The Leckie Protocol: Discussing Bryan Johnson’s 5-MeO-DMT Session

Written by Martin Ball

Bryan Johnson’s livestreamed 5-MeO-DMT session prompted questions about the Leckie Protocol and why it combines vaporized and injected 5-MeO-DMT. In this follow-up conversation, Martin Ball speaks with Steve Rio of Enfold in Canada about the approach—and the preparation, facilitation and integration that surround it.

The discussion goes beyond administration. Martin and Steve consider the difference between low, moderate and full-release experiences, why a beautiful first experience does not predict everyone else’s, and what can happen as the ego returns. Steve also explains the protocol’s name, the role of the setting, and Enfold’s observational research.

If you’re making sense of your own psychedelic experience, Martin offers one-to-one integration support. For those interested in studying his approach to integration work, explore his integration specialist training.

This interview is presented for education, not as medical advice or a guide to self-administration. Descriptions of doses, effects and therapeutic possibilities are the speakers’ accounts and opinions, not an endorsement or an established safety standard.

Key discussion points

  • Context matters: Steve describes the protocol as one part of Enfold’s multi-day process, not a stand-alone combination of substances or doses.

  • The experience and the integration period can differ: both speakers describe difficult material emerging after an initially positive session, and the reverse.

  • Full release is not simply ‘more’ of a low-dose experience: Martin and Steve distinguish their accounts of non-dual experience from experiences in which the ordinary sense of self remains.

  • Witnesses and facilitator behavior matter: the conversation examines emotional neutrality, unnecessary interruption, and filming for oneself versus filming for an audience.

  • The proposed longer tail is central to Steve’s explanation: he describes combining a rapid peak with more time for processing, while acknowledging that the saturation graphic is an estimate.

Contents

Full interview transcript

Lightly edited for readability, with fillers and false starts reduced. Timestamps are approximate navigation points from the video captions. Speaker labels identify the principal voice in each turn; brief overlapping acknowledgments are not all separately attributed.

Bryan Johnson’s 5-MeO-DMT session: why this conversation matters

Martin Ball — 0:16

As viewers can see, here is a video with me and Steve Rio. For people who follow the Entheogenic Evolution podcast, I'm sure that you're aware that I already have a podcast episode with Steve that we recorded last year about Enfold where he works in Canada which provides 5-MeO-DMT by way of injection. So anybody who's curious that the title of that podcast episode is Enfold injectable 5-MeO-DMT with Steve Rio and it's available on the Entheogenic Evolution YouTube channel and elsewhere. And due to recent events Steve and I thought it'd be great for us to have another conversation about injectable 5-MeO-DMT.

And I thought it'd be great why don't we just make a video. So just you know full disclosure right from the beginning I normally don't make videos with people so this is a little bit different for me. Normally we use video we record the conversation I put it out on the podcast. But I wanted to be able to do some screen sharing in our conversation today. So that's what has inspired this format here. And I already joked with Steve that we had got a little bit of a yin and yang kind of thing going on here. A little white and black. But Steve welcome back.

I would say welcome back to the podcast but that this is a video that will go on YouTube so it's not actually on the podcast but it's great to see you again.

Steve Rio — 1:35

Great to see you again too, man. Happy to be here.

Martin Ball — 1:38

Yeah. So what brings us together today is the other month there was the very public intentionally very public administration of both injectable and vaporized 5-MeO-DMT for Bryan Johnson who my understanding he's one of these very very rich guys and he was interested that 5-MeO perhaps has quote longevity properties which is not why most people take 5-MeO-DMT. Let's just put that out there. And this was very public. It was I think it was live streamed on X. Is that correct?

Steve Rio — 2:18

Yeah, it was live streamed on X. Yeah, I think at the time of taking the dose there was over 300,000 people watching concurrently. I think over a million people have probably seen that now.

Martin Ball — 2:29

Wow, that's a lot of people. That's a very public experience of 5-MeO-DMT. I watched a few clips from it. I personally have some issues with X and right now Elon Musk. I don't like the way that he's been running X. So I personally I try not to support X because I think he leans towards technofascism in ways that I just I don't jive with. But anyway, that's a completely different issue. But I was able to observe some of the reactions around people's comments about the process with sorry I spaced his name. Was it Bryan? Is that right? Bryan.

So we just want to talk about all of this stuff. And one of the things that we're going to be talking about is I saw a lot of people comment like, "Whoa, he did both an injection and vaporizing and look at that milligram number. Isn't that like too much?" And then I also saw people commenting about, oh well, if it's something is it's done as a performance because it's being video recorded. So I thought that was interesting.

And just maybe sorry I'm monologuing here a little bit Steve but just one thing that I wanted to also say in this that I think is really worthwhile is I then saw a number of articles that were published about Bryan Johnson had his experience. And you know I've been public about 5-MeO-DMT for the past over 18 years now and one of the things that frustrates me is when popular articles get written about 5-MeO is that they almost always contain incorrect information.

And so this is something that I also saw in sort of the aftermath of Bryan Johnson's experience was articles saying, "Oh, well, in the past people used to lick toads to get 5-MeO-DMT." That is a myth. Never, ever, ever licked toads. There is no evidence for that ever. Then also saw people saying, "Oh, this is the most powerful form of DMT." 5-MeO-DMT is not DMT. DMT is its own molecule. 5-MeO-DMT, that's another molecule.

And then also saw people writing about how well modern psychonauts have learned how to extract 5-MeO-DMT more efficiently from the Sonoran Desert toad and therefore are having more powerful experiences from back when they used to lick it. And this is just another absolute fallacy. Nobody extracts 5-MeO from toad secretions and the toad secretions had absolutely nothing to do with Bryan Johnson's experience. So those are just some repeated myths and inaccuracies that we see just repeated in the media.

So 5-MeO is sort of having this moment within the broader consciousness in media, but there's still a lot of misunderstandings and just a lot of blatantly incorrect information that's put out there. Yeah. Yeah.

Media myths, toads and the pure molecule

Steve Rio — 5:39

Yeah. It's you know it's whenever like when you're an expert in something and then it goes into the mainstream zeitgeist it's always really complicated because yeah we you know you just pray and hope that people are going to talk about it with some sophistication. And that almost never happens. I mean, look at what happened with mushrooms, quote unquote mushrooms, right? And you know, for multiple years, all the headlines were Johns Hopkins doing mushroom trials. While they were working with synthetic, right, psilocybin. All of the clinical trials do not involve—none of them. Well, maybe I'm not gonna say none of them.

Most of them do not involve mushrooms and all the headlines say mushrooms do this and mushrooms do that. And all the headlines were mushrooms cure depression, right? So, this is not new and it's not gonna go away. And it's been interesting watching that happen now with 5-MeO. And you know, it makes me kind of think as people in the space, what's our responsibility? What's our opportunity? What do we how do we participate in like because I've seen a lot of people say, "Oh, this should never happen.

People shouldn't do this kind of thing and we shouldn't." But on the same token everybody wants to raise awareness about the potential of psychedelics so you can't really have both you know sooner or later somebody famous or somebody big is gonna you know sooner or later Oprah is gonna talk about her ayahuasca journeys or whatever. And these things you know Tony Robbins has done that and people have done stuff like that so we can't stop that from happening how do we respond but there but what we're seeing is this massive gap in the education of the mainstream zeitgeist is just a huge gap.

Martin Ball — 7:31

Yeah. And I think with 5-MeO it's tricky because I think it's kind of inherently fascinating for people that there is this incredibly potent molecule that does come from a toad. And that's it's just interesting, right? This idea that people take the secretions of this toad. Oh, and this is another one. It's almost uniformly described as the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. Yeah. So, we just had a little technical difficulty there for anybody watching. So, if you see like a jump in the video, that's what it was.

But I was just kind of ranting a little bit on how often again in the media it is described as the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. And it's just semantics, but it's a technical point that it's not venom. Venom is something that is injected into the body via a bite or a sting. And toads don't bite anyone that they have these large glands on their body. And if you squeeze them or if they're attacked by a predator and you know a predator comes and grips it with their mouth that then it secretes these secretions. They're secretions. It's not venom, right?

There's no such thing as a venomous toad. Like that's you know mean nasty teeth would be the venomous toad. And I think that it just plays into that there's something of a little bit of a thrill with this idea that, oh, it's a toad and like what a bizarre creature for this potent molecule to come from. But, I think it's a really good point that you made that often when these things are discussed in the media.

It kind of falls into almost unconsciously that something that we see a lot of in the psychedelic community is sometimes a really radical distinction between what is deemed to be organic and natural and therefore plant medicine and good versus oh something synthetic made in a lab. And therefore it's bad. But it's really important to distinguish that when it comes to scientific studies and medical studies, they're not using the organic products.

That they're using the pure molecules because that's the only way that you can guarantee that you're dealing with precise levels and dosages that you can never get that from an organic source because there's going to be variability in the concentration.

Steve Rio — 9:49

That's right. And I think there's yeah, I think in general humans we have this aversion to human-made. It's like when we say lab synthetic, we're actually talking about human-made. Humans are nature. Everything is nature. Sometimes we distort nature in ways that's not healthy. Sometimes we can recreate nature in ways that is almost identical. Like when you vaporize 5-MeO-DMT the pure molecule where you vaporize bufo all the other alkaloids burn off and what you're left with is 5-MeO-DMT. It doesn't matter how that 5-MeO-DMT, it doesn't matter if that 5-MeO-DMT was made in a petri dish with algae and it was enzymatically created or it was synthesized.

If it's 5-MeO-DMT, it's 5-MeO-DMT and it doesn't actually matter. But people we get we like to fantasize about the meaning of it when it's coming from a plant versus when it's coming from a lab. I think there's some - I am purely through that, I personally find that most synthetics and this gets a lot of people, you know, disagree with me and I totally that's fine. But I prefer synthetic molecules much more often because I find it's easier on the digestive system. It's easier on my liver.

It's a it's a clearer experience and I just that's what I prefer personally and I totally understand if you like you know and I also understand you know for mushrooms there's something about the gut and about getting mushrooms into the gut. And maybe there's some other healing benefits or health benefits and I'm open to that too but as f ar as having a psychedelic journey or a trip or a whatever you want to call it I personally prefer synthetic yeah most of the time yeah.

