About Us

Holy Koolaid started with a single, stubborn idea: that ordinary people are smart enough to handle reality, and strong enough to choose it over comforting lies. For more than ten years, I've been making the case that the world gets better when people learn to question dogma, that science is the most reliable tool we have for understanding reality, and that no tradition, scripture, or strongman should get a free pass from honest scrutiny. I grew up as an evangelical YWAM missionary kid in the former-Soviet, Muslim country of Azerbaijan, raised by American Christian fundamentalists who taught me to take every word of the Bible literally and to expect miracles around every corner. I believed it. I lived it. Then, in university, I started reading, listening, and asking the questions I had been told never to ask, and the whole framework fell apart. Holy Koolaid is what I built in its place: a home for skeptics, humanists, and the quietly questioning, and a megaphone for everyone who refuses to hand their mind over to dogma.

When I started this channel, I had no platform, no investors, and no safety net. I cashed in my retirement early, sold nearly everything I owned, took out a business loan, and moved to Thailand so I could afford to keep filming. I came back to the states to build community. I slept in my car between conferences, networked my way into rooms I was never invited to, and spent years building an audience one viewer at a time. Today Holy Koolaid has more than 425,000 subscribers and over 52 million views, a small international team working behind the scenes, and a global community of people who finally feel like they are not alone. I've spoken at conferences around the world, appeared on countless podcasts, radio shows, and even television programs. I hosted The Here and How Podcast alongside Stephen Woodford of Rationality Rules and Rachel Oates, and I serve as president of the Faithless Forum conference, a gathering I founded for skeptics, atheists, humanists, and the non-religious, especially those who have been disowned, denigrated, or ostracized for walking away from belief.

The fight has only grown, and the scoreboard is sobering. Roughly four in ten Americans still reject evolution and hold a strict creationist view that God made humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. Nearly half tell pollsters they believe in psychic or spiritual healing, and almost as many say they believe in ghosts. The wall between church and state, once treated as bedrock, is being chipped away in courtrooms, classrooms, and statehouses across the country. Christian nationalism, right-wing authoritarianism, high-control religion, and the well-funded machinery of disinformation are reshaping laws, schools, and lives in real time, and they are the biggest threat to secular democracy in our lifetimes. Religion has been leveraged to win elections and hold power, with fear of hell and promises of heaven turned into political weapons.

Yet, as these forces desperately try to hold onto power, the cracks in the damn are growing, and the world is waking up. Holy Koolaid may be a small operation fighting against very large adversaries, but we've already had a massive impact, and our voice is only getting louder!

My Approach:

I try my best to attack ideas, not people, but no idea is above scrutiny. I research every video with journalistic rigor, and I cover a wide variety of content (all with curiosity and excitement - operating as though I'm perpetually on the edge of a bountiful harvest). In my videos, I often teach positions that are the scientific/expert consensus, but I always try to avoid simply telling you something is true because "the experts say so." Instead, while researching my videos, I take time to learn/understand why something is consensus (or why experts disagree), and then explain the evidence and why a position makes sense.

I believe that truth withstands scrutiny, and scientific skepticism is the best tool we have to probe difficult questions and fill the gaps in our understanding. Whether you're right or left wing, a religious believer or a lifelong atheist, there's something here for everyone.

Dare to be curious, but don't drink the Kool-Aid!