In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Joe Moore, co-founder/CEO of Psychedelics Today. Joe is a longtime voice in psychedelic education and media (700+ interviews), a holotropic breathwork facilitator, and the creator of the Vital year-long training program focused on psychedelic-informed practice and harm reduction.
• Origin story: books, Grof, breathwork, first aya, launching Psychedelics Today (01:13–04:17)
• 700+ interviews, role split with Kyle (04:17–04:55)
• Burnout/community dynamics during Denver decrim (04:59–06:00)
• Harm reduction, safe supply, and intra-community conflict (05:46–07:27)
• Indigenous exchange, access, climate & conservation takes (09:11–11:18)
• Agroforestry & ayahuasca reforestation co-ops (11:18–11:59)
• Drug war history, othering, and safe supply vs. prohibition (11:59–16:46)
• Rebranding Colombia: coca vs. ayahuasca, fentanyl era (17:43–19:35)
• Why psychedelic education matters; Vital’s inclusive scope (20:52–25:40)
• What success looks like: humility, community, model-agnosticism (27:52–29:33)
• Favorites: Team LSD, mushrooms, 2C-B; psychedelic minimalism (29:33–31:22)
• How psychedelics heal: competing models + Grof’s container (33:17–36:39)
• Breathwork for prep/integration; box breathing & long cycles (36:39–45:33)
• Podcasting as decentralization; universities & free libraries (46:09–50:28)
• Bitcoin/crypto & decentralizing money/power (50:28–52:06)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Joe Moore at psychedelicstoday.com and on Instagram: @jomo137.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Joe Moore: Some of the first drug war stuff was actually tobacco back in Europe. There were certain kings that were like, that is disgusting, ugly habit. Don’t do it. Didn’t work out very well. And then there was, drug wars happening from Catholic missionaries where there were erase plant medicine traditions and different religious traditions that looked stable enough to.
Make resistance possible to Catholicism in the Empire. So like there, there’s like kind of this tie in with the empire in drug war, and then if we look at early America drug war history, we’re looking at like opium and cannabis. And so we’re othering like the rhetoric was around black jazz musicians and then Asian immigrants.
And Asian folks were, brought over to help build railroads and sometimes they would smoke opium. And so it was used to make them a lower class of human drug war rhetoric. And similarly, during our Vietnam war it was used to other, the Black Panther party and like black rights people and also the hippie anti-war movement.
So you can’t make people illegal, but you can make things that people do illegal. And this is pretty well documented with tapes from Richard Nixon himself and pretty well documented by some of his top aides retroactively. Like we’re not doing a science-based thing. If there was to be a drug policy, it should be driven by science, not opinion.
We’re very far away from a science-based drug policy because cannabis is quite safer than alcohol and tobacco. Psilocybin and LSD in Ayahuasca. I think generally speaking, ayahuasca is much safer than alcohol. There’s a lot of things out there that are safer than what’s legal. Globally speaking, Columbia has been a leader in the drug war.
Columbia has been a major target of the drug war. Like I remember how much military action was happening from United States military in Columbia, not necessarily exclusively through the Escobar period, but after too.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca Podcast has always been the whole of Sam. Today I’m interviewing Joe Moore. Joe is the co-founder and CEO of psychedelics Today, one of the leading platforms for psychedelic education and media. With a background in philosophy, breath work, facilitation, and software.
Joe has been a key voice in psychedelic movement since 2016. He co-hosts Psychedelics Today podcast runs professional training programs and advocates for responsible. Psychedelic use integration and policy reform. 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. Joe, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. As I was telling you that I’m very familiar with your voice because. Whenever I’m planning to interview someone, I always try to listen to couple episodes and there’s always, at least they always are on your show as well.
So I, I heard a lot of you and Kyle it’s interesting to talk to you in person. Joe, tell us your story. How did you end up in this line of work, promoting conscious use of psychedelics and mental health.
Joe Moore: I accidentally bumped into a book called Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.
And my philosophy 1 0 1 course, it was assigned reading and there was a section in there about Stan Grs, LSD psychotherapy and Soviet Prague at the time. And it’s fascinating because he had a whole inpatient. Facility dedicated to psychedelic use for therapy. Didn’t seem real to me. It seemed like something like I really have to call bullshit on this, or I have to go read.
So I was like I want it to be real and I want psychedelics to be real and helpful. ’cause this is a really interesting story. Turns out my small school that I was going to, had a bunch of books by Stan and I started reading about LSD psychotherapy at that point. And then. Found some teachers in the next state over in the US and found holotropic breath work and really committed to that as a practice for about six years.
And at the same time, I’m like trying to find psychedelics not being very successful. Probably wasn’t asking the right people. And then I started actually to get more serious, I was like, I really need to find psychedelics. This is, I’ve read a hundred books, listen to a hundred podcasts on this thing so far.
Like, how can I not have the experience started growing, didn’t work for me. Started actually going to and attending Burning Man meetups in Boston and tried my best to get access that way. And so I was doing kind of community meetups. In Boston trying to get people together to talk about psychedelics and that, that was an interesting gateway because from what I learned on how to operate groups and hold triple breath work, I could operate groups on psychedelics.