Martin Ball — 11:26

I would say that I do as well that I like that it in my own personal phenomenological experience, I do think that it's a purer and cleaner experience. It's just less complicated by other physiological things like you mentioned with mushrooms like you know a long-running little personal joke of mine is that oh mushrooms would be perfect if they didn't give me gas but you know they do that I get discomfort in my digestive system. And I don't find that it contributes to the experience versus you know I did a lot of work with 4-AcO-DMT which is a pure.

Steve Rio — 12:03

I love 4-AcO-DMT.

Martin Ball — 12:05

But it's so clean right And yeah, I find for me absent the gas and the digestive issues and the burping and the taste that I don't really experience much of a phenomenological difference between 4-AcO-DMT and psilocybin mushrooms that yeah this is like psilocybin yeah just without having to eat a bunch of mushrooms.

Steve Rio — 12:29

Yeah, I said I kind of agree with you except I actually find 4-AcO-DMT to be clearer like you can stay you can hold a thread more clearly with 4-AcO-DMT and that I find that I bring more back with me than I do mushrooms because mushrooms I think they're sort of swirling around a lot. Yeah, which is okay. But I love the clarity of 4-AcO-DMT And then just from a purely in enjoyment or phenomenology perspective, I love the increased visual aspect of 4-AcO-DMT It's much more DMTish. It's much more crystalline.

It's actually to me closer to an ayahuasca experience minus all the gastrointestinal stuff than it is mushrooms. Like I just really enjoy it. I to me it's far superior. And I really enjoy it.

Martin Ball — 13:19

Yeah. And it's easy to work with. And I just want to give a little shout out to myself here because earlier you mentioned a phrase that I started promoting back sort of in the earlier days of the 5-MeO public discourse where there's really some strong claims made on the Bufo side that Bufo is better. And that it produces effects that the synthetic molecule doesn't produce. So it was that was back in the 2010s and I introduced the phrase of well let's just call synthetic 5-MeO let's call it the pure molecule.

That I introduced because I wanted to bring it out of that ideological divide of organic versus synthetic and that somehow something that's synthetic is inherently less than. It's just a proposition that I myself don't agree with and so I wanted to use language to kind of indicate that there's something of value actually if we're going synthetic because it is pure and it does provide a cleaner experience.

And you know something that comes up a lot that with people that I speak with yeah you know this is not a judgment this is not to say that something is better or something is worse but in my experience many people who have experienced both bufo. And the pure molecule of 5-MeO tend to say not that they think one is better than the other but when they're comparing them they often say very similar to what you just said about 4-AcO versus mushrooms is that the pure molecule just seems to be a cleaner smoother.

And clearer experience to some degree versus Bufo is a bit more tumultuous a bit more jagged a bit more rough in some ways and these are, you know, these are very relativistic kind of descriptions and terms, but I think that people who have been able to compare the two from their own experience that they tend towards agreement with those statements. I don't know if you've experienced anything like that.

Steve Rio — 15:24

Yeah, I think that's right. I've done I've worked with both and there's like a there is a slight feel variance and there are a few other overtones or undertones or whatever you want to call them to bufo that maybe aren't there with five and ultimately I just I don't I think it's just it's preference. And then we can have the we can have the ethical conversation about you know milking toads and all that stuff but if we're just purely talking about which one is better I don't think either is better or worse. I just think people have preferences.

I think when we're most people who are more in the synthetic side of their preference, they're not generally being like, "Well, yeah, but organics are terrible and they're bad and you shouldn't do them." I think there's more coming from the other side. There's like there's more of an ideological thing going on with people who are like standing up for plants or standing up for which I also think it's like we're always talking about all the extraction that humans do. Well We don't have to extract, you know, vines out of the Amazon if we just synthesize DMT.

And we don't need to extract toads if we're synthesizing 5-MeO, 5-MeO. We don't need to extract peyote if we're synthesizing mescaline.

Martin Ball — 16:33

Yeah. Yeah. That actually brings me to another recent development that was put out there in numerous stories about how some scientists genetically engineered a tobacco plant to produce a number of different molecules including 5-MeO. And so then these articles came out saying well is would this be a replacement for toad secretions that you know here we can have a bioavailable source of 5-MeO-DMT and then we wouldn't have to harvest from the toads but it completely missed the point of you don't need to use a tobacco plant to do this. You don't need to genetically you just make it in a lab.

I mean that's all you need to do is make it in a lab.

Steve Rio — 17:16

Yeah. I'm not sure. Yeah. Exactly. I'm not I don't know if all of these innovation type things are fueled by the potential of process patents potentially of just like oh if I come up with a new process for making 5-MeO, then I can patent that and I can call that if I can enforce that for a patent or if it's just scientists you know bored scientists because if you're a scientist why not nerd out.

And try and figure out how to grow 5-MeO on a tobacco plant like that sounds interesting and fun but the utility of that I agree it's I'm not sure like Why are we looking for another way? I'm I you know ultimately we the last 20 years or so this the natural marketing you know in food has been become this whole thing about like natural or organic or all it's kind of all natural thing which there's some merit to that of course.

But then it's translated into wellness products where a lot of times people are talking about a final what you're actually left with which is a molecule it actually has no it doesn't if you get a 5-MeO molecule and if it was made on a tobacco plant or is made in algae, which is something that people can do. You can grow 5-MeO in algae. People have shown that you can grow it in a mushroom or you can synthesize it or you can take it from a toad and extract it out of the toad secretion. You're it's just 5-MeO So, what's the simplest what's the simplest way?

5-MeO is actually quite easy to synthesize. It's not all that complicated, I think. Like, you know, in relative terms, it's fairly the low cost.

Martin Ball — 18:46

Yeah, seems to be obvious. This is genetically engineering a tobacco plant and then trying to increase the production value of that and then going through the extraction process. This is a lot of unnecessary steps now as pure science. Pretty cool, right? Yeah, totally. We got a tobacco plant to grow a bunch of tryptamines but it's just it's just not necessary. I think part of it you are in Canada yeah it's a different world in Canada because in Canada 5-MeO is not illegal and it was made illegal in the United States.

Was it like January 19th of 2011 is when it was made specifically made illegal in the United States. And this is right around the time that 5-MeO first started being noticed more publicly. I'm part of the reason for that. You know, I started my podcast in 2008 and had my first 5-MeO experience in January of 2008 and I was like, this is something I'm gonna be spending the rest of my life talking about because this is the most important molecule that exists on the planet.

I brought people like James Oroc on, brought Hal from the Temple of Awakening Divinity and then around the same time Toad was becoming popular in Mexico and so awareness was starting to spread out around 5. And then it was made illegal and here in the United States and prior to that, I mean, I'll just, I will reveal that I could order 10 grams of 5-MeO from China for like $200 before it was made illegal. Super easy to get. It would show up in the mail. It's not a problem. It wasn't an illegal substance. Now possibly could be prosecuted through the analogs act.

But the effect of that ultimately was that whereas prior to it being made illegal, it was fairly easy for people in the United States to get the pure molecule of 5-MeO, But then in making it illegal, that actually tremendously upped the pressure on harvesting secretions from the toads because people could just go out into the desert, catch a toad. And squeeze it and do that all on their own. And so it actually promoted the harvesting of toad secretions.

And so now we kind of see this divide where in the United States a lot of people who facilitate 5-MeO experiences work with toad secretions because it's easier to get also very very popular in Mexico to work with toad secretions. But in Canada where it has not been scheduled you well you can tell the audience how easy is it for you to get 5-MeO that you administer at Enfold? Is it difficult?

Access, vape pens and responsible facilitation

Steve Rio — 21:37

Well, I could tell two stories. So, but one one part is we have been able like we work at a bit of a different quality and scale. So, we work directly with a lab which we you know have to build a relationship with. We buy in fairly large volumes. We're working with 99.8% pure 5-MeO. We're working in a bit of a different class of substance than most people. But it's funny you can buy 5-MeO vape pens in stores downtown. You can buy them on the internet. You can buy them like very from well, you know, well branded, nice packaging.

Like it is it is a consumer product in Canada right now. That is technically illegal. It is not a it is not a substance that you can technically sell as a product, but there is no enforcement of that. So there's it is rampant right now along with, you know, there's all the mushroom stores in Vancouver. So if you come to Vancouver, you can walk into a store and it's a beautiful display. It looks like some of them look like Apple stores, but it's just filled with like 30 or 40 strains of mushrooms and they're really beautifully grown and they're excellent.

And the clerk or person working there will tell you this strain is for that and this strain is, you know, it's quite sophisticated. I don't know how much background knowledge there actually is there, but either way, that's interesting. And you can buy Yeah. DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, all sorts of stuff. So, it's a bit of a wild situation up here right now. I actually I'm very liberal about psychedelics. I don't think we should be randomly selling 5-MeO vape pens to everybody. I'm a little nervous about that to be honest. I don't know how you feel about that.

Martin Ball — 23:12

Yeah, it's not really an idea that I'm terribly supportive of because as you and I both know, as I'm sure the viewing audience probably knows as well, is that even a small dose of 5-MeO, while it doesn't last very long, it still is incredibly potent. And this can be even for a seasoned psychonaut, this can be surprising because you might think, "Oh, I'm only taking one or two milligrams." And yeah, it only lasts for a couple of minutes, but it comes on so quickly and it is so powerful that it's startling. And like the idea.

Okay, so I like I use my cannabis vape pen, right? So cannabis is legal in the United States. I've been using cannabis since I was like 15 years old. And you know, take a hit off of that and it's not a big deal, right? Especially as someone who's been saturated with cannabis for a number of years, It is not a big deal. But just imagining like if somebody accidentally or unintentionally grabbed a 5-MeO vape pen thinking, "Oh, this is just a hit of cannabis." I mean, the difference is startling. And that I've always advised for anybody who wants to work with 5-MeO.

I've always encouraged please work with a skilled facilitator at least for the first several times that you're working with it because it's incredibly potent. And once we get into those non-dual states, your ego is not going to be there to take care of you or to decide what you should or should not do. And it's very important to have someone who knows how to work with people in those states to protect and guide you through that. And that you might start releasing traumas or enacting some kind of unconscious patterning and processing that you don't have any control over.

And you're not going to know that until you have that experience. And therefore, just don't do it on your own. And then I get a little bit more flexible if people say, "Well, yeah, I've done like five sessions, five full release doses with a facilitator. I want to start working with it on my own." And at that point, I said, "Well, okay, if you have a good idea of how well you're able to ride through that, yeah, it's potentially safer for you to do it on your own. Please, I agree. Have have a facilitator introduce you first.

