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 was being turned into a very public, yet remarkably uncool, experiment on stretching the bounds of humanity.
Over a million people viewed the livestream. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.