Joe Moore on the Future of Psychedelics: From Underground to Mainstream

Psychedelics are no longer the fringe—they’re reshaping medicine, culture, and consciousness itself.

In this episode of Divergent States, 3L1T3 and Bryan sit down with Joe Moore, co-founder and CEO of Psychedelics Today, to explore the messy evolution of the movement: from the chaotic 1960s to today’s corporate clinics and grassroots revival.

They trace Psychedelics Today’s origins, dive into the Vital training program, and discuss what it means to build trust in a scene that still distrusts institutions. Joe shares insight into the next decade of psychedelic science—AI-assisted molecule discovery, new drugs entering clinical trials, and the fading of old stigmas—and the risks of turning medicine into marketing.

Along the way, they talk Leary and McKenna, ketamine cults, LSD alchemy, and the underground traditions worth preserving.

The result is a grounded, forward-looking conversation about authenticity, ethics, and the future of altered states.

Key Points Covered 

• How Psychedelics Today started from the breathwork underground
• What the 1960s got wrong (and right) about psychedelics 
•  The danger of idolizing substances and personalities — “don’t worship the drug” 
• How overuse of ketamine mirrors past mistakes in psychedelic culture
  The future of psychedelic research and the AI-driven chemistry boom
  Vital, the 12-month training program creating the next generation of psychedelic professionals
• What it takes to run an ethical business in a scene that distrusts business
  Harm reduction and why testing your substances matters more than ever
•  The LSD Philosopher’s Stone — does the chemist’s energy shape the trip? 
•  Why pleasure and integration must coexist in psychedelic healing 

🎙️ Joe Moore joins r/Psychonaut for an AMA on October 9, 2025!
🎧 Support the show and hear the Patreon-only “Trip Stories & Cosmic Jokes” bonus segment at patreon.com/divergentstates

Special thanks to SndBagz for the music!

00:00 – Intro / Bryan returns / Reggie Watts recap / Season 2 preview
04:16 – Meeting Joe Moore / Origins of Psychedelics Today
07:30 – Building a new media voice beyond academic monoculture
08:46 – Lessons from the 1960s and the cult of personality
12:00 – “Don’t Worship the Substance” – The Danger of Psychedelic Deification
13:30 – Unsung Heroes: Shulgins, Dr. Z, Grof & Leonard Pickard
15:00 – Repeating Old Mistakes: Ketamine Overuse and Media Myths
17:40 – “Is Anyone Driving the Bus?” – Who Really Controls Psychedelics Today
20:30 – Can Clinical Models Honor Mystical Experiences?
23:00 – Psychedelic Journalism: Objectivity vs Calling Bullshit
25:30 – Inside Vital – Redefining Psychedelic Training
28:30 – Teaching Mysticism to Therapists
31:00 – Building Trust in a Culture Skeptical of Business
37:30 – The Next Decade – Five Psychedelics Likely to Be Legalized
43:30 – Harm Reduction & Testing Culture
46:00 – The LSD Philosopher’s Stone – Energy, Alchemy & Intention
49:00 – Patreon Teaser – Trip Stories & Cosmic Humor
55:00 – Wrap-Up w/ Bryan – Breathwork, Culture & Community
59:00 – Closing – Future Guests, Patreon & Discord Invite

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Transcript

3L1T3 (00:14)
Welcome back to Divergent States. You know, we've been talking a lot about how psychedelics are shaping culture and medicine and even politics. But Today we're pulling in a voice that's been documenting this whole moment for years, long before the mainstream attention even caught on. And with me as always, Bryan, how you doing, man? Hey, W- Yeah, yeah, you've been busy doing your doing your thing, man. It's pretty awesome.

Bryan (00:30)
What's up man, glad to be back.

Yeah, that's right. I don't know if anybody knows why I've been gone, but I'm in a play right now and other ⁓ acting projects. It's a little side thing that I do that's, I feel is separate from this podcast, but just been busy with that and appreciate you holding it down and Valerie stepping in and you guys got to talk to some really cool people.

3L1T3 (00:57)
Right. We just had Reggie on last, the last episode. think, I mean, he, was really cool and he seemed down to do it again. So again, like that's, think maybe that's what we'll have in season two is maybe you'll be able to come up and step up and be with me for a lot of the more of these interviews.

Bryan (01:11)
100 %

dude and there's some cool things in the pipeline coming down.

3L1T3 (01:15)
All right. Yeah, we've got some really good, ⁓ some good ideas, you know, but if you guys want to see more of that, be sure to go to patreon.com / divergent States, ⁓ sign up there, help support the movement and, ⁓ you know, that's, that's, that's what we got. So what we can do. ⁓ but yeah, so, but Today we've got Joe Moore started Psychedelics Today. He's a co-founder and CEO, ⁓ started the company in 2015 with his business car, with his business partner, Kyle Euler.

⁓ he's been at the forefront of developing platforms for psychedelic media and education for like 10 years now. he's got, know, 20 years of psychedelic study tech, multinational project support. he specializes in transpersonal breath work and he's a frequent speaker about psychedelic medicine, drug policy, environmentalism, and he's host of his own podcast Psychedelics Today. That's right. Yeah. He's going to be joining us on the sub Reddit.

this month, going to be doing an Ask Me Anything. And so I thought we'd sit down and have a talk with him, be coming out the same date to the subreddit as we do the MA. So yeah, I think we're going to sit back, probably listen to a little more Sandbags. You guys check them out on Spotify and SoundCloud, Bandcamp, think. I don't know. Yeah, we'll sit back and listen to that, take a listen to Joe and hear the conversation, and we'll be back.

Bryan (02:32)
Yeah.

You are now listening to a synth bass original. ⁓

3L1T3 (04:16)
Hey, welcome back. elite. I'm here with Joe Moore from Psychedelics Today. How are doing Joe?

Joe Moore (04:22)
Wonderful. Yourself?