Don't just go out and get your own vape pen and start working with it." But I think that's just very dangerous.

Steve Rio — 25:45

Yeah, I agree with all that. Yeah, I just think Yeah, I don't It's funny the proliferation of five pens, not only do more people I think you know what we are seeing in our work here is that three years ago, maybe even maybe maybe even less, most people that came to see us had never worked with five. So they were signing up, they're investing in their first five experience in a proper container, you know.

Now I would say 30 sometimes 40% of guests have done 5-MeO before and they're often coming to see us as a corrective experience or as a hey I experienced five and I could see the power of it but I didn't really get it because the container wasn't right like I you know I didn't know nobody prepared me for it nobody integrated it with me. So it's interesting to see how many people now are accessing five like it just showed me in a couple of years how quickly it's dispersed and this is mostly mostly Americans but a lot of Canadians and Europeans and folks from Asia.

And stuff too. So it's quickly becoming much more popular everywhere. So that's an interesting thing and here at least in Canada the two things that are happening one is that vape pens are very easy to get. So it's really easy to become a 5-MeO facilitator and it's really I think in general like I get the inclination once you do something like this and if you have a good experience that you want to evangelize it you know.

And you want to share it with your friends like that's a natural impulse I don't think it's a very safe thing to do or it does you know it's misguided, but it generally makes sense as an impulse but it's very easy to become you know a little mini shaman. And roll around with your five pen and go to your buddy's house and serve everybody five. By being able to buy these vape pens that are you can buy fairly strong vape pens off the internet. Like you can buy breakthrough vape pens on the internet. So suddenly everybody has access to it.

And that's a little that's a little sketchy and you know I just think we just need to keep educating people, keep educating people. Keep educating people. And the message is exactly what you said. Don't do it alone. Especially not never do it alone the first time ever. Or never do it with somebody who doesn't know what they're doing the first time ever. Yeah. It's like the one it's like that and ibogaine and maybe some of the other super strong like maybe you don't want to do ayahuasca by yourself, but who's doing that anyway? But like a lot of the psychedelics I'm pretty liberal about.

It's like you know what when I was 14 or whatever I did some pretty massive heroic doses of mushrooms and survived you know I was fine. I'm so glad I didn't have a strong vape pen, a 5-MeO vape pen at 14 by myself.

The range of experiences and the limits of prediction

Martin Ball — 28:24

Yeah. Yeah. I think just jumping on what you were saying there sort of the evangelist phase this is also something I went through myself in the 5 world we kind of recognize it this is a normal it's a natural response that particularly for people who have a really positive experience yeah you know sort of the heart of love is this desire to share particularly something that's positive that when we experience something that.

And let's just be clear and in my opinion a positive experience with 5-MeO-DMT is incomparable to any other experience that a human being can have like this is like the pinnacle of human experience because it's so awe-inspiring and so amazing. And so then the natural inclination is I want to share this with everyone I love and everyone I care about and that I want to tell everyone about it and I want them to have the same experience I had Again, I think that's normal. And it's natural because it is overwhelmingly positive. The difficulty is that's not going to be everyone's experience.

And when we have had a positive experience, we might mistakenly assume that oh, this is going to be everyone's experience. And it for me, it was so easy. All I had to do was take a hit and it was the most amazing experience, the most life-affirming experience possible. And what we miss then is that some people are going to have a traumatic experience.

Some people are not going to be able to let go of their ego and it and it's going to be a battle and it's going to be a fight and that there can be all kinds of difficult materials that arise within someone's experience.

And in my opinion and experience I've found that you it's not really possible to make accurate predictions with people that this is why like I just released a video on my channel called the 5-MeO diagnostic round where I make the argument that until you get to that full release dose level, you can't really diagnose like how is this person going to be able to manage it?

You know that working working up to it, you can get some information, but it's so categorically different that once we get that full release dose level that's where we're able to really learn, okay, this person can let go, this person can't. This one has deep trauma that needs to be worked out. This person needs to scream and run around, right? But we don't know until we get there.

Steve Rio — 31:00

I agree. It's when we at the beginning of the Leckie Protocol, there's a there's a section saying, you know, as kind of a disclaimer saying this is a pretty intense administration approach with 5-MeO-DMT and it's we've developed in the sense that we have two full days in person with the guests before we even do this. We've spent three weeks preparing them.

You know there's all these steps and I agree with you like we do our best we do some very light dose work on day one where we work you know in the one to one and a half milligram range you get, you know you get a little bit of sense of where their nervous system is at. And how they talk about it after and how much they can connect with the experience and some people go deep and you know so you start to get a feel we do some heart opening work the next day you get a feel for what's really under the hood.

And but we've still learned that you just never make assumptions about what the actual ceremony is going to look Like because we've seen people who have really heavy trauma profiles, you know, maybe serious abuse profiles or something like that, childhood abuse profiles, have incredibly beautiful journeys. And very easy and light. And we've had people who seem like they're going to breeze through it, getting walloped, you know, and the truth is both are great. Both are great experiences. I don't discriminate and I think, you know, working through that tough stuff, that muck is like just as important.

It's not as fun, but it's actually potentially at at certain points in people's lives potentially more transformative than having a pure white light experience right off the bat. It just depends like white light experiences are, you know, exceptional. I think if you poll people who serve this medicine, I don't know what the percentage was, but I guess it's close to 100 percent that had amazing first experiences, you know, like that's why we're doing this, you know, that's true for Austin. And I for sure. And true for most anybody I've asked.

I haven't heard anybody say, "Yeah, it was super brutal the first time and now I'm serving it." I've never heard that. Yeah. Yeah. So, go ahead. I was just going to say, after our first experience, I had an incredibly beautiful first experience and since then I've had many many many very challenging experiences. I think there's like a little difference of like I was letting go but I was also just processing all the shame in my system and I was processing you know all this different stuff.

Like that's part of the work too and that's all good but the letting go piece is yeah that's I in my experience you know it's a pretty low percentage of people that are actually ready for white light white light journeys off the bat.

Martin Ball — 33:33

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's important just as you're highlighting here in this conversation that the white light experience is only it's subjectively better in our direct experience because it's amazing. But that doesn't mean that the difficult or challenging or you know in the thick of the muck experience that's not worse that actually might be more transformative and more necessary for someone. But the important point to speak to what you're saying here is that most people who facilitate started off with that was amazing. I want to give this amazing experience to other people.

And that if people jump into facilitation prematurely without understanding the full spectrum of what happens with 5-MeO then they those facilitators are often unprepared when somebody does have a difficult or challenging experience. And then you know I work on the integration side and a lot of people who have a difficult experience they believe that maybe they did something wrong or there's something wrong with them or they say well my facilitator just told me it was going to be beautiful. And it wasn't beautiful it was terrifying. So what's wrong with me? What did I do wrong?

And then sometimes facilitators themselves if they're inexperienced they might reinforce that by saying whoa we've only served people and they've had beautiful experiences like I don't know what's up with you.

Steve Rio — 35:00

I know that's the worst like that deflection is a it's actually a real disservice when that deflection happens. Yeah.

Martin Ball — 35:07

Yeah. And it just comes from the fact that a lot of people who facilitate they jumped in too early. They were feeling they're just riding that high of that white light experience and not really educating themselves or educating their potential clients about what really is the full range of the 5-MeO experience, what might be possible. And again, as we've been emphasizing is that you can't really predict with anyone. You can't just look at someone and say, "Oh, I think you're going to have a great time. I think it's going to be all white light for you." Like, you just don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Rio — 35:41

I always say the only thing I can promise you is it will be intense. Yeah. Like that's all I that's the only that's the guarantee. 100% of the time it's intense and everything else is variable. I was thinking as you were talking I'm realizing that I think I really got lucky in that—this was before we—I had my first experience and then we had a facilitator.

We brought him in to kind of learn from him and he was going to host at our home and we were recruiting friends and people who wanted to come have this experience and I had a friend, an older guy very very smart done a lot of meditation you know pretty anyway just like very just felt like. And I just went for a walk with him I was like this It's gonna be so beautiful and I kind of pitched him the white light you know because that's all I knew yet I mean I wasn't even a facilitator.

So I was just like you should come do this thing it's going to be awesome and he got just absolutely walloped like just screaming into the ground, like like the darkest experience. And it took him probably three or six months to fully integrate the experience. Luckily, he's a fairly resourced guy, has some money that you know wasn't didn't need to go back to work the next day or something like that. Like luckily he had a very very hard you know classically very hard integration.

Probably a lot of the kind of folks that find you saying I need help kind of guy and that was the literally this was about a year and a half before we started serving but that was my second experience of the medicine was sitting. And watching that happen. Yeah. And so I got the chance to be like oh here's a guy who I look up to and think is a great meditator and a super and was super low key and not nervous at all about coming into the experience. And then just got smacked.

And I just feel I'm realizing now how lucky I was to get to witness that early on because I always say to people if you want to serve this medicine witness 50 ceremonies and actually do integration work like follow up with people because that's the other piece that's missing is a lot of people hold the pen for somebody or hand the pen to somebody. But they don't do the follow-up. So they actually don't know how hard it is a month from now even if people have great experiences.

Like we also find this phenomenon where some people with a lot of trauma have a beautiful loving like the medicine just shows them love and it's kind of like the impetus they need to start this process of facing their trauma in a way. But it kind of it starts to pour out in the weeks and months after actually. So that's the hardest part not the journey itself. And if you're not paying attention you're not if you're not in communication with people afterwards you don't know what's happening in their world. Like you actually don't know what the sort of rubble you're leaving in the back.

You know what I mean? You got to be I think a lot of facilitators just because they're not offering that service of following up an integration or connection with their previous clients that they don't know.

Integration, preparation and informed consent

Martin Ball — 38:32

Yeah, I think that's such an important point. Like often when people contact me and say, "Hey, I'm going to be having an experience on this day. Can I schedule an integration call with you say the next day? What I will do is I will advise why don't you actually wait a few days between your session and when you're coming for integration because we don't really know how things are going to land and what energies are going to be up for you because it often doesn't show up right away.

And I think this is a really important distinction that you're making here is that the integration time period is not necessarily determined by the experience that the person had. So in other words, somebody might have a what they experience as a very difficult and challenging experience with 5-MeO, but might actually have a very pleasant and enjoyable integration period because they've been through the worst of it in a sense. And then other people might have that white light divine grace experience and just feel like they're on top of the world.

