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 \u2014 it was simply impossible for such a dainty plant to hold his weight \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Bryan Johnson \u2014 who made his millions selling his finance startup Braintree \u2014 wants to live forever. He publicly documents each step of his process on social media, including getting plasma transfusions<\/a> from his son, taking over 100 pills per day, and injecting Botox<\/a> into his genitals. All the while, Johnson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 listening to music and getting too high \u2014 was being turned into a very public, yet remarkably uncool, experiment on stretching the bounds of humanity.<\/p>\n 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> \u2014 a giant black helmet \u2014 to monitor his body\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n While some people see Johnson\u2019s methods as elaborate, vampiric performance art, his Silicon Valley contemporaries think he\u2019s a visionary.<\/p>\n Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, spoke about the parallels he sees between Johnson and the biblical Jacob.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> \u201cMy Bible study this morning was on Jacob\u2019s Ladder\u00a0\u2026 Jacob ends up with this incredible experience where he\u2019s able to talk to God, and he\u2019s climbing the ladder and coming back down, and finding the land he was in as holy,\u201d Benioff said on the stream. \u201cWe\u2019re still trying to find those bridges, and I think that\u2019s what Bryan\u2019s trying to do\u00a0\u2026 He\u2019s not doing this for recreational purposes, I would say.\u201d<\/p>\n Naval Ravikant, the renowned investor and founder of AngelList, described Johnson as a \u201cone-man FDA,\u201d complaining that scientific advancement does not move forward as quickly as he would like due to regulators and bioethicists. It\u2019s reminiscent of the manifesto<\/a> Marc Andreessen published two years ago, in which he decries \u201csocial responsibility\u201d and \u201ctech ethics\u201d as enemies to innovation.<\/p>\n \u201c[Bryan\u2019s] just like screw it, I\u2019ll do it myself, and I\u2019ll legitimize it, I\u2019ll popularize it, I\u2019ll experiment with it, and I\u2019m gonna blaze the trail,\u201d Ravikant said. \u201cI hope he survives for a long time and then gives us the cheat codes. That\u2019s really what we want. There should be a thousand Bryans, ten thousand Bryans out there doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n But Johnson was not privy to this lavish praise \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d explained Ashlee Vance, a journalist who has been chronicling Johnson\u2019s pursuit to conquer death.<\/p>\n The purpose of Johnson\u2019s public, meticulously measured shrooms trip is to research the potential for the use of psychedelics in life extension \u2014 research that academics are already working on<\/a> in peer-reviewed studies. He\u2019s far from the first to approach hallucinogens as a therapeutic intervention.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s tech elite: space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which Leary abbreviated as \u201cSMI\u00b2LE.\u201d<\/p>\n In Leary\u2019s era, psychedelics were the focal point of a broader cultural movement that emphasized expanding the mind for the sake of music and art \u2014 he had a personal relationship with artists and writers like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead (then called the Warlocks). Kesey,<\/a> who has said he volunteered to participate in experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs, was a key influencer of the psychedelic era, whose exploits were documented in Tom Wolfe\u2019s \u201cThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.\u201d Even John Lennon first wrote \u201cCome Together\u201d as a campaign song for Leary\u2019s political aspirations, but Leary never did run for office \u2014 instead, the song served as the opener for \u201cAbbey Road,\u201d one of the most iconic albums of the decade.<\/p>\n Two generations later, Johnson is gearing up to take shrooms on a livestream as he tries to explain a concept he calls \u201clongevity escape velocity,\u201d the point at which humans would no longer have to age.<\/p>\n \u201cTime passes, but you stay the same age biologically,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cSo that would be probably the most significant accomplishment for humans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAKA, we\u2019re going to try to make Bryan Johnson immortal, effectively, by 2039,\u201d explained Tolo, who sat with Johnson through the duration of the stream.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we\u2019re basically doing this protocol and sharing it with all of you, for free, of how can we all do this together?\u201d Johnson said. \u201cSo psilocybin is part of that journey where we\u2019re trying to say, what therapies in the world could actually help us slow down our speed of aging, and reverse aging damage?\u201d<\/p>\n Johnson and Tolo portray this shrooms trip as a groundbreaking moment in the quest for immortality. The backdrop isn\u2019t a dimly lit and smoke-filled room festooned with psychedelic colors and music, nor is it a university research lab. 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. Looking fondly at Johnson in his cozy cocoon, Benioff remarked, \u201cI think we\u2019re missing a really great opportunity for a sponsorship with a sleep mask company.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Welcome to Johnson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Screenshot-2025-12-02-at-1.31.11-PM.png?w=680\")
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