When Sam Believ interviewed me on his Ayahuasca Podcast a week and a half ago, I asked him if he had a community. He told me yes — the people who work at his retreat in Colombia, the people who pass through it, his family.
I then asked him about the people in between: the ones who do not work there and are not currently on the retreat. He said there weren’t really any.
I don’t remember thinking it was a particularly important moment. That was the whole exchange.
But when Sam came onto my podcast, Mind, Body, Health and Politics, this week, the first thing he wanted to tell me was that he had spent the ten days since our last conversation drafting a permanent community for the people who already pass through LaWayra. It has ten founding members and a financial structure. Three people had signed up before the plan was complete.
I have been broadcasting for twenty-one years to find out whether the work travels. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it travels ten days and shows up as three founding members of something that was not there before.
I hope you’ll enjoy our conversation.
We talked about:
the 3,000 ayahuasca ceremonies Sam has hosted without a single hospital transfer
the pattern he calls “bastardization,” and
what 65 years in clinical practice tells me about the executive order signed two weeks ago.
You’ll find the detailed summary below.
But first, I want to tell you about my latest book on the adverse effects and therapeutic potential of psychedelic medicines comes out May 5. You can pre-order it here.
A few of my distinguished colleagues wrote kind endorsements:
Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.
– Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:
Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.
– Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
Show notes / Summary
Welcome and the Epidemic of Isolation [00:00]
Richard opens with a thesis he has carried for two decades: humans are tribal animals, and we are healthiest in small groups where you know everyone by face if not by name.
The current American condition is an epidemic of alienation, isolation, and loneliness. The antidote is connection, and connection is easier inside tribe-scale community.
He introduces Sam, coming in from roughly an hour south of Medellín, Colombia.
Tribal scale is a health variable, not a lifestyle preference
Richard’s 21-year body of work puts community density in the same category as sleep, nutrition, and movement. The retreat context about to unfold is, in his framing, a case study in rebuilt tribal scale.
Sam’s Origin Story: From Latvia to Colombia [01:40]
Sam grew up in Latvia under Soviet rule. His birth certificate carries a hammer and sickle. He worked as a marine mechanical engineer in offshore oil and gas, made around $500 a day tax-free when the Latvian minimum wage was $350 a month, and was clinically depressed.
He quit his job and his relationship, took a year off, and traveled South America to learn Spanish. He cycled Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, went home to refill his savings, and kept returning to Medellín until he stopped leaving.
Ayahuasca found him in an “echo chamber” of friends and podcasts. He tried it once and thought he was finished with it. He was not.
During the COVID era he moved to the countryside. A stranger found him online and asked to rent his space to run a ceremony. The partnership did not last, but the retreat did.
In his seventh ceremony, Sam says ayahuasca told him his purpose was to work with ayahuasca. He has followed that directive since.
“I quickly bought myself everything that society tells you you need to buy when happiness comes, and happiness never came.” — Sam Believ
Building LaWayra and the Community Spark [06:02]
Richard asks what occupies Sam’s mind when it is quiet. The honest answer: how to fill the next retreat. The business side of a healing container is, like any business, stressful.
Sam credits Richard’s last appearance on Sam’s own Ayahuasca Podcast with seeding a plan he had somehow never considered: a permanent community of the people who already pass through LaWayra.
In the ten days between that conversation and this one, Sam drafted a plan for 10 founding members and a financial structure. Three signed up before the plan was complete.
Running the retreat is running four businesses at once: hotel, restaurant, media company, and what Sam calls a “crazy house” where guests temporarily lose their minds by design. Team of 37 staff.
Sam first came to ayahuasca for his own depression, then abandoned his own work to facilitate others’ healing, then returned to the medicine six months ago. A maloka sits 100 meters from his office.
Richard’s community prompt traveled ten days and hit ground
The episode captures an unusual proof point: the ideas this show transmits are not only consumed but acted on inside a recognizable timeline.
“Since we last spoke, about 10 days ago, I have created a full plan of how I’m going to start my own community.” — Sam Believ
Frequency: Indigenous Lineage vs. Western Protocol [14:08]
Richard frames the frequency debate. His daughter did roughly 20 to 30 ceremonies in three months at a Peruvian retreat. American clinicians often recommend three, six, or even nine months between sessions. What does Sam see on the ground?
Sam’s position is a middle ground. 20 in three months is a shamanic deep dive, useful for a narrow profile. LaWayra’s standard program is one week, four ceremonies.
On the other extreme, single-session protocols drew the episode’s most quotable line.
Sam’s reasoning rests on lineage. His Taita comes from seven generations of shamans inside a thousand-year-old tradition. If forced to pick between that lineage and “some doctor from a United States hospital,” he trusts the lineage.