It was very similar framework and style of conversation to help people feel comfortable enough to share and get something out of the sharing and being in group. Had my. Initiatory Ayahuasca experience about 2009 maybe. That was my first psychedelic experience without drugs and that kind of played really an important role in my life.
Kind of got depression outta there and felt like I was walking on sunshine for at least six months from one dose. And then moved to Colorado. Tried to do the same thing in Boulder and Denver. Eventually realized I just wanted to be in the mountains. I moved up to the mountains and Kyle and I started our podcast in 2016.
We probably started chatting in 2014. He was trying to talk me into going to grad school for psychedelics and I was trying to talk him out of it. And neither of us were successful, but we decided we wanted to have a podcast and we, yeah, that’s how I got here. Started really using a lot of psychedelics heavily in about 2014.
There was a lot of personal experience that goes along with it.
Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing. It’s a, it is been, it’s a long time ago, the very early beginnings of the psychedelic renaissance. So you’ve done I’ve asked Chad GT and it says you’ve done psychedelic podcast has 7, 9 36 interviews.
Is that. Accurate.
Joe Moore: I say over 700. That probably sounds better. That sounds like a better number.
Sam Believ: And do you reckon you’ve been, at least in what I think, ’cause I think you do more interviews than Kyle, so maybe 60%, 70,
Joe Moore: maybe even 80 at this point. Because he, he spends a lot of time running our educational programs.
So I try to run the media and he stays being the teacher
Sam Believ: that’s 650 interviews or whatever. That’s like a lot. Conversations do you ever find yourself like just tired? Not wanting to talk to anyone again,
Joe Moore: certain guests, for sure. Sometimes I wanna hide. Which actually, so it stuff happened like it was during, when Denver was legalizing and decriminalizing a lot of psychedelics and mushrooms.
I, I just decided I didn’t like what was happening in the community and I needed to just be a hermit in the mountains for a few years. So I just did internet stuff like this and chose not to enter. So in a sense, yes, I definitely chose to opt out of the community for a while because I didn’t like what was going on.
Sam Believ: What was happening that you didn’t like.
Joe Moore: Bad behavior. Stuff that felt risky in terms of the way people were treating each other. Just really sharp opinions. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of grounded conversation happening. Like I come from this perspective of harm reduction and, safe supply and it.
One of the major problems in our ecosystem is that the government makes it such that we can’t operate safely while also, safely, chemically, and or legally, right? Like we might be incarcerated. We might die from consuming something that, we don’t know if it’s safe or not, because they don’t allow us to tell if it’s safe or not.
We’re gonna do it anyway. That’s the history of this thing. We’re very far into the war on drugs. And still today, people say it’s over. It’s absolutely not over. And people are still dying. And it’s the government’s choice to to kill us. So I come from that perspective and psychedelics being a major component of the drug ecosystem.
People, I would see very kind of complicated dialogues that didn’t make sense to me. And then people would fight each other like crazy. And sometimes it looked like people were gonna put each other at legal risk and I’m just not okay with that kind of thing. And I was like, I’m gonna go play my own game.
Not be at legal risk being near these folks. And not to mention like the moral arguments you’re a bad person if you have this opinion. I’m like, I’m of the opinion that you’re a bad person if you want my friends to die from using drugs and or go to jail. That’s where I live, which is a very different conversation from a lot of parts of the drug and psychedelic ecosystems.
Does that make sense?
Sam Believ: Smart decision. You pick your fights, you don’t want to be in this one, you just withdraw. That’s very strategic. And yeah, regarding sharp opinions, like it was my first time at Maps and we had a booth there and we’re, apart from this podcast around a retreat it’s called LA Wire and we’re like one of the most affordable retreats out there.
And we, one of the best reputable retreats. So we really know what we’re doing and we’re doing it well, but we’ll get people come and say like very charged oh what about your indigenous shaman? Like convinced that we’re mistreating them even though like my shaman is probably the richest guy in his town and like he has a pretty good life and works like four, four days a week.
They, but they just wanted to fight. They like, there are people with like strong opinions. Not all. Not most like it was a minority, but like us definitely the, even though it’s psychedelic space and everyone’s on the same page, but there’s a lot of infighting and a lot of tension. That’s how it felt to me.
It felt very foreign given that. I’m in my little micro bubble here, also in the mountains of Columbia, but there’s basically no negativity here. I don’t know if you wanna say anything about that and then talk about war on drugs.
Joe Moore: Yeah, so it’s a whole complicated thing about like, how.
I have light opinions on what kind of energy exchange is appropriate for shamanism. So I’ll put it a different way. What kind of energy exchange is acceptable for medicine? What kind of energy exchange is acceptable for magic, right? ‘Cause we’re in this intersection of all three things and like I don’t think anybody has a reasonable answer for that.
I think if it’s, some pretty white girl from Washington DC doing it, that’s a very different conversation. Versus somebody who’s steeped in the tradition, and I think access is important. My primary critique of Amazonian Shamanism and like the commercialization aspect is just.
