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 \u2013 Braintree, the electronic payment company he founded, was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013 \u2013 to the pursuit of his own immortality. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s johnson, I refer you to a blog post he published last December, entitled How I\u2019m 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 \u201cDon\u2019t Die\u201d.<\/p>\n
Late last month, Johnson opened up a whole new front in his personal war on mortality<\/a> \u2013 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<\/a> and Salesforce<\/a> chief executive Marc Benioff, along with a live DJ set from Grimes<\/a>, the Canadian pop star who is also the mother of three of Elon Musk<\/a>\u2019s 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 \u201cnightmare blunt rotation\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n The event was \u201cmoderated\u201d 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: \u201c5.24 grams of Magic Mushrooms (28mg of psilocybin).\u201d This was, in other words, no mere Silicon Valley microdose \u2013 the practice, increasingly popular in recent years, of taking very low sub-psychedelic doses of psilocybin as a supposed route to optimising one\u2019s 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, \u201cCome watch me trip balls.\u201d<\/p>\n [\u00a0Give me Helen Mirren\u2019s refusal to \u2018age gracefully\u2019 over the tech bros who refuse to age at allOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n I took him up on it, sort of. I didn\u2019t 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<\/a>, and got the gist of it. As a viewing experience, it was powerfully dull \u2013 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 \u201cneuroimaging helmet\u201d, a headset made by his own company Kernel, which supposedly measures brain activity. <\/p>\n