104 | Psychedelics + Society: Safe Cultural Containers, Psychedelic Underground & Facing Global Challenges w/ Psychedelic Solutions (Joe Moore)
“Imagine the degree of suffering that the planet would not have had as a result of the drug war. If the drug war never happened, prohibition never happened in the same way it did. MDMA psychotherapy would have been a thing 30 years ago. LSD and psilocybin interventions would have been interventions all through the mid late 70s. ”
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In this conversation, Joe Moore, co-founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, discusses the evolution and impact of the psychedelics movement from both individual and societal perspectives. Joe shares his background in the field, leading into the broad-reaching work of Psychedelics Today in education, media, and events since its inception in 2016.
The discussion explores the importance of creating safe cultural containers for psychedelic experiences and their potential for addressing global crises. The conversation emphasizes the intertwined roles of individual transformation and societal change, advocating for ending the drug war and improving public education to integrate these substances meaningfully and safely into society.
Additionally, the conversation touches on the structure and goals of the VITAL training program, aiming to provide a comprehensive and diverse education for those with a professional interest in psychedelics. The overarching message underscores the power of individual actions combined with collective efforts to foster a better world.
Topics Covered:
The journey of building a world-leading psychedelic education platform since 2016
What it means to be “anti-drug war”
Creating safe cultural containers for psychedelic usage
What it will take for society at large to accept psychedelics
How psychedelics can be used to combat greater social and environmental issues
Seeing through the illusions to heal society at large
The balance between individual and social healing
What is really happening in the psychedelic underground?
A look into Vital: Psychedelics Today’s comprehensive training for psychedelic professionals
LISTEN
Things Mentioned in This Episode
Show Links:
Where to find Joe Moore
About Joe Moore:
Joe Moore co-founded Psychedelics Today in 2016 with Kyle Buller. As CEO, Joe has co-created one of the planet's best-known psychedelic podcasts and training platforms. He combines over 20 years of avid psychedelic study and training with over 20 years of experience in software and multinational project management. Joe is a leading expert in transpersonal breathwork, a board member of the Psychedelic and Pain Association and the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, and a sought-after international speaker on the intersecting subjects of psychedelic medicine and healing, breathwork, drug policy, medical innovation, international justice, and environmentalism.
Looking for a professional coach to support you on your psychedelic path?
Look no further! Along with being the host of the Modern Psychedelics Podcast, Lana is a 3x certified professional coach who works with people on the psychedelic path.
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Lana Pribic: [00:00:00] Hey, Joe, how is it going? Welcome to the show.
Joe Moore: Happy to be here. It's going great today. Beautiful Friday.
Lana Pribic: Amazing. I'm really excited for our convo, like podcaster to pod, not even psychedelic podcaster to psychedelic podcaster, like two people who take very different angles. I think it's going to be a really fun convo. But can you introduce yourself to the audience and let people know what it is that you do in the space.
Joe Moore: My name is Joe Moore. I'm a a long time interested party in the space. Started reading clinical LSD psychotherapy stuff from Stan Groff in 2001. Pretty intensely cause it was just blowing my mind. Now I'm the CEO co founder of Psychedelics Today, which is a leading education and media outfit in the United States.
Colorado based in Colorado, but we serve the whole world.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, it's pretty amazing how far psychedelics today has been. I was just on the website [00:01:00] yesterday, which I visited many times over the years, and I was just like, wow, we've got the podcast blogs vital. Oh my gosh, what else events there? There's just so much that you guys are offering to the world.
And I'm just curious about, man, what is that? journey been like? Because you started the podcast in 2015 and it's just insane what you've built.
Joe Moore: Yeah, I forget the action. I'm going to guess we might have fed you wrong information. May 2016 is what I remember. Kyle and I had been talking for a few years before that. And I'll give you a really quick and dirty history. I was doing a bunch of psychedelic organizing in Boston after I got out of my undergrad. I was trying to literally just find drugs, honestly, and find a community around them that were gonna say some interesting things. I was going to sleep every night with Terrence and Tim.
and Sasha and many of the other psychedelic [00:02:00] luminaries in my ears, like every night. And, you know, I wasn't really perhaps the best employee for my first employer. And I was listening to psychedelic podcasts almost every day, all day long as I was working. And so eight hours a day at work, plus my commute, plus going to sleep with it.
It was a really interesting immersion after doing so much holotropic breath work, you know, starting in 2003 until. that time Psychedelic organizing in Boston started getting close with the burner scene there and started producing events in an anarchist loft in Chinatown, which is really something. And had a lot of people come out, even had Graham Hancock make it there.
We had all sorts of interesting mushroom grow workshops, and this is all like 2007, eight, nine, maybe. And I think I did some more in 10 before I left. And Yeah, it was amazing. It was a really good time. And Kyle and I connected years later through our breathwork teachers in Vermont, Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson at Dream Shadow.
And they were blown away that we didn't know each [00:03:00] other. And then we decided After trying to talk each other into going to grad school, he was trying to talk me into going, I was trying to talk him out of going to grad school, neither of us were successful, and we decided we wanted to start a podcast because I had some experience podcasting before, and the intent being to promoting the work of Dr.
Stanislav Grof via transpersonal psychology, Holotropic breathwork, things like that, along with our teacher Lenny's legacy. He's a really interesting psychologist and philosopher with a lot of really interesting writing and most captivating lecturer I've ever become really close to. So We wanted to do both of those things.
No intent of business, but it was a reaction to what we were seeing in the psychedelic scene being mostly boring. I'm sorry, researchers, clinical research. When Kyle and I were coming from the perspective of all of this had been done already, and it's tragic. We need to do it all over again. More so than exciting.
We have to do it all over again. And you see [00:04:00] that today in some of the rhetoric around. should MDMA be approved or not? And it's very similar discussion to when we got started. So over time we started offering courses. We wanted college kids to have an easier time in college because they were going to use, but didn't have any mentorship or education.
You know, you come out of high school and then you start throwing acid or mushrooms in your head and what do you have other than like some cartoons? Like you don't know what to do. You have no cultural container. So this is around creating a safe cultural container for the youth. And I thought that was really meaningful.
And eventually doctors and therapists started showing up. We started getting a little embarrassed that doctors and therapists were coming to that program. So we started developing a more clinical program navigating psychedelics for clinicians and therapists. Kyle, I believe at that point was in grad school as we were developing that.
So he had already finished a transpersonal psychology undergrad and was working on his master's for clinical psychology or clinical mental health. [00:05:00] That's how we started. Then, Vital, which I'm sure most people have heard of at this point, is our 12 month training program. And that came out of a response to analyzing the CIIS program and the MAPS program, and realizing that there was a lot of room to develop an improved training program.
That It was more comprehensive, wasn't so mono drug was really, at its core, very anti drug war, which I think is a really important component. I say anti drug war I also at the same time mean it's an anti it's a decolonization exercise as well, that people don't necessarily tie in with that space, but it's a really important one.
