more to this existence. The first lesson from that first ceremony was one of language. To us these are the roots. All religions that there are hidden truths in every true religion that’s out there that track back to the deep use of anthropogenic substances.

Sam Believ: What do you mean by true religion?

Dave Hodges: I, there’s, when I say true religion, I’m trying to weed out things like weird sex cults or ones wrapped around aliens where people drink Kool-Aid to go visit the stars. The things with real truth in them. I’m not necessarily saying large religions or any specific flavor of anything, but there’s religions that focus on deep teachings and deep universal truths, and then there’s religions that are really just focused around one charismatic leader to do whatever they want you to do,

Sam Believ: mostly make money.

Dave Hodges: Yeah, generally A lot of other worse things too.

Sam Believ: It’s interesting you mention aliens and I see. Ayahuasca work is different from ocean work, but there’s still similar patterns and there, there are some patterns that emerge. And one of them is some people go to this alien direction and some people go to ancient Egypt.

And there’s many different ones are around me space. And Elliot is one of the routes some people takes us. Do you, in your experience with high doses, you never encountered that, so you don’t think, what do you think about aliens? I’m just curious.

Dave Hodges: Aliens are real. They, there’s.

The breakthrough dose lets you leave this space and time and interact with things that are outside of this world. I have met many different races and entities and things that would absolutely be considered aliens. I’m not saying they’re not real. I’m saying that if somebody is telling you to drink a glass of Kool-Aid so you can go hop on the ship, there’s a problem with that a, as far as whether or not there are intelligences outside of our existence, outside of our knowing that interact with us in some cases on a regular basis. It’s absolutely a fact. There are, and these tools allow us to interact with some of them in a more direct fashion and actually go to them versus them coming to us.

Sam Believ: Why build a spaceship where you can just take some mushrooms and go visit directly. But do you see aliens real as in, there are somewhere else in this physical reality, but on the other planet or is in like another dimension?

Dave Hodges: Yes. The, yeah, both. Both there. There is life outside of this dimension and.

There is absolutely life outside of this world. The ones who have had the most technical technology developed that would allow them to travel from planet to planet it’s a relatively small number, but one of the ways in which they can do that is by stepping outta this dimension and stepping back into it at another point.

Again, yes. You have life that exists outside of this dimension. You have life that exists all over this dimension. In my direct experience. So there’s a ceremony that I talk about where I was ripped outta my body and taken to a place of pure light the place that I describe as the consciousness that existed before all else, and what I considered to be God.

In that experience I was given a few questions with a few answers. The question, the main question was, if you were, God what wouldn’t you know? And this is where I experienced the creation of space and time and all that exists. Every planet every substance, every property, every law, all created from what science sees as the Big Bang.

Along with that was the seed of life that was distributed along with it. So every world that we can see, every planet that can support life, there is some form of life. It’s just which ones have developed at a level that their technology allows them to perceive and travel between others.

Sam Believ: So speaking of God, the understanding that I recently gained this.

We’re all God. Then it’s if you’re a leaf on a tree and a tree is God, you’re a leaf, but you’re still God. What? What do you think about God?

Dave Hodges: The air we breathe, the chair we’re sitting on. We are all God experiencing self in every way possible. That’s what I was shown, that the Big Bang was.

God, not just creating everything, but becoming everything to experience itself in every way possible.

Sam Believ: Cool. So I run an Iowa retreat, right? And that’s a pretty different way of living your life, but I can’t imagine running in a church, what is what does, what kind of job is it running a church?

Dave Hodges: Doing what we do and what I do specifically, there’s a lot of interaction with lawyers and city officials and a little bit of everything. But we, our goal is to make sure that people have safe access and information so that they can use these substances and find their own truths.

On a day-to-day bus, a day-to-day basis. We interact with. In some cases, hundreds of people that have questions about what these sacraments do, how to use them safely, and we’re a place where people can go and both acquire those and learn what they need to learn to use them safely.

Sam Believ: But do you do you ever do sacraments in the church itself?

Like in a ritual or

Dave Hodges: No? No. The, especially in the high dose work. It’s definitely not something you wanna do around other people or in public, but in general, our facility is relatively small and it’s in a re, relatively bad area in Oakland. By far not the worst, but it’s not a place where we can host people to do this sort of work.