And then three, four days later suddenly they're processing some kind of uncovered trauma and it becomes scary, challenging and difficult. And even the most positive experience might bring up challenging material afterwards and have a difficult energetic process. And that there's so much time after a powerful 5-MeO experience for things to continue to move and process that it's again with if people are facilitating that aren't really aware of this or don't really attend to this that they're just going to have a very limited understanding of how 5-MeO actually works with people.

And that for those of us in the field who want to be conscientious about it that we need to be aware of all these things and that a positive experience doesn't mean it's going to be easy afterwards. And also a challenging experience doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be challenging. But there's all these potentials. And at a very general level, what I have always liked to share over the years is that I've seen two basic trajectories with 5-MeO. One is somebody takes their first full release dose and it's just that white light, divine non-dual infinite unconditional love and it's just it's amazing.

I mean we can't overstate how amazing it is and but then after that kind of like you were describing for yourself it's actually really common that it becomes more personal and individuated afterwards where for example lots of people say well the first time I got the white light experience. And I've done it 20 times and I've I've never gotten the white light experience again that it's been more about dealing with my crap and so this kind of this unwinding and deconstruction process and then the other general trajectory is that some people need to go through an extensive process of unwinding, deconstructing, encountering, releasing, letting go.

And then eventually they get to, oh, I can just surrender and it is this beautiful, loving experience. But it's just our knowledge is incomplete if we're just telling everyone, oh, it's going to be beautiful for everyone every time.

Steve Rio — 41:49

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Or that's the point or that's Yeah. Or that if that doesn't happen, there's something wrong with the person or yeah, it's we're always we're always we may have mentioned this last time we talked, but I think what we're always discussing internally here is how do we really be as upfront about what might happen without freaking people out, without implanting negativity into the experience, like without, you know, kind of placeboing in the worst possible experience because we're also very suggestive as humans, right? So you got to like draw that balance.

But I'd rather I think we'd rather make sure people have really clear informed consent about how big and how challenging this can be and also what to do if that happens. Like you know it's ultimately if you know how to when that when the medicine hits because 5-MeO is so at high dose at least is so it's not an intellect you're not intellectually processing the sadness of your three year old, You're just feeling it. You're just feeling the energy in your system that is that is not that is stuck. And so you're finally feeling that pain or that sadness or that fear.

And if you're if you have been prepared to orient yourself towards, hey, whatever comes, welcome it. Like just welcome it. Like fall back into it. Dive into it like a pool. Just feel the energy of it. Just move through it. Don't think about it. Don't worry about it. Don't fix it. Just feel it. Feel it all. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. And that can be really, really incredible.

Like and like you say, some people have really hard experiences and the next day they wake up feeling like a million bucks, you know, like and that's and that's amazing because they actually just were able to feel through a ton of stuck energy in their nervous system. Ultimately, like that's kind of all this is just working through energy in the nervous system.

Martin Ball — 43:36

Yeah, that's why I like to educate people on that with the idea of this is going to amplify every energy possible and it can find anywhere that you might be stuck or unprocessed or that might have energies that you need to attend to. But kind of along the lines of what you're saying here is that the job is to go all the way into it and allow yourself to feel that, but you don't need to fix it. You don't need to figure it out. You don't need to do anything about it.

And so I think educating people along these lines saying, "Yeah, like some energies are challenging. Some are really pleasant and ecstatic." We're going to be going into big energy. Your job is to allow yourself to go all the way in, meet whatever arises there, and process that and feel it. That giving people that understanding, I think, can help prepare them for the reality of the experience. And it's just I always find it tragic when somebody has a difficult experience or even a difficult integration afterwards. And I mean honestly sometimes people are in tears and they're just like nobody told me it could be like this.

And sometimes people say I never would have chosen to work with this if somebody had told me that this was a possibility. Now, we can't actually know if that's true because maybe somebody said, "Look, here's the good and the bad. Here's the difficult and here's the easy." And people still might say, "Yeah, I do it anyway." But if somebody has not been told, if they have just been given this spiritual spotlight of, "Oh, it's gonna be this white light. It's gonna be so beautiful." If that's all they've been told, then they are gonna have a more difficult time.

And just that sense of, oh man, I really made the wrong decision and nobody told me it would be like this. I wish somebody had told me. And that's I'm always on the side of let's educate people and let them make informed decisions for themselves.

Steve Rio — 45:33

Yeah. And as you're speaking, what comes to me on that is just that the whole point of this experience is to energetically process and like stuff that's been stuck a long time because things happened at a time where we didn't have we were overwhelmed by something. And it got stuck in our system, right? And so we're three years old and something happens and we and we freak out and we lock it in. And this is a chance to finally push like let that energy move just to and again you don't need to do anything except express the energy in whatever way feels natural.

But when we don't educate people when people aren't educated about it actually just recreates the exact same scenario of I thought this was going to be okay. It's not okay. I guess life is scary It literally reinforces the exact same paradigm that people are coming to work through to overcome right this paradigm that we have anything to be afraid of that we are in any way not fully you know immutable.

But it's really interesting like it just it just recreates that loop for people that I thought it was gonna I was gonna be okay and I am not okay and now I have to be fearful.

Martin Ball — 46:44

Yeah. And that's where again with that education, that preparation and that feedback with the facilitator, that's where I find that a facilitator can really help people even in the moment to help them face those difficult energies and really move through them with grace rather than fighting with them or trying to fix them or trying to stop them. I mean, yeah, it's intense.

You know, I sort of jokingly use the phrase of the cosmic washing machine and most people say like, "Yeah, I felt like the whole universe was turning inside out through me and like that was intense and that was hard." It's like, "Yeah, but if you just let it happen, you do come out the other end and you feel clean, but we react with fear and this is wrong. I need to stop it." That's the recipe for a potentially disastrous and traumatic experience.

And here again is where if the facilitator is inexperienced and they see this happening with someone and they think, "Oh god, there's something really wrong happening, then they add that panicked energy into the client's experience and then it just spirals out of control. And that it needs to be met with grace and met with poise." And that's again where a skilled experienced facilitator makes such a powerful difference with the 5-MeO experience. And that's why it's so important.

Like please anybody watching this or listening to this like if you're approached by someone who's like, "Yeah, I've tried it a few times and I want to share it with you." You know, just like go find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. Go to Enfold in Canada - I don't get any commissions.

Steve Rio — 48:25

What you just said described to me the ideal the ideal work of a facilitator is that they know how to hold their nervous system in a neutral and loving and open and compassionate way like you said so that when that huge energetic release is happening that person's nervous system is receiving hey it's okay this is totally fine you I'm here with you I'm going to help you ride it out. And you're good like this is good this is fine you know that's a big part of the whole experience which again it keeps mimicking back.

If you're three years old and you're upset and your mom gets equally as upset or gets upset that you're upset, that is not a good that is going to reinforce you know, a lack of safety in your in your nervous system. And what we're working to mostly do with people is help correct those those imbalances in the nervous system or those stucknesses in the nervous system and letting people finally work through that stuff. Work through their deepest darkest emotions in a in a safe container and where they've been contextualized to realize this is not going to kill you.

Anything you feel today, anything you experience is your nervous system. Yeah. You're carrying it around anyway. So either we turn around and face the boogeyman or the boogeyman just keeps following you around for the rest of your life. So that's really the choice we're making and it's really powerful when you turn around.

Witnesses and facilitator neutrality

Martin Ball — 49:39

Yeah. And that's where the facilitator as you say if they are grounded and clear and present in their own nervous system. Yeah. You know we are dealing with when somebody consumes 5-MeO those normal boundaries and borders that we have through the ego those are being dissolved and whether or not someone is consciously aware of how the facilitator is behaving in the space they're actually going to be feeling that their own nervous system is going to be open. And receptive to that. So how the facilitator works in the space has it doesn't determine the outcome but it has a huge impact on how things proceed.

And this is where as you say if somebody has had an opportunity to observe a lot of different people having a 5-MeO experience then their nervous system has now been acclimated to oh there's this whole range of events that might take place. I don't need to freak out, right? And like this is something that happens. So I don't know if you guys allow this at Enfold, but back when I facilitated that I always said that the client can bring a witness if they want or they can bring several witnesses. I don't care. You can bring people with you.

But I always gave a little talk and had instructions that if you are witnessing, it's very important for you just to remain neutral. Even if your friend or loved one, even if they seem to be going through something horrific, I need you to trust that they're going to be okay. You are not to intervene. You are not to come at them with panicked energy. And that if I, as the facilitator feel that you are not able to just maintain a neutral energetic presence, I may ask you to leave the room.

And if the person having their session feels that your energy or presence is disruptive to their process, they also have the right to ask you to leave the room. And it's not personal. It's just that we do need to maintain a certain energetic hygiene within this space so that people aren't unnecessarily being imprinted with panic or worry or concern or that you're freaking out over here on the side and that's going to feed into their experience. And let alone like how the facilitator is handling themselves. You know, I didn't need to lecture myself because I know how to handle my stuff. Yeah.

In that context, but I just think it's very important to understand that these dynamics are all at play and that it's not just the person having their experience. It's in the context of who's serving them, how they're being served, what's going on in the space. And this is also why I am not a fan when I see people's videos of I was served toad on a beach in Mexico and there were people walking by and watching me have my process and then I got up.

And I ran down the beach because you know I'm trying to get away from it that I think it's important to have a carefully secured space for this very vulnerable and intimate experience and just not be impinged by other energies that may or may not understand what's going on.

Steve Rio — 53:01

I agree. Or there's like these circles where there's like 10 people or 12 people in the circle and somebody's in the middle getting served five and you are then energetically interacting with all of the anxieties and all of the projected fears and all of the stuff that's happening in that circle. That is impinging on your ability to just relax yourself which is hard enough as it is for one person let alone having to manage all of those energies.

Martin Ball — 53:24

Yeah. So on that question at Enfold do you allow witnesses or do you have a policy on that like how do you guys.

Steve Rio — 53:32

Yeah we allow witnesses so our you know the container is groups of six so we don't allow people to join for the week with somebody if they aren't participating in the process just because it creates a strange dynamic like everybody is going through something together.

But a lot of times people come with a good friend or with a sibling or with a partner and in those cases more than welcome to sit in on each other's ceremonies and witness and it we give it's funny we're almost word for word what you just described I don't need to repeat it the two words we say is just is just yeah please remain neutral.

And compassionate compassionate is different than empathetic you're not here to absorb their feelings and make them your feelings you're just here to hold loving neutral space for them and just project love towards them and hold neutrality because yeah because it's also really easy for people who grow up you know there's lots of a lot of people grow up having to caretake parents. And stuff like that.