How many people, like how many times a year should people be flying to the jungle to go consume? And I’m thinking of Americans particularly, or Europeans, like I don’t know, like how many times do I need to fly intercontinental to do my religion and do my healing? And I think I think we should be, highlighting really great operators and really great shaman and especially if they’re ethical and amazing.
But like, how do we. How do we balance climate change in the mix, but people in the jungle need work too, and they have amazing skills and so let them heal, let healers heal is my position. There’s conservation angles, but like ayahuasca doesn’t worry me from a conservation point of view, from are people gonna have enough ayahuasca?
Like I, I think other things like peyote are more concerning to me and sono and desert toad. But I’m not too concerned about the other stuff.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Ayahuasca girls grows where nothing else grows. And to grow ayahuasca, you need to grow a tree first. So it’s kinda like reforestation effort.
And then yeah you need at two years to get a vine to be relatively mature to harvest it, that’s not bad at all. Yeah. You just need some time.
Joe Moore: So my primary like hope, like I hope somebody does this, is some sort of cooperative agriculture venture with some indigenous groups to just reforest tons of land and do like regenerative agroecology agroforestry.
Try to figure out how do we create really healthy jungle ecosystems that you know, everything likes, including the earth and the land. And then also have this kind of thing that helps people, which is, would be, in this case, ayahuasca.
Sam Believ: Maybe somebody is listening and they will be inspired, so go do this work.
Sounds very complicated. So you mentioned war on drugs. You said they don’t, government doesn’t want you to be alive or, not like killing you specifically, but they don’t want people that take psychedelics to be alive. Why? What do you think? What is, I have my theory, what
Joe Moore: I have to be more nuanced than that.
So I, at first I want to interject that one of my best childhood friends. I don’t think he was related, but he was Columbia and he is from Bogota. His last name was Escobar. So I like, I’ve had a long love affair with Columbia, even though I’ve never been. But anyway, so like, how I wanna put it is like the government likes to use the drug war to other people to act other, as like an active term.
Like I, I turn you into something other than me so that I can do something to you. And so think about like I’m so steeped in America that I assume everybody knows American history, but it’s not true, right? So some of the first drug war stuff was actually tobacco back in Europe. There were certain kings that were like, that is a disgusting, ugly habit.
Don’t do it. Didn’t work out very well. Tobacco one in Europe. And then there was, drug wars happening from Catholic missionaries where they’re erase plant medicine traditions and different religious traditions that looked stable enough to, make resistance possible to Catholicism in the empire.
So like there, there’s like kind of this tie in with the empire and drug war and then, if we look at early America drug war history, we’re looking at like opium and cannabis, and so we’re othering. Like the rhetoric was around black jazz musicians and then Asian immigrants and Asian folks were, brought over to help build railroads and sometimes they would smoke opium and that so it was used to make them a lower class of human drug war rhetoric.
And similarly. During our Vietnam War it was used to other, the Black Panther party and like black rights people and also the hippie anti-war movement. So you can’t make people illegal, but you can make things that people do illegal. And this is pretty well documented with tapes from Richard Nixon himself and pretty well documented by some of his top aides.
Retroactively. So the idea is that we’re still not cleaning up, like we’re not doing a science-based thing. If there was to be a drug policy, it should be driven by science, not opinion. And we’re very far away from a science-based drug policy because cannabis is quite safer than alcohol and tobacco.
Psilocybin and LSD in Ayahuasca. I think generally speaking, ayahuasca is much safer than alcohol. You don’t wanna overuse it, yeah, there’s a lot of things out there that are safer than what’s legal. Globally speaking, Columbia has been a leader in the drug war. Columbia has been a major target of the drug war.
Like I remember how much military action was happening from United States military in Columbia, not. Not necessarily exclusively through the Escobar period, but after too like exfoliation of the rainforest to like out factories and like extraction plants. It’s it’s not okay that we’re like exporting our opinion based violence globally and we’re still doing it, there is not a good safe container in America for. For us to be safe operators around drugs, and a lot of us in America have lost a lot of friends to contaminated drug supply. Starting with not knowing how strong something is, not knowing if it’s adulterated with other materials like a Fentanyl, for instance, and people dying, so when people before prohibition, like before 1920s America, people could buy almost whatever they wanted. Morphine, cocaine, heroin. And they knew what they were buying and in what quantities and what potencies, and they could go to the doctor like a normal, like they had a normal disease. They can’t really do that these days.
They’re treated it as second tier citizens or third tier citizens in America. If you have addiction often, if you’re trying to go for stuff like Suboxone treatment, for instance, so sorry for the super dialed in rampage there, but I just wanted to get some data out.
Sam Believ: No, man first of all, I largely agree.
There’s definitely, it’s definitely not the approach and the US has been losing war on drugs since forever. It’s only getting worse. And now there’s fentanyl, right? That it makes everything so dangerous. So as long as, it’s not adulterated, it’s so it’s so scary that interesting fact.