And. Yeah that's what we've been up to other than producing hundreds and hundreds of podcasts, events, and other online courses and all sorts of stuff, yeah, so we're hoping to make a dent and be a hedge against the potentially over moneyed interest that might come in the near term. I'm more concerned with you know, large, big [00:06:00] pharma, like Johnson Johnson, for instance, than I am around these smaller Startup psychedelic companies.
I think those are mostly good Expensive experiments for sure because a lot of them keep failing, but I think they're worthy nonetheless So it's me in a nutshell. Hope that wasn't too long.
Lana Pribic: No, it was perfect. I love what you said about like this idea of having a safe cultural container was a motivator. I guess yeah, an intention behind psychedelics today. And I want to circle back to that. But first, I want you to tell the listeners what you mean when you say anti drug war.
Joe Moore: Oh Well Number one I Think it's giving people an appropriate history. Kyle and I were recently published in a book along with Lenny Gibson around The history of the drug war. The book was the philosophy of psychedelics. We were at first contacted to write about the ethics of the [00:07:00] American drug war, and then we just started writing about the drug war more generally.
I want people to understand the why and how it happened, and then I want them to understand, like, how it's still impacting their lives and their approach to drugs and their drug safety today. People in the psychedelic movement are operating in a really serious information vacuum because of the drug war.
And if the drug war never happened, prohibition never happened in the same way it did, MDMA psychotherapy would have been a thing 30 years ago. You know, or 20 years ago, and LSD and psilocybin interventions would have been interventions all through the, you know, mid late 70s. And imagine the degree of suffering that the planet would not have had as a result of that, not to mention the impact of the drug war on All sorts of populations for instance um, African American population in America is so disproportionately charged and impacted by the drug war in terms of incarceration and much more [00:08:00] harassment included.
And when a parent in um, African American community goes to prison around this, the family is then impacted for seven generations and in a really negative way. And this is a really broad issue. And highly racist, highly inappropriate, and something that needs to stop immediately. And then the third part being contaminated supply.
How many people are dying from contaminated drug supply due to fentanyl and all these other similar molecules and novel molecules coming along? Because we can't buy these things at the store and hold manufacturers accountable for quality, there's a a lack of ability to Prosecute people for fraud or harm, you know, and same thing in the facilitated sessions.
Like we can get abused in a psychedelic session and there's next to no recourse. For instance, the Center for Consciousness Medicine or whatever that group is from San Francisco that got all busted up because they were [00:09:00] abusing a lot of people. They are, they're somehow still free despite all the abuse.
I best I can tell, I don't think they're in prison. And they're still operating. So it makes me uncomfortable that even today, 2024, hardcore abusers are getting away with it because of the drug war.
And you know, the next, the next thing I always jump into is just how strong handed the United States was in exporting this globally. And America is not the hardest hit. There's countries out there where if you get caught with drugs, you get executed. And this is because of the United States war on drugs.
Yeah. Duterte was one of Trump's buddies in the Philippines or something. He was, like, bragging about how many people he was able to murder as a result of drug possession. And Trump was super into that, which is a little nerve wracking for me.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Cause it's not like when we're talking about psychedelics, it's not yes, it's about [00:10:00] the drug, but it's also about consciousness expansion. Yeah. It's like putting people in jail for pursuing the expansion of their consciousness or murdering someone or killing someone because of that.
Joe Moore: Yeah, and I, I also like to deflate psychedelics a little bit too because we we did a piece recently called harming while healing. And it was about this rhetoric. A lot of us have in the psychedelic space around just how amazing psychedelics are. Which are amazing. I really like them quite a bit, and I think they have a lot of hope for us.
At the same time as we do that, and say, no, these drugs are special and different and better, which in some ways they are, in some ways they are not we contribute to the narrative that other drugs need to be criminalized and people need to keep going to prison. You know? You know, think about, for instance, Canadian reservations.
Indian reservations where people are perhaps consuming methamphetamines and what like that kind of [00:11:00] government incursion would look like and the penalization there which just it doesn't seem fair given everything they've gone through. And it's not fair for anybody, like we should have a lot of bodily autonomy and again, less of a Canadian issue, maybe more of an American issue and we don't have much bodily autonomy here in America.
And the autonomy to do with what our psyche and body that we will. And, it's a really complex thing, psychedelics included here. not everybody needs to go on the mystical quest, but if they choose to, they should be allowed to. Well informed, hopefully.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. And should also be allowed to just consume because they want to consume. I guess that's a very Carl Hart approach with his like whole idea of psychedelic exceptionalism that you were just speaking into.
Joe Moore: I'm very much a devotee. Our episode with him was, like, life changing for me.
Lana Pribic: You know, I was on email with him and he said he was going to come on Modern Psychedelics and then I guess he got busy.
Joe Moore: He's [00:12:00] very busy
Lana Pribic: yeah still still holding out for that. Yeah, I really enjoyed his book and his work. It definitely opened my eyes a lot to yeah, I like the word that you used, deflate psychedelics a bit.
I think it's really important because The more that we inflate them, the more people go into them with really high expectations and you know, treat them as a sort of panacea. And I see it all the time working with clients who do journeys and just, yeah it's something that I love to see more conversation around.
Yeah, so I guess that kind of like the hangover of the drug war and the ongoing drug war. I guess that kind of leads into a safe cultural container because it's hard to create that with the drug war narrative. Can you speak into what you mean by a safe cultural container? What does it mean and how can we get there as a culture and a society?
Hopefully not
Joe Moore: I was talking to a [00:13:00] sociologist friend works at university somewhat recently, and she had this line. Maybe psychedelics are not really good drugs for people who live in very impoverished environments. Maybe methamphetamine heroin is a superior drug for them, given their cultural container, which is like kind of challenging for me to hear.
But at the same time, I wanted to really understand what she was saying. And LSD or mushrooms, MDMA could be a really superior drug. If you're at a university with a beautiful yard and woods and you, you have enough money where you can, you know, buy yourself a little bit of privacy or something like that. There's cultural context that goes into that calculation of superior drug or not superior drug is what I took away from it. Right. That's, I think, part of it. Cultural container, right? So think about the depth of the container of the Native American church, like those rituals that [00:14:00] very long like decades, many decades long.
This is a newish tradition. Everybody, this is not a very ancient tradition, what they're doing in NAC. But it's an adaptation of their ancient traditions. So I think that's really important to note. But that's a really solid cultural container where they actually know what to do with people if they're having a hard time after or before or during.
An inappropriate cultural container could be something like eating 10 hits of acid and going to a Taylor Swift show where they probably don't have that kind of container ready for you. Versus going to some sort of electronic festival where DanceSafe is there or Zendo is there and there is a cultural awareness of what's going on with the people who are attending because there's a very large percentage of people who are going to be consuming psychedelics or other drugs there.
And we know it.
Lana Pribic: tabs, but
Joe Moore: Some people are doing it. I've seen it. I've only had one accident like that. It was somewhere around. I've seen it. My calculation was somewhere around 12 to 20 [00:15:00] hits.