3L1T3 (04:23)
I'm doing great. I'm glad. I'm excited for the conversation. Glad to have you here. ⁓ everybody, kind of almost everyone that ends up in the psychedelic space kind of has a turning point, whether it's the trip or, you know, something that changes and kind of puts them in this space. And I kind of want to start there. What was that for you?

Joe Moore (04:44)
God, ⁓ from like a work perspective or a topic perspective.

3L1T3 (04:48)
Or just like, mean, what got you into the psychedelic industry? What kind of pointed you in that direction?

Joe Moore (04:55)
Yeah, so let's go back to like roughly 2015, 2014, 2015. Kyle Buller and I, my co-founder of Psychedelic Today, we got introduced by our breathwork teachers from Vermont. We both kind of studied there and we didn't know each other, but we both spent a lot of time at that place and had like a lot of lineage there. And our kind of like...

mutual background with them, plus our mutual interests and psychedelics and the outdoor space. You know, we started chatting and we're like, okay, you, you're going to go to grad school. ⁓ great. Like I'm, kind of busy doing mountain stuff and, working in software. So I'm not going to do that. And, ⁓ you know, we, he tried to talk to me into going to grad school. I tried to talk him to go on getting out of grad school and we said, ⁓ let's meet in the middle and do a podcast together and kind of preserve our teacher's legacy.

a lot of really interesting stuff that comes out of dream shadow, ⁓ where teachers are. And there's this other issue where the psychedelic scene seemed to be far more of a monoculture than it is Today in 2016. And we found that to be a little problematic because ⁓ the really interesting, weird, psycho-naughty stuff wasn't being discussed. The spiritual stuff wasn't being discussed. It was like, cool, here's this really dry research from Hopkins yet again, or like,

It's kind of like, you know, helpful, but like boring data for maps at the time. So we're like, let's get new, weirder voices in that we're not seeing platform to conferences. So it was those two things. And that was kind of when we started really getting Psychedelics Today together. ⁓ and starting the podcast, we had no intent of business or really grandiosity about it. We're like podcasts sounds fun. Let's do that. And, ⁓ you know, I had a background in event production and site in the psychedelic ecosystem.

Boulder, Denver and Boston before that. So I, you know, had been around. just, you know, this is the first time I got like really serious and regimented and like, let's do a thing and make it, make it something.

3L1T3 (07:06)
Nice, so it wasn't like just like a life path you had mapped out, just kind of pulled you in sideways, which you'd say.

Joe Moore (07:13)
Yeah, yeah, gravity well just kind of got its hold.

3L1T3 (07:19)
Yeah, so was it vision, frustration, necessity? What would you kind of classify that push to start Psychedelics Today?

Joe Moore (07:30)
⁓ you know, on one hand, was like the ability to actually chat with more people in the ecosystem that I was excited to meet and interact with, insert our, you know, philosophical quirks and agenda here and there, ⁓ you know, and things like that, I guess I wouldn't call it like despair. I'll call it like, ⁓ I know this thing can be a lot greater and I want to help it get there.

if I can.

3L1T3 (08:01)
Yeah, that's, that's, mean, that's almost the same as what I've been kind of doing here with the podcast even as we, you know, the word, you know, we can get the message out there, you know, we, it's, you just gotta, just gotta kind of do it and take this, take ⁓ the, step, do the infrastructure, I guess. Yeah. ⁓ that's awesome. so the psychedelic past gets told like a fairy tale a lot of times with like Timothy Leary, the summer of love, Woodstock.

Joe Moore (08:19)
Exactly.

3L1T3 (08:30)
But the truth is usually pretty messy. So if we're to strip the gloss off it and talk about how it really went down and what we could learn for it, ⁓ what do you think the first wave back in the 60s and 70s just got completely wrong?

Joe Moore (08:46)
⁓ God. ⁓

There's so much to that question. I love it. You're tripping me up because I'm also like a psychedelic history buff. So like, ⁓ what did they get wrong? ⁓

Uggghhh

So first and foremost, they did a pretty good job given the hand they were dealt. ⁓ But let's not necessarily get high every day and try to stay high all the time. ⁓ That was a pretty fundamental error that could be really destabilizing. And of course, we want to go there because it's really interesting and neat and novel. But what are we actually doing and what are we actually building? ⁓

You know, Leary's message of like turn on, tune on, what is it? Turn on, tune in, drop out was more, you know, I think it's still quite poignant Today where, ⁓ you know, the thing we're dropping out of is this kind of suicidal surveillance capitalist system. That's not necessarily here to help us or make us happier mammals or happier transcendental beings. You know, it's, it's, it's to extract as much.

Out of us. As it can. ⁓ and it's it's not to build up the earth and make many amazing happy generations. You know, and you know, I think I think that's something that got really right. ⁓ But it's like, OK, so how do we actually take these insights? Terrence McKenna calls them medium sized ideas and then like put them into play. How do we actually implement those medium sized ideas that we can actually?

Grapple with as an individual or small team and implement really great things to move this kind of project of.

⁓ gosh, I don't know what this project is. I have all sorts of framings for it. Making a more complete beast, making ⁓ happier, healthier communities and tribes and whatever. I say snarky shit like, let's try to make humanity last 20 more generations. It's a low bar, but I'll throw that out there sometimes. But it's not looking like we're going to hit that. So how do we actually say, hey, we can hit that?

And we can go far beyond that. We just got to get our shit together here and realize that you don't necessarily need that Ferrari and you don't need to stab everybody in the back to get it, you know, to be a happy human.

3L1T3 (11:27)
Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, I kind of my view on it, I wrote something on this actually started a sub stack and put an article I just wrote up on there. To me, it was I find that when we we start tying psychedelics too close to some personalities, that causes a lot of issues because like Leary, I mean, he was labeled what the most dangerous man in America, you know, from the Nixon administration and.