You mentioned Colombia and one of the, my sort of dreams, so I’m not Colombian. I’ve been here for eight years and my wife is Colombian, and I look more Colombian than I do Lavin. That’s where I’m from originally. So people assume I’m Colombian, but I care deeply for this country. I think it’s it’s an amazing country.
I have three children now. So I want it to be. To have a bright future. And one of my sort of dreams is to rebrand Columbia from cocaine to ayahuasca. And interestingly enough, I’ve been talking about it since I started working with the medicine, but my shaman told me a few years ago that now it’s actually more profitable in the jungle to grow ayahuasca than to grow coca because it grows in the same jungle.
Literally have and in between the trees, you grow coca or you grow ayahuasca. And and we speculate that the reason for that is fentanyl. Taking all of the more addicted people and they just switch to fentanyl because it’s cheaper and whatever. And then the other thing is people that consume cocaine recreationally and are afraid to do it because they think it has some fentanyl and they will die.
So basically cocaine has dropped in popularity because of fentanyl, and now ayahuasca is more profitable, which is a good sign. And like in a weird way, Coca, there’s nothing wrong with coca like you have, have some mamba and mamba is lovely. You take a spoon, takes away you hunger.
It’s a super food. You, it’s not addictive. You can be in a high altitudes and feel okay. It’s the way, it’s what we do with with those plants, it’s so there’s good drugs, bad drugs, and mostly it’s in our hands. But yeah. So where was I going with this? Anyways,
Joe Moore: if you wanna disagree with me about drug war, go for it. I would love the conversation, but I think you’re right. Like coca is not bad. I think from what I understand, like agriculture of coca just hasn’t, like agriculture as like the peasant farmer has never been very profitable. Like the profit comes downstream, right?
From like the manufacturer to distribution end. ’cause coca is not really that hard to grow either. But I think you’re onto something and that the global demand for ayahuasca is much higher now. Much, much higher.
Sam Believ: And also on the other point that you were saying about people, flying and the ecology, which is another kinda worms, but.
We’re not gonna stop people from flying, and I hope they don’t stop because it’s gonna ruin my business. And I’m obviously against against psychedelic tourism ending, but for each one person that flies to Columbia to drink ayahuasca, there’s a thousand people coming here to take cocaine and, have sex for money, which is very unfortunate.
In a way, it’s just about. Not maybe increasing the other people flying here, but just converting them. And a lot of them seek those things because they are in pain emotionally, and they just use it as an escape instead of just, drinking semio and then going, doing some good integration and healing.
But let’s switch topics. So you have you’re in you’re part of two companies, which is the podcast, the psychedelics today. Show and the vital training. So obviously you chose to educate people in this space. So why is education important in the psychedelic space?
Joe Moore: We initially started our education arm of the company because we wanted college kids to have an easier time. Like people can have a very difficult time with psychedelics. Like I think everybody’s, if you had a handful of experiences, you can probably understand what that means, right? Going back to your job.
How soon do you divorce? Like all that kind of stuff, like how it’s really challenging and like how do you go back to your job? Like a lot of these things can be really difficult. With psychedelic experiences including ayahuasca and I wanted people to understand a little bit about preparation and at least a little bit about integration and honestly, frankly, like a little bit about safety.
There’s a lot of safety issues out there and drug supply is one of them, who’s, who is safe to do psychedelics with? Is another one, or who’s safe to even tell that you’re doing it? Where is safe to do it? Things like that. So we wanted people to have a better experience.
And the reason behind that is the less bad news there is around psychedelics and drugs more generally, the. The harder time media is gonna have demonizing these things. And I’m a true believer that psychedelics can really be helpful for folks. And I just, want more people to have access and having less kind of negative media attention drives less po policing and drive safer access and better outcomes overall.
It’s a better set and setting, so it’s like a kind of an ecosystem play. Like how do we make a much healthier ecosystem so more and more people can flourish. That was the idea.
Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara ias retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been to Lara before.
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There are no hidden fees. Visit lara.com to book your retreat or learn more. Lara Connect, heal. Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. How’s it going? What are the main challenges, like you, you’re training you helping people learn? I think you don’t call it facilitation, but what’s the exact phrasing you use?
You train integration coaches.
Joe Moore: So for a lot of reasons we’re not all that specific. So we’ll train anybody from anesthesiologist to wellness professionals like massage therapist, physical therapist yoga teachers all sorts of people. Like we’re a very inclusive program. And one of the terms is psychedelic informed practice.
So whatever that means. So imagine. Imagine you run an ayahuasca facility somewhere and you need somebody to answer the phone that isn’t you. Do you want your mother-in-law who’s not trained, or do you want like somebody who’s really well trained in psychedelics to answer the phone and or do the marketing, do the accounting, do the, be in the room with people, not necessarily doing the work, but even being in the room, a certain level of education is really helpful.
Before, before having customers interact with those persons or like prospects, so like we call it psychedelic informed practice. People that come out for sure, some are facilitating. We’re not saying you’re legally allowed to facilitate. You can go do whatever you want. I’m not here to tell people what they can and cannot do.