It was, uh, thankfully I didn't need help.
Lana Pribic: The one person who's done that and yeah, it sounds intense. But yes continue the safe cultural
Joe Moore: clarify that. I didn't need help from the organization and my crew is able to help hold that container with
Lana Pribic: Okay,
Joe Moore: and that was fine. And everybody else that did the same amount was fine too, but it's around is there. You know, a judgy grandma. Is there a cop that could give you some sort of fear, which contributes to that unsafe sense of unsafety?
Is there like embarrassment? Or is there full acceptance of what we're up to and doing? Right? So even in modern psychotherapy, say, for example, I, I find some therapist on better help and I want to start talking about my life. Psycho spiritual path and my, you know, interest in occasional partying with these things.
They're not going to know what to do with me, and in fact, oftentimes feel very unsafe working with me. [00:16:00] I've been fired by a number of therapists, which is fascinating to me. Could be more about me than them. I don't, I'm not going to judge. I know I'm complicated. But having a good cultural container is, I think, really essential and will continue to improve in America as folks like yourself and us at PT keep creating media, keep getting people hopefully talking about these things, hopefully getting them interested in getting an education.
It's like programs like we offer. There's plenty of other programs. There's plenty of free programs, plenty of good YouTube videos. But you want to find the right people too, right? There's some kooky folks out there that might not be telling you science based information That could conflict with actual scientific findings.
Not like science is the be all and end all, it's a little frail but it's one of the best information sources we have today. So yeah I'm hopeful and I'm working towards [00:17:00] getting as many people literate on this topic as possible so that the world can see these things as somewhat normal.
Again, deflate them. Yes, there's magic there, but there's magic everywhere. And this is just one of those access ways. And it's a tool there if we need it. And if it's the right tool for the job. That's another thing. Not every psychedelic is the right tool for every job, right? You don't want to consume ayahuasca before a Grateful Dead show.
You don't want to do a boga, like a very big dose of a boga before going to EDC or something in Vegas. Like those, that was a very big mismatch, but there are substances that seem to work well and cultural depth of cultural container. I forget if I said this just imagine what the depth of the cultural container is at a Grateful Dead show who they've been at it since mid to late sixties or something.
And then the fish scene, which has been at it since the early eighties. And there's other large groups of people and similarly [00:18:00] that have held containers for a long time. I think one of the oldest is the the Psytrance scene out of Goa. I think when the hippie scene was ending in America. And Europe, I think a lot of people just landed there.
They're like oh and had this really good conjunction with machines that could make music for days and days, unlike a band who could maybe go somewhere between two to eight hours. Maybe 12 if we're lucky, but you know, go at Gill like, let's do a 24 hour thing. And we're all here for the duration of whatever we're on.
I'm assuming they were doing a lot of LSD. But yeah, there's deep cultural containers around psychedelics. And what we're living in the Western world, does not have that. And finally, probably the most ancient one, Mike Crowley a Lama in the, I think, Tibetan Buddhist tradition wrote a book called The Secret Drugs of Buddhism talking about how it's quite likely that Tibetan Buddhism had a number of psychedelic drugs that they would use at certain phases of the development process.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, I love how you [00:19:00] frame that in terms of like music culture like yeah this Taylor Swift crowd may not be the most psychedelically informed crowd where probably wouldn't be the safest idea to consume psychedelics at that
Joe Moore: And no hate on Taylor Swift, some beautiful music.
Lana Pribic: Yeah they're taking from the rave kids with the, have you seen the bracelets that the Taylor
Joe Moore: No, really,
Lana Pribic: doing like the candy bracelets from the rave scene.
Joe Moore: there's worse things they could take.
Lana Pribic: that's true. Yeah, no, I love how you framed as someone who's a big festival person. I love how you framed it in that way.
Side note, I want to get back to the cultural container. Are you into psytrance? Are you?
Joe Moore: I used to be very into Psytrance. I had a um, like, probably starting in mid high school, I was like, super into Infected Mushroom and Goa Gil. I was like,
Lana Pribic: Okay.
Joe Moore: a little too hype y. I had no drugs at that time in my life either, I was just like, Psytrance, oh [00:20:00] my god.
Lana Pribic: It's a crazy genre.
So like. spiraling upward. It's like ascension. That's how I think of Psytrance.
Joe Moore: Right,
Lana Pribic: get that into it, but there's been moments on LSD when I'm like, I get it
Joe Moore: I was driving by I'm a huge Infected Mushroom fan still. I was cycling by them at Burning Man at one point. I think I was on 2C B with a bunch of friends. And I was like, oh my god, I really want to go see them. And then I roll up, I'm like, I not for me. And I just start cycling away from my favorite pants.
This is so ridiculous. But,
Lana Pribic: you were in.
Joe Moore: Yeah, it just, it wasn't a good match. That's all.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Joe Moore: Yeah, and I still proceeded to have a good time. I'm just like, that's not for me right now. And I think that's, you know, that, learn from that folks. It's okay to walk away from something if you're not feeling it.
Even if it's something you anticipated.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, let's go back to the cultural containers. So yeah, I'd love how you put it in terms of festival culture or music culture. [00:21:00] How do you see like a safe cultural container for psychedelic use in a society like zooming out in the macro?
Joe Moore: Alright a couple people started painting me as Like a drug war anarchist or something. I forget the term they used, but I believe so strongly that the drug war needs to end and that it's incumbent on governments to keep us safe by allowing us to have a safe supply of these substances.
So we're not getting poisoned similar to how we buy acetaminophen or ibuprofen. And can usually trust the dose. We can trust the purity. There's probably not too much dish soap inside each pill or whatever, you know, contaminant could be in there. I really believe we need access at that level so that people can know how much they're taking, know what they're taking.
There is, to support this point, there is a project by The Loop in the UK who implemented drug checking at a festival, 80 percent reduction in hospitals year over year by implementing drug checking on [00:22:00] site where people could just throw away bad drugs that they didn't want. They're like, yeah, I'm sure I could get high off this, but whatever.
I'm just going to throw it out. And so all sorts of drugs, like people then knew what they were taking. They might not have known potency, but they at least knew the substance. And that's a big win. So imagine if we could just go to a store and there's no question. And or enabling some sort of underground network where people, you know, are allowed to.
Distribute and there's less tape, government rags and all that kind of stuff. I think there could be some issues there, but I'm more concerned with people going to jail and dying than overregulation of manufacture at this point. I'm sure that'll change in time. I want that.
That's step one towards a safe cultural container. I want law enforcement and first responders like EMS and fire departments to be educated. on this stuff maps is doing some good work around that in Colorado, which is lovely. And then once we have broad education, you know, [00:23:00] a couple more years of big blockbuster hits on psychedelics, both in books and radio and TV and movies, I think we're gonna keep developing as a culture around this and not shaming people so much.