LaWayra has served close to 3,000 people. Sam considers one to two weeks, with up to 10 or 12 ceremonies a month, safe for the average guest. He does not recommend three months of continuous ceremony for anyone without a shamanic training path.
Reverse tolerance is the pharmacological anomaly behind his frequency stance
Sam’s dosing math only works because ayahuasca behaves differently from classical serotonergic psychedelics.
Psilocybin and LSD build tolerance fast. Take five grams of mushrooms today, you need 10 tomorrow.
Ayahuasca inverts that curve. Take one cup today, tomorrow you may need half a cup. Sam calls this reverse tolerance, attributed in the pharmacology literature to the harmala alkaloids in the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.
The same property enables titration. One cup, wait, add half a cup, and the effect combines.
“One ceremony every nine months is, unfortunately, total bullshit.” — Sam Believ
Dosing: Why You Trust the Shaman, Not a Scale [21:53]
Richard asks how strength is measured. With LSD it is micrograms. With psilocybin it is grams. With ayahuasca there is no standard recipe.
Ayahuasca varies by vine, by admixture plant, by cook time, by tradition. Each shaman has his own recipe, his own extraction window, his own dose ladder.
The dose is not a number. It is the shaman’s read of the person in front of him. Sam says guests are sometimes disappointed by a half cup, then grateful at hour three that the shaman gave them exactly that.
Sam is explicit: this is not a home medicine. Set, setting, and facilitation are structural requirements.
The Bastardization Triad: Tobacco, Cacao, Coca [24:10]
This is the sharpest rhetorical passage in the episode. Sam lays out a pattern the West repeats.
Tobacco. Indigenous people used it for peace treaties, social bonding, and healing. Industrial processing made it a “death stick that gives you lung cancer.”
Cacao. A heart-opening ceremonial medicine. Add milk and sugar and it drives diabetes.
Coca. A traditional superfood leaf, “much better than coffee.” Process it and you get cocaine.
Sam’s concern: the same extraction logic is circling ayahuasca. Pull the medicine from the tradition, and the tradition dies or zombifies.
The framework is the argument against overly clinical psychedelic medicine
Sam is not anti-regulation. He is anti-extraction. The clip carries without needing Richard in frame, which is exactly why it travels.
“The beautiful medicine became a death stick that gives you lung cancer.” — Sam Believ
Adverse Effects: 3,000 Ceremonies, Zero Hospitalizations [26:17]
Richard introduces the book directly. He has been studying adverse effects of psychedelics and has a new title coming out the following month. He wants to know what Sam has seen across 3,000 people.
Sam’s framing: ayahuasca is a very strong plant medicine, not a joke. Adverse effects arise in specific conditions, not at random.
Risk drivers Sam names: pre-existing medical conditions, drug-drug contraindications, excessive dose, and unsafe settings.
Short-term: purging, vomiting, diarrhea. Sam classifies these as integral to the healing rather than side effects, and dos Santos et al.’s pharmacology review of ayahuasca supports the somatic-release framing.
Post-retreat: if the dose is wrong, emotional destabilization. Dose discipline is the control variable.
Zero hospital transfers, zero psychiatric transfers across 3,000 guests
Sam is precise about what the worst cases looked like.
No one has required hospitalization.
No one has required a psychiatric transfer.
The hardest cases involved childhood sexual abuse memories surfacing mid-ceremony and overwhelming the guest. Those required extended follow-up with the integration team, and the guests reported improvement over time.
Sam is honest that malpractice exists in the broader field. Stories of guests being overdosed, running, falling, or entering psychotic states come from settings with thin screening and weak facilitation.
At LaWayra, the container is designed to suppress those failure modes. A pre-arrival questionnaire, training workshops, and 26 hours of on-site onboarding before the first cup.
“We’ve given ayahuasca now to close to 3,000 people... We’ve never really had anyone with such an adverse effect that we needed to take them to the hospital or where they needed to be taken to a psychiatrist.” — Sam Believ
This is self-reported field data. It is not peer-reviewed outcome data. It is the largest single retreat-operator dataset Richard has on tape, and the book’s chapter on ayahuasca needs exactly this kind of input.
Age range: 18 to 84
Sam’s oldest guest to date was 84. He has served roughly 30 guests aged 70 and older. Average age is 35 to 40. When Richard, 87, mentions the book, Sam extends an open invitation: come to LaWayra and be the oldest guest on record.
The Facility and Why Colombia Is Safer Than the Headlines [30:58]
12 cabins, 20 beds, a pool, a sauna, a gym, massage, and a QEEG brain lab that scans guests before and after the retreat. Kitchen team of four. Ayahuasca-friendly menu.
