"Immortality influencer" Bryan Johnson recently livestreamed his second-ever psilocybin trip "for science." But was it, really? Derek and Julian break down the performative nature of this stunt and discuss the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics culture.
Show Notes
Bryan Johnson Has Discovered Shrooms, and He Really Wants You to Know It
Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends
How the Right Coopted Psychedelics
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Last week, I found out that Brian Johnson would be live streaming a psychedelic mushroom trip here in my adopted home state of Oregon.
The text from one post on social media is really worth listening to in full, Julian?
Tomorrow, Grimes will DJ a live stream of immortality influencer Brian Johnson tripping on shrooms to determine its effect on longevity.
Mr. Beast and the CEO of Salesforce will be there too.
You know, this is a real art to headline writing.
I hate to tell you now so early in the episode, Julian, but Mr. Beast did not make it.
I don't know what happened, but spoiler.
Let's think about some of the other things going on here.
Immortality influencer.
That's fantastic.
I never heard of that.
Grimes DJing.
You know, one media outlet said it was off the chains.
I listened to it.
It was a pretty boring set.
You know, then there's the fact that the CEO of Salesforce doesn't have a name.
It's Mark Benioff.
And the day after Johnson's hero's dose trip, hero's dose officially being five grams.
I think he did a little bit over.
The publication, the local publication from San Francisco, SF Gate, fantastic newspaper, they nailed down its own headline when they wrote, Billionaire CEO talks about God during hallucinogenic live stream.
Now, this is one of the more meta occurrences from that live stream, which we should note is five and a half hours long.
The article unpacks that, though, a bit more.
Benioff cast Johnson's latest experiment in more religious terms, comparing the drug trip to Jacob's communion with God in the Bible.
The billionaire tech CEO joined the webcast three hours into the show.
And while Johnson was recorded lying down with an eye mask on, nodding his head back and forth, Benioff said the influencer was trying to speak to God.
Yeah, I really look for my religious direction from Silicon Valley billionaires.
I mean, this is all a spectacle.
And adding to the ridiculousness, you had fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Naval Ravankant was there.
Ashley Vance was there.
He is the guy who made the Don't Die documentary on Johnson.
I believe they're good friends.
We covered that in full in episode 240.
My initial reaction to all this was, my God, I want to run as far away from psychedelics as possible, even though I've been doing them for over 30 years now.
But then you floated the idea of covering it.
And I think there are some areas of exploration that are worth touching on.
So thank you for that.
I'm Derek Barris.
You're welcome.
And I'm Julian Walker.
And you are listening to a conspiratuality brief.
Have tech bros killed psychedelics off the bat.
I do not personally understand the fascination that people have with broadcasting every aspect of their lives.
I also don't understand people who are fascinated by watching every aspect of people's lives.
I mean, I'll admit, I did watch season one of the real world in 1992, which is kind of the original reality show.
You know, there was one in the 70s, I know, but that sort of brought it to the mainstream on MTV.
But I never watched any other episode of any reality show ever.
Nothing about listening to people's everyday bullshit is interesting to me.
That's not to say I don't have parasocial bonds, though.
And for me, that's especially true with musicians.
You know, the most nervous I ever was was when I conducted an interview with Ben Harper in the year 2000.
I had consumed his albums so much in the 90s.
They were such a part of a pivotal period in my life.
And I was really anxious, even though I had been doing interviews for years by that point.
But he was so kind and nice.
I actually ran into him a few times later around New York City or at events, and he was always such a good dude.
So it's not like I'm not interested in people, but the whole like wake up with me thing just eludes every part of my brain.
Yeah.
My interest in Brian Johnson specifically has always been around his scientific claims and the ways that he monetizes attention and his products.
As we talked about during our episode on Don't Die, he seems like a very likable dude.
But the mushroom trip live stream hit me differently.
And I had that immediate allergic reaction that I often do when people seem to exploit those parasocial bonds.
But after I got your text, Julian, I started thinking about my relationship to psychedelics.
And I wondered why that allergy was so strong, which we can explore a little bit here.