A lot of this comes down to shame, by the way. And. then people can more intelligently choose when and how to do this stuff and talk to their health care professionals about it in a more reasonable way. The amount of lied to my health care professionals is, makes me concerned about my health that I can't necessarily be honest with these folks.
Like you just did what at burning man? Why are you kidding me? Sorry. But yeah so it's a tough scene and we need to get through a lot of those things. We need folks to understand that there's many possible containers. One of my favorite episodes Kyle and I did was called contexts of use where we talked about everything from raves to shamanic use from clinical to everything else [00:24:00] possible.
And we don't even know yet all of the possible contexts of use for these things. So That's like a broad vision, the apex of the vision and potentially the most important isn't even psycho spiritual for me right now, it's around how do we unlock the potential of psychedelics to help us combat the poly crisis, meta crisis, which includes climate, nuclear war sea level rise, ecosystem destruction, habitat loss species loss, all of these major things, healing communities, like how fractured our communities these days.
Big tech being a major contributor there. So like, how do we solve these problems in a real way and use psychedelics when interfaced with the human body to help us solve those things? And we have some good. Case studies from Palo Alto, I think Willis Harmon was the researcher working with Jim Fadiman there in Palo Alto on that.
And thankfully there's a group that just rebooted this in Texas called the Center for Minds. Bruce Dahmer is part of that whole network and [00:25:00] very excited to see what they're able to do.
Lana Pribic: Okay, can you tell us more about what you're learning about how we can use psychedelics to I think you use the word combat, some of these bigger social, cultural, global, environmental issues?
Joe Moore: The research I always fall back to, which Bruce Dahmer is now picking back up with his organization what they were doing was bringing in scientists, architects, chemists and more, with two to four, I think, problems they were unable to solve. In nine months time and this is about technical technological advancement really and problem solving they would consume, I think, 100 micrograms of LSD, which they at that time called a very small dose.
I think it's a pretty robust dose and uh, they would lay down headphones on, listen to some classical and the idea was to be working on the problems Through the come up through the plateau and at about [00:26:00] an hour and a half, they would get up and actually start working on the problems on whiteboards and their paper, you know, notebooks.
They'd have all their resources there so they could work on stuff. I think I would have trouble seeing anyway, but they would be cranking out and solving everything they brought within a couple hours. Eventually they would have to bring More problems to solve. And I think that is a very promising tale.
So architects, chemists, and much more. We're solving problems like super fast. Imagine if we were able to deploy that to things around infrastructure resilience, so things like how do we make resilient rail network, resilient road network more resilient and robust power. Networks. So like, how could we make solar 10 X better or 10 X cheaper?
Similarly, battery technology. Like how do we develop a micro grid instead of having one mono grid? So like every community could power itself [00:27:00] and its neighboring communities. So if any one community goes down, so it's the, for me, it's taking from permaculture design, taking from design thinking more broadly and expanding.
In solving major technical problems to improve the core technologies that drive our culture, which is right now, coal power, which isn't super great apparently. And then can we, could we 10X, 100X fusion, like fusion for power generation or fission for that matter? And just how do we make fission way safer?
So we don't see more Fukushimas. And then I think we've come a long way in that regard anyway, but I think we still are always going to need more in my hope. Is that we can, by developing these technologies further, implementing them rapidly, we can continue to do culture in a semi normal sense, at least for the next couple hundred years, I hope.
And then, once we solve a lot of our [00:28:00] international relations issues. Hopefully, we can consolidate and then become some sort of, you know, beautiful global culture that's space faring in some helpful capacity, at least for curiosity, but, you know, there's some major things we need to solve here, but, you know, I think there's a major imperative to get multiplanetary to on account of asteroid strikes and whatever else could happen, you know, nuclear war
Lana Pribic: quite the vision,
Joe Moore: likely as a comment.
Lana Pribic: Quite the vision. I love that. Yeah. So the study you were referencing, I think it's in the psychedelic explorers guide, right? That's that one that people can read about.
Joe Moore: to Jim Fadiman about it a few times and it's a really compelling story and I'm really glad Bruce Damer's onto it. And what they're trying to do is pin down the actual science behind all of this. And as you know, in five, 10 years, they'll have a really excellent framework that can be deployed almost anywhere.
I think.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. I'm imagining some sort [00:29:00] of, Retreat like experience, but for the intention of bringing minds together to solve problems. And maybe it's like a specific problem that a bunch of people from different disciplines are coming to and all working on together. Imagine how cool that would be if like, they're all approaching one problem from different angles on the acid.
Whoa, that would be
Joe Moore: And So the psychotherapy aspect is still super important. One aspect of that for me is that in a relatively short period of time, it's projected that one seventh of the world's population will not be able to live where they live today due to extreme weather, including heat and sea level rise and the amount of trauma that we'll have to address as a result of that.
It's going to be pretty intense and there could even be, you know, guilt. Like maybe we start feeling really guilty about Oh God, I didn't live cleanly enough and I contributed to this. So [00:30:00] we might need it as well. So there's there's a lot left to solve here.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, I know.
Joe Moore: It's a big set of problems.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Even as we're having this conversation right now, I can just feel it in my chest. That's yeah, the weight of the world's like we're in quite a pickle. We're in quite a pickle here.
Joe Moore: My biggest experiences was just like how. How old was I? I was probably like 28. I'm like, okay, I don't really have a future. Like I'm going to die on account of this climate change stuff. And like all the stuff I was sold in the previous, you know, years is just not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is going to be pretty tough. Thankfully, I think the worst of it for me is a little far out, like maybe 15 years, but I don't know. It could be longer. It could be shorter. I just hope we get through it as a species and with as much grace as we can.
Lana Pribic: Do you take that kind of classic psychedelic approach where you believe that. [00:31:00] What is needed to get us out of this pickle that we are in? I'm laughing at the word because pickle just doesn't even begin to describe the extent of this. This situation that we are in globally. All the things going on that I don't even have to list because I know everyone knows what I'm talking about.
Yeah. Do you take a kind of a classic psychonaut approach where you believe it's that I Evolution and consciousness that is needed to get us out of it. What do you think it is about psychedelics and what they have to offer to help us get through things?
Joe Moore: I think there's a, there's something around just how sick culture is. There's something about how sick we are as individuals and then how difficult it is to see through the illusions. You're familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave.
Lana Pribic: Yes.
Joe Moore: yeah, very Matrix y. It's pretty much everybody's just seeing these surface [00:32:00] impressions.
Somebody actually goes out and it's actually like literally shadow puppets. Somebody crawls up, goes above ground and sees the sun and sees the truth. It's comes back down and says, Oh, You guys aren't really seeing reality. You're just seeing like really surface level things. There's a lot more here to reality than just these shadow puppets on the wall.
Everybody's you know, you're crazy. So there's on one hand I think we should look at the word apocalypse, apocalypse, not necessarily being like end of the world apocalypse as meaning what it really means, which is revealing, like revealing the truth. And there's something really interesting happening today where more and more people, it seems to me, are seeing how manipulated we are by gigantic forces.
