Tripsitting the Mega Rich

“The higher doses of mushrooms, you usually defecate,” explains Freddy.

Wearing glasses, sporting a heavy beard and in possession of a good set of teeth, Freddy looks extremely LA. He’s just blended 60 grams of Tidal Wave (a potent hybrid strain of Psilocybe cubensis magic mushrooms) for a guy called Jesse. The standard dose for psilocybin mushrooms is around three grams. Five if you’re feeling brave. Judging by his Aztec headband, Jesse also resides in LA. He’s an addict. Watching the clip, we never find out what it is he’s addicted to, but it’s implied that he’s taking this quantity of psychedelics because a 12-step program feels too much like hard work.

So instead, he takes one last sane look at the camera, ingests the large dose via a delicious-looking smoothie, then proceeds to strip off, thrash about in a pool, and eventually soil himself. Lurking in the background, presumably armed with a mop, is Freddy: Jesse’s tripsitter (or on this occasion “tripshitter,” perhaps).

Over one thousand miles away, near Vancouver, Canada, Bryan Johnson is doing much the same. Happily, the man determined to live forever doesn’t lose bowel control. If you tuned into the lengthy March livestream of the American entrepreneur and famed biohacker taking 5-MeO-DMT (a psychedelic compound found in the venom of the Colorado River toad that is illegal in the U.S.), you’d be forgiven for thinking he was just having a nice little nap. And who’s that in the background? One Steve Rio. Bearded, bespectacled, and dressed from head to toe in saintly white, you get the sense he’d be fantastic at running a cult.

A cottage industry has quietly sprung up around the job of guiding the mega-rich through their psychedelic experiences, at considerable expense. Intrigued by this new way of earning a living, VICE spoke to a few of them.

Joel Brierre has something I call “blue-eyed syndrome.” It’s when someone has really piercing blue eyes and they hold your gaze in a way that suggests they’re hyper-aware of this fact. Sitting across from Brierre on Zoom, it’s clear he’s got a very serious case. “They gave Bryan Johnson a wildly high and unsafe dose,” he tells me. “It could have resulted in serotonin syndrome or serotonin toxicity for plenty of people. That can result in death.” It’s not an isolated concern. Paul F. Austin, founder of psychedelic education platform Third Wave, also noted that the first clinical trials on vaporized 5-MeO-DMT only tested doses of up to 18mg. Johnson took 27mg. When I reached out to Rio for comment, he said that in 700 ceremonies, Enfold had never seen a case of serotonin syndrome. (“We are industry-leading in our approach to measurement, dosing, and administration of 5-MeO-DMT,” he added.)

Operating out of Tandava Retreats, located in the mountains of Mexico, Brierre is perhaps the crème de la crème of 5-MeO-DMT facilitators. If you’re in the business yourself (or if you’ve got $5,695 to spare), Brierre is who you go to. “You’re watching people acknowledge and go into their deepest wounds,” he explains. “And when it gets dynamic, it gets really exciting.”

“They went on a bunch of Reddit threads, did some homework, and have already explained it to a bunch of their friends like they’re the authority”

Ask the premium facilitators what it is, exactly, that rich people cry about, and the language starts off deliberately vague. It can’t be because of patient-doctor confidentiality. None of them are doctors. Looking at the Tandava website, the team’s credentials are of the woo-woo variety: Brierre’s background is in “classical non-dual yogic philosophy” and another tripsitter called “Butterfly” is certified in “Compassion Cultivation Training.” It’s certainly a touch that someone with a Fortune 500 company can shit themselves without it getting back to shareholders, but what the clients are really paying for is the veneer of legitimacy. Somewhere with linen sheets as opposed to a bloke who, as Brierre puts it, “managed to get [his] hands on a buffo supply and a crack pipe.”