Joe Moore (11:53)
Convenient marketing title. Good for him.

3L1T3 (11:56)
Yeah. But yeah, think that kind of that tie in that close to that cult of personality really, it kind of derailed things a little bit. ⁓ Who do you think the

Joe Moore (12:06)
And especially

making substances the gods too, like the god ketamine, the god ayahuasca. ⁓ You know, like that can get really problematic, limiting and ⁓ has its own set of difficulties. ⁓ There's a really, really great story of this kind of cult in a while ago. She was like an heiress of like the Marriott fortune or something.

Marcia Moore, same spelling as my last name, and ⁓ she ended up dead as a result of her ketamine cult activity. And it wasn't ⁓ an overdose. you know, the ketamine became a god. It became like dark Kali for them. And, you know, when that happens, things can get really complicated. It's the same as this cult of personality thing you named.

3L1T3 (13:00)
Yeah, I kind of see that too. When you start, I guess, yeah, that idolization of the whatever substance or making it your God or your higher power deity, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, that can, that can lead to downfall too. It seems to be kind of the common thread. There's when ego gets mixed involved. So who do you think the real keepers of the flame during permission are?

Joe Moore (13:23)
⁓ gosh, there's probably a lot of people that shouldn't be named, right? I think, you know, I obviously the Shulguns helped a lot. ⁓ And that's pretty clear. That whole circle helped a lot. ⁓ There's, I'm sure at this point you've heard of Dr. Z, who's responsible for three and four MMC and many others. I think that gentleman ⁓ has

I think, you know, he's not as charming as Sasha, so he might not become as ⁓ famous. But I think his contribution to this whole scene is ⁓ immeasurable. And ⁓ we're not going to really know the full impact for a few decades, I believe. And he's still active. you know, ⁓ real genius, real genius. I'm still a gigantic fan of Groff's work.

⁓ especially around kind of ⁓ the synthesis of Freud, Jung, and the European traditions and everything else that's happened there. I think,

Is there others? Well, you just you just had an opportunity to chat with one of them, Leonard recently. yeah. Extraordinary character.

3L1T3 (14:48)
He's

a great guy. He's so deep and thoughtful with all of his stories. I was just mesmerized half the time.

Joe Moore (14:58)
Yeah,

he's good at that.

3L1T3 (15:00)
⁓ So do you see any of the mistakes from the error of the 60s and 70s or any way we're repeating them now?

Joe Moore (15:09)
Yeah, for sure. I'll kind of like name again. Like, it's not really happening with acid so much anymore, but it's kind of happening with ketamine. It's like, you know, the overuse of ketamine is pretty substantial. Did you see the South Park the other day about ketamine?

3L1T3 (15:23)
Yeah, we mentioned that up with their microdosing in the K-hole the whole time. Right, right. Yeah, that's come up a couple times. yeah, we said that really it's, I think it's whatever the popular flavor is because the long time, they did the, I think it was the 90s or early 2000s, they talked about the MDMA with holes in the brains and stuff.

Joe Moore (15:29)
I mean, you don't get it, I'm in tech.

Right,

which I hope you know is totally fraudulent. Yeah, and like with the contrast on the imaging, you can actually make the images say whatever you want. Carl Hart did a good treatment on that in his books. ⁓ How like when somebody shows you brain images, get really skeptical right away. Right. You're like, ⁓ I don't know. ⁓ And dig deeper. So MDMA like.

3L1T3 (15:54)
amphetamine.

Joe Moore (16:17)
I personally overused it like crazy, but it also helped my chronic pain condition that I had unknowingly. I was doing that. ⁓ And, you know, I was, it's probably mushrooms plus MDMA. it's like way too regular, way too regular. And I was probably more exciting a person when I was deep in that. But also like, you know, ⁓ I learned a lot.

and healed a lot too. So I'm happy to be kind of on the other side of that. And I think, know, Zach Leary told me once four times a year with MDMA everybody, like try your best not to go over that because it's not great for you.

3L1T3 (16:59)
Yeah, I could see that. I went over, I've yeah, I get out there sometimes too. If I get too deep into it too often, I find myself like going down rabbit trails that, know, normally I wouldn't even entertain. So yeah, it's good to kind of keep you on your feet a little bit sometimes. And, ⁓ yeah. ⁓ so fast forward to Today, ⁓ wall street, big pharma retreat centers, underground circles. Everybody's trying to claim psychedelics.

So depending on who you ask, it's either the dawn of the new era of the death of everything that made the culture what it is now. who's steering the ship right now? Is it corporations, clinics, or the underground? Should we be worried?

Joe Moore (17:42)
⁓ you know, ⁓

Yeah, you should always be worried, you know, like is there, is there anybody driving the bus? I think that's what people should realize is that there's not really anybody driving the bus. Like there's people trying to drive the bus, but they don't know how to drive. ⁓ you know, I think some smart business people are going to have some success. I think as they have success, there's going to be proportional success in the underground scenes. ⁓ Hamilton Morris, a couple of years ago at, ⁓

What was the San Francisco conference called Discovery Sessions? He was on stage and saying like effectively saying like boohoo So what if billionaires are going to fund your psychedelic research that you've wanted funded forever? Like you get to know more about psychedelics ⁓ And I I tend to agree because you know for the longest time no federal funding We're starting to see some drips the federal and state funding for this stuff, but it was all philanthropy Which isn't really great science either

It's, you know, really unbiased science comes from government funding and universities kind of like being really ruthless with each other about that stuff. like, we're going to keep seeing new drugs. You know, Leonard famously, you know, had a conversation with me on my show ages ago. ⁓ You know, this is kind of ⁓ it's cheaper now than ever to do chemistry. It's cheaper than ever to distribute.