So we recommend that they find a safe place, ideally at home, around people that they trust, who know what they’re doing. And that’s where they do their work. We do have a project called Gods Sitters, which is a house in the Oakland Hills where we dose people with these breakthrough doses. It’s not exactly open to the public, but we do have, we do open it for anybody that comes across me and asks about it.

That is we do the dose where there’s two sober sitters, one person on the dose the dose is done. Downstairs is this two story building. The sitters stay upstairs, the person’s downstairs in a room with nothing on the walls, a bed on the floor, and just a safe place for them to go deep into themselves.

With themselves. The sitters are there to make sure that if something happens, like the house catches fire, or they hear a loud thud, somebody can go check on you and so that you know that you have somebody safe around you who understands what you’re doing. But the whole goal is to let people get deep into themselves with themselves, for themselves

Sam Believ: and why inside of the house?

Why not outside in the nature? What, and just what do you think about the connection with nature

Dave Hodges: when you’re d There’s many different ways to use psychedelics and mushrooms specifically, but when you’re talking about the breakthrough dose, you’re leaving your body. If you leave your body and an animal comes and decides to chew on it, you might have a problem when you come back.

The way that we recommend these breakthrough doses being done is in a safe environment with a bed and a bathroom nearby. There are people who, who do them out in nature, but it’s, for us, it’s making sure that we have a safe container for your body to keep your body safe when you’re not in it.

Sam Believ: So when you say you’re leaving your body, it’s the soul leaving the body.

Dave Hodges: Yeah. Yeah. You have experiences where, especially on the extremes of the breakthrough dose, you completely acknowledge you are not in your body. If somebody who was to come in and check on you, they would just see you. What they appear is you just passed out on the floor.

If you ask you what you were doing in that, you will tell them that, no, I just wasn’t there. So it’s really important to make sure that we have a safe container for people. And the bed and the bathroom are pretty essential. You wanna have a, again a comfortable space for your body and if there are any accidents that happen, having a shower and a bathroom right next to you are very dice.

Sam Believ: So if the soul leaves the body, does it always come back?

Dave Hodges: So far the, you might feel like you never come back. And one of the more important tips for all of the, all this work is to make sure that you let go and you accept whatever’s happening. If you feel like you’re dead instead of freaking out, oh, no, I’m dead. What do I do? You just have to accept, but, okay I’m dead.

So what’s next? If you feel like you’re trapped in a space and you’ll never come back again, the only thing you can do is just accept that you’re trapped in that space. You did it to yourself, and you’ll never come back. You will, but focusing on whether or not you’re going to and focusing on what, what happens because you’re dead, that will only limit what you’re trying to do.

The goal is, especially when you’re dealing with a death experience, to understand what happens after death.

Sam Believ: Do you have any priests or shamans in your religion, like someone that maybe if a soul can’t come back, like in, in Alaska work, we have shamans, right? And sometimes people go very deep and then they can help them navigate their way back.

Do you do something like that or?

Dave Hodges: We haven’t found the need to. One of the biggest things that has made the work a lot safer is understanding this potency and dosage relative to body weight. Where we have, especially before we had that calculation, we have taken people too deep. It’s just a matter of time before they come back.

So we wanna make sure that the environment’s safe, that they. Aren’t planning on going anywhere that night and that they got somebody who’s experienced these deep realms to be able to talk to them after they come out. But really the worst experiences where we’ve seen the overdose and potential harms that come out of going too deep, too quick and not understanding what you do.

It, I haven’t yet had somebody not come back. I’ve had multiple people who just decided that they never wanted to do this work again. And honestly, all but one have eventually come back and, maybe six months to a year later and said, okay, I’m ready to go back. I understand that I was just too afraid of what I was dealing with and I went too far.

But, it’s. Your soul is more powerful than anything else. Your soul wants to come back. The goal is to get you to actually truly connect with it, and it is the one. It is more powerful than any shaman. It is more powerful than any guide. It is what will guide you back to your body as long as you truly accept you are it.

And you came here for a reason.

Sam Believ: And like every religion has a book. Did you have to write your own book or you using some other book or.

Dave Hodges: Yeah. But I’m actually, it’s funny you say that. In the next several weeks, our book will be in the first stages of printing. We’re gonna do a few rounds of feedback to people in the community before we do the final printing of it.

But we do have our own book where we talk about the practices and that first tribe that found the mushrooms and the lessons that they learned to, to guide us to where we are.

Sam Believ: That’s cool. You have a name already.