First, though, why were you interested in covering this?
Well, I want to say something about that likability comment you just made too, because for me, when watching that Don't Die documentary, he just came across as sincere and genuinely vulnerable, especially about his love life and about his relationship with his son and about his recovery from being a religious fundamentalist, all of that stuff.
But alongside that, he still seems very self-absorbed and privileged and captivated by what I can only describe as a narcissistic quest for youth and immortality with that grandiose sense that this is really important.
These self-experiments I'm doing are going to change history for humanity, change the arc of humanity in relationship to aging and health, et cetera.
And I just walk away thinking, if only he was using his wealth to actually help people.
So the live streamed mushroom trip I found interesting because it's, to me, it's almost like a mile marker on the arc of psychedelics finding their way into first pop spirituality and then influencer culture and now biohacking.
And as you mentioned, Derek, the epitome of exhibitionist and voyeuristic parasocial entertainment is filming such an intensely personal and internal experience so that hundreds of thousands of people can watch it as it happens.
Now, I don't know about you, but I've seen home movies that other people have made of their trips, and they tend to be supremely boring.
Yeah, and incoherent.
As you just described, it's someone lying down with a face mask on, you know, shaking their head sights aside and probably making all kinds of strange sounds and incoherent comments.
So I was curious, like, how is this going to compare to my previous experiences of that sort of thing?
Yeah, I love those videos where they're like, oh my God, all is love.
God is love.
I figured it out.
So, you know, this episode is titled Tech Bros in part because Johnson does come from that world.
He very much still is in that world.
He sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million in 2013.
Time magazine reported that he walked away with over $300 million of that.
And since then, he's been operating as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
He's continued to launch his own companies as well.
There's one called Kernel that he launched in 2016, which produces $50,000 helmets that you put over your head and you can record information and supposedly study aging, meditation states, and even strokes.
And this is what he wore during his own mushroom trip to scan what was going on neurologically.
It was in 2021 that he appears to have become super fascinated with not dying.
He launched his own anti-aging company called Project Blueprint.
And since then, he's become known for efforts into extending his life as long as possible.
He apparently spends upwards of $2 million every year on his protocols.
And that plays into this mushroom trip, which apparently is only the second he's ever done.
For this trip, he supposedly measured 249 biomarkers.
It required 29 vials of blood, brain scans, urine, stool, saliva, and I'm guessing semen samples because he lists fertility in that mix.
Wow.
As well as a profiling of DNA, hormones, and microbiome samples.
You know, all the shit you and I have done for years when we trip out.
And if you're thinking, oh, that's a lot of shit to measure.
Yeah, that's the same exact criticism he's experiencing for years.
He presents himself as I'm doing this for science, and he's super big into big numbers, but that's not a scientific way of going about research.
Actual science would be something like this.
We tested 200 people on psilocybin to understand its effects on stress, looking at these three biomarkers in this pilot study.
Johnson is like, I scan these 200 things on my one body using a dozen different things.
So it must be clinical evidence, which it most certainly is not.
Few people can spend $2 million a year on optimizing their health or even in their lifetimes.
So the notion that he's actually doing science is honestly preposterous.
Any sort of results he gets from this mushroom trip is not going to be applicable to a broad population because he didn't isolate anything, which brings us to the spectacle of science, which is actually what's going on here.
Wired magazine wrote an article after the trip.
It was by journalist Matthew Matha Busby.
And it was a fair, although, in my opinion, a little bit too charitable article on the trip.
And I'll include a link in the show notes.
Now, I do appreciate Busby pointing out that Johnson's, what he's doing here could reduce stigma around psychedelics.
I'll get back to that point in a minute.
And he actually chatted with former conspiratuality guest Jamie Wheel, who I talked to back for episode 47.
This was like in our first year of this podcast.
We'll call Johnson's stunt a circus of self-indulgence and an exercise in digital narcissism.
And I'm going to agree with Weal on this point.
What do you think of that assessment?