And so they build these these sort of things like I gotta make you better and you know so they start to project their own anxieties into the person or kind of co-opt the experience by trying to fix it you know. So yeah, exactly. Exactly the same messaging and also the same messaging around, hey, we're gonna make this agreement that we're gonna do this and you're gonna sit in, but at any point anyone can pull the ripcord including me or like as a facilitator, us or the participant or the observer, if this is too intense for you, just step out of the room.

And as and everybody agrees that we are all allowed to take care of ourselves in whatever way we need to because that like that's the primary concern here. So exactly the same thing.

Recording sessions, privacy and integration

Martin Ball — 55:08

All right. Great. That's good to hear. Yeah. So, I want to get into the Leckie Protocol and talk more specifically about that. But, first actually, just since we were talking about witnesses, what it made me think of is oh, let's talk about the topic of filming and yeah. Like with this experience with Bryan Johnson which was filmed and then it was streamed live and then all kinds of people have been able to watch it and now he's done a number of interviews afterwards and he's talking all about it.

And you know I've watched some of those and I like what he has to say about his experience itself. But over at Enfold like what is the policy around video recording? Like what are your own thoughts around that? I have lots of my own thoughts on it.

Steve Rio — 55:53

Sure. So, a couple things. One is you know, by default, every ceremony is technically being recorded by a security camera. We have that in the room for us actually, you know, because when people are unconscious and they may make assumptions about something that happened because of some fear they experienced, right? So anyway, so that's just it by default. That footage is never viewed by anyone. It's essentially stored on a hard drive in case of any issues. There's never been one.

But the second thing we actually proactively take short videos and some photos for people like you know just little iPhone videos of peak moments of their experience in order to share them just privately with that person if they would like them. Usually about two to three weeks later once the dust is settled but I think it can be really helpful to see back what was the expression of your nervous system when you weren't there you know and what was the sound you made.

And sometimes that can help connect some dots or help people realize oh yeah there is there is this sadness in me or there is an anger in me that I should really work with you know it helps to close some loops for people I think that can be very valuable because regardless of how much people would like to just let go. And let the mind go. The mind comes back online after this experience and says, "What the heck just happened? Did anything happen? Did this work? Did it not?

Did I—there's a lot of chirping of the mind." The mind is not a huge fan of this you know the ego or the psyche, I guess, is what I'm talking about. Not a big fan of this whole thing, right? And so it's mostly looking for ways to undermine the progress, which is why some people have these beautiful experiences and then weeks later the mind is so confronted with the potential that we could be loved in that way that it just gets really dark, you know, all the fear loops start up. But that's an aside. But so anyway, we do some short filming.

Once in a while we have guests ask to set up a camera and film like film their own ceremony in entirety which in general we are fine with the you know it's totally fine. I the considerations I feel are one one is when we filmed for an audience like we shot a documentary back in August. So that was in a case where we have cameras in the room shooting all the things through the week. We know that's going to potentially have some impact.

So I think when third-party cameras, or when somewhere in your psyche, you know, other people are going to see this, there's a differentiation between that and filming for yourself. Not that one is bad or good, just that there's a difference between those two. Somewhere in your psyche, there's a good potential that it's going to dampen down the experience to some degree, right? You know, it's hard to imagine a psyche that's like, "Sure, I'll let the whole world see my deepest darkest pain." You know, as uncontrollable as this experience is, there is amazing mechanisms within our psyche to keep us safe to some degree, you know.

So, we've seen that a few times. I'm kind of bouncing all around, but like I think when somebody wants to film their entire experience, what we'll often suggest to them is that's fine. What I always recommend just don't watch the footage on the ferry ride out of here. Like don't like on like an hour after you leave, which is a couple days after their experience anyway. We do a lot of integration work first, but just let it breathe before you process it by watching it. I always I don't know.

I don't know what you think about that, but for me, I think there's a difference between the felt experience of five and the just allowing it to kind of bubble up in terms of what does this mean for me and what's this all about compared to watching it, which is very easy to fall into a much more analyzing mindset, which may or may not be super productive in the early days of integration.

Martin Ball — 59:54

Yeah. Well, I think that's great advice for people to potentially not watch it right away. I do like it when people have a video record of their session to potentially go back and review. I think it's really useful as an integration guide to be able to observe people's sessions and really, as you say, help identify, oh, look at look at how these emotions are being presented right here. Look at how this energy is being processed or presented. Look at how this is being expressed. But I think yeah, not immediately turning to the video to like, oh, how was my performance or how did I look?

I think that can be good. And then also, you didn't mention this, but even advising people not to watch it on the ferry going, you know, back to the mainland because even watching something like that could potentially reactivate someone. Absolutely. And so that's why, you know, we do need to be careful There's also the music that might have been used in your session. If people listen to the music like whoa and then even the sounds that they made in a session, if there's a recording of that and they hear that and then then they make those sounds, that also could engender a reactivation.

And it should be noted that also just talking about your experience can re-engender some of those emotions and energies and people can have reactivations by sharing about it. But I do like people to be able to have a record of it because as we've been talking about that when in the deepest states the ego is not there. It doesn't know what you're doing. And this is where there's like a really interesting discrepancy.

I'm sure that you've encountered this where someone says, "Well, it felt like I was like really fighting and running around all over the place and screaming and yelling." And then you can show them the video like actually, you were lying there doing nothing. And then the other side you have people who say wow like I don't think anything happened. And then you have video recording of them like rolling around screaming pulling out their hair. And so that I think that's very useful for people of again not necessarily right away like yeah well look at this.

But being able to like really kind of encounter like, wow, there's stuff going on in me that I didn't know or my internal perception was that something was happening and now I can see at the exterior level something totally different. I think that invites self-inquiry into like well, what's really going on with me.

And I also like that you just have security cameras but I think that this is very important because this is where like in the United States where all of this is done underground like a lot of people don't want any filming because oh it's underground we don't want to get in trouble right. But you kind of hinted at this sometimes people going through a session with 5-MeO, they will project a narrative of something that they think has happened or is happening. Yeah.

And it's completely a projection of the ego and therefore having a video recording to demonstrate this is what actually took place I think is very important like there have been times well certainly not just have been times but there are times you know oftentimes people will take their clothes off it happens in 5-MeO experiences. And there you know like some facilitators have been accused of removing people's clothing. We don't have video. We do know that people often people do strip their clothing off. It's just something that happens. It's not sexual in nature. It's just something that happens.

But having video footage to show like actually that was you taking your clothing off. I think that protects the facilitator. And that also sometimes people do act out violently or aggressively or even sexually. You know the client and there again that we do as a facilitator I think we want to be protected to show like look that wasn't me doing that so I think it serves both the facilitator and it serves the client there's a lot of purposes for that.

But I think it is just problematizing the United States where again people are operating underground and in secret and then some people are no no this is sacred you can't film it that's just something I don't agree with and then sort of on the opposite end of that. What we see a lot of in Mexico is people filming for their Instagram reels that they wanted as social media cred, which that's something that I am not really approving of.

Steve Rio — 1:04:45

Yeah, I think that comes back to in the category of when you're filming for the sake of an audience that has a much higher potential to impact your experience. Now, some people are very comfortable and accustomed to having an audience and there's a range there like somebody like celebrities or something like that are potentially, you know, very comfortable with that. But I think the whole is like filming for Instagram thing, you know, it's really easy to actually suppress what could have happened in that experience in order to make a better Instagram or to overemphasize your experience to make a better Instagram.

It's just like anyone who's experienced five the ego dissolves and then the ego comes back and in that coming back the more we can relax and let the just just slow down that process and keep staying with the experience the better off we are. So the more impetus our ego has to jump back in the driver's seat and be like whoa it'd be a really good video if I shrieked and screamed right now or it'd be a really good video if I said something really smart that I wrote before this you know ceremony right now.

You know those kind of things just can get in the way and so I think you just got to be super cautious about that. And you know it's not necessarily a it's a safety concern only when somebody truly represses something that needed to be expressed because there was a camera in the room and that represses something that is now going to be kind of stuck. And unstuck at the same time in the system. You know, it's like you've seen where people kind of push through almost, but they don't quite release. And then the next few weeks can be really tough, right?

As that as that bubble comes up and comes out of the system. You know, that can be a really challenging integration.

Martin Ball — 1:06:33

Absolutely. That's why I like to emphasize this idea of when you're working with 5-MeO, I like to really prioritize like let's see the process through to completion in the session ideally so that you're not left after the session. Well, like something partly came out or it rose up but I didn't attend to it because that does tend to be more difficult but that's more of facilitation issue. But yeah, I think that potentially having cameras, particularly with the idea that this is social media performance, probably potentiates that kind of difficulty where someone's insistence on performing.

Like let's say someone had a kind of challenging experience, but then the ego comes back and then if they're immediately thinking like, oh, how do I look? And start attending to their appearance or something like that or oh I don't want to seem like I'm freaking out so then they hold it in that's where the baby didn't get all the way out right that there's like you were in the process. But now there's some kind of disruption to the process and so I just think it's an interesting topic obviously there's a lot of angles to it.

Steve Rio — 1:07:45

Yeah I think that's right and I think you know like us making a documentary and filming it back in August that it was a clear decision that said first of all we're not going to work with a bunch of people who are naive to 5-MeO. And put their first big experience in a film you know like we're going to be a little nuanced about that and people who haven't done enough personal development work that they can kind of handle the complexity of cameras being there. And it not totally impinge on their ability to work through what needs to be worked through.

And I think we saw that like the ceremonies were huge and they were really powerful and impactful and we were and the crew was very respectful and we figured those things out. But for us it was a weighing of well you know what right now there's not a lot of great footage or stuff of what does it look like to be properly supported in ceremonies.

Like you've done some stuff and a few but there's a lot a lot a lot of Mexico beach stuff and we need to we need to kind of counteract that with some some some more sophisticated nuanced conversation especially as these big event type things keep happening which they will. And 5-MeO keeps bubbling up more and more into the mainstream awareness we need just we need to be really mindful like how do we educate how do we bring awareness to what does best practice look like like what does a really well-held facility. And facilitation actually look like because most people couldn't tell you.

Martin Ball — 1:09:12

Right. Right. Well, this sounds very interesting. I'm very interested to see this documentary.

Steve Rio — 1:09:19

Yeah, me too.