Dave Hodges: It’s the Book of Ambrosia.

Sam Believ: Cool. What is ambrosia anyway? I remember when I was living in south of Russia when I was a kid, there was a plant called Ambrosia.

And it was kinda like, like a past plant that would just grow everywhere. And if you touch it, it like burns your hands. Is that the same thing?

Dave Hodges: Ambrosia means food of the gods.

Sam Believ: Oh, okay. Cool. What is what is your craziest realization that you got through this extremely deep plant work?

Something that like, makes you view life different forever, ever after that?

Dave Hodges: I would there’s too many that I could say that completely changed my outlook on reality. If you want something crazy, that is actually more of a warning when doing this work. I did a right, right as we were learning this potency and body rate ratio the last major overdose I did I, I started by experiencing nuclear death outside of time.

And if you imagine nuclear death. If a bomb were to go off right next to you, it would be beyond instantaneous. You remove time from that equation and you can experience as every atom is affected. The warning. And the reason I experienced that it was the day I did a ceremony the day after Russia first Atrac attacked Ukraine.

And I decided that was gonna be a focus of my ceremony. I definitely don’t recommend focusing on inter interdimensional wars, which is what I learned. There’s a lot more going on to the truth behind this push for war and destruction. Unless you’re really ready for it. I, it was a part of my path that I needed to understand and it started a, a.

Phase of ceremonies. There was actually three ceremonies over the next six months that all focused on that same topic and all brought me to the same space where I was dealing with those sort of things. But what I was dealing with were some entities that wanted all humans to experience nuclear death.

And what I saw was there were shamans on both sides, on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side, along with these entities. Causing what we’re still experiencing today. And again, the motivation of those entities is they want all humans to experience nuclear death.

Sam Believ: Okay. Let’s go back to the legality of psychedelics in US and like the whole drug war and, you do your thing and you trip on very high doses of mushrooms and you experience deep stuff like, as far as I can see, you’re not hurting anyone. Why do you think they wanna shut you down and just the whole war on drugs, why do you think it happens?

Dave Hodges: The war on drugs is all about money. You have to understand the different players and the motivation behind it. But actually our raid was a perfect example of that. I don’t necessarily want to go into the full details of the raid, but I did manage to talk them out of continuing to raid us.

After they started raiding us I came down there yelling at them that they were violating our religious freedom. If they told me to go away, I went away and I came up with a plan with my attorneys to come back with a letter that said, Hey, if you sign this, we’ll let you into the saves and you can pack your bags and leave.

The head cop the sergeant on scene really didn’t wanna be there, and he said he couldn’t sign it, but. If we let them into the eight hour safe, so we had a bunch of safes there, but one of ’em is a professional jeweler, safe rated at eight hours for a professional safe cracker. So you have all your tools, you knew exactly what you’re doing.

Best case scenario, it takes you eight hours to get into the safe. If you let us into the eight hour safe, we’ll pack our bags and leave well. What they expected to be in the eight hour safe. And the real motivation behind all this is if we had a bunch of money, you’d expect it to be in that safe unlucky for them.

That safe just hadn’t been used, and there was nothing but some old paperwork in there. So I let them into the eight hour safe. The sergeant or the officer that caused the raid got pissed off, threw the shit on the ground, and then they packed their bags and left. But the whole motivation was a smash and grab to take money.

And when you look at the overarching war on drugs, the more drug dealers there are, the more money these people can take from the drug dealers. And if you follow that money through the asset forfeiture laws and where it goes and how it gets spent it gets spent on what they call our good things, which are equipment and training.

The people that decide what equipment gets purchased and who provide the training are the associations. These are things like the Chief of Police Association, the League of Cities, the Counter-Narcotics Officers Association, which those are replicated in every state. Sometimes even in every county, in every state and at a national level.

So this is a large group of government influencing entities who then end up with this money. To help pay politicians to get elected, and so that they also allocate even more money for this entire network. But it’s really all about money. And the easiest way to spell it out is the more drug dealers there are, the more money it there is for them to take from drug dealers.

It’s not about morals, it’s not about keeping people safe. It’s about money.

Sam Believ: But in your case, you’re not a drug dealer, you’re a church. And, as far as I know, churches don’t even have to pay taxes. Why? How can they take your money then?

Dave Hodges: What they did was illegal, but that doesn’t, they, what they did was they submitted a false affidavit to a judge, and when I say false, it was completely false.