⁓ with AI, we're going to find all sorts of new molecules and routes to create them that are probably cheaper too. So we're going to see this like brave new world of drug use where there's so many substances out there that, ⁓ we're going to have to deal with in the underground and not to mention the things that we like becoming hopefully more available and more pure and hopefully less, you know, ODs from it. We'll, we'll, you know, that that'll prove itself in time. ⁓

But yeah, is it clinics? Is it biotech? Is it wealthy people? ⁓ It's kind of a yes and right now, in my opinion, because even the people who are billionaire players are still accessing the underground in very similar ways that we are.

3L1T3 (20:04)
Yeah, that's very true. Yeah, you hear about like at Burning Man, know, that's a lot of VC goes on out there under, you would never even know about. ⁓ But yeah, can mainstream medicalization honor that weird mystical side or do you think it's going to get like stripped down to sterile ketamine clinics?

Joe Moore (20:27)
⁓ like both AMP. So what's happening right now, in my opinion, is that we're going to see that and that's going to be first. But what we're going to see is that once we have this stuff out there by including other things and including different ways of kind of pitching it and administering it, we're going to see better performance for longer periods of time. ⁓ And right now we're also kind of seeing the fall of materialism as the dominant frame.

And ⁓ I think as a result of that, ⁓ we're hopefully going to be more inclusive, of like more integral and more honoring of people's experiences as opposed to psychology says this, your experience says this. What do you believe more? And you're the world's foremost expert in you and your experience. So what if the lab coat clinician told you this, like maybe you believe yourself.

So there's like a lot of evolution happening at real time in psychiatry and therapy in the psychedelic fields, including in the clinical aspects of it. ⁓ So here's like one thing I like to bring up around the ketamine thing is even with super boring by our standards, super poorly designed clinics, ⁓ they're still getting great clinical results that are often far superior in performance to the standards of care.

So we're seeing like crazy good results, even though it's done in a way that we think is crappy. And we, it's only up from there is kind of like how I like to be optimistic about it.

3L1T3 (22:08)
Yeah, I would talk to Anne Wagner. She did the MDMA study up in Canada, and she kind of brought that up. I think it wasn't ideal for their first run with stuff. I think it was like 10 couples or something. But by their second, now that they're doing this another one, it's greatly expanded. So hopefully, that will tell us more as well. Having that diversity in the sample size is really going to help.

Joe Moore (22:35)
And the other factor is now governments, including Canada and European governments are funding this research. So we're actually seeing not just American research and a little bit of European seeing it expanded globally, including Australia. And with that. And with the universities kind of competing for better data, better findings, like your journal article sucked and here's my study proving it. And like all that kind of stuff is helpful for the progress here. It might not feel awesome to us, but it's like.

It's what we need.

3L1T3 (23:06)
Yeah, I see actually that that's probably one of the biggest things that surprises me when I look at like metrics from the podcast is how many, you know, European and Australian and just listeners from all over the world who are interested in psychedelic science. And it's, really heartening to see that and just, you know, to know we're kind of in the middle of that right now, ⁓ as a media, yeah, as a media outlet, ⁓ do you ever feel pressure to play nice or do you see it more as your role to call bullshit when you see it?

Joe Moore (23:33)
So glad you asked. I play nice more than I probably should. ⁓ I will sometimes have people on and be buddy buddy with them, but like try to get stuff on record that maybe they are not psyched about saying on record. ⁓ And I'm not playing the bad guy. But it's not like I'm playing purely the nice guy. I remember years ago I had JR.

from MindMed on the show, that's the company that's kind of trying to pharmaceuticalize candy flipping and LSD. And they're getting pretty good performance. But I was like, hey, man, like, how do I know that you're not, you're through the FDA, that your company is not going to participate in and fund ⁓ prohibition activities that harm me?

And I was like, really, really, really trying to get them on record saying that. And, know, effectively he said, there's no way my recollection of it. This is still out there. People want to go listen. ⁓ my recollection is it's pretty much like, there's no way that he can make a promise to me that feels real and that he'll stick to, you know I mean? Like, ⁓ he's exited from mind med. So it's not even his game anymore, but you know, public markets do public market things and like public companies are effectively AI is that.

don't necessarily have to reflect human values. Like not throwing your friends and neighbors into jail for using drugs nonviolently.

3L1T3 (25:06)
Right.

⁓ so let's talk a little bit about what you're building. And we cut this part. Let me mark that. I love, I love Riverside sometimes. ⁓ Let's talk about what you're building right now. Psychedelics Today isn't really a podcast anymore. It's education, it's training, and it's become kind of an institution in its own right. That's not easy in a culture of the distrust institutions. So who's signing up for vital and what are they hungry for?

Joe Moore (25:36)
Yeah, vital vital has been funds are 12 month training programs. So we'll get everybody from family doctors, anesthesiologist, psychiatrist, yoga teachers, therapists, people who have just been in the underground for ages will sign up. And it's ⁓ we designed it to be a very inclusive thing because what we were seeing when we started.

Was that psychedelic training was only for people with licenses and people without licenses should never do drugs or help people be safe with drugs. So we said that's not right. Let's make this far safer and better for everybody because the less bad stories we see in the newspaper, the better for all of us in terms of legal progress and. ⁓ Safer access and safer use so. It's our 12 month training program. It really is the culmination of ⁓ Kyle and I's work.

for decades and decades, you know, collectively. ⁓ So we, we try to ⁓ make it a preparation and integration program. Of course, we discussed facilitation quite a bit. Legally, we're not, you know, comfortable calling it a facilitation program, but, you know, I'd be more comfortable with a lot of these graduates sitting for me than a lot in the other programs. And, but that's, you know, bias, of course. So.

we're trying to create the next generation of psychedelic professionals by having them be broad spectrum players and broadly, you know, broadly read in the space. So not just I know how I know about psychology and I know how to sit for people. It's like, well, like, what do know about harm reduction? What do know about, like, advising people on the right retreat? What do know about? ⁓

⁓ boundaries and transference and counter transference and drug combinations and you know, there's so much there and we actually work people through their own transformative process at the same time as they're getting the education. So they're radically different person on the other side just by having engaged in so much inner work and group process and in lot of ways we've kind of expanded the whole atrocious breath work methodology in the community.