Hospital is 10 minutes away in a town of roughly 20,000 people.
Richard asks whether Colombia is safe for American visitors, the Pablo Escobar question. Sam’s reframe: Medellín was the most dangerous city in the world 50 years ago. Today at least seven U.S. cities rank higher on global homicide lists and Medellín is not in the top hundred.
Ayahuasca was historically popularized in Colombia. The Yajé Letters by Burroughs and Ginsberg, and Richard Evans Schultes‘s ethnobotanical expeditions, put it on the map. Dennis and Terence McKenna came through as well. The narco era pushed psychedelic tourism to Peru and Costa Rica, and Sam argues most Costa Rican ayahuasca is sourced from Colombia anyway.
Colombian regulation is tight. Only indigenous people with an official council permit can serve ayahuasca. Sam’s shaman operates under that permit.
Sam is producing a documentary with Sam Lipman-Stern (of VICE’s Telemarketers) pitched as a “cocaine to ayahuasca” rebrand of Colombia.
From Oil and Gas to Purpose [39:43]
The wealth arrived early and hollow. $500 a day tax-free bought everything society advertises and delivered no happiness.
Sam’s baseline was a traumatic childhood that taught him emotions were painful. He had, in his words, tuned his emotional dial to zero.
Travel did not fix it. Ayahuasca did.
The depression lifted. Purpose emerged. Sam dedicated his life to the medicine that rescued him.
He does not universalize. Some guests leave LaWayra with a new vocation. Others leave with a new relationship to the one they already had.
Marxism, AI Unemployment, and Finland’s Housing Answer [43:56]
Richard asks Sam what he thinks of “from each according to his ability, to each according to their need.”
Sam grew up inside the Soviet aftermath. He knows the slogan’s failure mode: resentment at unequal contribution destroys motivation.
He floats that AI, blockchain, and a post-scarcity planning layer might change the calculus, and asks Richard how motivation works without extrinsic reward.
Richard’s answer is the teaching moment of the episode. People are already motivated. The engine is purpose. The purpose does not have to be large. Winston Churchill built a brick wall in his backyard. JFK put a man on the moon. The structure is the same.
Richard then pivots to the political implication. Autonomous driving alone will eliminate every truck and cab driver. Millions of jobs collapse in one wave. If working society does not plan for the displaced, the unrest will dwarf any unemployment check.
The pragmatic template exists. Finland has largely ended homelessness by housing people without charging rent, on the basis that ER and fire-department costs for the unhoused exceed the cost of housing. Washington state’s 1811 Eastlake program showed the same math in the U.S.
Purpose is the floor of any functioning political economy
Richard’s through-line from psychedelic healing to housing-first policy is the same argument in two registers.
“What matters is having purpose. I think people are motivated towards purpose.” — Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Psychedelics, Hydration, and the Closing Invitation [52:44]
Hydration during ceremony is non-trivial. Purging drains fluids. LaWayra keeps electrolyte drinks on hand.
Richard thanks Sam and gives him space to say anything he wished he had said. Sam uses it to thank Richard for continuing to broadcast at 87 and to reinforce that older voices matter in a world without elders.
Sam’s two closing asks to listeners: consider visiting Colombia, and if ayahuasca interests you, come to LaWayra. If you are not ready to drink, listen to his podcast.
He extends the invitation to Richard himself: come be the oldest guest on record.
“I appreciate that in your very old age you’re still creating content and educating people... We have modern-day elders, or grandfluencers as you said, and I appreciate that you continue doing that work.” — Sam Believ
Resources mentioned
LaWayra Ayahuasca Retreat — Sam’s retreat, also reachable at lawayra.com
Ayahuasca Podcast with Sam Believ — long-form conversations on plant medicine, available on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, and Amazon Music
The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines by Dr. Richard Louis Miller (Park Street Press / Inner Traditions, May 5, 2026) — [pre-order link]
Psychedelic Medicine (2017) and Psychedelic Wisdom (2022), Richard’s prior two psychedelics titles
Master Your Mind, Richard’s most recent book
Rick Doblin — founder of MAPS, upcoming guest on Sam’s podcast
Dennis McKenna — ethnopharmacologist, past guest on Sam’s podcast
Gabor Maté — physician and author, past guest on Sam’s podcast
Richard Evans Schultes — Harvard ethnobotanist whose Colombian expeditions helped introduce ayahuasca to the West
The Yajé Letters — Burroughs and Ginsberg, 1963
Mind, Body, Health and Politics archive at mindbodyhealthpolitics.org — 21 years, open source
Housing First Finland via the Y-Foundation and Washington state’s 1811 Eastlake project
