When I was 18, I bought cheap tickets from my college class’s Facebook group to go see Grimes perform at a nearby music festival. That sunny afternoon, in the crowd, a drug-addicted man kept trying to climb a young, fragile tree for a better view. He failed again and again, but it was simply impossible for such a dainty plant to withstand its weight. Yet I watched in fascination and horror as this stranger persisted in a task that required him to defy the very laws of physics.
More than a decade later, I found myself in a disturbingly similar situation. I saw Grimes perform in front of yet another drug-addicted man on Sunday. But this time, her DJ set was part of a public livestream for investor and entrepreneur Brian Johnson, who ingested a massive 5.24 grams of psilocybin mushrooms to see if psychedelics could help him in his quest for immortality.
Brian Johnson made millions selling his financial startup Braintree, but he wants to live forever. He has publicly documented each step of his process on social media, including receiving plasma transfusions from his son, taking more than 100 pills per day, and injecting Botox into his genitals. Meanwhile, Johnson’s outlandish campaign to fake his death doubles as an advertisement for his neurotechnology company, Kernel, and his business, Blueprint, which sells supplements, nut butters, and olive oil.
Johnson promoted his shroom trip as a livestream extravaganza using corny graphics that resembled a Windows XP desktop. Johnson and Blueprint co-founder Kate Toro joked before the trip that they could turn the stream into a Super Bowl to sell commercials. What was once a rite of passage for some college students by getting too high by listening to music has turned into a very public but very uncool experiment in stretching the limits of humanity.
More than 1 million people watched the X livestream in real time or in replay. After Johnson ingested the mushrooms and used Kernel’s proprietary technology (a giant black helmet) to monitor his body’s reactions, a cadre of commentators worth more than $10 billion joined the video feed to praise Johnson for valiantly tripping the ball.
While some see Johnson’s methods as elaborate, vampiric performance art, his Silicon Valley contemporaries consider him a visionary.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff talked about the similarities he sees between Johnson and the Biblical Jacob.
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“My Bible study this morning was Jacob’s Ladder…Jacob ends up having this incredible experience of being able to converse with God, and as he climbs up the ladder and comes back down, he discovers that the land he was on is sacred,” Benioff said in the broadcast. “We’re still trying to find those bridges, and I think that’s what Brian is trying to do…I would say he’s not doing this for entertainment purposes.”
Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList and a prominent investor, described Johnson as a “one-man FDA” and complained that regulators and bioethicists were keeping science from progressing as quickly as he would like. This is reminiscent of Marc Andreessen’s manifesto released two years ago, in which he denounced “social responsibility” and “technological ethics” as the enemies of innovation.
“[Bryan’s] “Like I’m going to mess it up, I’m going to do it myself, legitimize it, popularize it, experiment with it, and then blaze a trail,” Ravikant said. That’s what we really want. There must be 1,000, 10,000 Brians out there doing this. ”
But Johnson was unaware of this extravagant praise. Wearing an eye mask and wrapped in a weighted blanket, he was oblivious to the scheduled five-hour livestream.
“I think it was a little taxing having to hold the microphone and focus on what he wanted to say on the livestream,” explained journalist Ashley Vance, who has been documenting Johnson’s quest to overcome death.
The purpose of Mr Johnson’s meticulous public mushroom journey is to study the potential of psychedelic use in life extension, something that academics have already tackled in a peer-reviewed study. He is not the first to use psychedelics as a therapeutic intervention.
In the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary helped accelerate the movement to embrace psychedelics as mind-expanding tools, and he also shared an interest in space migration, increased intelligence, and life extension (which Leary abbreviated as “SMI²LE”), the same themes that fascinate technological elites today.
In Leary’s time, psychedelics were at the center of a broad cultural movement that emphasized expanding the mind for music and art. Leary had personal relationships with artists and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead (then called the Warlocks). Kesey, who has said he willingly participated in experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, was a key influencer of the psychedelic era, and his accomplishments were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Even John Lennon originally wrote “Come Together” as a campaign song for Leary’s political aspirations, but Leary never ran for office. Instead, the song became the opener for Abbey Road, one of the most iconic albums of the decade.
Two generations later, Johnson is poised to feature mushrooms on a livestream, trying to explain a concept he calls “longevity escape velocity,” or the point at which humans no longer need to age.
“Even though time passes, biologically they remain the same age,” Johnson said. “So it’s probably the most important achievement for humanity.”
“Aka, we’re essentially making Brian Johnson immortal by 2039,” explained Toro, who was with Johnson throughout the broadcast.
“So we’re basically implementing this protocol and sharing it with you for free. How can we do this together?” Johnson said. “Psilocybin is part of the journey we’re trying to make to say what treatments around the world can actually help slow the rate of aging and reverse the damage of aging.”
Johnson and Toro depict the mushroom’s journey as a breakthrough moment in its quest for immortality. The backdrop is not a dim, smoke-filled room filled with psychedelic colors and music, nor is it a university laboratory. Instead, it could be another corporate Zoom meeting, wrapped in a weighted blanket and an eye mask and joined by Mr. Johnson, who happily shied away from responsibility. “I think we’re missing out on a really great sponsorship opportunity with a sleep mask company,” Benioff said, looking fondly at Johnson in his cozy cocoon.
Eventually, Johnson awakens from his swaddle, and Toro struggles to collect the necessary saliva sample, placing a large black helmet on his head and recording his brain activity while he stares at a wall.
Welcome to Johnson’s longevity revolution. This revolution unfolds in a beige room with beige furniture, a laptop and tools to monitor his biometrics, and some of the richest and most powerful tech companies looking on.
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