⁓ understand that we gained from dream shadow into this larger psychedelic training. So that's kind of what we do at vital. ⁓ we're in the middle of teaching our 5th cohort of that right now. ⁓ and hopefully May 2026 will be starting our next one. We're not sure on our dates yet, but TBD.

3L1T3 (28:16)
Nice. there a, how do you avoid water, how do you avoid watering down psychedelic education for the mainstream?

Joe Moore (28:25)
⁓ In vital ⁓

3L1T3 (28:27)
Yeah.

Joe Moore (28:31)
We really pride ourselves on not giving our students answers in a clean way where like everything is kind of dynamic and in flux. There's no simple answers around these things. It's like, you know, we can face the science squarely, but we can also face limitations of science generally and a lot of the research like we can say, OK, like. ⁓

Science as such is not going to necessarily tell us how to deal with. Skillfully big mystical experiences that people have in sessions like they have a survey that says, oh yeah, you gotta you know 29 out of 35. That's a good mystical experience or whatever. You know, like that doesn't tell you anything about the mystical experience. It really doesn't capture the essence of the thing. But like helping people understand how to work with folks who have had that is totally different jam.

that is really difficult to discuss in mainstream settings because therapists aren't going to necessarily get that. Therapists have great training. They can be really skilled in a lot of scenarios, but therapy for mystical experiencers, you updo abductees, like this kind of stuff, it's not necessarily apparent in your therapy training or your psychiatry training. You're like, oh, that guy needs Thorazine or

that guy needs to be institutionalized ⁓ versus like, how do we show up with compassion and kindness and validate their experience and let them slowly over time, make it, ⁓ make it part of their lived experience integrated, in other words. And, you know, so we bring in a lot of the weird anomalous 40 and psychonauty things and say, like, there is not a right way to do these things. ⁓

There's certainly some wrong ways if you want to be healthy and happy. ⁓ But you know, I don't presuppose anybody wants to be happy and healthy, you know, I them tell me. Yeah, and I think it's a lot of respect for who you are and how you're showing up and respect for we collectively. We don't know where you want to end up and let's explore that together.

3L1T3 (30:31)
All right.

Yeah, that's a, I guess it's a good way to put it. know, like that's, it's really the heart of the whole conversation really is that the synchronicity, guess you'd say, and then the cooperation, the whole ecosystem. Kind of along those lines, how do you balance running a business instead of a space that just inherently distrusts business?

Joe Moore (31:08)
⁓ You know, yeah, this is a good one. So this is, it's been a learning process for me. did 20 years in software. was doing like systems engineering and tech support and, ⁓ kind of web development design, things like that for 20 years and, ⁓ you know, dealing with giant customers and hospitals and whatnot. So I got some exposure to business and sales and things along those lines, but, ⁓ you know,

coming in, you really had to be, you know, we started Psychedelic's Day when I was kind of somewhat deep in my overuse period. And I think that gave me some sort of like credibility. We're like, okay, this guy's deep in it. let's, you know, trust him as far as that goes. And like, let's hear what he's saying. And you know, what I would do on the show. So I'll give you, I'll give you a little like business history here.

So like, you know, we didn't sell anything for a while. Like we were just a podcast. And then I was like, uh, Hey, Kyle, it'd be really cool. Just like sell something. So we didn't have to pay for this on our own. Um, and it's like, okay, cool. And, uh, we kind of collectively decided we wanted to build programs for college kids to say, you know, here's how you can be a little safer. Here's how you can make this productive. And I saw people who got lost in psychedelics in my undergrad.

I'm sure plenty of other people maybe have themselves or have seen it. ⁓ So. We had some success there and that was a relatively affordable program and we helped a bunch of students and then doctors and therapists started showing up. Not our intent. ⁓ So we started actually building programs for them. And you know, collecting testimonials. People are really happy with what we were doing for them. There wasn't really ⁓ education available.

online at the time in the way we were doing it, especially when we were, you know, really ⁓ call it brash. We're really just like, here's the facts. Like, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. Like, sure, you might get really hurt. Sure. You might actually have a miracle of healing. You know, you might have a miracle of a good time. Like, you know, I don't know how to tell you what is or is not going to happen. But you know, these drugs are safer than those drugs. And like, here's, you know,

Here's what you can and shouldn't mix and here's how long your breaks might, maybe should be. ⁓ you know, I was a major lurker and contributor on sites like DMT Nexus and Shroomery and Grow Report and a lot of other older sites like that. And, you know, I learned a lot and I was contributing what I learned from my teachers at Dream Shadow, my own personal readings and undergrad and philosophy and the forums and, you know, was my own kind of synthesis along with Kyle.

So we were authentically there and in it. And I think that helped. know, if you're just a suit that comes over from Canadian mining, like how do you actually convince people that you're a reasonable player? Some people choose to hire giant PR machines to make them into a personality in the psychedelic space, which I've seen a few times. ⁓ Or you just can jump in and it's your world.

I got laid off from my job in software in 2020 and decided to just go full in. was like, here's my severance money. I'm, a hundred percent committed. And if software doesn't want to hire me back, cause I ruined my name in psychedelics. It was worth it. You know, it was something I was passionate enough about to risk, um, any kind of normal life on, um, and that kind of stuff gives you credit a little bit, I guess.

3L1T3 (35:00)
⁓ yeah, I, I, what I, what I kind of see, I thought of this earlier, just kind of going back and we're talking, but it, I think that's kind of the problem. A lot of times we see in the space is there were, there are people who get out there who were afraid of LSD or afraid of MDMA and they're never going to try it. How do they even expect to kind of get in the business or even, know, that's that to me, that that's one of the big problems that, that I think that probably happened back in the, you know, the era back in the day.

that might be happening again Today would be kind of a parallel issue as we're talking.