And the undue influence companies like BP Shell, Mobile Exxon, major other oil producers the amount of PR muscle that Saudi Arabia can influence the world with. And honestly, like people [00:33:00] should do some reading on how much Saudi Arabia influences America. Like we can't really talk about climate very help very well because there's so much money coming against us from very wealthy groups due to oil.
Look at Texas, for instance. And like for a little while I was calling NPR, which is our kind of Canadian the equivalent to CBC, for instance, and I would call them National Petroleum Radio because it was like really clear to me they were taking a lot of money from oil groups. Finally, in the last three, four years, I've seen them step up their climate rhetoric, but it's you know, guys, it would have saved a lot more lives if you started 10, 20 years ago in real, in earnest.
And likewise with the larger political apparatus in America would have been helpful 20 years ago. But yeah I don't know. I don't know where hope comes from other than from each one of us and influencing our politicians to get in line and work towards saving the rest of us. In terms of.
Trauma, like we need to clean up a lot of our trauma so we can see more [00:34:00] clearly and be less reactive and unhelpful ways and understand better how we want to interact with each other and lead in political leaders, business leaders, etc. With less trauma, we can make better decisions. Decisions and have potentially more skillful actions.
It's not necessarily the case that you just throw a bunch of psychedelics on it and your trauma is gone. It takes careful, deliberate work over time and potentially psychedelics aren't for you. And potentially that much psychedelics isn't for you. Yeah. So it's seeing through the illusions a little bit more that are cast by really powerful forces.
And then it's also cleaning up. Our own material, so that we can be more authentic and impactful operators.
Lana Pribic: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's aligned with that. What I was saying in the beginning.
Joe Moore: The classical psychedelic
Lana Pribic: yeah, the [00:35:00] consciousness expansion, seeing the truth, removing the illusions. I love that you tied in the role of personal work and healing our own trauma because we really do need to be able to clear all of that to see the truth and to expand our consciousness using both of our kind of words here.
And I love that. Yeah, you're,
Joe Moore: Briefly, can I, one thing, I don't want people not to act without cleaning up their trauma first. People should still be
Lana Pribic: thank you for saying
Joe Moore: and otherwise.
Lana Pribic: yeah,
Joe Moore: Yeah, it's not because this was the major schism between the Timothy Leary camp and the hard left of America during the 60s counterculture scene.
The 60s counterculture, like hard left criticized Timothy Leary's world for just, you're just escaping.
Lana Pribic: Yeah
Joe Moore: I don't super believe that, but I think that debate is really important for us to be aware of today.
Lana Pribic: yeah, because it's like what level what awareness or what perspective are you acting [00:36:00] from if you're going out and trying to fix the world, if you're still traumatizing coming from that lens, then that's going to, yeah. be a very different action or result than if you look at your own trauma first.
So what I love about having you on the show is that your approach and psychedelics today. If you look at all your podcast episodes they're a little bit more macro, I would say. And you even said yourself like you're less concerned about the psycho spiritual stuff. that I'm very much Working on that level of individual psycho spiritual kind of work.
So where do you see the intersection between the two society and culture and the individual, and then the micro and the macro, the individual and the global, like, how do those interact for you?
Joe Moore: I wonder if there's some subtext here that I'm missing, but I love this [00:37:00] because I'm very aligned with the concept that the individual is the kind of atomic unit of culture. The individual needs to be heavily respected If we go historically and look at cultures that didn't really appreciate that, we can see what, what Mao did in China, Stalin in Russia.
The individual did not matter because they had such a robust plan that the individual was irrelevant. And I think that was extremely spiritually harmful for both countries and they're probably, and for sure no China's experiencing that today and I'm sure Russia is too. The amount of people the government killed of their own people in those two countries is very unconscionable.
So I think we need to really lean into how important the individual is. And. Work towards what is this collective future that we want together? I identify as politically confused, by the way and quite publicly, I wish I [00:38:00] had something I believed in, other than I want people to be as healthy as possible and taken care of as possible, like Buckminster Fuller might be, like, the guy I would have voted for most primarily, super kooky, but he had the vision, and Technologically and otherwise, like we've had enough food to feed everybody on the planet for many decades, but we've not had the will to do so people are dying. Sure, stock market keeps going up, but like people are dying and kids don't have enough food. Even in America it's you're twisting people's arms to get kids fed in school. Like, how does that even make sense? It's a both and for me. It's the individual reflects the culture and vice versa.
Culture reflects the individual in some way. It's it felt like you were hinting at the hermetic axiom of as above so below, as within so without. And there's some gold there. It's something people should be thinking about here and there.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, that might have framed my question a little bit. Yeah, you're [00:39:00] right.
Joe Moore: Yeah, that's what I was thinking you were saying, and I think there's something there like the more Robert Anton Wilson, who we were talking about before we recorded, he posited at one point in a radio interview that there's very likely more Buddhas alive today than there have ever been in the history of the planet. And I think that's a really helpful thought. And you know, we need as many as we could get, I don't super identify as Buddhist. I'm interested in Buddhist philosophy. I appreciate it. I think it's pretty beautiful. It's not necessarily for me. But I think, you know, the idea of all of these people being more dedicated to the good of humanity than to themselves, it's really beautiful. And it's how do we get people's minds a little more straight so that we're not just stuck in this kind of weird, wanting, inappropriate level of wanting and suffering that we might have more joy elsewhere, music festivals, for instance,[00:40:00]
Lana Pribic: Yeah, no, I appreciate your answer. It's something that I think about all the time in this space because there's tons of people Doing work with psychedelics at the individual level there's tons of people like you who are wanting to apply it more to the macro cultural level and I often see a a hierarchy that like, no, we should only be focusing on individual healing.
No, we should only be focusing on things that move society ahead. And it's something I think about a lot. So I like hearing people's perspectives, you know, in my perspective, similar to what you said, I think both are important and both inform one another. Yeah.
Joe Moore: there's a theme. There's a, let's call it a meme in the psychedelic space right now that nobody should really be healing until we fix our, all of our systemic issues. And To me, that strikes [00:41:00] of Stalinism, and Stalinism being absolutely fascist. Any individual dissenter goes to jail or dies. And any action is justified to meet our collective ends.
Any kind of harm to another individual is totally okay, which I think is not great. And you might be able to Understand what I'm hinting at here. But there's like major aggressive violent forces at play in the psychedelic space. And I want more peace. I want more unity. I think it's always a both and. The idea of forcing an or in there is so crazy It's just not. Like at the same time as we're learning and growing. We need to be making collective action as we're learning and growing. And by putting violence on people, you know, blackmail extortion, doxing, all these really outrageous actions that a lot of folks have taken part of, like how are we still supporting some of those [00:42:00] individuals?
I
Lana Pribic: I'm sure between the two of us, we've seen some stuff behind the scenes of the psychedelic space. I can think of a few instances, but yeah, I mean, it's the chicken or the egg. It's probably one of the things that we will contemplate until the day that we die. Yeah, what comes first, the individual or society?
