The Third Wave: Psychedelics, 5-MeO, and the Path Forward

Reflections on the state of psychedelics and a big announcement for Enfold.

There’s a feeling in the air right now that’s hard to name. AI is rewriting the world faster than most of us can metabolize. The us-vs-them mentality has metastasized into something that feels structural. Optimism is in short supply. People are exhausted, dysregulated, and quietly suspecting that the operating system humanity has been running on is no longer fit for purpose.

I think they’re right.

Humanity is facing a set of challenges that requires us to uplevel our ability to hold complexity. It requires that we upgrade our level of consciousness. The days of fighting over pieces of the ground need to end. Integral Theory maps the levels of human consciousness with a colour coded system both on an individual as well as a collective level. Without getting into the weeds here, we need to get into teal and purple as quickly as possible if we want to survive.

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This is the first of what I plan to make a regular practice — a few times a year I’ll step back from the day-to-day at Enfold and write what I’m seeing in the world, where I think the psychedelic space is going, and how we’re trying to be useful inside of it. Consider this a state of the union.

Let me start with the bigger picture.

The third wave

Psychedelics have moved through two distinct cultural cycles, and we are now entering a third.

The first wave was the 1960s. A genuine spiritual and cultural awakening that promised a new consciousness and got crushed by its own excess. It positioned itself in opposition to the establishment, against science, against institutions — and the establishment came down hard. Schedule I. Decades of silence. A whole generation of inquiry erased from polite conversation and forced underground.

The second wave began roughly a decade ago. Biotech investment, clinical trials, FDA pathways, MDMA for PTSD, psilocybin for depression. This wave was a necessary corrective to the first — it took psychedelics seriously as medicine, generated real data, and gave the field credibility. But the pendulum swung too far. In the rush to make psychedelics legitimate and profitable, the field stripped out the spiritual dimension that has always made these compounds meaningful. It overpromised, overhyped, and underdelivered. Companies raised hundreds of millions and then disappeared.

What’s emerging now is the Third Wave. It’s not anti-science like the first. It’s not narrowly biomedical like the second. It’s the middle path: science and ancient wisdom. Evidence-based tools alongside contemplative traditions. Rigour without reductionism. Reverence without dogma. An approach that can hold the complexity of the human experience without needing to compartmentalize it. An approach that recognizes that “one-size-fits-all” simply won’t work.

While this Third Wave is still nascent in many ways, where we operate from it’s alive and well. We see more and more people who were previously psychedelic naive, or even psychedelic-phobic coming around. The people we support are not “psychonauts”. They are mothers, fathers, executives, retirees, Entrepreneurs, first responders, politicians, academics.

Quick note: Paul Austin called out his Third Wave concept for psychedelics many years ago. My interpretation is a little different than his, but credit is due to him for launching this idea into the zeitgeist.

Psychedelics are not for broken people

There’s been a stubborn assumption born from the second wave of psychedelics that needs to be put to rest: that psychedelic work is for people in crisis. Trauma, treatment-resistant depression, PTSD. These use cases are real and important. But they’ve also created a frame that says, this is medicine for people who are broken — and if you’re functional, you don’t need it.

That framing is incomplete.

What we see in our intensives is that everyone walks in carrying something. It doesn’t matter how successful they look on paper. This is the human experience. Old stories about who they’re supposed to be. Patterns inherited from family, culture, profession. Defenses built before they were old enough to know they were defending. The successful and the suffering both arrive with versions of the same condition: a gap between who they are deep down inside and who they present themselves to be. The wider the gap, the lonelier it is. This condition doesn’t discriminate.

Psychedelics, inside of the right container, are one of the most efficient catalysts we know of for closing that gap and helping people break through their unconscious conditioning. Not because they fix what’s broken, but because they help reveal what’s already there.

The individual work is the collective work

At Enfold, we help individuals deconstruct the stories that no longer serve them and consciously author new ones. That sentence has always described our work. What I realized more recently is that it’s also a description of where humanity is.

The old stories aren’t working. The narratives of permanent growth, scarcity, hierarchy, and tribal allegiance — they brought us this far, but they cannot carry us through what’s coming. The complexity of the world we now live in demands a corresponding rise in consciousness. We have to grow our capacity to hold contradictions, to sit with people who see the world differently, to move past zero-sum thinking and recognize that the same operating system that runs us individually also runs us collectively. In many ways we must evolve out of our evolutionary instincts that no longer serve us.