It was a form letter that they used for marijuana clubs underground marijuana clubs in Oakland. They said that letter to the judge. Our information on it, that was enough for the judge to issue a warrant, and that’s enough to start their investigation. And their investigation could mean knocking down the doors and taking everything, and then you have to prove later that you were in the right.

Unfortunately that’s an expensive process and the vast majority of the time, if people. Aren’t truly in this for the right reasons and don’t have the legal support. The cops just get the money. And that had been what was happening to what are called Measure Z clubs in Oakland, which in 2014, Oakland, or actually 2004, Oakland passed the lowest priority for marijuana use and was one of the first cities.

It actually was the first city in the entire country to have. The legal adult use of cannabis. And ever since then, there was these Measure Z Clubs. But what the cops eventually figured out is they can kick down the doors of the Measure Z Clubs, take everything. The Measure Z clubs would never fight back, and they would just, because they didn’t really have any legal grounds to fight back.

They just had the city’s lowest priority loss. There wasn’t really anything for them to stand on. And the Measure Z would even some cases open in the exact same spot. Six months later, or several months later, or just down the street. So there was this cycle of take everything from the Measure Z Club, let them reestablish themselves and then do it all again.

And that had been going on up until when they rated me. After they raided me, that whole program got exposed and the officer that was leading it is no longer with the Oakland pd. Because we fought back, we ended up suing the city of Oakland in federal court. We went back and forth with them for a while and ended up withdrawing our lawsuit because they came up with an argument that said the, and this was not the reason we were raided, but that we didn’t have merit for the lawsuit because in the location that we’re in, we need a special use permit to be a church.

Now, most places in Oakland, you wouldn’t need a special use permit to be a church. Just happened to be the zone that we are in. Which was surrounded by two churches, we would need a special use permit to be a church. So we withdrew our lawsuit and we’ve been slowly working on getting that conditional use permit to be a church.

If they deny us that, then we go right back to court. It’s when you’re asking like why the war on drugs and what’s really going on what is causing all this horrible impact and this war on our own people. It’s not a moral decision. It’s not because drugs are wrong. It’s not because you shouldn’t be using ’em for religion or you shouldn’t be using them all together.

It really is all about money, and the difference with the church is as long as you are doing it for the right reasons and can stand up in court and protect what you’re doing, then you have some level of protection. That doesn’t mean that they won’t still do an investigation where they come take everything and then you gotta prove yourself right later.

It just means that when you go to actually sit in front of a judge and jury that there’s a good chance that the jury is gonna find in your favor.

Sam Believ: But can you ever expect to get your money back, like the money they took away from you?

Dave Hodges: Theoretically yes, but most of the time, no. In a best case scenario, you get your legal fees back. And the problem with especially what we’re facing is the only laws that protect what we do are actually at a federal level.

Going through federal court costs a lot of money. Some of the some of the. Churches who have done it and done it successfully. You’re talking about bills that can easily be five to $7 million going through court. So you’re much more worried about getting your attorney fees back than anything else because those are really the biggest expense.

But we’ll never see anything back from what they took from us back in 2020.

Sam Believ: It sounds expensive, man. Running a church in in us.

Dave Hodges: If you’re gonna do what I do and provide public access for this stuff and sit there and say, Hey, I’m right here, come get me it. It’s not gonna be cheap. If you are just talking about a small group of people and you’re not trying to put any, draw any attention to yourself you’re never gonna have any problems. You know that, that’s why the vast majority of the churches, and really the vast majority of people that we support underneath the church have small groups of friends where they use these tools between each other.

Sam Believ: Cool. And then the people that are coming to your church are they coming because they’re looking for healing or they’re looking for, spiritual exploration or what is the most common complaint they get?

Dave Hodges: We literally have everybody, everybody coming for every reason you can imagine.

We see all walks of life from. The homeless guys on the street to bankers and tech people and everything in between. We see families where their grandkids are bringing in the grandparents. We see literally every stage of life, every type of person, and they’re all coming for different reasons.

A lot of them are definitely coming for things that they hear micro doses can help with. Many of them come to just explore themselves a little deeper or try to get some answers of things that they’re going through, but it’s literally any reason any walk of life. The whole thing about this is it’s all about the personal experience.

It is, it’s not about me telling you what I’ve experienced or reading from some old book. It’s for you to actually go in and address the issues yourself and come out better.