This is getting really philosophical. Um, But something fascinating to think about in the context of how do we introduce psychedelics into the greater society, right? Should, like, how do we apply it to individual work, to social work? Yeah, I love thinking about this stuff.
Joe Moore: we've got a lot of work ahead of us to get our shit together before we can be more broad.
But we're going to be growing exponentially here for the next bunch of years in my opinion, given desperation and all the media interest. Yeah, it's going to be tricky. For whatever reason, I'm just thinking about spiritual debates in the psychedelic community and how aggressive they can become.
[00:43:00] And I challenged somebody on their definition of consciousness a year or two ago and it was like, it's fireworks. It's crazy.
Lana Pribic: was that
Joe Moore: And I was citing kind of William James's uh, was, I'm not going to mention which one, but yeah.
Lana Pribic: the air, someone could find it if they wanted to. Yeah,
Joe Moore: Yeah. And fire, small fireworks, but it was fireworks for me, I was pulling from William James and his definition of consciousness is more of function than a real thing.
It's more of an abstraction and a function of multiple things intersecting than such a thing. But there's, we might not be playing with the same definitions and people don't want to slow down enough to even compare definitions,
Lana Pribic: And back to the end rather than or, right? Maybe it can be multiple things.
Joe Moore: right? Right. Right. Yeah, or like consciousness is not the right term for us to necessarily be
Lana Pribic: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Joe Moore: Like, uh, One of our philosophers that we really like, Alfred North Whitehead, who we were introduced to through, through our teacher [00:44:00] Lenny to do the philosophy he needed to do, he had to create hundreds of new words because old words carried too much cultural inertia. And we're doing some radical shit here in psychedelia, and we're not necessarily making up new words. We're fighting over, what kind of drug should we call MDMA? Intactogen? Empathogen? Contactogen?
Lana Pribic: Yeah. You know who's good at that? Laura Dawn. She's great at coming up with these new words to
Joe Moore: As long as it's helpful. So again, on account
Lana Pribic: Let's talk a little bit about the underground and what's going on there. Um, Yeah. And yeah, the good, the bad, the ugly. Tell me what you see going on in the psychedelic underground.
Joe Moore: It's really hard for [00:45:00] any kind of accountability to take place. I've seen many people try to implement all sorts of interesting methods, and I've not seen anything really work yet. Largely I'm very pro Underground. Very pro. I think the underground needs to police itself a little more aggressively when they see really bad behavior, they need to figure out ways to clean that up.
So if you are an underground operator, I believe you have some sort of responsibility towards your peers who might be doing really nasty stuff. There's When I talk about this, I like to say there's a set proportion of the population who's a sociopath. There's a set portion of the population who's a psychopath.
Narcissists as well. And I come from New England, like Boston, like a little outside Boston. I don't know if you remember much of this, but the Catholic Church had a bit of a child abuse problem for a little while. And it was very deep in the Boston area. So I [00:46:00] like to make a little bit of an analogy here.
It's like people with certain interests and predilections will go towards careers that give them that kind of access and power. And Similarly in psychedelia, we have a good, you know, set of interested parties coming forward. I've had to deal with many of these people who I believe have threatened my freedom and my ability to operate many times.
One guy just kept I was critiquing him just because I, I did, I thought his rhetoric was really harmful. So I publicly critique and then he would threaten suicide and blame me. It's Joe Moore is the reason I'm killing myself. Did it like 50 times. The first time it happened, I was on a psychedelic retreat in Jamaica, working with some client.
I'm like, how am I going to handle this from Jamaica? So I called the police a few times. I was like, I'm out of the country. This guy just claimed he's going to commit suicide and it's my fault. Good luck, you know, and that sucked and it was going for [00:47:00] years. And this is just one of many situations and people don't like getting critiqued.
I I sometimes like getting critiqued. I just hope it's a useful critique I can grow with as opposed to a worthless critique. So underground there's a lot of wisdom there. Prohibition happened. A lot of these operators just stayed and kept doing what they were doing. They just had a less safe supply.
And no legal recourse in the possibility that they would get incarcerated or lose licenses or lose their kids if they got caught doing this kind of work. So they were doing it with, at great cost and risk to them, largely. And they're, in a lot of these people, there is no break, right? They've been doing this stuff since the mid to late 60s. And I find that really impressive. So you can find these underground groups that have decades, many decades, and in some cases, probably centuries of collective experience that we should be learning from. And still today, it's a little too risky for a lot [00:48:00] of these folks to come forward with their wisdom. Another avenue, like I was talking about before, this is Francois Bourzada, her own Grossbard case where they got in big trouble for a lot of abuse scenarios. Think there is a good, I speculate that there is some drug distribution happening from the stories I was told. I don't know 100 percent on that.
They didn't get in trouble there was minimal accountability and they designed a system where a lot of the people they were working with were afraid to come forward and share their stories because the organization had a good amount of data on them breaking the law with them. And think, you know, Scientology and auditing, for instance oh, let's have a really robust file on everybody.
So we're insulated because we have all the blackmail in the world we need. You know, maybe that's not how Scientology does it. I don't know. That's my perspective. But you know, bad actors can be really compelling to be around. [00:49:00] It's starting a cult in my perspective is really, it's almost formulaic at this point.
You need the right players in place, but we have the science of cult building pretty clearly spelled out. So anybody that wants to do it can do it. I hope it's a really helpful one and not a harmful one. And for clarity, the metric there is there's a measure you can take on high demand groups.
That's the term of art in the science aspect of this. But shadows breed weird molds, weird, potentially toxic things can grow in these like really fertile environments. And I'm thinking of some cases I've heard around Boulder. where perhaps some people were doing underground work and then with a licensed facilitator, like an actual licensed therapist, and then something happened.
And then the actual sitter went bananas and tried to get this person's license [00:50:00] pulled, tried to really out this person as a problematic player in the space, and to me, created more toxicity. And and broke a lot of rules. And this is why I think underground communities really need to have frameworks set up for handling stuff like this carefully outside the scope of the law, because we can't really trust the law to actually even judge these cases.
Well, so I've been thinking about how we can solve this kind of underground problem using tech. And I think there's some sort of interesting encrypted blockchain solutions where we could actually. People could be on like this I don't know, call it like the Boulder Blue Jays or something. And you have 20 facilitators as part of this cohort.
If there's bad behavior, people can mutually vote people off of that island and put record on their like, I hate to get too technical, but the term is soulbound token. It's okay, you own this thing and this now has all [00:51:00] these records on it. So there's ways that we could like mutually report, mutually share that data and keep it encrypted.
So that law enforcement can't get ahold of it or other bad actors can't get ahold of it. So I think there's ways in which we could create those sorts of professional accountability communities, but I think for now it needs to be at a smaller scale before we start saying,
Lana Pribic: the public about how that works would be like people like me who don't understand blockchain and
Joe Moore: it would be like a consumer thing, browser based with passwords. And like that community could see how it show you how it operates and have their
Lana Pribic: very creative. Did that come to you in a psychedelic session by chance?
