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.
Image Credits:Byran Johnson's livestream on X
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.”
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