Joe Moore (35:35)
Not enough people trying the goods. know, on one hand that might've been a contributor in the old days. ⁓ I don't know what it is now. Like Rick Perry just came out as an Ibogaine user, which is radical. There's some senators, Republican senators came out as Ibogaine users. think more need to come out as MDMA enthusiasts. That would be helpful for our cause. ⁓ you know, I met a biotech guy who is developing psilocybin.

He's the CEO of a company and he was like, yeah, I was too afraid. The only time I ever did it, I was super drunk in my hotel room and by myself and ate a bunch on a business trip. like, that is the most outrageous story for a biotech CEO to be telling me. you know.

3L1T3 (36:20)
What's the worst way you could do shrooms? ⁓

Yeah, just, I, yeah. If I were to ever tell someone to give anybody advice on what you should, when you should take shrooms, being drunk alone in a hotel room would not be one of them. Yeah. On top of the list. Yeah. But I think that, that, kind of could contribute to it. I don't know if it, you know, it's a full, it's a full issue, but yeah, when I, when you see the suits get into it, that are even afraid of psychedelics. ⁓

Yeah, things get a little weird, you know, but yeah, you were talking about Republican senators even coming out. Yeah, we had Kirsten Sinema on the show a couple months ago and yeah, just, just hearing people like, like that, just openly, you know, advocating for psychedelics is just, it kind of blows me away. ⁓

Joe Moore (37:14)
Yeah,

it's interesting.

3L1T3 (37:17)
Yeah, so looking forward psychedelics are at a crossroads. They could go mainstream in a way that changes everything, or they could get chewed up by the machine and spit out as another fad. So what does the next decade really look like to you?

Joe Moore (37:31)
⁓ God. Well, I think it's everything. I don't think it's one or the other. Yeah. What's the next decade look like? ⁓ I think, you know. ⁓

In less than three years, I think we're going to have at least five psychedelics approved for clinical use in America.

3L1T3 (37:51)
Yeah, I could see that.

Joe Moore (37:53)
Yeah, I think that's a, that's a, you know, maybe a conservative timeline. Maybe not. we all expected MDMA to be sooner, but, ⁓ you know, there's issues there. And I think, so we're going to see that then there's going to be more money coming in from companies like J and J and, and ABV, which we saw the, ⁓ the recent there, there, I think that's how you say their name, the name of that company was at $1.2 billion acquisition of an Ibogaine company.

⁓ so there's some really interesting stuff there. ⁓ I think, I think we're going to see more and more institutional kind of money come in. like banks, like JP Morgan and other like bigger investment groups are going to start spending money here. I hope. And I've heard rumor of this. So alcohol sales are going down, you know, big brands like, ⁓ and as a Bush Coca-Cola rebel, things like that.

they actually contribute to this like future like kind of think tank group. It's like, what are the products we need to be looking at 12 years out eight years out and like as alcohol declines in popularity and interest and people are like, maybe I shouldn't drink six rockstar energy drinks a day. Like what? That's that's me kind of making fun of myself for drinking two pots of coffee a day for years, which is not advisable. Anybody out there ⁓ you break eventually.

Uh, I, uh, I think they're contributing to these think tank groups or what are the consumable futures? And clearly we're seeing an interest in kind of THC consumable beverages and like other kinds of highs, like the market in Colorado and California for psychedelics right now is bananas. And, um, I think, you know, the underground is going to really inform what above ground companies are going to want to be developing. So clearly, you know,

Kana's is nice, but it doesn't really like move the needle in the same way like alcohol does, which is perhaps why we're seeing Amanita products like kind of move. So like it moves that GABA in a way that you actually kind of feel it at the right doses. ⁓ Some people say Kana can really get you high. I don't, I haven't had it yet, but I've been with people and they really feel the high. But I think like we're going to learn a lot about like what molecules can we safely, hopefully productize.

But we're going to see some bullshit like, OK, like remember Olestra? We're like, you know, I was dying on dying as a euphemism for like, you know, eating these Pringles and you know, you have that situation and then like, you know, we're to have situations like that, too. We're like, ⁓ this is a good angle. Bad execution because the molecule is bad. So we need to like reformulation is that we need to actually like let's shift the formulation and maybe people can drink six a week or whatever it is. ⁓ But I think.

You know, I think we're going to see more sobriety. Like I see less and less people smoking cannabis. I see less and less people drinking, but also they are microdosing. They are, you know, not everybody, but a lot of people. And I think we're going to see more and more people actually macroing once a month or quarterly. ⁓ so I think it's going to be a mainstreamed practice, but we don't know what that really looks like yet. Could it be like,

You and your wife smoking a DMT pen on Friday evening. Once the kids go to sleep. That's not, not happening, you know, ⁓ will it happen more regularly? You know, time will tell the five MEO pens are really getting democratized, which is really an interesting phenomenon. don't know how I feel about it all the way, but I'm not the one to tell people what they can and cannot do. So it's kind of like, ⁓ the market's going to do interesting things. Hopefully people like you and I can.

steer people in a healthy direction. ⁓ And, ⁓ you know, what is constructive use? What is destructive use? And what's in the middle? You know, because I've had people say, like, ⁓ getting high, like, that's really bad. Like, we shouldn't be consuming anything. And it's like, well, you know, with that same logic, we shouldn't eat any foods either. Because like, there's anti nutrients and nutrients. And like, some of these things really are great for us. And some are good and bad.

And even the great things have some downsides. So it's a complex thing.