Sam Believ: Yeah, no, I agree with that part. That’s a direct experience and no intermediaries. What’s, how does it, obviously you have a lot of expenses and you get rated and that’s expensive in the court cases. How does a church make money? What’s the business model? I run an Iowa retreat, we’re not huge, but people come in, they pay some money. That’s what I used to pay the workers and the remainder. We used to, build improvements in Medicine House and things like that. How do, how does, how do churches work?

Dave Hodges: Everybody is a little different. The way that we work is when you join the church, you own everything that is the church.

All the sacraments, we have everything else. But part of our membership agreement says you will contribute or donate towards the church to receive sacrament. So people come in and they contribute to the church and they receive the sacraments that they need. That covers the expenses in producing, providing and all of the legal bills and everything else that we have associated with what we do.

Again, we have over 125,000 members now, so

Sam Believ: it’s like a small country. What do you what’s the end goal? Do you wanna be the best, the biggest religion in the us Or what is the final, what is the best case scenario?

Dave Hodges: Everybody understands that they have a soul and understands why they’re here and what they’re supposed to do.

That is the true goal of what we’re doing is to make sure that you understand there is a way to get these answers. You can get them from somebody that loves and cares about you more than anybody else because they are you. They are what came to become you, and they know. Why you’re here, what you’ve gone through, and what you need to learn.

To me, if every human on the planet could have that experience and knew that they had the ability to have that experience, the world would be a much better place. It’s not about me or any specific person or anything like that. It’s really about you and about you learning that you have something much deeper inside yourself.

That is you.

Sam Believ: I agree with that mission. I wa I wanna do something similar. I want to wake up in a world where yesterday everyone had to see how the world feels.

Dave Hodges: I’m, I haven’t done it and I don’t necessarily feel that drawn to it myself, it, whichever path you choose to use to go in deep. For me, and what I’ve been shown is the mushrooms were the first, ayahuasca came later.

It’s, although it’s a very important technology, the original technology, it’s all built into one small mushroom that you could take and all you have to do is trust it and go in deep with it.

Sam Believ: Yeah, of course. Because with mushrooms you just take the mushroom. You don’t need to fine two ingredients and cook them.

But you should definitely try it one time. I think it’s gonna be interesting for you. What and in, in the extremely high doses that you work with are you ever afraid of losing yourself as in, you come back, you’re not maybe a bit of psychosis or something like that?

Dave Hodges: I can say I’ve lost myself several times and I’ve also helped people who, there, there is something that’s fairly common with the breakthrough dose, and especially when people don’t really know what they’re doing and don’t have a lot of guidance of feeling like you left something behind.

To me the only solution is you go back and you get it. So you’ve gotta do another dose to repair that and bring back what you lost. I’ve done some incredibly deep, heavy doses and you, you always come back. It just you have to also recognize if you come back and you’re still, you don’t feel quite right that means you just need to go in and do more work.

Sam Believ: Have you had anyone that comes to your church and you tell them like, no, sorry, we’re not gonna give you the sacrament because of such and such conditions?

Dave Hodges: Yeah, there’s a couple really important things to watch out for. One of the big ones is heart issues or especially transplanted hearts.

And I would imagine this would be similar with Ayahuasca too, although I don’t know if there’s been any, anything around it. But there was, there’s a really scary case of a 24-year-old heart transplant patient. This wasn’t at my church, but in, in all the research that we were doing who did a higher dose and her body rejected her heart science called it a.

Overstimulation of the sympa nerve or something like that. To me, my, my concern is more that what these tools do is they wake you up and they wake up every cell. So if your heart, which is not your heart, wakes up and goes, wait, I’m in a different body. That you might have some problems. I definitely don’t recommend anybody that has had a transplanted heart or really any transplanted organ or has any sort of physical issues with their heart.

Do any sort of breakthrough work, maybe even stay away from psychedelic.

Sam Believ: Yeah, maybe worst case if they’re really desperate, try microdosing or something like that. And what is your take on integration? Like, how do you help people bring it all back together into their day-to-day life?

Dave Hodges: Yeah. One of the, so when we do these doses there’s a couple things that are.

Requirements. One is you fast before the dose, ideally 24 hours before the dose. And what that’ll do is just make sure that the medicine hit, or the sacrament hits you as quickly possible. And it’s very controlled as far as the timing goes. But the other big one is after that. One immediately after the dose, we ask people questions and these are meant to be non-leading questions that try to get them to tell us more about what they experienced.

