The scene of Brian Johnson and his journey broadcast live to the bedrooms

When I was 18, I bought a cheap ticket from my college Facebook group to see Grimes perform at a nearby music festival. In the crowd that sunny afternoon, a drug-addicted man continually tried to climb a small, flimsy tree to get a better view. He failed again and again – it was impossible for such a beautiful plant to support his weight – and yet I watched in amazement and horror as this stranger focused on a mission that would only succeed if he could defy the very laws of physics.

More than a decade later, I found myself in a similar, troubling situation. I watched Grimes perform Sunday opposite another drug addicted man. But this time, her DJ set was part of a public live stream by Brian Johnson, an investor and entrepreneur who took a massive 5.24-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms to see if psychedelics could help his quest for immortality.

Brian Johnson – who made millions selling his financial startup Braintree – wants to live forever. He publicly documents every step of his process on social media, including a plasma transfusion from his son, taking more than 100 pills a day, and injecting Botox into his genitals. Meanwhile, Johnson’s bizarre campaign to cheat death also serves as an ad for Kernel, his neurotechnology company, and Blueprint, his company that sells nutritional supplements, nut butters and olive oil.

Johnson promoted his bedroom excursion as a live-streaming extravaganza, complete with Windows XP desktop-like hockey graphics. Before his trip, Johnson and Blueprint co-founder Kate Tollo joked that they could make this broadcast like the Super Bowl and sell commercials. What was once a rite of passage for a certain group of college students — listening to music and getting too high — has turned into a very generic, but remarkably uncool, experience of pushing the boundaries of humanity.

More than a million people watched the live broadcast on X, either in real time or as a replay. As Johnson swallowed the mushroom and used his own Kernel technology — a giant black helmet — to monitor his body’s reaction, a cadre of commentators with a collective net worth of more than $10 billion joined the video stream to praise Johnson for his bravery in launching the balls.

While some people see Johnson’s methods as elaborate, vampiric performance art, his contemporaries in Silicon Valley believe he is a visionary.

Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, spoke about the similarities he sees between Johnson and Jacob the Bible.

“My Bible study this morning was on Jacob’s Ladder…and Jacob ends up having this amazing experience where he’s able to talk to God, and he climbs up the ladder and comes back down, and finds the ground he was on holy,” Benioff said on the stream. “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, the famous investor and founder of AngelList, described Johnson as “the FDA’s one-man man” and complained that scientific progress is not progressing as quickly as he would like because of regulators and bioethicists. This is reminiscent of the manifesto published by Marc Andreessen two years ago, in which he denounced “social responsibility” and “technology ethics” as enemies of innovation.

“[Bryan’s] “Just like damn it, I’m going to do it myself, I’m going to legitimize it, I’m going to promote it, I’m going to try it, I’m going to blaze a trail,” Ravikant said. “I hope he stays alive for a long time and then gives us cheat codes. This is really what we want. There must be a thousand Brians, ten thousand Brians doing this. “

But Johnson was not privy to this lavish praise, as he put on an eye mask and wrapped himself in a heavy blanket, oblivious to the proceedings of the five-hour live broadcast he had planned.

“I think it was a bit of a burden to have a microphone and have to focus on what he wanted to say on the live broadcast,” explained Ashley Vance, a journalist who has been chronicling Johnson’s quest to overcome death.

The purpose of Johnson’s public and carefully researched trip is to investigate the potential for the drug to be used to extend life – research that academics are already working on in peer-reviewed studies. He is not the first to treat hallucinations as a therapeutic intervention.

In the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary helped accelerate the adoption of psychedelics as mind-expanding tools, even sharing an interest in the same topics that captivate today’s tech elite: space migration, increased intelligence, and life extension, which Leary abbreviated as “SMI²LE.”

In Leary’s era, psychedelics were the focal point of a broader cultural movement focused on expanding the mind for the sake of music and art—and he had a personal relationship with artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead (then called the Wizards). Casey, who said he volunteered to participate in experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs, was a major influencer of the psychedelic era, whose exploits were documented in Tom Wolfe’s book “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 ran for office — instead, the song served as the opener for “Abbey Road,” one of the most popular albums of the decade.

Two generations later, Johnson is preparing to take mushrooms on a live broadcast as he tries to explain a concept he calls “longevity escape velocity,” the point at which humans will no longer have to age.

“Time goes by, but you stay the same age biologically,” Johnson said. “So this will probably be the most important achievement for humans.”

“AKA, we’re going to try to make Brian Johnson immortal, effectively, by the year 2039,” explained Tolo, who sat with Johnson for the duration of the broadcast.

“So, we’re basically implementing this protocol and sharing it with all of you for free, how can we all do this together?” Johnson said. “So psilocybin is part of that journey where we’re trying to say, what are the treatments in the world that can actually help us slow down the speed of our aging, and reverse the damage of aging?”

Johnson and Tollo portray this mushroom journey as a pioneering moment in the quest for immortality. The background is neither a dimly lit, smoke-filled room decorated with psychedelic colors and music, nor a university research laboratory. Instead, it could be another company meeting via Zoom with Johnson added wrapped in a heavy blanket and eye mask, blissfully removed from responsibility. “I think we’re missing a really great opportunity to nurture a sleep mask company,” Benioff said, looking fondly at Johnson in his cozy cocoon.

Eventually, Johnson wakes up from his swaddle, and Tullo struggles to collect the required saliva samples, then places a large black helmet on his head, which records his brain activity as he stares at the wall.

Welcome to Johnson’s long-running outburst, shown in a beige room with beige furniture, equipped with laptops and tools to monitor his biometrics, while some of the richest and most powerful people in technology look on.