The Leckie Protocol: vaporization and injection

Martin Ball — 1:09:20

Yeah. So, let's talk now about the Leckie Protocol and Sure. You know, we've already talked a little bit about how there, prior to getting to the injection plus the vaporization, there's a couple low doses, there's lots of integration. But this is really what we want to focus on. Yeah. Should I throw up the graphic now and talk about it? Okay. So, what we're gonna do here is, Steve recently posted this to his blog. And so, we're just gonna take a look at it here. And I've never done this before, recording on Zoom.

So, I assume that this is just going to take over our screen and the audience will be able to see it. Otherwise, I'll have to insert it editing later. But, let's see. Here we have the observed saturation. So tell us about this and how it works, Steve. And this is also this is in reference to this is basically what we saw in the Bryan Johnson video.

Steve Rio — 1:10:19

So essentially first like the only the only context or background I'll give is that you know for a long time we were working with vaporized 5 like most people do and have like that's kind of the traditional route of administration. And then we experienced intramuscular for the first time. This was about four years ago and we loved it and we thought, oh, we're going to switch over to intramuscular because it's at that time, you know, the first initial instinct was, oh, it's better than vaporized. That was the first instinct.

And then we did some work on a bunch of trials internally and we worked with a few private clients and we explored things and we realized, oh, it's not better, it's just different. And we kind of missed some of the benefits of the vaporized administration, which I could talk a little bit about, but the fundamental difference is vaporized is the classic, you know, four to five second onset, huge peak non-dual experience, very consistently getting somebody to that non-dual experience. And then a very fast metabolization. So, that's represented by the dark green line here, right?

So peak right off the top like you know zero at zero minutes it's peaked and then it's basically around the 15 minute-ish mark it's going to be largely metabolized that there's lots of variability in that but let's just keep it simple. And then the intramuscular administration route is definitely a lot smoother for people. So it's more of like at about the three minute mark you start to really two to three minute mark and then the onset is up to about seven minutes is where it fully saturates and then it holds more consistently. So you get this longer plateau, right? Yeah.

So the blue line and then it trails off much more slowly. So you get a longer window. I think of it as like a therapeutic window to work with the medicine and to continue processing the experience because a lot of people have these peak experiences, but it's either a whiteout, or the or the psyche just kind of blocks it all out. So you don't you don't come back with much. There's, you know, a lot of times people are like, I don't know. I don't remember any of it. And that's partially true. It's going to trickle back.

But what we found is that so what we loved about the intramuscular was this long tail and this ability to work in the medicine for longer and have more time with it. But we also found that in our own testing and then working with clients high dose intramuscular is very difficult because it's a I would say very difficult to truly get that non-dual peak. You've got to dose very very high and you know you did I think when you did your video you did 18 right?

Martin Ball — 1:12:58

Yeah 17 18 milligrams.

Steve Rio — 1:13:00

Something around there. Yeah I and I've done 18 as well. It was one of the more intense experiences and exceptional experiences. And at the seven and or I think at the seven—or I think at the ten—seven, ten and twelve-minute mark I could still hear a question from my wife though I couldn't I had forgotten to ask I had forgotten that I'd asked her to ask me. But I was not non-dual like I was aware of the question. It was hilarious to me what she was it made no sense but I heard the question.

So it just occurred to me that and then what we also found is that for a lot of people who are more novice to 5-MeO-DMT high doses, high intramuscular doses are just really challenging because you're in the thick of it for a long time. Right. Right. I think so what we found with this administration route is that you get the benefits that the two major benefits. One is that peak breakthrough dose and that huge nervous system opening the non-dual and this kind of energetic blast.

It's like this sort of energetic dynamite of 5-MeO which is I think in a lot of cases just really it's just incredibly powerful and so that we get that but then as it as it vaporizes as it metabolizes quite quickly you land in this lower dose bed of the intramuscular. And you get time to stay in the medicine your ego doesn't take over quite so fast.

Martin Ball — 1:14:23

Yeah. So then that's the beige line.

Steve Rio — 1:14:26

Yeah. That's kind of an estimation of the beige line. And so a lot of people get confused by this when you combine the two numbers like like meaning what did you serve somebody as an intramuscular dose and what did you serve somebody as a vaporized dose? It can be confusing because it sounds like a really big number but when we really think about actual sort of saturation and this is an estimation. I it's very hard to test the blood every minute when somebody is doing 5-MeO. And in fact, none of the drug companies have been able to do it yet either.

But this is an estimation, but you get this the average since you know the metabolization. We know the halflife of 5-MeO. So you can kind of estimate this. You're never really getting all of that at once, right? The combination you're kind of getting the first bit and then it's metabolizing quite quickly and then you're getting that lower dose intramuscular. So that's the basics of Leckie is generally a high dose vaporized with a low to mid-range intramuscular dose generally from 6 to 9 milligrams of intramuscular.

It's also important to note that if you're depending on what you're working with for intramuscular, that number is misleading because if you're working with succinate it's really actually about 65% total material. So if you have nine milligrams of intramuscular, you're really talking about a dose of just over six, right? So nine times 0.65. If you're working with HCl, like a different form of salt, it's about 85%. So it's a little bit higher, but mostly what people are going to be finding is succinate. It's actually a more stable final product. It's a better better route, but it does have a bigger gap.

That's 35% of the material is actually the salt wrapped around the 5-MeO-DMT.

Martin Ball — 1:16:18

Okay. So, I'm curious. So, with this protocol again, we're showing so let's assume this is like six and a half milligram experientially speaking, right? This bottom one, right? So, that's a moderate dose. It's not a super high dose, but that's going to get you a lot of time, a lot of experience. And We have a relatively high dose of the vaporize right away. So, we get right into that peak, then that peak is drawn out a bit longer and then you kind of return to this more moderate level and then it's washing out.

In contrast, I've encountered some other people who like to work with injectable 5 and what they've done is start people on a higher injectable dose range and then offer a low dose vape pen. Oh. To kind of process somewhere here at during the plateau to kind of boop kind of boop you up potentially to the non-dual but then come back down. I'm curious, why are you guys going this way rather than that way? What do you see as the advantages or is it just this is how the protocol developed?

Steve Rio — 1:17:25

Yeah, that's an awesome question and I like that. I we've done that as well. We've experimented with that as well. And I think if if we were working with someone, so if I if if if I was thinking of a session with somebody as a singular thing outside of the context of our entire five-day process, I would actually probably lean towards something like you're describing where we're going to start a little lower. And I would actually we've done things where we do a three-milligram intramuscular application and then a larger one and then a vaporized somewhere.

So we've done things where you kind of like just easing in and it's nice and slow and you've got lots of time. Kind of the classic titration route which is you know pretty classic in 5-MeO as well. The sort of three step or whatever. In our case, we've spent two days prior to that, they've done eight mini doses of eight or so very small doses, which is its own sort of titration ladder over the course of about an hour and a half. We've done some other heart opening work. We've like really done a lot of preparation and context building and safety building.

And what we just found is that mid-range doses are really tricky for the ego. So, as long as we feel like the person's nervous system is kind of like been primed enough and that we have enough safety built with them, I'd rather go straight to the high dose. But the big caveat is does, you know, has the proper preparation work been done so that high dose blast isn't in itself traumatizing or in itself jarring. But I think in the context of what we're doing, it makes sense that we've already spent two days with the person getting them prepared for that high dose moment.

And I just find that what we found because we used to be really adamant that you got to titrate up in a session. That was actually our first we had to really overcome our own bias to that towards that to do this. And what we found is that when you just when if somebody's prepared and they have the proper preparation in the days leading up, let's just dive in. Like let's go straight in and let's skip the wrestling match Well, the wrestling match might happen but at least you're unconscious for it.

Full release, the returning ego and the longer tail

Martin Ball — 1:19:51

Right. Right. So this is something that people who are not familiar with 5-MeO might have a really difficult time understanding this that because that idea like if it's presented as oh we're gonna gradually work you up to that full release dose and we're just gonna ease you gently into it. That might seem really appealing to people, but what people often don't understand is I always like to say that the ego is for one, it's incredibly resilient. It takes a lot of energy to actually override the ego.

So much so that most people even with ample years of psychedelic experience with anything other than 5-MeO, they've probably never actually experienced a full ego dissolution experience. They've probably not actually had a full non-dual experience. Most people will get what I would call a non-duality within duality experience where they say, "Oh, I'm a part of everything. It's all one thing. We're all in it together." But the full ego dissolution is something quite distinct. Yeah. So, not only is the ego incredibly resilient, but it's also kind of addicted to doing, always trying to do it. Always trying to manage.

And so this is where a mid-range dose actually can be very aggravating to the ego. Totally. Totally. Very uncomfortable. And so what I like about this protocol here is that you're starting people that let's take the full release vaporized dose right away because for me going back to this idea of the diagnostic round, that's what gets the process going. Yes. Not the ego struggle on the way up. Like let's just start there and then if we get extended out as this model does through this modality of also having the injection then you get a lot more time to work with it.

And what's kind of echoing something that we talked about already in this conversation is that a lot of people and even facilitators don't really emphasize that when your ego starts to come back, that is actually a really productive part of the 5-MeO experience. As long as you can resist immediately operating from your ego, So for example like a facilitator who doesn't understand this if someone's ego comes back and they look up and you're like oh well I'm back in reality again and if the facilitator immediately says hey how are you doing how is your experience.

And starts trying to talk to that person totally that's the worst it's disrupting their experience so if that person can just relax and notice wow my ego really wants to look around right now my ego really wants wants reassurance that I'm okay. My ego really wants to bring everything back under control. But if we can resist that and not have input from people outside saying, "Hey, how are you doing? How is your experience?

What's going on?" And allowing them that time and space, you get a lot of opportunity to notice where the ego wants to unconsciously come back in control and also consciously you notice all these pulls on yourself. And if you just relax, then there's actually more time for more repressed materials to come out, for more energy to process, and to actually get a cleaner system overall. So having this long tail is really, really therapeutic. But again, the important point is that it's therapeutic because the ego gets out of the way in the first place.

Steve Rio — 1:23:36

That's right. You've already knocked it out of the way in the first place. And then as it's coming back, can you just bring awareness to that? What's happening there? And just look at it like, oh, interesting. This is what I think about like these are all the fears I have. This is the this is all the stories I tell myself because those all rush back. I mean, and in this case, they come back more slowly.