Well, I mean, this is a little fascinating, just as a quick aside, because, you know, we had a lot of mixed opinions internally about Jamie Wheel's book and about how he was approaching things like psychedelics and spirituality.
I quite like the guy.
I think he's very smart, very interesting.
But, you know, there is a sort of, he's done his own version of popularizing psychedelics as they relate to personal growth and spirituality and with this bold idea of how they could transform society and create kind of like a new religion.
And, you know, I resonate with that for what it's worth, especially from my past.
So it's interesting to me that he would have such a harsh critique of Johnson.
I actually think it's pretty accurate.
I mean, the thing about any psychedelic experience is that for a lot of people, those first few trips feel subjectively like a revelatory, transformational experience, unprecedented.
Oh my God, I found the holy grail.
I have to share it with the world.
That's a pretty universal experience, especially for people who have a positive experience and go on to have more trips.
It's like a conversion experience and usually in like very warm and open ways, not dogmatic, it does foster an impulse to evangelize.
And it feels like he's in that initial phase and being like, hey, come and see my second trip live streamed with my friends, right?
Right.
That's an important point.
I found that people whose first experiences with marijuana, psilocybin, and LSD, if they were not positive, they never went back.
And if they did go back, they were so nervous and anxious that it skewed and they were never able to do those substances, which happens.
Yeah, it's kind of self-selecting.
And it's funny because I've taken a ton of psychedelics.
I know you have too.
Something about my brain does not do well with cannabis.
Like it's really unpleasant for me.
And every single time I've ever smoked pot, I'm just like, why did I do this?
I'm really not having a good time.
I will never do this again.
And so, so yeah, it's just how people react is such a powerful driver then of how they think about it and how they talk about it to others.
Well, you just got to power through.
I mean, that is literally what I did with marijuana because I also had anxiety disorder and some strains.
You know, in the 90s, you didn't get the percentage of THC and the strain on the bottle when you were getting shipments from Mexico of this shitty weed that I started my career with there.
But, you know, I have found the fact that I can now understand the strains and the percentages that I'm taking extremely helpful because I can just do a little and get a lot out of it.
But I have had some terrible experiences on marijuana in my life.
So back to the concept of reducing stigma, speaking of it, because all of that does matter, because if this Johnson thing was done a decade ago or even like six years ago, I might have agreed with Busby more on this.
To be honest, this stunt seems a little late because if your target is Johnson's Silicon Valley biohacking bros, they've been microdosing, they've been doing mega doses.
They've been going to Peru for ayahuasca trips for years now.
So it seems like he's on the tail end of this.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
It is late in the arc for those dudes particularly.
But I think there's still a lot of people watching Johnson who may have yet to have their first experience.
And, you know, as we've talked about recently with a lot of the wellness and biohacking people we cover, their audiences do tend to follow their lead.
Like the influencer doesn't have to say, hey, do what I do.
He just has to do it in front of them and be like, this is amazing.
And then they're like, oh, well, I guess I should do that as well.
So that, you know, that goes for supplements.
It goes for cold plunges and saunas and different dietary fads, ways of working out.
So I'm not sure about stigma specifically, but whatever may have been holding them back from having a psychedelic experience may be reduced and overcome by watching Johnson first go through it and then talk about how amazing it was and then talk about all of his biomarkers and how incredibly transformational this trip was at every level, including on like his the quality of his semen, I guess.
No, that's all true.
I agree with that.
And if you actually watch, I didn't watch it straight through, but I did try to watch segments of every part as I scrub through and stop for a moment.
One thing that bothered me was the fact that when he pulled out of it and the woman who was with him, who it turns out is his girlfriend, that's a whole other story I don't want to get into here, but because he announced it after the trip and that was a whole other parasocial thing going on there.
But he sits up and he immediately gets on his phone.
And I'm just like, ah, like, like, I know tech is involved in the whole thing, but it was just kind of gross.
It's like you're still actually in that state and then you're texting and talking.
And that to me is like, when I still do these experiences, I mean, I literally just put my phone locked up somewhere for five, six hours and I don't engage with it because that just seems so antithetical to the experience.