I’m here to build a community of people that holds each other accountable to standards and hopefully. If there’s somebody that needs attention, they can work it out themselves because there’s no way to police this thing while it’s still underground. So community to me is the solution and that’s why we’ve done what we’ve done.
I think we’ve done a good job with Vital. We’ve had, I think over 500 people through the program now, and I’m so proud of what they’ve done. So anything from integration to facilitation, to designing all sorts of interesting small companies. At the conference at Maps PS 25, we had a lot of people from our program with their own booths.
I think there was like five or six companies that we knew about that were vital graduates with their own companies. And it’s not all facilitation. I actually don’t know that more than one was facilitation. So like it’s really, it’s a broad spectrum of things and I a turn of phrase I use is holotropic breath work, like the Stan Grof breath work method.
Bare minimum two years. It’s probably gonna take somebody four years to finish the program and there’s no drugs involved. And like we have drugs involved, like we have really powerful things going on. I don’t like I wouldn’t be comfortable saying you’re good to go and facilitate after a year.
As part of a program, like certain individuals, maybe like certain individuals coming into Vital are probably amazing facilitators before they even start. But I just want people to know that this is a lifelong journey and path of education and that vital can be a major foundational step one for them.
Does that make sense?
Sam Believ: Yeah, definitely. I would probably never step into this line of work and be a part of that, ceremonial setting. If I didn’t have like a shaman who has been doing it for his entire life and be like, okay, I can do it alone, but if you’re there it’s nice.
So it’s like you don’t carry the brunt of the responsibility physically and also spiritually and yeah, it’s it’s really cool that you say people that go through your training program they create a lot of. New businesses and new ideas, because obviously your creativity is also quite enhanced.
But this line of work, and I’ve actually met three people at Maps that were our, we call our people at Count Our Doors patients because we see it as like ancestral healing. And two of them actually pursued career in psychology. So they wanna do.
Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, and it was inspired by their experience. It’s always nice to see you affect people positively. And so speaking about success stories and from your point of view out of those 500 people and like when they get the training, what is what do you wanna see where, and for you it’s it was success, you know what attributes or.
Characteristics or knowledge you want them to exhibit?
Joe Moore: Humility and respect for people’s own process. I really wanna see people doing their own work and understanding that to do well here, they also need to be doing. Work on themselves. I want people to understand that they should and necessarily need to be in community with each other around this.
And, if you’re in isolation, you’re gonna make a lot of mistakes and you don’t have people calling you to account if you do make mistakes. I personally really want to see people that are somewhat model agnostic, meaning how to put it. I want people to be able to function in like the neuroscience, contemporary science kind of therapy worldview, but also flip into other worldviews and allow for their client’s, patients, whatever, whoever they’re working with, to have their own worldview that isn’t necessarily in agreement.
Substance agnosticism is something I would like to see. I’d like to see model agnosticism from them to some degree. Everybody’s gonna pick up their own. Framework eventually. But I think yeah, that’s, those are some of the kind of fundamental pillars and I’d like to see people understand that the drug war need, the drug war is a drug on us, not necessarily like a war on drugs.
It’s really it’s not about, it’s not about stamping out drugs. It’s a way of controlling people and harming, yeah.
Sam Believ: So you said everyone’s gonna find their favorite modality or their favorite medicine or psychedelic. What’s what’s your favorite psychedelic?
Joe Moore: Oh, God. It’s like picking your favorite kid.
Sam Believ: We know, we all know we shouldn’t, but we all know we have a favorite kid.
Joe Moore: I’ve been saying that lately. Which one’s your favorite? I love that. So I think. There’s a rank, right? I really love LSD. I really like mushrooms a lot. I really two ccb, which is not two C like you have in Columbia.
Two cb. It’s like a derivative of me in a way. And so what else? Those are like the tops right now. Of course. I like DMT. I like, probably if I was to like pick a team in the way some people pick like soccer football teams. Like I, I would be like LSD. If I had to pick a team, I’d be team LSD right now.
Bang for your buck for like less than $10, 12 hours, that’s that’s tough to beat. And the risk profile being super low. I put out an Instagram story yesterday about this, like Terrence McKenna had this dream about dematerialization and maybe ethereal is what he called it.
Imagine if we could just own a lot less things and humanity require a lot less physical tools so that we have less of a footprint on earth. LSD fits that. Like micrograms is the dose quarter of a milligram. And if we wanna be like futuristic and like that kind of thinking, LSD really does it for me.
It can be a lot to handle. I’ve had some of my more complicated experiences on LSD, but it’s a lovely thing for me. And, go figure that The first books I was reading were about LSD.
Sam Believ: Yeah, no, not medical advice. So it’s just personal opinion, right? Yeah, from the spiritual or psychedelic minimalism, that’s for sure.
I remember thinking once in a ceremony. I just, I, after ceremony, I just had this amazing life changing breakthrough experience and I was like, how can I give this experience to everyone in the world? And I. Started calculating and you have to give our ask 200,000 people every day for 30 years to give it to everyone side.