So, it's a little more tolerable, a little more gradual, and you have more time in that in between space, but you've already had the peak experience that has kind of I it's like when you're going into very cold water, like a very cold ocean. And you're trickling like you're trying to walk in, it can be a lot more difficult than jumping off the dock. Jumping off the dock is going to be a little more jarring off the top, but you're in and then you're swimming back to the dock, you know, like that's the tail versus trickling in it, you know?

So, it's kind of the difference there. And I think if you're well if you're well warmed up and you know it's not going to be dangerous because I do think if I just show up at somebody's house and I'm just meeting them for the first time and I've never done 5-MeO-DMT. And the first thing they do is serve me a massive dose of 5-MeO-DMT, I don't think that's a great idea. That doesn't make a ton of sense, but in the contextual framework we're talking about here, this seems to be very very effective.

And yeah, it just it get kind of gets people into the heart of it without having to move through those those those ego hurdles of can I let go? Oh, I'm resisting so much. And then they start beating themselves up before we've even gotten to the high dose.

How the Leckie Protocol got its name

Martin Ball — 1:25:07

Yeah. Yeah. And that's where this phrase I've been using for years now just I like to say like look just pulling the proverbial rug of reality out from underneath the ego that actually tends to be the most effective than the oh let's slowly work you into it let's gradually get you there. And then we're going to gently pull the rug out because again the ego is resilient that it is evolutionarily programmed to maintain itself across all circumstances and all space and all time because that's like the job of the ego is to be like no I'm me I'm here I'm aware.

So that I can protect myself and I can enact my own agency and that it just takes a lot in order to convince the ego to say nothing I can do okay bye I'm out of here that the life instinct is to hold on for sure just to maintain. And so this is this ego death experience and to facilitate that it really does take just like no more reality for you. Like here you go and then it can effectively let go. So this seems to be a very workable model. Something I haven't asked you but I've been meaning to ask you this whole time.

Where does the name Leckie come from? Like why is it Leckie? What who's.

Steve Rio — 1:26:26

Okay. So The very first person the very first person we served this protocol to is a is a guy named Mike Leckie. And so and he you know we said we have we've been working on this thing and we really think it's amazing but it's a big one and we you know we hadn't worked with and he said I'm game. I'm in like let's go. And he was just so excited about it and then he had just such a profound experience with it.

It just kind of marked it and then after that we just started calling it the Leckie Protocol because just in honor of him. Then we asked him, "Do you mind if we use your name to name it?" Because we were like, "Oh, we can name it the Enfold this or the I was like, "Well, no, let's just have fun. Like, let's a lot of times in science, we name it after some emblem of the actual who who are the people involved, what else was happening." And in this case, like let's honor the first person that we serve this to externally, right?

You know, that just felt really cool. So mostly just a fun like anecdote that I hope lives on.

Martin Ball — 1:27:28

Yeah. Okay. The Leckie Protocol. Let's get to know the story. So.

Devices, administration and individual differences

Steve Rio — 1:27:34

Can I just say one other thing? I think because I think it's just worth noting for facilitators to know that when we're talking about the intramuscular dose or sorry the vaporized dose I think it's important that like five or 18 milligrams is not 18 milligrams in every device right like one of the things that I think often gets overlooked is how are you administering how are you vaporizing the material if you've got like a little eclipse pipe with a little glass vial. And you're heating it up and you're literally serving it right as it's being burnt, I probably wouldn't be hitting 18 very regularly.

It'd be a lot lower. It'd be like that 12 to 14 range is 12 and maybe 16 for a really, you know, tight ego, but 12 to 16 is plenty. Because but in our case, we're working with a lamp of light. Which is basically for those who don't know, it's this glass cylinder. It's about an inch and a half or maybe almost two inches in diameter and it's got this you know eight inch container. So we and we pre-vaporize the material into this into this chamber and then we serve it to somebody.

So it's already been vaporized and it sits in that chamber I don't know let's say for anywhere from five to ten seconds and in that time some of the material is bound to stick to the glass and it's and it's quite a large surface area. So we are bound to be losing a couple of milligrams in that process right so it's good it's just good to know like there's lots of nuance to how you know to what device you're using to how it how long it sits in the chamber of the device.

Some people are using those volcanoes which are much even you know big bags or something like that or so and that's those kind of lungs that's a huge surface area right so there's just lots of different ways to administer and just to be aware of knowing yeah no understanding your device. And what the what the considerations are there.

Martin Ball — 1:29:40

Yeah. How long have you guys been using I assume it's one of the argon gas lamps, right? So, you use.

Steve Rio — 1:29:47

Yeah, that's right.

Martin Ball — 1:29:48

How long have you guys been using that?

Steve Rio — 1:29:50

We've been using it for probably not too long. Maybe a year and a half, almost two years. Before that, we were using an Eclipse.

Martin Ball — 1:29:59

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was probably one of the first people to ever get to use one of those because when I was one of like Hal's early ones. Yeah. Is it how? Right. Yeah. Yeah. That when I first went to the Temple of Awakening Divinity at the end of 2007, he had an early prototype of the argon gas vaporizer and it didn't look anything like it looks now. And I've never seen anything like it. And I was given some Toad secretions, but it ultimately was a small dose. So, it was like a nothing experience for me.

It was like, "Yeah, big deal." Like, big deal. So then he invited me back a month later where he's like, "Okay, I've got the pure freebase 5-MeO. I've got this new style argon gas lamp with the glass chamber and the little stopper up at the top." so it was brand new at that point, but this was one of the early prototypes. And yeah, I always share about that experience. You know, I'm watching the stopper go down as I'm taking the hit in. And I got to there. I didn't even take the whole hit. I got to there and I was like, oh, it's happening.

And it was from that point on it's like this is the most important molecule that exists in reality that people need to know about what this thing is because this is like nothing else that exists. But yeah, that was my early claim to fame of the argon gas.

Steve Rio — 1:31:30

Yeah, that's so cool because because I Hal actually handed on like kind of handed on like passed on the production of those to another guy who now makes them and he's very exclusive like you have to be a facilitator that basically gets kind of a referral in yes to get one of these. And he and this new guy is also, you know, he's kind of an engineering nerd and he's figured out how to 3D print all these components and just continues to nerd out and improve the whole process and continue to make it more. And more of an art piece.

He was a little like we're such minimalists in our design and we said, you know, could you just make it look like an iPhone? And he was not impressed by that. But he's a lovely guy to work with, but I think he would have liked to put more artistic flourish on it than we allowed him. But, they're they're amazing devices and the argon is so nice in terms of just just the cleanliness of the vaporization and there's no oxidization and how smooth the dose is. It's like an amazing device for delivery. It's a little, you know, you got to keep it clean.

There's a lot of nuance to it, but it's awesome.

Martin Ball — 1:32:35

Yeah. Yeah. But it really, in my opinion, it's the if if we're dealing with inhaling, it's definitely the smoothest route available. And it's definitely it's the easiest for anybody who doesn't have a prior history or experience with smoking or vaporizing anything which this is another area where I find in the 5-MeO world there's more and more people coming to experience 5-MeO who you know they didn't smoke cigarettes they didn't smoke pot or.

And that the whole concept of like inhaling something is brand new for them yeah that's where I think it just at a functional level if something is easier like this is because again more people are coming to it without this prior background that a lot of people find working with toad secretions can be quite challenging if they don't have any experience with smoking or vaporizing because you have to take in. So much and there's just so much that you're putting into your lungs. It can be quite challenging but the argon gas vaporizer is just like.

Steve Rio — 1:33:37

Yeah. So good. It was so much the eclipse a lot of people would cough. It was it's hard to moderate the temperature so you're often it's too hot coming you know it was an art. This is a lot easier. And then vape pens are just they have all that carrier oil. They're also quite agitating for the throat. They can cause more headaches and stuff like I find the carrier oil gives people headaches and things like that. So it's nice to have a great device for delivery.

Martin Ball — 1:34:02

Yeah. And then of course injection. I mean that's super smooth as well. Just this whole model of using the vape with the injection because you know what you mentioned about the injection I would also point out that this is a common claim that people make about if they're doing nasal application you know the snorting or to using a liquid.

And then more rarely most people don't do this but some people like to do anal plugging route yeah the common complaint about both nasal and anal is people say well it doesn't really break through into the non-dual that even if you up the dose, it's because it again it's that more gradual up, more gradual down. And because the ego is so inherently resilient that it will reconfigure and modify all the way through and not necessarily have that fundamentally a crisis experience of like there's nothing I can do here but let go because this is too much.

And that's where again vaporization really seems to put people over the top that's that is the effective method for that full breakthrough.

Steve Rio — 1:35:09

That's right. And I and there's and there's a good use case. I think when you know all the hum of what happened a little while ago happened, there's lots of people who say, well, you don't need breakthrough doses all the time. And I agree with that. There's sometimes where working with just a lower intramuscular dose in a more, you know, that can be excellent. And the step-wise methodology of stepping into the dose can be a great very safe way to enter into the process too.

However, I don't think that like stepwise you're familiar with stepwise the whole there's like this group that's kind of propagating the step wise I think they're.

Martin Ball — 1:35:47

Not familiar with that then.

Steve Rio — 1:35:49

Okay they're called the Pattern Project but honestly what they did is they picked up they picked up I won't say the names but some serious old timers that you'd be familiar with who were the first to go on Erowid and say here's how you make different size pens. And you know here's how you titrate with pens you start with a 16 to 1 then a 12 to 1 then an 8 to 1 and a 4:1, and you should, you know, they basically published all that on Erowid.

And then this group has kind of picked up what they did and branded it and called it stepwise, which in the basic premise is that super low dose every five minutes and then every every third or second or third or fourth or whatever you want to do, you step up to a stronger pen. And you gradually take somebody into potentially a non-dual or you just stay low. Like one idea is to just do low low dose more therapeutic style or you take them into a full release.

And I just think in terms of the potential for that really big blast breakthrough of the nervous system that a lot of people just need to work through some of that really stuck energy. I don't think that easing in super slowly like it may feel safer but it's not necessarily going to be as effective. And there's a use case but there's a use case for all of these. And I think just being really open to that is important to not being dogmatic. Like I don't think the Leckie Protocol is what everybody should use every time.

I just think it's worked very well for us and in the context of how we're serving this medicine, it's been the most therapeutic thing we've found. And that people tolerate it very very well. Like for anybody concerned about the dosing or something like that, lots of very average non-psychonaut type people tolerate it very well and have excellent results, you know.