As much as the whole thing was supposed to be about science, it was very low on science.
It was very high on vibes, which fits into the last thing I want to talk about, which is the growing right-wing influence on psychedelics.
Now, that might seem like a jump, but it actually kind of fits into everything that was involved with this live stream.
Johnson himself has generally been apolitical in his affect.
He talks about it a little bit in Don't Die.
He's not interested in politics.
He's just about the science.
But in the last two months, he's been skewing MAGA or specifically Maha.
He appeared at the recent Maha Action Summit, which was not a government event yet included many government figures like RFK Jr. interviewed JD Vance.
You had appearances by Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Macri mingling with biotech CEOs.
You had an off-the-rails closing speech by Russell Brand.
Benny Off for himself, who was there, he's a formerly liberal businessman who advocated for more stakeholders in capitalism back 10 years ago.
He backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But then he jumped on the Trump train in 2024 and even requested that the president send the National Guard to San Francisco.
Wow.
He ended up pulling back when a lot of people in the city are like, what the fuck are you doing?
Because I don't know if you've ever been there though, but whenever I go to San Francisco, I stay in Soma and Salesforce Park occupies a huge area right outside of Soma.
So it's like Salesforce has a huge presence there.
So that was a bit of a dick move by him because he knows, yes, yes, all of the homeless services happen to be in Soma and neighboring Knob Hill.
So you do tend to see more homeless people in that area.
But if you are a billionaire and you own all this real estate and then you're calling the National Guard in, that was a very Trumpian move.
Now, during the live stream, Benny Off appeared with a guy named David Friedberg, who is a co-host of the All-In podcast, which he've co-founded in 2017 with another big-time MAGA supporter, David Sachs, who is the current White House AO and crypto czar.
So you have all of these influences coming from MAGA land into this psychedelic experience.
Now, a writer named Justin Smith Rui, I don't know how to say, R-U-I-U.
That's an unusual name for us to try and figure out.
He wrote a fantastic article, though.
So apologize about the name, but your piece in GQ was great.
And he talked about the rightward turn of psychedelics culture.
I think his framework here is worth quoting in full.
Libertarians who once wore out their Atlas shrug copies now pass around microdosing protocols as if they were Pomodoro timers, 10 micrograms on Monday, Gratitude Journal on Tuesday, a disciplined, almost Protestant plan for managing the entirety of one's conscious life.
The hippie took LSD to watch the ego dissolve into the all, the sort of experience we've already seen Musk still claiming in 2025 to be after.
For the most part, however, what we find today is a new practice of psychedelic drug use designed to enhance the same capacities for which we are known professionally, rather than to give us a break from those capacities.
Two generations ago, there were only a few rare professions that could be enhanced by the right amount of drugs, mostly confined to the creative arts.
Today, we find added to that list the tech founder whose drug taking is not at all a break from, but rather an enhancement of their professional endeavors.
Neither is wrong.
The drug stays the same, but the meanings we embed it in change from one context to another.
As the French anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss wrote decades ago, drugs do not have a single chemically determined effect.
Everything depends on the way they are taken up and interpreted within a given cultural nexus.
I'll link to that article in the show notes.
It's fantastic.
And again, great job, even though I can't pronounce your last name, because I really appreciated the fact that this is a guy.
I looked into his work.
He's written a book on psychedelics.
He's really into this culture.
And just pointing out that, as we've talked about before, psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, meaning they don't make you more liberal, loving, and accepting, as some people like to claim.
They rather amplify what's already inside of you.
And you can't separate your individual experience on a substance from the culture that you exist within.
So if you're a Silicon Valley douchebag and you think that you're changing the world because of your app, it's not like doing acid or ayahuasca is going to make, oh my God, maybe I'm part of the problem here.
So when he writes, quote, the new psychedelic pragmatists will praise mushrooms and still block cannabis reform.
They will champion MDMA for veterans and still speak about how overdose is a matter of discipline rather than policy.