That’s just impossible. So I thought about it what can be actually used to spread and yeah. LSD definitely would be a good choice. And then probably mushrooms, because you can, it is in microgram. Yeah, exactly. Self-replicating because in micrograms you have the spores and you just send the spores and then eventually all those people that take mushrooms and LSD will be curious about ayahuasca when they wanna try something new.
I’ve never tried LSD actually, I’ve only worked with. Ancient sort of psychedelics, but LSD has roots in ancient traditions,
Joe Moore: so Absolutely. And there’s actually some interesting legal stuff in Columbia around LSD that you might look into. It’s really fascinating. I don’t remember offhand, but I remember being really intrigued.
Sam Believ: Will point me in the right direction would be really interesting. Out of 600 guests that we calculated minimum that you spoke to, and probably even more people in your panels and conferences, et cetera, you pretty, you probably collected pretty good sample size of knowledge and that’s a question I like to ask everyone.
Based on that information, how do you think psychedelics heal people? What is the model that appeals to you?
Joe Moore: Well phrased, it’s too, there’s too many models, right? There’s and so many of them have real validity, right? There’s the recent Stanford Ibogaine study around like actually healing brain tissue with like better blood profusion through like the dark spots and MRI images.
And then there’s the kind of like Robin Carhartt Harris shake the snow globe model and develop better patterns. There’s I. Those are prob, there’s probably a lot of truth to those things. And the golin one around what is that critical period reopening, like creating childlike brains to create new patterns, which is a conflicting theory with the snow globe theory.
And then there’s the one I work with the most is the Groff framework and gr. Waning in popularity a little bit lately, but I really think it’s very useful because the idea is that each individual human contains a ton of wisdom, including how to heal. And in the same way, this is a Michael Miho for analogy I’m stealing.
He is an early breath work person, an early MDMA therapist physician, when you go into the emergency room for a big wound, it’s not the physician that’s healing you, the physician’s creating the scenario with which you can actually heal yourself. And I think that’s a really fundamental and great analogy for psychedelics.
And I think like when it gets complicated is when we bring in shamanism and plant spirits to the conversation, we’re like. It looks like something else or somebody else is healing me in this context where that may or may not be true, right? Like we could draw some sort of abstract analogy of, okay, that spirit is now out of you.
That entity attachment is now out of you, and now that creates the conditions with which you could heal. So you could theoretically make that argument still, it’s just something else is supporting that process. So there’s a lot of ways to slice and dice this, but I think that we contain a lot of healing.
Wisdom in and of ourselves, which is why I think in part that I keep pushing on LSD ’cause it’s it’s about us and it’s about those things external to us helping us uncover these things about us and healing us and helping us be better collaborators on earth, collaborators and healthy stewards on earth.
Yeah. So that’s where I like to land.
Sam Believ: It’s a good explanation. So you mentioned stang graft. Can’t mention stang graft without breath work. So he started with LSD and then they shut it down. So he developed the breath work method. So talk to us about that. You, so you said you, you did six years of breath work before you had your first psychedelic experience, which I believe was ayahuasca.
Is that correct?
Joe Moore: Yeah, so we did six full years of being immersed in a pretty rigorous community of practice where people would come regularly to check in see each other, talk to each other. So there’s like real community there along with the technique. ’cause it was always at the same place. And I feel so lucky that I found that.
Because I got to see people who were also deeply exploring ayahuasca, but still coming back to holotropic breath work or doing other psychedelics or other weird healing modalities and sharing and recentering and being in community and and sharing circles in that way. And I’m like, oh, this is amazing.
So get this, I sat down for my ayahuasca ceremony. Pretty terrified, not terrified, like humble, because I know I’m about to get beat up for a while and it’s gonna be amazing, but I’m, in for a real ride. The person next to me who’s in, I’m so happy I’m sitting next to you. It’s feels really comforting to know that you, with a lot of experience is right next to me.
I’m like, this is my first time. Sorry. It’s you just seem so calm. I’ve been around the block just not with this one. And I. I think breath work is a really great preparation. I would hope at some point in the future, people have more access to breath work before they jump in right away to psychedelics.
It’s a really great preparation tool. It’s a really great integration tool, and it’s a good tool in its own right for inner work. Breathworks right in the title right work. It’s right there. It’s not easy to do breath work. Like it’s, you’re gonna have to put in like real effort to get some results and sometimes you’re gonna have some duds too.
So my first couple experiences were not very robust, but I could tell something was going on below the surface and moving, and I was calling it like a maturation process. Like a kind of. Karmic accelerator maybe is a good way to put it. And there’s something going on there and it was interesting and but what I saw in the room, because you actually have time to observe, not only the person you’re taking care of in the sitting phase, but like the whole room.
Like people are going through some really wild experiences and you’re just sitting there going I gotta come back ’cause I wanna really have something like that. So I kept coming back and eventually I got some really interesting and big experiences. And I think one that was kinda like, who knows what, where these things come from.