The market for 5-MeO-DMT is less woo-woo, though. Since Johnson’s stream, a small army of wealthy biohacker types has descended upon Tandava. “We’ve had multiple people in the past few weeks calling up to request a dosage that high,” he explains. “Like, ‘Can you do that protocol?’” Basically, the optimization crowd has arrived: those with no discernible issues, but a desire to be the best at everything and money to burn. “They went on a bunch of Reddit threads, did some homework, and have already explained it to a bunch of their friends like they’re the authority,” he explains. “Gods are amused at those of us who attempt to make plans.” Through the floor-to-ceiling glass doors behind him, I notice what looks like an exotic bird moving through the garden. It’s actually a gardener pruning the bushes with a long pair of shears. I wonder whether Brierre is perhaps a little naive about the package he’s offering, and who it’s available to.

When Steve Rio joins our call, it’s as if I’ve been thrust in front of the pearly gates. Everything in the frame is white. Looking at my cluttered background by comparison, it’s clear I’m a candidate for 5-MeO-DMT. If nothing else, I could use a good domestic clear out. Rio runs Enfold, located on a small island off Vancouver, with his wife Austin. It’s an aggressively chic operation. When 5-MeO-DMT invariably ends up on Goop, this’ll be the resort experience that Gwyneth Paltrow shills. The thread counts look higher, and linen isn’t reserved for just the bedding. Everyone is wearing the stuff. Four nights in a shared room at Enfold will cost you $6,900 per person. For a private room, it’s $9,000.

Rio is the most stringent when it comes to his clients’ confidentiality. Even though Johnson live-streamed the entirety of his two-and-a-half-hour trip to over 200,000 viewers, the innermost depths of his psyche are off limits. But he does imply that several important and/or uber-rich figures have been through Enfold. “Whenever we know somebody may be in a certain tax bracket, I don’t look them up,” he explains. “I just want to see them for the human they are.” He rattles it all off. “The wealthier people often have the craziest childhood stories to tell you,” he says. “The more societal power somebody has, the more they end up in a vacuum of people willing to speak honestly with them.” It’s not a surprising take—these are, after all, an important revenue stream.

“There can be a billionaire on one side of the couch, and a Mormon mother of eight on the other”

It’s around this point that Rio mentions Enfold’s scholarship program: a “Patron Program” that’s designed, as the website puts it, to break down “the barriers to accessing safe and guided psychedelic use.” In practice, it means asking their high-ticket clients to pay it forward. “A lot of wealthy people come through our doors, and we ask them to make donations,” he explains. “Oftentimes there can be a billionaire on one side of the couch, and a Mormon mother of eight on the other […] and they pay for the Mormon mother.” It sounds like the plot of a Sean Baker film.

I listen to enough of Rio’s spiel that for a brief moment it feels like the article is going to pivot from “here’s what billionaires do while they’re incapacitated” to something along the lines of “billionaires have feelings too.” “I guess mental health issues don’t discriminate,” I muse, as Rio nods approvingly. Then I end the call and come to.

“He was hurt and abused, and that had crafted his personality at such an early age that he became a multimillionaire who is ruthless, and has affairs”

“Consent is a very important thing.” Sarah Tilley, the founder and CEO of the Dutch organization Beautiful Space, is giving me a slap on the wrist because I forgot to say that I was recording our conversation. She’s actually not that woo-woo. Unlike some of the other facilitators I speak to, Tilley has no qualms about psychedelic therapies getting absorbed by the optimization crowd. Mostly, she scares me. “I was having a conversation with an underground tripsitter yesterday and they said, ‘Everything you do doesn’t apply to me because I don’t charge thousands of pounds,’” she rants. “I said, ‘That’s exactly where you are going wrong. That’s why I’m setting up a whole fucking program on trip sitting.’”

But Tilley is disarmingly honest when I ask what comes up for her wealthy clients. “It’s usually the story of a little boy who was four years old and got taken to the woods and beaten,” she says. “He was hurt and abused, and that had crafted his personality at such an early age that he became a multimillionaire who is ruthless, and has affairs. Who is absolutely out of touch with any empathy for his wife, and who is distraught with his sexual behavior.”