He's reflecting a culture that has consumed psychedelics within their frameworks with their biases and their grindsets in place.
It's such an interesting thing to think about.
I mean, it's not only Claude Levy-Strauss who talked about this, you know, famously Leary and Ramdas and those guys, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner.
They talked about set and setting and how set and setting was everything.
And there's a whole thing in psychedelic therapy as it was blossoming in the 70s that was all about, you know, how you sort of establish a context within which you can have the kind of experience that people were aspiring to have.
I would be fascinated to see a comparative study between, say, MDMA and LSD regarding how they impacted people's political attitudes because MDMA famously does tend to activate a lot of empathic and compassionate impulses and the desire to like really connect with other people.
And yeah, it'd be interesting to see.
It's been really mind-blowing for me, especially since I was a lot younger, to grasp the context-dependent nature of substances like LSD and psilocybin, especially, because as is being touched upon in that article, I grew up in the idealized shadow of Western boomer counterculture.
And so all of my associations with psychedelics had to do with super progressive politics, rejection of conservative social norms, embracing of non-Western wisdom traditions.
So the implication was always for me that the psychedelic trip had this almost objectively undeniable quality as a doorway into a mystical ontology, like a land that you were discovering that was the same for everyone.
It was like a shortcut fast track into enlightenment and a specific enlightenment, right?
That described by the Buddha and by non-dual Vedantists like Adi Shankara.
And then of course, as perhaps even being what Jesus was really talking about, right?
The unity of all of these mystical figures as having arrived in this particular state of revelation that you two can access now.
And bundled up in all of that was this set of political values, which was meant to embody the egolist sense of compassion and humility with which we could now champion the intention for all beings to be happy and free.
Like that does seem to have a political valence.
So it took me a really long time to realize and then accept that these were all actually beliefs and values I was bringing to the experience.
And that for others, this nonspecific amplifier of experience could make them just as convinced of the ultimate nature of their evangelical worldview or hyper capitalist worldview or grandiose narcissism.
Right.
It's so hard because when I started doing them, the environment I was in was living on one of the most diverse college campuses in the country.
And I was studying Buddhism and Hinduism in my college courses, which I had just discovered.
So of course, it seems like all that goes together.
And you're getting all these, you're tripping with people from around the country, around the world, foreign students in this diverse environment.
So you're bringing your worldviews and you're like, oh, this is amazing.
It is very progressive.
But that is Central Jersey in the 90s.
It is not the Midwest.
It is not Silicon Valley in the California experiment in the 70s.
You know, their sort of accoutrements, specifically of Silicon Valley and then of Johnson, are designed to hack your biology.
They're not tools for ego dissolution, which is what we're talking about.
And it's just chemistry.
I'm not going to get into this is meant for that mindset because minds like cultures evolve and that doesn't mean they evolve into what we personally want them to evolve into.
That's not how evolution works.
If something is beneficial to some number of people, it becomes adapted.
So I don't want to get into this is how psychedelics are supposed to be used because our ancestors supposedly use them in some way.
To me, that's as romanticizing as Christian nationalists being like, we need to get back to the 1950s.
Yep.
But I will say, as someone who's taken psychedelics over 150 times, I don't foresee ever feeling a need to broadcast one of my trips live either.
I mean, it could be a very high tier of Patreon, right?
Like, I mean, that's Maybe if we pitch it that way, we'll get Matthew to do his first trip ever.
Come on, patrons, let us know what you feel about that.
I don't want to see me tripping.
What I've learned is that this sort of deeply personal space, I find, is great for working shit out in my head and then trying to apply it when I'm sober.
Performative tripping to me, it just feels gross.
And if it turns out there are health benefits to some of these substances, which I believe is likely given, you know, we had early research in the 50s and 60s pointing in that direction.
We have more recent clinical studies that are a lot more reliable in terms of clinical evidence over the last 15 years.
So I think all of that is awesome.
Microdose, macrodose, heroes dose, whatever helps people, let it help people.
So if Brian Johnson wants to live stream his life and people enjoy rubbernecking, you know, more power to them.