When I just felt all sorts of Sanskrit letters on the tips of my fingers. I’m like, oh, okay. And at the same time, I’m studying a lot of Hindu mysticism and religious thought at the time, and I’m like, okay, like there’s something here and I want to keep coming back. I don’t know what it is or what it means, but this feels meaningful and helpful.
So the practice is made up of five parts. I’m facilitating this weekend in a very similar technique. Accelerated breathing, evocative music focused body work, artistic expression. I think safety being the fifth. The group process being the fifth, sixth would be safety. So being in a group is really important.
And I think you probably get that from like the ayahuasca work too, right? If you’re doing it alone, it’s a very different experience from, being more collaborative energetically and presence with each other. You start rapid breathing, it’s like a big out and exhale, minimal to no stop the top and bottom of the breath.
And then there’s, the instruction is pretty much breathed till you’re surprised. Just keep doing it until you’re surprised and there’s not a reason to necessarily stay with the breath for three hours straight. ’cause the sessions are like at least roughly three hours. My longest was five that I was really with it.
And typically your body just takes control or the experience takes over and you’re just with it. Again, the idea is that you’re creating a safe container where the body feels comfortable enough to slip into this healing mode where it says, Hey, this thing in your subconscious or in your body really needs attention right now, or energy or something, and it’s gonna come to the foreground in some way.
Yeah, I always say the thing with the strongest charge in the subconscious is what comes forward. It’s, I need to like work on my language. I haven’t. Facilitated a ton since COVID wrapped and I think we’re gonna really accelerate how much we do breath work now here at psychedelics today.
So I’m gonna be evolving my language quite a bit over the next couple years and I’m really excited about that. But yeah, and so you come outta the experience. You do some body work. If anything’s feeling funky or you want to very optional you can always say, stop and we’ll stop. And there’s an increase in safety with the touch because we’re in group together.
And then people before they start saying everything about their experience, we try to get them to keep it inside and try to express it in an artistic way. And then later we’ll come together as a group and share about our experiences and process it that way. So yeah that’s roughly speaking the process.
And I’ve been into it for. A long time since 2003 is when I started, I think. So 20, 22, 23 years.
Sam Believ: It is really cool that we can get high on our own supply, so to speak, and just the, that we are pretty much psychedelic beings. We just need to, we reconnect with that feeling through natural or external ways.
And, you’re mentioning breath work and also groups. And we. I would arguably say that group is maybe even more important than the owas itself, like tiny, like few percents because it’s it just makes such a huge difference and then people supporting each other. It’s really important.
And interestingly, as we speak, we have we have a 22 people group about 15 years in front of me in the Melora doing breath work right now because we, we do a little bit of breath work before we do the meditation. Helps people ease in, into the meditation. Then this helps them ease in, into the ceremony.
And we find that it’s better results as well as different breathing techniques during the ceremony that we teach them so that they can ground themselves. Maybe the last thing about breath work, any favorite apart from like holotropic breathing, any favorite breathing exercises that you like to use in the in the ceremony or.
Breathing to integrate or breathing to, yeah, breathing for other reasons not to start tripping.
Joe Moore: Personally, I like box breathing quite a bit. I think the data is pretty good on box breathing, just in and out, in, out hold equal periods. So 3, 3, 3, 3 kind of thing. And then, I like personally, a practice I have to calm down beyond box breeding is how long can I take to, to make an inhalation and exhalation cycle.
And sometimes you can get really long 30 plus seconds and longer and it’s really calming. And there’s this link between the breath and the body where. Your body gets signaled to like, Hey, it’s safe to calm down now. It’s safe to downregulate now. So there’s what I love about the explosion of breath work is that the science is only gonna get better ’cause there’s more funding to research that stuff now because more people are doing it and we’re gonna actually, so what can we say about all these different modalities?
Like kind of not much. But with time we’re gonna be able to say quite a bit. In the next couple years, we’re gonna have so much more data on breath work, generally speaking, but in the session, just long, slow breaths.
Sam Believ: Yeah, I agree. I like box breathing myself. And I think, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that same thing, same answer Kyle said about the favorite breathing. On the topic of podcasting, I believe. Your podcast is, if not the biggest, one of the top five Definitely in, in the psychedelic space.
Why podcasting? What’s, what do you think is the importance of this specific type of media, like in this day and age?
Joe Moore: I’m a big believer in decentralization. I think, as you could tell from my comments and early in the podcast around like empire and control and drug war, like that all comes from centralization of power, and I think podcasting is a radical, decentral, decenter of power by giving anybody a voice.
Pretty much anybody can have a podcast. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if those like small little Nokia phones that we see in the jungle or in the desert, like if those could podcast too. So like almost anybody has the technical equipment to, to podcast. And by raising up smaller voices and having more robust, smaller conversations, hopefully towards a productive, helpful end, like I think that’s just a net positive for humanity.
And what’s happened as a result of my podcast is people are using our material in major universities now. I forget who offhand, but this year I was able to give a talk at Stanford, at their d school, their design school around regenerative futures and psychedelics for creativity.