We audio record all of this, but the goal is if you say something like, I saw light, we might say was there any sort of color? Did you see anything behind the light? Just to get people to. Spell out the details of their experience as much as possible while it’s still fresh, while there’s just fresh coming out of it.

And to me, one of the most important things is then having you review that audio after the ceremony yourself, because there’ll be a lot of things that it brings up that you either forgot about or maybe didn’t realize were as important as they are with your fresh ears. And then as far as further integration, we’re available.

We have people that have had these doses that you can talk to about things that you might’ve experienced in ’em, but it’s really about you giving yourself some time to just integrate the lessons that you were shown with yourself. After the ceremony the next day is something where we tell people you can’t have anything that you gotta do.

You don’t wanna work, you don’t wanna do anything else. You just wanna focus on you and what you just went through. And then the rest of the integration is as you prepare for the next ceremony. And this may be, three, four weeks later. This might be three or four months later, but just until you really feel ready that I’ve learned everything that it tried to teach me, and I’m ready to go back and learn more.

Sam Believ: Cool. Yeah. We do something similar just with journaling, right? Giving people journals so they save information while it’s still fresh, and then go back to. Interesting man, interesting stuff. Thank you for sharing. I’m sorry about your church being closed. At least the one in San Francisco. Hope you find a big place where you can take all of your 120,000 people.

And that could be an interesting event. If quite a difficult one to organize, but.

Dave Hodges: Once we get the right building we’ll start doing regular sermons again. Before the pandemic I was doing a sermon every Sunday at four 20 we’d pass out joints and I’d get up there and talk about cannabis mushrooms and other antigenic plants, how they related to religion and the insides that I was getting through the breakthrough dose.

After the pandemic, it’s been a little harder to get people together. And we got an extra a hundred thousand people. So yeah, we were already having a hard time fitting everybody into the building. We can’t even do those events on a regular basis until we do have a space that can fit at least 500 to a thousand people.

Sam Believ: Do you ever get people making it about you? Not about the church, not about the sacrament, but being like, Dave you’re my God, or something like that.

Dave Hodges: Rarely. I think more, if anything, that there’s a lot of people that have a misconception that, that’s why I’m doing this, that haven’t met me or haven’t talked to me who think that, I’m just trying to be this guy standing on top of this thing, and it’s really not about me.

It’s really, truly about. You having the tools that you need to get your own answers. ’cause I can’t tell you why you’re here. I can’t tell you why you went through what you went through, but I can tell you how to find the answers. I can tell you this is the safe way to go into these spaces and how to ask your soul what the questions are.

Sam Believ: Yeah. It is important in this work to not make it about the people who give the plat medicines, but about the final destination itself. So it’s pretty cool. It’s pretty great to see that you, you’re conscious of that cool day. So how can people find you, if somebody wants to join your church, where do they go?

Dave Hodges: There’s a couple websites, Ambrosia Church has a lot of information on it that’s got our dosage calculator potency testing, a bunch of safety guides and a lot of other stuff. So it’s really good resource for people That will also lead you to sidedo, which is like side, but spelt with a z. Zido is the physical location that we have in Oakland where people can get their sacrament.

If people are looking to reach me directly on Instagram, it’s at Dave Hemp four 20 and I do my best to get back to everybody. But if you’re interested in the church, definitely and you’re in the Oakland area, come check out Zido. And if you’re curious about other things we do, make sure you check out the Ambrosia Church website.

Sam Believ: Thank you Dave. Thank you for sharing and I hope you give mushrooms to a lot of people and awaken their consciousness. Especially in the us you guys really need it. I just came back from us recently and it’s a really tense and really angry place.

Dave Hodges: It’s really something that needs to happen all over the world.

But for sure there, there’s a lot of need for it out here. The, this understanding that we are all one is one of the most important things that come out of this dose, that hating somebody else is the same as hating yourself. And that there really is no difference between skin colors or borders or languages.

We are all God experiencing himself in every way possible. And if the whole world understood that we’d be in a much better place.

Sam Believ: Amen to that. Dave your church sounds sounds less less weird than most.

Dave Hodges: It again, it’s really all about you experiencing the truth for yourself.

Sam Believ: Cool. Cool. Thank you Dave. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. Guys, you’ve been listening to our Oscar podcast. As always, we do the host and leave, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us alike wherever it is you’re listening.

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