A decade ago, a curious scene unfolded at a music festival: a man, under the influence, repeatedly attempted to scale a fragile tree for a better view, a futile effort defying the laws of physics. This image of determined, if misguided, ambition found a modern echo recently when Grimes performed a DJ set during a public livestream hosted by tech investor and entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. Johnson, known for his controversial longevity pursuits, had ingested a substantial 5.24-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms, aiming to explore psychedelics' role in his quest for immortality.
Bryan Johnson, who amassed his fortune by selling his finance startup Braintree, is driven by a singular goal: to live forever. He meticulously documents every step of his "Blueprint" regimen on social media, which includes receiving plasma transfusions from his son, consuming over 100 pills daily, and even injecting Botox into his genitals. Beyond his personal quest, Johnson’s outlandish campaign to defy death also serves as a high-profile advertisement for his neurotechnology company, Kernel, and Blueprint, his business selling supplements, nut butters, and olive oil.
Johnson promoted his psilocybin trip as a livestream extravaganza, complete with retro graphics reminiscent of a Windows XP desktop. Before the event, Johnson and his Blueprint co-founder, Kate Tolo, playfully suggested they could turn the stream into a "Super Bowl" event, selling commercial slots. What was once a private rite of passage for some college students—listening to music and getting high—was transformed into a highly public, yet remarkably uncool, experiment pushing the boundaries of human existence.
Over a million people tuned into the livestream on X, either in real time or via replay. As Johnson ingested the psilocybin and utilized his own Kernel technology—a giant black helmet—to monitor his body’s reactions, a cohort of high-net-worth commentators, including Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, joined the video feed. They lavished praise upon Johnson for his "brave" psychedelic journey.
While some observers view Johnson’s methods as elaborate, almost vampiric performance art, many of his Silicon Valley contemporaries hail him as a visionary.
Marc Benioff, for instance, drew parallels between Johnson and the Biblical Jacob.
“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 stated 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, dubbed Johnson a “one-man FDA,” lamenting that scientific advancement is often hampered by regulators and bioethicists. This sentiment echoes the manifesto published two years prior by Marc Andreessen, which decried “social responsibility” and “tech ethics” as obstacles 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 asserted. “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.”
Ironically, Johnson himself was not privy to this lavish praise. He had donned an eye mask and swaddled himself in a weighted blanket, oblivious to the proceedings of the five-hour livestream he had meticulously 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 extensively chronicled Johnson’s pursuit to conquer death.
The stated purpose of Johnson’s public, meticulously measured psilocybin trips is to research the potential for psychedelics in life extension—a field academics are already exploring in peer-reviewed studies. He is far from the first to consider hallucinogens as a therapeutic intervention.
In the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary championed the movement to adopt psychedelics as mind-expanding tools. Leary shared an interest in themes that still captivate today’s tech elite: space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which he abbreviated as “SMI²LE.”
Leary’s era saw psychedelics become a focal point of a broader cultural movement emphasizing mind expansion for art and music. He cultivated personal relationships with artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead. Kesey, who volunteered for LSD experiments, was a key influencer of the psychedelic era, his exploits documented in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Even John Lennon initially penned “Come Together” as a campaign song for Leary’s political aspirations, though it ultimately served as the opener for Abbey Road, one of the decade’s most iconic albums.
Two generations later, Johnson prepared for his livestreamed psilocybin trip, attempting to explain a concept he terms “longevity escape velocity”—the theoretical point at which humans would cease to age.
“Time passes, but you stay the same age biologically,” Johnson elaborated. “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,” added Tolo, who remained with Johnson throughout 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 asked. “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 presented this psilocybin trip as a groundbreaking moment in the quest for immortality. Yet, the backdrop was not a dimly lit, smoke-filled room adorned with psychedelic art and music, nor a sterile university research lab. Instead, it resembled another corporate Zoom meeting, albeit with Johnson wrapped in a weighted blanket and eye mask, seemingly detached from the ongoing discussion. Observing Johnson in his cozy cocoon, Benioff humorously remarked, “I think we’re missing a really great opportunity for a sponsorship with a sleep mask company.”
