Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old venture capitalist and tech company founder, is a strange and fascinating man. As regular readers of this column will know, he has for several years now devoted his life, and his considerable wealth – Braintree, the electronic payment company he founded, was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013 – to the pursuit of his own immortality.
His methods have variously included adhering to an austere caloric-restrictive diet; taking a prodigious number of high-end supplements; regular medical interventions to adjust various hormones to an optimal range; a plethora of dermatological and other cosmetic treatments; and receiving transfusions of blood plasma from his own son, who is called Talmage.
He has attracted attention and no small amount of ridicule for his practice of taking detailed measurements of his nocturnal erections, and comparing them, in terms of quality and durability, to the nocturnal erections of 19-year-old Talmage. (For more on the whole business of Johnson’s johnson, I refer you to a blog post he published last December, entitled How I’m De-Aging My Penis, wherein he detailed such matters of penile import as semen analysis, erection measurement and the assessment of maximum urination speed.) He spends, by his own estimation, something in the region of $2 million per year on the goal of becoming, in terms of his biological markers, functionally 18 years old. His rallying cry, which is partly a joke but also entirely serious, is “Don’t Die”.
Late last month, Johnson opened up a whole new front in his personal war on mortality – that of getting completely out of his gourd on magic mushrooms. The set-up was seductively bizarre: viewers were invited, via an announcement on social media, to tune into a live-streamed event entitled Bryan Johnson Takes Magic Mushrooms, featuring a host of live guests, including the YouTuber MrBeast and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, along with a live DJ set from Grimes, the Canadian pop star who is also the mother of three of Elon Musk’s many children. Fittingly enough for an event centring around getting extremely high while being extremely online, the line-up brought to mind, for me at least, the “nightmare blunt rotation” meme. (This is a popular online joke format whereby that phrase is used to caption a photograph of a group of people with whom it would be truly hellish to share a cannabis joint.)
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The event was “moderated” by Ashlee Vance, the tech journalist and biographer of Musk. (The idea of a mushroom trip being moderated at all, let alone by Ashlee Vance, is in itself uniquely monstrous.) The ad specified the precise measure Johnson would be taking: “5.24 grams of Magic Mushrooms (28mg of psilocybin).” This was, in other words, no mere Silicon Valley microdose – the practice, increasingly popular in recent years, of taking very low sub-psychedelic doses of psilocybin as a supposed route to optimising one’s cognitive function and attention capacity. This was the real deal, a quantity sufficient to thrust a person toward the threshold of eternity, to have them weeping in awe and terror before the face of God. Or, as Johnson put it on X, “Come watch me trip balls.”
I took him up on it, sort of. I didn’t watch it live, to be clear; the thing went on for well over five and a half hours, and I am not insane. But I did flick through the recording on YouTube, and got the gist of it. As a viewing experience, it was powerfully dull – even in, as it were, the low dose I consumed. (God knows how potently, psychedelically boring the full 5 hours and 36 minutes would have proven.) The thing was presented as an enterprise in gonzo science, a self-experiment to determine what, if any, effects tripping on mushrooms might have on longevity or cognitive function. Throughout the trip, he wore something called a “neuroimaging helmet”, a headset made by his own company Kernel, which supposedly measures brain activity.
In a way, the idea that getting out of your gourd on magic mushrooms might have some benefit in terms of longevity is a fairly counterintuitive one. But Timothy Leary, the rogue Harvard psychologist who became the high priest of the 1960s counterculture through his advocacy of LSD, might have agreed. SMILE, the acronym he formulated to encapsulate his crackpot unified theory of psychedelics and life itself, stood for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension – a cluster of ideas that might easily have come from some of the more wide-eyed Silicon Valley prophets of our post-human future. Johnson isn’t positioning psilocybin as some kind of magic elixir of eternal life, but he is obviously bullish on its potential longevity effects. Magic mushrooms, according to one study, may help extend the lifespan of mice, as well as reducing inflammation and increasing neuroplasticity.
I must admit to quietly hoping that Johnson would be thwarted in his desire to glean from his trip new insights into his quest for immortality, that he would instead be brought face to face with the intractable transience of all earthly phenomena, with the total inescapability of death. No such luck: existentialism, like mortality itself, is clearly for poor people. Once he came down, he posted the following on X: “Life feels fresh today. New thoughts are flowing. My mind feels more nimble and curious. Did my normal morning routine: light in eyes, nutritious breakfast, exercise, sauna, red light. Completed some tests: brain scan + blood samples.”
Johnson is a compelling figure, I think, not only because of the strange tragicomedy of his struggle against his own mortality, but because of how his monomaniacal obsession with youth and vitality reflects, albeit in absurdly intensified form, a larger societal fixation on such things. He seems to me like a kind of mythological figure, an allegorical figuration of the deeply human desire to resist and deny our own mortality. I myself have a personal Bryan Johnson, a pampered little charlatan who sits on my left shoulder and whispers into my ear that I must never grow old, and never accept my own mortality. On my right shoulder, however, sits a miniature Martin Heidegger, who, in his clipped German accent, never tires of telling me that the only authentic and meaningful life is one shaped in relation to the certain knowledge of death.
The great irony of Bryan Johnson might be that, in the end, he is living his own version of just such an authentic life. And it’s an irony he himself may well even be aware of. “I guarantee I’m going to die in the most ironic way possible,” is how he put it in a social media post last May. “I hope you all enjoy.” He’s surely right, because he is living his life in such a way that no matter what form his death eventually comes in – heart attack, cancer, stroke, falling down the stairs, getting knocked down by a bus while tripping balls – it is by now guaranteed to be ironic. And maybe ironising death is the closest thing we have to defeating it.