Joe Moore: It was probably coffee. No, I wish it was
Lana Pribic: just always creative. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Moore: Yeah, I wish I could stop thinking. But, it's not lately.
Lana Pribic: of you who are listening to this, Joe has I don't know, it looks like at least a hundred books on his bookshelf behind [00:52:00] him. So very well read. Plethora of information in your brain. Yeah, Viva la Underground, as we say. Yeah, huge supporter of the underground as well. Also recognize the shortcomings of it.
Joe Moore: The less severe the laws, the less deep the shadows, and the more we can tell these stories publicly and bring people,
Lana Pribic: So true.
Joe Moore: accountability we
Lana Pribic: So
Joe Moore: End the drug war. And that solves the underground problem. And, in a real way. Real way.
Lana Pribic: And then there's also education, right? Educating underground facilitators. Is that what inspired vital to be built? Or one of the things that inspired vital?
Joe Moore: Yeah again, we saw a few shortcomings that we thought we could do better with in the existing landscape, particularly we analyzed, I think, IPI CIIS's psychedelic program, Janice Phelps developed that one, and then oh, God, and Integrative Psychedelic [00:53:00] Institute, or Integrative Psychiatry Institute, maybe.
They're another Colorado based program. And, you know, IPI, CIIS, and MAPS, we're like, Okay, let's look at all these things. What can we do better? We come from, The tradition of Stan Grof who he's responsible for more psychedelic or more LSD sessions than any other individual alive. He's given more LSD in a clinical capacity in inpatient facilities and in outpatient and other psychedelics as well.
So we come from his school of thought. And we're like, we don't really see all of his insights included. And we're again, a yes and organization. I hate to say his name out loud, but like even a little informed by the work of Ken Wilber in terms of integral theory. So the, I think operative terms there are transcendent include.
So let's learn from the past. Let's not throw it out. But let's transcend the past and keep doing better. And it's like [00:54:00] things are often true at their own level for instance. Using a lot of these things, building out a more holistic curriculum, I think what we've developed is almost more like a liberal arts degree in psychedelics than, okay, now you can go facilitate MDMA or ketamine.
Now that you know this stuff, we wanted to be a lot more big tent, a lot more inclusive because we'll have psychiatrists, anesthesiologists NPs, PAs therapists, LCSWs, like social workers. So we'll have all these clinical folks and then we'll have yoga teachers, underground guides who've been operating for 10 years plus.
We'll have people from other programs like when the When the school I was talking about before collapsed in San Francisco, we had a lot of people come over and they just didn't have a home. They wanted to finish their education. And I think we were calling them refugees and we gave them like big discounts to jump into our program.
And I thought that was really awesome because we had all of their experience and lived experience and we could [00:55:00] challenge what they were taught or include it. So It was, what was it? This is our fourth round that we're enrolling right now. So when we started, we just said, can we do this?
Can we create the best training program that we can imagine? And we did it. The what I like to come back to is Stan Groff, Christina Groff's holotropic breath work. The training is two years minimum and there's no drugs. And many training programs are only nine weeks, six months. And so we were informed by that whole frame, which I think is a really good foundation
To say okay, we really need to be training people very rigorously if they're going to be doing anything at any kind of standard.
VITAL is different because it's not explicitly a facilitator training program. It's, let's give you a very broad view. And you're probably going to have better facilitation skills than you would from other [00:56:00] programs, but that's not what we're teaching you. But we're We are of the opinion that the more broad your education is, the more inclusive your education is, the better you will be as an operator of any kind in the space, from you know, somebody who does integration work as a therapist after or a coach after, to The person that answers the phone at the retreat center or does the emails or whatever, you know, there's a lot here that people can then apply to whatever path they're choosing to do.
So we've seen people enter grad school, start businesses create all sorts of interesting networks that I probably shouldn't talk about, but it's fascinating to watch because we want to enable people and empower them to choose their own path here. And it's very Wild West y these days.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. One of my coaching clients is going through the current cohort. So I got to hear a little bit about that from her.
Joe Moore: Love that. I met somebody the other day who went through our Navigating Psychedelics program, and I think the second cohort of the Clinicians and Therapists edition. And now she's [00:57:00] doing some super intense state level work around a legalization program, state level legalization and they went through Navigating Psychedelics and I'm really proud of that kind of stuff.
I'm like, oh my god, you now are changing the politics in a really meaningful way for your state.
Lana Pribic: so cool. What are people learning inside of idle? Can you give us a brief rundown of the curriculum and I guess is there like learning objectives or like what can people expect from it?
Joe Moore: The structure is, I'll do the structure and then I'll tell you the content, so people come to an all vital lecture once a week, so we'll try to find some world class talent to teach you about XYZ topics. We've had some amazing folks Luis Eduardo Luna Joe Tarfur in the past has taught for us in those.
We've had some really major lecturers and scientists and therapists as our kind of like big lecture. And then there's a Q& A period after that where [00:58:00] you can ask all your questions. Later in the week there's a small group. You get broken up into a small cohort group. So you develop relationships with those folks over the year.
And you have two study group leaders that'll be supporting you so you can discuss that and or other material in those meetings. And then there's an online community website where you can talk with alumni and current students quite actively. And we don't censor too much, but no illegal stuff on our platform.
Just go elsewhere, please. But yeah, then In terms of the content four major categories. Prep, Harm Reduction, Clinical Evaluation and Assessment, Space Holding and Navigating the Psychedelic Experience, Psychedelic Integration and Therapy, Inner Work and Embodiment. So those are the four major components.
We've added some specializations to this certificate program. Calling these there's five of them here. So microdosing, spiritual emergence, which is a really important [00:59:00] topic that the world is not ready for, what we're going to see in the next couple years in relation to this. Somatics and trauma,
Lana Pribic: all that 5MEO that people are doing. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Moore: going to be a really wild few years in psychedelics, everybody. I hope you're ready. If we want, I can, we can do my spiritual emergence talk after I run through this, if you want. I have some proposals. Then we have depth and Jungian perspectives, because Groff in a lot of ways is the, is like a synthesis of Freud and Jung and everything else in the European psychoanalytic tradition.
And in a really beautiful way. And we like to really make sure people understand the depth traditions. So Freud, Jung, etc. And thankfully Johanna on our team is a Jungian scholar, which is always amazing to have her around for that.
And then finally, regenerative business and leadership, which I think is really important for people coming out that actually want to develop
Lana Pribic: Yeah. It sounds like a degree. It sounds like you could take this [01:00:00] as you know, four separate courses at a university. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe one day, Maybe one day.
Joe Moore: don't reveal my ambitions.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Who should apply for vital and who is vital for what are you guys looking for an applicants?
