When I was 18, I bought a cheap ticket from my college class Facebook group to see Grimes perform at a nearby music festival. Amid the crowd on that sunny afternoon, a drug-addled man continuously tried to climb a young, flimsy tree for a better view. He failed again and again — it was simply impossible for such a dainty plant to hold his weight — yet I watched in fascination and horror as this stranger fixated on a task that would only succeed if he could defy the very laws of physics.
Over a decade later, I found myself in a disturbingly similar situation. I watched Grimes perform on Sunday before yet another drug-addled man. But this time, her DJ set was part of a public livestream for Bryan Johnson, an investor and entrepreneur who had taken a hefty 5.24 gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms to see if psychedelics could aid him in his quest for immortality.
Bryan Johnson — who made his millions selling his finance startup Braintree — wants to live forever. He publicly documents each step of his process on social media, including getting plasma transfusions from his son, taking over 100 pills per day, and injecting Botox into his genitals. All the while, Johnson’s outlandish campaign to cheat death also functions as an advertisement for Kernel, his neurotechnology company, and Blueprint, his business that sells supplements, nut butters, and olive oil.
Johnson promoted his shrooms trip as a livestream extravaganza, complete with hokey graphics resembling a Windows XP desktop. Before his trip, Johnson and his Blueprint co-founder, Kate Tolo, joked they could make this stream like the Super Bowl and sell commercials. What was once a rite of passage for a certain ilk of college kids — listening to music and getting too high — was being turned into a very public, yet remarkably uncool, experiment on stretching the bounds of humanity.
Over a million people viewed the livestream on X, either in real time or as a replay. As Johnson ingested the shrooms and used his own technology from Kernel — a giant black helmet — to monitor his body’s reaction, a cadre of commentators with a collective net worth upward of $10 billion joined the video feed to heap praise upon Johnson for bravely tripping balls.
While some people see Johnson’s methods as elaborate, vampiric performance art, his Silicon Valley contemporaries think he’s a visionary.
Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, spoke about the parallels he sees between Johnson and the biblical Jacob.
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“My Bible study this morning was on Jacob’s Ladder … Jacob ends up with this incredible experience where he’s able to talk to God, and he’s climbing the ladder and coming back down, and finding the land he was in as holy,” Benioff said on the stream. “We’re still trying to find those bridges, and I think that’s what Bryan’s trying to do … He’s not doing this for recreational purposes, I would say.”
Naval Ravikant, the renowned investor and founder of AngelList, described Johnson as a “one-man FDA,” complaining that scientific advancement does not move forward as quickly as he would like due to regulators and bioethicists. It’s reminiscent of the manifesto Marc Andreessen published two years ago, in which he decries “social responsibility” and “tech ethics” as enemies to innovation.
“[Bryan’s] just like screw it, I’ll do it myself, and I’ll legitimize it, I’ll popularize it, I’ll experiment with it, and I’m gonna blaze the trail,” Ravikant said. “I hope he survives for a long time and then gives us the cheat codes. That’s really what we want. There should be a thousand Bryans, ten thousand Bryans out there doing this.”
But Johnson was not privy to this lavish praise — he had put on an eye mask and swaddled himself in a weighted blanket, oblivious to the proceedings of the five-hour livestream he had planned.
“I think it was a bit of a burden to have a microphone and have to be concentrating on what he wanted to say on a livestream,” explained Ashlee Vance, a journalist who has been chronicling Johnson’s pursuit to conquer death.
The purpose of Johnson’s public, meticulously measured shrooms trip is to research the potential for the use of psychedelics in life extension — research that academics are already working on in peer-reviewed studies. He’s far from the first to approach hallucinogens as a therapeutic intervention.
In the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary helped accelerate the movement to adopt psychedelics as mind-expanding tools, even sharing an interest in the same themes that captivate today’s tech elite: space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which Leary abbreviated as “SMI²LE.”
In Leary’s era, psychedelics were the focal point of a broader cultural movement that emphasized expanding the mind for the sake of music and art — he had a personal relationship with artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead (then called the Warlocks). Kesey, who has said he volunteered to participate in experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs, was a key influencer of the psychedelic era, whose exploits were documented in Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Even John Lennon first wrote “Come Together” as a campaign song for Leary’s political aspirations, but Leary never did run for office — instead, the song served as the opener for “Abbey Road,” one of the most iconic albums of the decade.
Two generations later, Johnson is gearing up to take shrooms on a livestream as he tries to explain a concept he calls “longevity escape velocity,” the point at which humans would no longer have to age.
“Time passes, but you stay the same age biologically,” Johnson said. “So that would be probably the most significant accomplishment for humans.”
“AKA, we’re going to try to make Bryan Johnson immortal, effectively, by 2039,” explained Tolo, who sat with Johnson through the duration of the stream.
“So we’re basically doing this protocol and sharing it with all of you, for free, of how can we all do this together?” Johnson said. “So psilocybin is part of that journey where we’re trying to say, what therapies in the world could actually help us slow down our speed of aging, and reverse aging damage?”
Johnson and Tolo portray this shrooms trip as a groundbreaking moment in the quest for immortality. The backdrop isn’t a dimly lit and smoke-filled room festooned with psychedelic colors and music, nor is it a university research lab. Instead, it could be another corporate Zoom meeting with the addition of Johnson wrapped in a weighted blanket and eye mask, happily divorced from responsibility. Looking fondly at Johnson in his cozy cocoon, Benioff remarked, “I think we’re missing a really great opportunity for a sponsorship with a sleep mask company.”
Eventually, Johnson is roused from his swaddle, and Tolo struggles to collect his requisite saliva samples, then places a large black helmet on his head, which records his brain activity while he stares at a wall.
Welcome to Johnson’s longevity revolution, which plays out in a beige room with beige furniture, equipped with laptops and tools for monitoring his biometrics, while some of the richest and most powerful in tech watch along.