3L1T3 (42:18)
It doesn't

work to take it to that puritanical level of, yeah, no salt on your food. We need some spice in our life. ⁓

Joe Moore (42:30)
Yeah, I see a lot

of that and I really want to encourage that and we really want to encourage pleasure as a thing. It's not just, I healed my childhood trauma. It's like, ⁓ I got to party with my friends for two weeks and X, Y, Z, you know, could just be their basement. Then I came out a new person and I did it healthy partying.

3L1T3 (42:51)
Yeah, yeah. I would also encourage listeners to be careful. Like they came out with that study this week earlier where somebody went through and tested all these over-the-counter bars, I think. And a lot of them had like the four MEO, five MEO, you know, just a bunch of different random.

Joe Moore (43:06)
Yeah, for a DMT and a bunch of other weird tryptamines and non tryptamines. Yeah, don't be skeptical of what you're buying. For sure. And trust, you know, work towards figuring out how to trust your supply chains. And, you know, if you can afford to ingest, you can afford to test and learn what the testing resources are that you can access. And at home test kits like bunk police and dance day for good, but they're not complete.

3L1T3 (43:33)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, bunk police, dance safe. Always test your stuff before you get a hold of anything. So if Prohibition just ended tomorrow, is there any underground tradition that you would just insist on saving?

Joe Moore (43:47)
Oh, I underground tradition. Gosh.

I don't know. I don't know of anything that I particularly love. ⁓ I think it would be really interesting to preserve kind of ⁓ and enable like old school chemistry as an art, you know? Like how do we get folks like a Leonard or a Dr. Z or an Albert Hoffman to still keep doing cool shit like that? And, you know, once in a while.

similar to Wyant's, get the 1979 edition of XYZ, that could be an interesting phenomenon with LSD and other things.

3L1T3 (44:28)
I had an ex that actually said I do that too often. She said she didn't like tripping with me because I spent too much time judging the LSD and actually enjoyed the trip. I'm like, I can't help it. I can tell the difference.

Joe Moore (44:44)
So here's that's an interesting topic, man. So like I've been thinking about this as a research project because ostensibly LSD is LSD. But in the lived experience, everybody has a different experience on different batches and sometimes the same batch. ⁓ One of my one person I know actually ran ⁓ a trial with their product and their customers, and they actually confirmed this like bias towards like

You're going to experience what I tell you you're going to experience in the marketing and they confirm that of a pretty reasonable sample set by saying, you know, this strain does this and this strain does that. And, you you know, the data was pretty clear. So I want to do the similar thing with LSD. And then I want to like chat with chemists and analytical chemists, like how much like, is it. ⁓ Not exactly DMT. It's like the molecule didn't totally make it to DMT or it decayed a little bit from DMT and.

You know, similar how ketamine is kind of like not always ketamine, right? It's kind of like a blend of the precursors and degradation things and whatever. So I want to like understand that story around LSD better. And I'm sure that's an interest of yours too,

3L1T3 (45:57)
Yeah, that would be that would that would be an amazing study. Just even to see because I especially with it with a drug like LSD that's that puts you in such like you're an open minded state that how much of that that that preemptive kind of what you should expect would actually influence your actual experience. So, I mean, that would be it. Yeah, because you could take.

this really pure LSD and tell everyone it's shit and see what they come out on the other side talking about. I don't know why you'd say that was shit. That was the best LSD I had in my life or whether like, yeah, that was terrible shit. So yeah, that really interesting. Do kind of a double blind or yeah, see if you could, but yeah, that's yeah. Is there anything. Hey, no, for sure. And I would say one of the traditions I think I would keep is blotter paper. I'd like you guys need to keep doing nice art.

Joe Moore (46:40)
No joke ⁓

3L1T3 (46:50)
on blotter paper, because...

Joe Moore (46:52)
Yeah, limited run.

3L1T3 (46:54)
Right. Yeah. Number them. Number your sheets and everything. Limited edition. ⁓

Joe Moore (46:59)
you

I've

branded myself, ⁓ I don't know if I ever got a chance to tell you this, but I've branded myself for years as saying like, I'm not done with my job until we're buying LSD without a prescription at Walmart. you know, Equate LSD might be a little weird, but like, I'll probably still buy some. ⁓

3L1T3 (47:21)
Right.

The equate versus the Tylenol brand, right?

Joe Moore (47:26)
And

everybody's like, you want the Whole Foods version? Great, like give Bezos your money. But LSD is LSD. It's kind of like my argument at the end of the day. But I like I like this kind of concept that I've not got Leonard to like speak explicitly about it. But there's this idea that the chemists energy is imprinting on the LSD as they're making it. And that's kind of like in the alchemical traditions, like you need a really pure heart and soul and mind.

And you've done a lot of purification, rectification of you to make sure you're making the philosopher's stone in the right way. And I think a lot of chemists, LSD cooks, feel similarly, but I don't know about all.

3L1T3 (48:08)
I, I, I've heard, I heard a quote, I can't remember where I heard it from, but they said, ⁓ you know, you're, you're in a room and you're, you're with a substance in which one millionth of a hit will, or one millionth of a gram will give you a noticeable reaction. ⁓ if you really don't think your energy around you is, is, ⁓ affecting that at all. I don't know what to tell you. You know, I was like, ⁓ so I could kind of see why they would, you know, it's.

It would be interesting to find out if there is anything to that. It might have been the Sunshine Makers, I think, the Amazon documentary. Yeah. Yeah. It's surreal sometimes. I'll hang out and be talking to Leonard. I'll get a text from him in the middle. He'll be like, it's Leonard Picard messaging me. Let me answer his question real quick.

Joe Moore (48:45)
That was a really good flick.

Yeah.

3L1T3 (49:05)
Yeah, it's, it's a real sometimes. I think that's the biggest thing, you know, you talked about when you started, ⁓ you had all the, know, you have the people come up and they do, you're in it. And I think that's the biggest thing for me too. It's like, I've been talking about these figures and talking to people for years. And then suddenly I'm, you know, in front of them and face to face and talk to them. It's it blows my mind, but it's, it's an amazing, it's an amazing kind of, ⁓ trip likely.