Joe Moore: So I like to say it's for anybody with a professional interest in psychedelics. So anybody from a doctor who just wants to be able to talk to their clients better, or sorry, patients better because people are going to be coming in and asking about regularly. And do you want to be You know, absolutely ignorant as a clinician to this topic.
I think the answer is no. But generally clinicians are just like, you know, let me go back. And I'll come get you an answer in 10 minutes or but what if you had all these answers more people now than ever are using psychedelics and you should be prepared interface with these folks if you're working with populations that might be users or interested, like chronic pain [01:01:00] sufferers are going to be using psychedelics a lot more.
In the next handful of years, and I've had some interesting fingers in the pot on that one. You can also look at non clinicians so people like yoga teachers, who their people are going on ayahuasca retreats already, or mushrooms, or whatever it is. Like, where are psychedelics being consumed, and what people interface with them. Either in the experience before, after, during, so I like yoga teacher, like massage therapist. I think they're really interesting folks to have in the mix here. Not only do I think body work could be really helpful in psychedelic psychotherapy or psychedelic sessions, but I think for integration,
Lana Pribic: Oh yeah.
Joe Moore: Stuff in your body around afterwards, maybe even before could be really helpful.
Lana Pribic: between sessions.
Joe Moore: Absolutely. Yeah, say you're doing a couple sessions. Absolutely. Just keeping the energy moving, loosening up the tight zones in your body. Body work is very core to Stan Grof's holotropic breath work. That's a big [01:02:00] portion why we're, we believe in very strongly in it. Not only do we believe it theoretically, but we believe it because we have lived experience with it, doing it to people and receiving it in many different ways.
Really anybody, again, with a professional interest. So it could be anybody from a doctor, therapist, yoga teacher, massage therapist, to a psychic, to somebody with Interest in investing in the space or starting a retreat center
Lana Pribic: you have coaches?
Joe Moore: even politicians or staffers could be really helped. What'd you
Lana Pribic: you have coaches in there?
Joe Moore: We have plenty of coaches joining us. Yeah. Which is a big segment of our student population. What we've noticed a pattern of, and this is not something we necessarily encourage is a very big personal decision. We've seen physicians, therapists, social workers drop their licenses so that they can do certain kinds of work that they feel more passionate about.
I think there's a lot there.
Lana Pribic: Like that's becoming
Joe Moore: know that somebody with that level of training imagine how useful, I almost try to push back against [01:03:00] that sometimes, but just imagine the therapist or doctor who's super well informed, who chooses not to facilitate and do the edgy stuff and as a result maintains a really powerful position in culture.
and can continue to steer politics around this in the right direction.
Lana Pribic: That's why I always say we need everyone all hands on deck with this movement. Yeah, it the more diverse.
Joe Moore: accountants, right? Accountants, marketing professionals like I would be more inclined to work with people who have had a bunch of experience and understand our world a little bit better.
Lana Pribic: Amazing. I love the diversity and I love how it is just the come as you are and we're all just going to learn about psychedelics together, no matter who we are, where we come from, or how we're going to apply it. That feels, I don't know, there's something special about that, that I haven't seen in other psychedelic training programs.[01:04:00]
Joe Moore: There's a problem in contemporary medicine where Physicians aren't always allowed to be or feel human.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Joe Moore: And that, that cuts both ways, right? With like trust and rapport and also ability to hear things appropriately. We've had students in our program who are physicians who are in just a room with not all clinicians, which is edgy for some clinicians.
Say I'm I feel like I've grown so much, including, I feel like I know how to be human
Lana Pribic: Wow.
Joe Moore: Because it's a really I feel bad for physicians because they get beat up by their training, by people, by the anti medicine movement, like all sorts of really wild places. They're getting beat up and allopathic medicine had to fight really hard to get its position in culture.
It wasn't just like they didn't have to fight. They had to fight really hard if you look at the history. So we should be like culturally aware, but we should also be culturally aware that why would we want a [01:05:00] doctor in training, not even a super experienced doctor, to not sleep for 24 hours straight and be prescribing and treating people for 24 hours straight?
We know that after, what is it, 18 hours, our cognitive capacity is effectively like we're drunk. So like legally drunk level cognition doing medicine like we as a culture need to push Medicine to cut that crap out because people are getting hurt Yeah. So we need to just keep improving
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Joe Moore: all over the place here and giving, cutting people slack and having compassion, but also helping them see this stuff.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, that's amazing that you've been able to cultivate a space where people feel human and can just explore their next steps and explore how they want to apply that knowledge. So congratulations on building this. I'm sure it's just going to keep building. If [01:06:00] people listening are interested and they want to learn more and maybe apply, can you tell them a little bit about the next cohort and where they can learn more?
Joe Moore: Yeah. You can learn more at vital psychedelic training. com. Make it easier. It's probably psychedelic today. com. You find the follow the links up top to it. And then if. You're interested in the timeline, or to learn more about the program. There's some informational material there. There's videos, testimonials.
I think we have a 40 page brochure you can ask for. We might even just have it right on the website. And You can learn about the timing and the schedule. We're trying to get more in line with the academic calendar year. So I believe our start date is September 17. And Yeah, we can we can get more information about you if you want to apply for the program from that site.
There's like an apply here button, no fee, and just apply and we'll be in touch and talk you through it. Yeah, it's about a year. It's pretty intense, [01:07:00] but it's transformative It's gonna give you a community and a network that you might not have hopefully a lot more hope because I that's what I want to be doing is selling hope I think like when I watch the news I'm nervous and who's selling me hope these days. to sell it myself, I
Lana Pribic: Yourself. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. So people can learn more. We'll have that linked in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with today?
Joe Moore: I want people to understand how powerful they are and how influential individuals can be. And yes, it's great to find a role model and be all about that person. But it's, I think, more appropriate to be all about them. And you being the superhero of your story, especially if you have a team of people who you're conspiring with to make [01:08:00] whatever change you're working on making.
And I really just want people to be empowered to improve their lives and the lives of their community and peers. Hopefully just take more care with what they do in the world and how they do it. Yeah, the more deliberate, intentional we can be with our actions, the more we can work towards um, riding the ship here.
Lana Pribic: Beautiful.
Joe Moore: Planet Earth's the biosphere might be a little edgy for a bit. We've got to see what we can do to help each other and the planet.
Lana Pribic: Love that. Beautiful. So in line with the ethos of modern psychedelics and everything we talk about here. So beautiful place to end. Thank you so much. It's been so awesome to drop in with you like OG psychedelic podcaster on modern psychedelics. Yeah, I guess we didn't mention that you guys were such a huge inspiration for me to start my own podcast.
And when I, when I was researching podcasting. Podcasts and what was going on in the [01:09:00] space. It was like you guys and the third wave podcast. And I was like, I think there's a space for me here to talk about more like personal transformation type of stuff. So yeah we're all out here doing it together.
I love it.
Joe Moore: That's right. Here comes everybody.
Lana Pribic: Amazing.
Joe Moore: Having me.