Like the other tripsitters I speak to, Tilley stresses the importance of the screening process: everything that comes before heading out to the Netherlands for the psilocybin therapy itself. “Anyone doing it for the wrong reasons is screened out straight away,” she explains. It makes for an interesting dynamic. Our interview begins to feel like a screening of sorts, and I start to wonder if I’m going to pass. When she laughs, I’m at ease. When she says she’ll “answer [my] question, but perhaps we can make a better question out of that,” I feel like a fucking idiot.

“In [Johnson’s] case, it feels like it’s something for him to do,” says Paul Antico. “Like, he could do a lot of things in life, but it’s just something he’s into doing right now.” Antico either has beautiful natural curls, or a perm. “I love your name,” he says. “I love your hair,” I reply. Weeks have passed since I spoke to Antico over Zoom, but he remains a consistent liker of my Instagram stories. By virtue of the fact that Antico thinks I’m funny rather than depraved, I reckon he’d be a great person to do a load of mushrooms with.

To be fair, that’s Antico’s approach: no frills. “The more salesy people are like, ‘OK, we’ve got this package, we’re gonna carry your trauma,’” he tells me. “You can’t guarantee that to people.” Antico started Akasa Journeys in 2018. Back then, he was one of the only tripsitters around. Nearly ten years later, things have “gotten a little crazy,” and the important stuff has, he says, been lost in the noise. “It’s the process, not the medicine,” he explains. “People get all hung up on, ‘Well, I did albino penis-envy mushrooms versus golden teachers.’ What strain did they use in all the studies? There was no strain because it was pure synthetic psilocybin.” And the people facilitating 5-MeO-DMT? “God complexes,” Antico concludes. “Not all of them, but they tend to more than others…”

Nearly a month after I first stumbled across the video of Jesse shitting himself, I managed to track down his tripsitter, Freddy. I was wrong about Freddy. He doesn’t live in Los Angeles. The whole, fluids-heavy affair went down in Florida, where Freddy does tripsitting “for the love of it.” He has just 26 followers, and his profile picture is a dog with sunglasses on. “Jesse’s handler” reads his bio. “When you look at the premium side of this world, what do you see?” I ask. “A fucking scam,” he replies. “Healing comes from within. Not from someone charging ten grand in a luxury retreat while pretending to be spiritually enlightened.”

As for Jesse, Freddy would call him something of a “trust-fund bohemian”: “If I had to describe him, imagine Hunter S. Thompson mixed with Charlie Sheen, then add a little Alan Watts into the equation. But that still probably wouldn’t fully capture him.” It was Jesse who landed on 60 grams of Tidal Wave, by the way. As Freddy puts it, they were a “last resort”: he’d been using cocaine and methamphetamine intravenously. “The level he was operating at would destroy most people, but he genuinely doesn’t fear death the way most people do,” Freddy tells me. “At one point he called me and basically said, ‘Now or never. I won’t be here tomorrow.’ I called [crew member] Brandon [Burnett] and said, ‘Grab the cameras. We’re going deep.’”

Deep, they went. I’ve since seen uncensored photos and videos of Jesse’s session. “They are very raw, to say the least,” wrote Burnett. When I open them, I realize that means Jesse has got his knob out in each and every one. I look through maybe five, then feel satisfied.

According to Freddy, Jesse’s “more tapped in than ever,” these days. “Not in some sci-fi ‘chosen one’ sense,” he explains. “I mean he’s genuinely connected to life again in a way he wasn’t before. He’s clean now and has stayed that way.” When they eventually do the follow-up video, Freddy says people will see the difference for themselves.

“Not that everyone needs a Jesse dose,” he tells me. Then he pauses. “Or maybe they do.”

Follow Amber on Instagram @amberawlings

The post Tripsitting the Mega Rich appeared first on VICE.