What is the real tale of 5-MeO-DMT?

Live Discussion with Kimon de Greef

Recording will be sent to all ticket holders.

Bryan Johnson livestreamed his 5-MeO-DMT trip to hundreds of thousands of viewers and called it the most profound experience of his life. Tech founders are tattooing the molecule on their arms. Underground toad ceremonies are commonplace in the psychedelic scene, promising total ego dissolution in under twenty minutes. Behind sits a much stranger story: one of unregulated dosing, self-styled gurus, and a substance whose power to unmake the self can just as easily be exploited as revered.

Kimon de Greef spent years unearthing that story. The Ego Trip traces 5-MeO-DMT back to physician Octavio Rettig, who claimed in 2012 to have revived a forgotten indigenous ritual around the substance and became, for a time, the face of a global movement. As his following grew, so did reports of extreme dosing, abuse and cult-like control. Part true crime, part cult exposé, part reporting on our search for transcendence, the book has already won praise from Patrick Radden Keefe ("entirely mesmerising") and William Finnegan ("a one of a kind book").

Join us on Kimon’s journey into one of nature’s most powerful psychedelics and the powerful figures steering the wheel.

The Ego Trip will be published 6th August, 2026 and is available for preorder now at Waterstones, Norman Records, White Rabbits, and Hachette.

Read Psychedelic Alpha's review and write up here.

Kimon de Greef

Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author of The Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads, forthcoming for Doubleday in August 2026. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.

Some of his recent stories involved a Syrian raccoon trapper in New York, the rise and fall of a charismatic toad-smoking evangelist, the dystopian underworld of illicit gold mining in South Africa, the rivalrous underworld of songbird smuggling (featured by NPR) and the harmful supply chain for white sage. He has also written about gang violence, corruption, food delivery work, racing pigeons, sea cucumbers and donkey rustling.

Your Organiser

Kate is an event coordinator at the Psychedelic Society. Her research background spans clinical sleep studies, altered states of consciousness, and personalised gene therapies. She currently works applying neuroscience to the arts at the neuroaesthetics lab, Kinda Studios. Working with Onaya Science, she explores how rituals, music, and plant medicines support trauma recovery. Kate brings curiosity and care to the ways we feel, connect, and transform (and will usually be found outside).

@katedalbyy

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