Low-dose work and full-release experiences

Martin Ball — 1:37:28

Yeah. And one of the things that I always like to emphasize around low-dose work with 5-MeO is that I've always been like look if that's what you want to do that's fine. I personally I'm very interested in the full release dose and what that entails what that involves and how do we educate people around that and how do we work with it effectively. But setting those things aside, I always like to really emphasize that it's really important that everybody understand that small or moderate doses with 5-MeO, they just don't inform you about what the full release experience actually is.

Steve Rio — 1:38:00

And almost a different drug or a different substance.

Martin Ball — 1:38:05

It's so different that we just don't want to have a mistaken understanding. If people are only working with small or medium doses, it's not really accurate for them to say that they know what 5-MeO does because they don't. And that's because see this could be misleading where if somebody thinks like okay well yeah I know what that is so go ahead like give me the full thing. It's just going to be more of what I've already experienced. That's where it's like no we're going into a completely different realm of experience here.

So that's where I just like to emphasize like please understand that once we're beyond that threshold. It's something totally radically different. And here we can also use the language of duality versus non-duality that 99% of all our experience is grounded in duality. That's not that it's bad, but there is a subjective sense of self that is in context with everything that it perceives as not itself. And it is situated in space and time. But once we go into the non-dual, all of this dissolves and there is no ego there to process it.

This is a different order of experience and no amount of work in the dual realm actually informs what the non-dual experience is just by definition because the non-dual is not that. So whatever happened this is not that not that.

Steve Rio — 1:39:26

I appreciate that a lot. And I think one thing to the Pattern Project's credit, they've coined this phrase low five, you know, and I think we should like it would be great if we really in our minds and everyone understood low five is a different thing than high-dose five. It's just a like a as you're saying a fundamentally different experience. It's as if you're doing two different substances. Both could be beneficial. Like I'm I think like I my bias is more towards yours. It's like the non-dual experience is what we're really specialized in and what this is all about to us.

It's about getting people to that experience and getting them through that experience and making the most of the potential of whatever comes up there, whether it's total resistance and terror or total bliss and beauty.

Observational research and the wider context

Martin Ball — 1:40:15

Well, Steve, I had you for almost two hours now, so I think I'm gonna be wrapping up and letting you go. But I did wanna touch on in the blog post that talks about the Leckie Protocol where we've shared the graphic that we've discussed here. It also mentions some research that's going on in Canada in your neck of the woods. Could you tell us a little bit about that and where researchers in Canada are looking at 5-MeO and how Enfold might be contributing to that?

Steve Rio — 1:40:44

Yeah, sure. So, a couple of things that are are happening. One is we've just finished we've just wrapped data collection on our own observational study and it was the data collection was done in partnership with the University of Toronto and UHN which is a big hospital research hospital group in Canada. It's now been passed to the we're just in the process of signing all the documents, but I think it's safe to say we're going to be writing the paper on this research with the New School in New York with some awesome researchers there.

And I'm really excited about this because it is even before we started the study, I take meticulous notes. So at about the 200 ceremony mark, I started taking meticulous notes. So I have about 500 ceremonies documented. How long did it take? What did we witness in terms of energetic or emotional responses? How much was the dosing? How long did it take? What did we experience phenomenology wise throughout the journey? So, it's like there's like a kind of a play-by-play. So, I have these I take pretty solid notes on all these ceremonies.

So this research will be able to capitalize on all of that data as well as both before, during and after basically at the one week I think one month and three month mark post intervention with guests. So their own experience and it as far as I know I think it will be one of the more the most comprehensive looks at 5-MeO-DMT where it's been like repeated the dosing is consistent the you know And a lot of the factors are highly consistent.

And then we can actually look at what happens where a lot of the 5-MeO observational research is web-based, which is have you smoked 5-MeO-DMT come fill out our survey which somebody did it on the couch somebody did it with a facilitator somebody did it in a group somebody did it alone it's hard to really gain a solid footing of what does 5-MeO do? And so we're really excited about that.

And it will also really emphasize the fact that this was done in a multi-day container with these other elements and bring that into the research realm which I think is important to stop being so kind of isolationist in terms of let's just talk about 5-MeO the molecule versus was there music playing was there facilitation was you know what did they get in terms of integration all those those kind of very important details that often get left out of scientific research. So I'm really excited about that.

Martin Ball — 1:43:17

Yeah. And to have something that's been consistent over time I think is really valuable because as you say a lot of the research has been done at a survey level and there you know we're not really controlling for all of these other factors. And like we've been discussing like the other people in the room can make a difference. The room can make a difference. How the facilitator works makes a difference. What kind of music might be played that makes a difference. So these are all really important questions.

So having a consistent container and a consistent methodology over time I can see that be very very valuable and I'm glad that you guys are contributing to that you know when I started talking about 5-MeO on my podcast in 2008 that you know I was kind of doing this public broadcasting of like Johns Hopkins University why aren't you researching 5-MeO-DMT? MAPS why aren't you researching 5-MeO you know that I was trying to challenge people to actually research it. But it's only now that really 5-MeO research is online and it and it's happening and really happy for that.

But it you know like if we were comparing like what's the data from people being served on the beach in Mexico versus in a therapeutic context that takes all of these steps around preparation, facilitation, and integration like you know that's the big thing down in Mexico. There's almost zero preparation and almost zero integration. That's right. And that a completely uncontrolled setting. Like that is not a good setting to be generating data.

Steve Rio — 1:44:48

Yeah. And so it'd be interesting like when our study comes out if somebody wanted to replicate or say well let's go talk to you know we did 50 people here. Let's go talk like let's go follow 50 people who do it in a tent in Tulum for $150 and let's see if we can follow them a month a week before and a month after and these kinds of things. Let's just compare the results. That would be I mean I don't want anybody to honestly access 5-MeO-DMT in that way but it is going to continue to happen.

So what if we compare those two or my hope also is just that this study will influence further studies which might incorporate more of our elements. So, you know, it's interesting. The Leckie Protocol is us really saying, "Hey, we've spent four years developing this protocol.

Here it is in its entirety, dosing amounts, all the pre like we give away a lot of our secret sauce or whatever you want to call it as a as a small business, but like it's if we're not up up, you know, upscaling the entire, you know, the entire way that this medicine is being served, then we're not really doing a duty." and I think the same thing with the research. So the research will reveal even more details about the elements of our process.

And that to us is great because it just puts it in the field and it starts to make it commonplace that you would expect as a person seeking 5-MeO. You might actually just expect that now as opposed to thinking, oh yeah, I guess the beach in Mexico is fine. You've learned because you've read a research study that said, hey, these guys had a couple of nights with their facilitators and they had integration calls and they had these steps. Like do you do that when they're when they're seeking their 5-MeO facilitator?

So I hope you know I hope I think for all of us that you've been doing this for years it's just as this continues to raise public awareness around this medicine, what do we do to backfill the education layer? That's not going to happen at the celebrity level. Exactly. You know, it's kind of like that's when the experts got to step in and say here's how you actually do this super well. And I think, you know, some things that are happening. I thought the way that the whole thing with Bryan the way he talked about it afterwards, I was actually pretty impressed.

I thought he did a great job. But there will be further guys that come, you know, there'll be other people that do it that will say stuff that you and I cringe hard at. It's inevitable. You know, some famous actor or something is going to do it and they're going to say, "Everyone should do it. It's a beautiful white light experience." and they're going to say it to 50 million people and we're going to go, "Oh my god.".

Public education and closing reflections

Martin Ball — 1:47:24

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know the guy's name, but this comedian, I saw a clip of him on the late show with Stephen Colbert. This was a number of years ago. I forget the guy's name. He's kind of had like a big sort of afro, but he said he was telling Stephen about how, oh yeah, I went down to Tulum and I smoked some some toad. And he was like, "Oh, what was that like?" He's like, "It was great. It was like getting shot out of the asshole of God. That's not the way I would articulate it.

But what I liked about Bryan Johnson is like I saw an interview with him with some guy like the day after or maybe just a couple days after. And I appreciate that he said, you know, I'm still I'm struggling for words to describe this, but this was the absolute pinnacle of human experience. And I don't know much more to say about it something like that. And so I like that. I like that. And even that shows a certain level of vulnerability and openness to say like I'm not sure how to talk about it.

I'm still not certain what I think, you know, that he's not pressuring himself to like I have to have a definitive answer. But I really appreciate that he said like I don't think that there's a an experience that a human being can have that's bigger than this. And because that's something I've always tried to emphasize about 5-MeO. I think again when I first started speaking about this publicly in 2008 this is a place where it just pissed a lot of people off because there's like how could you say that like what makes you think like this is.

So much is different than anything else It's like look like it just is like this really is something profoundly special and it's profoundly different so I like what he had to say about it but I think that's more maybe more useful than like getting shot out of the asshole of God. That you know this is kind of a fun image I guess. You know I don't want to be prudish about it. Not necessarily the most accurately descriptive I would say. Yeah. Yeah.

Thanks so much for your time today to explore this further with me and to agree to make this video and hopefully this will help generate more discussion for people and more understanding. And let's just close with so if people do want to go to Canada and work at Enfold how do they do that? What's the process for applying for doing this work with you guys?

Steve Rio — 1:49:51

Yeah, thanks man. I really appreciate this conversation as always. I feel like you and I could probably go for five hours at a time. So it's good to just cap it somewhere. But if people are curious, our website is enfold.org. It's really we have a ton of information. We're very public. We explain a lot about our thesis and our ideas and there's an application form there that people can fill out and we do a really rigorous screening with everybody.

So if you're ever curious about this medicine because I think sometimes you listen to these types of conversations with experts and we say a lot a lot of gnarly things like this is intense, no doubt. But we do a really good job of we take it really seriously to I guess educate and screen people thoughtfully and really make sure is this the right time is this the right medicine and if it is we'll you know be very clear about that.

But we'll also sometimes just say hey this is an amazing medicine and maybe the first step for you would be something a little bit more accessible and so I think if you're curious just reach out and we're happy to chat. And see if it's a good fit.

Martin Ball — 1:50:57

All right. Well, thanks, Steve. Thanks for doing the good work. Thanks for sharing this information with me and with whoever you are, the audience out there. And I'm sure we'll have more conversations in the future because there's always a lot to talk about here. But yeah.

Steve Rio — 1:51:13

I hope so. Yeah. Thanks, Martin.

Martin Ball — 1:51:15

Yeah.

Resources and further listening

Martin Ball
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