Joe Moore (49:32)
Absolutely.

3L1T3 (49:34)
So Joe, respect, you know, big respect for bringing it Today. For anybody listening, check out Psychedelics Today, podcasts, courses, training, all of it. Links are going to be in the notes. ⁓ for the Patreon crew. Well, I'll probably skip the Patreon cause we got about eight minutes. So, well, we could probably pull a couple. All right. If Patreon crew don't go anywhere, we've got a bonus round coming up where Joe and I ditch a lot of the formal questions and we'll dig into the weird shit.

Joe Moore (49:53)
Yeah, let's do it.

3L1T3 (50:02)
trip stories, cosmic jokes, and the kind of things you only share when it's off the record. So if you want that, go to patreon.com.divergentstates. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next stage.

Joe Moore (50:11)
you

Bryan (51:31)
listening to a synth as original.

Joe Moore (51:37)
you

You

Bryan (51:47)
You're not alone

No, get up.

You ⁓

Joe Moore (54:07)
is

Bryan (54:23)
You're now the

and bags too.

Get up.

Joe Moore (54:52)
you ⁓

3L1T3 (55:23)
All right. So yeah, that was Joe Moore with Psychedelics Today. ⁓ pretty heavy conversation, lot of ground covered. ⁓ but yeah, just kind of unpack a few of the threads that we talked about a little bit. what stood out to me most was Joe doesn't just report on shiny headlines. ⁓ he's documenting the whole messy story, kind of like we are here, ⁓ from the underground voices to clinical trials and everything, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's that archive matters.

Bryan (55:48)
100%, dude.

3L1T3 (55:50)
Right. I, you know, I, it's interesting. You know, we talk about all these altered states all the time, especially around chemicals, but yeah. mean, as you said in the, ⁓ the intro, you know, working with breath work and, and like, it's crazy. Like, yeah, they've got the Winn-Hoff method. ⁓ there's a couple other, you know, methods I've heard that actually can induce semi altered states.

Bryan (56:12)
No, I've got a friend of mine that he got into breath work after going through a rough patch in his life. A lot of things changed very suddenly for him. ⁓ I mean, like big life changes, like he was very religious and kind of dropped that, like divorce, all kinds of crazy stuff and just took a different life path. And that's how we ended up meeting. like in combination with psychedelics, he also talks about, you know, this breath work stuff and he's been trying to get me into it. I've been thinking about going to check it out.

And after listening to Joe, think.

3L1T3 (56:45)
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a lot of fun just to, mean, even just to try it because, know, it's just breath work. It's oxygen.

Bryan (56:52)
Right,

yeah, it's fucking crazy. Right. That's all it takes.

3L1T3 (56:57)
All

right, just get nice hyper oxygenation of your blood.

Bryan (57:03)
Which, okay, hold on. Which brings me to, have you seen these cans of oxygen? Yes. You can buy? Have you tried that? I feel like if you went pretty hard on a whole can of it, you could probably get fucked up.

3L1T3 (57:11)
Now I haven't.

Yeah, you can probably, mean, don't know how often.

Bryan (57:19)
that oxygen

high, you know, cause we're never breathing pure oxygen. to get like straight oxygen can fuck with your brain a little bit.

3L1T3 (57:28)
It might be. Yeah, that'd an interesting guy. I guess they've got the like hyperbaric chambers, which is kind of like that. So that's interesting. Yeah. yeah, it's a, it's a cool, it's a cool thing that, you know, then it's so cool that we get to like document all these different people and the different methods to the different chemicals to whatever. And that's what it's really about. ⁓ you know, and it was, it was also good to hear him talk about, you know, eventual capital and grassroots culture. And, know, it's, ⁓

It's, it's, it's really good to have somebody who's been in the industry. You know, I've been running Psychonaut for about 20 years, but Joe's been doing the podcast for about 10 years. So he's been actually doing the documentation out and the, and the whole media realm. So it's good to sit down to talk to a, an old pro.

Bryan (58:14)
Yeah, a seasoned professional, someone who's been where we're trying to go already. Right. And for him to take time and sit down and chat with us, I mean, it's an honor.

3L1T3 (58:24)
Yeah, it was great. Um, we've all said we had some good news. Um, somebody reached out and next CNN producer, you guys might've heard of him. He runs a podcast called microdosing over 50, uh, Caesar Mara Marin. Uh, he was a CNN producer for 25 years. He reached out and said he'd love to, you know, have us check. He wants to help us, you know, maybe help get some stuff going for season two.

He also has a clothing line out there. So yeah, having him out there, you know, helping along it's, it's been really cool to see how everything's coming together and how the podcast is growing. It's again, you guys, yeah, you guys want to come support it and support us grow, you know, become one of our founding members over on Patreon, know, patreon.com / Divergent States. It's less than a cup of coffee a month. yeah. Right. Why don't you, you know, go ahead and.

Bryan (59:10)
I'm gonna cop a cup of coffee.

3L1T3 (59:14)
Yeah, join the the the heroic dosers or the thumbprint here. Yeah, you guys join the thumbprint here. I'll write you down as a producer on the show. So it is that. But yeah, so, yeah, thanks for joining us Today. We're going to, ⁓ you know, we'll still be here. We're going to we got season two in the works. We're, you know, moving as much as we can. But yeah, come join the come join the movement.

Bryan (59:26)
Hell yeah.

3L1T3 (59:42)
We've got the discord server open for everyone. ⁓ you know, I've got the, this, the subreddit out there. I've started a subreddit just for the podcast. So Psychonaut itself doesn't get just, just bombarded with nothing but the podcast stuff. So, it's come joined over there and, you know, join on Patreon, follow on YouTube, Instagram, wherever you're listening. And, we'll talk to you next time.

Joe Moore (1:00:08)
you you