If we’re going to make it through the next chapter of being human we have to raise consciousness. This can only happen at a collective level if it’s happening at an individual level at a rate and velocity that can break through the existing societal paradigms holding us back. The tipping point is generally thought to be about 10% of a population shifting its beliefs in order for something to rapidly become mainstream.

Psychedelics, used safely, are one of the most direct paths I know of for doing exactly that. They quite literally interrupt the default mode of mind that keeps us locked into the same loops and create space for something new to emerge. I’m not speaking in metaphors. It’s a measurable neurological effect with profound spiritual implications.

Which is why this moment matters.

5-MeO-DMT is having its moment

For most of the last decade the public conversation around psychedelics has been about psilocybin, MDMA and on another level, Ayahuasca. 5-MeO-DMT has been on the periphery — known mostly to insiders as the most powerful psychedelic on the planet, the one that bypasses imagery entirely and drops you into a non-dual state of pure awareness.

That’s changing fast. More research. More high-profile testimonials. More people seeking it out. 5-MeO is moving from the edges of the conversation toward the center.

This is exciting and concerning in equal measure. Exciting, because 5-MeO can produce some of the most profound and rapidly transformative experiences available to a human nervous system. Concerning, because it’s also the most unforgiving of these compounds when held poorly. The shorter and sharper the experience, the more important the container. A twenty-minute 5-MeO journey can take a year to integrate — or it can leave someone disoriented and unsupported in ways that do real harm.

Context is everything. Set, setting, screening, preparation, facilitation, integration, community. When all of those are present, 5-MeO is unmatched. When they’re not, it’s a coin flip on whether the experience helps or hurts.

We’ve spent years developing the most comprehensive process for 5-MeO-DMT in the world. As this medicine enters the mainstream, our role is to keep raising the bar — to share what we’ve learned, push for higher standards across the field, and make sure that as more people seek this work, more of them find their way to containers that can actually hold it.

Where Enfold fits

I’ll keep this part short, because the origin story deserves its own piece another time.

Enfold started, in spirit if not in name, in 2019. For the first three years we had no website, no marketing, no strategic plan. We were quietly developing a way of doing this work that we didn’t yet know how to describe. People found us anyway. We’ve now served upwards of 700 people through this process, and we’ve outlasted 90% of the psychedelic organizations that have come and gone in the same era.

We didn’t get here by being loud. We got here by being patient, careful, and uncompromising about quality. Most companies today take a marketing-first approach: Pitch the product, build an audience, and then assemble a product on-demand. We have done the opposite. We have been honing our craft for years. We knew that too much external pressure early on would make it impossible to honour the depth of what we were doing.

In 2023, we decided to come out of stealth mode, and out of the underground. Quiet diligence wasn’t enough anymore. The third wave was arriving and the conversation was shifting quickly. And companies like ours — ones that have spent years developing real expertise — have a responsibility to step into the stream and help shape where this all goes.

So that’s what we’re doing.

Welcoming Scott Barker

Which brings me to the news.

I’m thrilled to share that Scott Barker is joining Enfold as a partner. Scott is one of those rare people who can hold both the strategic and the soulful — who understands that growing an organization in this space isn’t about blindly pouring fuel on a fire, it’s about tending one carefully.

Scott is coming on to help us scale our impact without diluting what makes Enfold what it is. That’s the core challenge of the third wave for any of us doing this work: how do you support more people without compromising the depth that makes the work worth reaching for in the first place? Scott is uniquely equipped to help us answer that question, and he’s already moving us forward in ways I’m excited to share over the coming months. He is an absolutely incredible entrepreneur with a track record that speaks for itself. He truly could have done anything he wanted after leaving the VC fund he raised $150M for. It speaks to the quality of his heart that he chose to join us in this sacred and challenging work. We are truly grateful.

Welcoming Scott is the first of several moves we’re making to match the scale of what’s being asked of us with the team we need to deliver on it.

If you’ve ever met Scott, you already know why I’m grateful he said yes. If you haven’t, you will soon.

What’s next

I’ll be writing more like this — periodically, when I have something worth saying and worth standing behind. Part state-of-the-field, part state-of-Enfold, part state-of-the-world-as-I-see-it. If that’s useful to you, stick around. If it’s not, no offense taken.

The short version of where we are:

The third wave of psychedelics is here, and it’s the most important one yet. It’s mature, integrated, science-respecting, and spiritually serious. It belongs to the organizations that have spent years quietly doing the work and are ready to step forward now.

We are one of those organizations. We are stepping forward. And we’re bringing the right people with us.

More soon.

With so much love,

— Steve