I was able to talk to a school of social workers at UMass Boston. So two American universities. I like, had me talk like I, I would love to talk to tons of universities and talk to kids and get them excited. I talked to our local community college all because of. Podcast. Building value, building a free library of material for people to learn from over time.
Think, when I’m thinking about this, I’m like, okay, where did I ask the right questions that somebody might’ve wanted to ask 20 years in the future? I can’t have it. There’s no way I could really know that. But that’s something I’ll think about sometimes is like how can I make sure this is a really good asset for.
Or forever, right? Like people are writing books and they’re hoping they’re around for at least a hundred years. I spent all morning reading Plato like there I appreciate old stuff.
Sam Believ: Yeah. I wish It would be great if Plato had a podcast.
Joe Moore: We can do that. We can do that.
Sam Believ: That would be really cool if like all the ancients had podcasts and this sika interviewing Marcus Aurelius or something that, that’d be interesting. Of course I’m a big fan of podcasts as well. That’s why I started mine. I remember I, I was looking for a podcast specifically about Ayahuasca ’cause I was just so obsessed about the topic and I just wanted to like, ignore everything else.
And that’s why I started one. But I’m at Target episodes now. I’m getting close Target episodes nowhere near seven nugget episodes. And even then, even now, I would say if someone were to listen to all Hunger episodes, they probably know more about ayahuasca and psychedelics and even mental health and 99% of people ’cause it.
It is just ’cause I’m interviewing experts, including yourself and PhDs and writers. It’s just a way of learning and there’s something about that conversational format where it doesn’t feel as stressful and the information just like slowly sips in. Like for example I started this retreat center and I never went to business school.
Everything I learned about business was from listening to podcasts and a lot of stuff that I learned about plant medicine is from listening to podcasts. And it’s just like, why is it even. Honestly, in the future, they should just give you a diploma after, like listening to 500 episodes on a certain topic.
Joe Moore: Do you think I should have
Sam Believ: a PhD yet? Yeah, you should definitely have a PhD. Thank you. Yeah, PhD and and podcasting.
Joe Moore: Comparative psychedelics. Yeah, it’s, isn’t it interesting like education being free, it’s like the economy of education is changing because of this technology and many other technologies.
Sam Believ: Yeah, and the decentral, decentralization, thanks to podcasts. I’m a big fan of decentralization. I think when was it like six, seven years ago? I was like what’s the future holds? What should I. Be interested in. And I got interested in blockchain, which is, technology behind Bitcoin.
And then later on I got interested in psychedelics because it’s, it has a similar feel to it. So I don’t know. Are you, I never ask anyone about that, but just because of topic came, are you interested in bitcoin?
Joe Moore: And so let’s flip the question like, should governments control money?
Like what happens when we de disconnect money from governments? I think it’s a very important thing. I think governments have, especially United States government has radically manipulated the world due to government being too close to money and owning money supply, and we’re seeing. It’s very complicated too, right?
Like there, there’s this really interesting kind of Russia, China access competing with the United States now, and it’s like, who do we want to win is the new question. But it looks like the United States dollars definitely not gonna be the dominant thing, and cryptocurrencies will be a dominant player as part of the future.
So yes I think like cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin are very interesting and very important. I think they’re radically misunderstood. I got into them initially because of what I do for work. I still think it’s a super interesting technology. I’ve always been a software nerd.
Sam Believ: Cool. Yeah, I agree. I’m definitely very interested in all of those topics, so I know you gotta run soon. Let’s wrap it up. Just maybe any last parting words and what would you want where can people find you and your work?
Joe Moore: Yeah. Our main website, psychedelics today.com or on Spotify and every podcast platform.
Vital psychedelic training is our year long training that’ll kick off again in May. We were trying to figure out what it looks like. We’re trying to adapt to what people want and what we wanna see in the world too there. I also, DJ should follow me on Instagram and other socials, Jomo 1 3 7 on most places.
And what else? I have a giant art car for Burning Man. It’s called Big Crab Car Crab with a K. It’s really fun, really funny. If you’re out there, take a, look for it. What else? Yeah, we’ve got all sorts of stuff at Psychedelic Education Center, including a digital security course. As digital surveillance grows, our need for privacy and security grows, so really take care of yourself, especially if you’re entering and exiting the United States these days.
It’s not a it super pretty scene, so take care of yourself. Take care of your loved ones and your collaborators. Make sure you’re, being good to each other out there. Act with good intent. Assume people are acting with good intent until you know they’re not. And then still keep acting with good intent towards them.
Be good to each other. We’re all part of the same thing. We’re all in this tiny spaceship earth hurdling at insane speeds throughout the universe. We’re all one little tiny team human on the rocket ship earth. Yeah.
Sam Believ: Thank you, Joe. Thank you for this episode and thank you for all the other work.
I’m just so happy that you exist because anytime I want to learn more about any person’s psychedelic space, there’s a podcast with you, and then I can get to know them more intimately. So I really appreciate your work. Thank you. Guys, you’ve been listening to our podcast as always with the host, Sam.
Leave, and I will 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 a like wherever it is you’re listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.
This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Lara Connect, heal. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you
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