Mattha Busby
View all posts by Mattha Busby March 24, 2026
Bryan Johnson at his 2025 SXSW keynote, "Don't Die with Bryan Johnson." Hubert Vestil/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images Bryan Johnson, the centimillionaire who has turned his own life into a data-driven experiment in living forever, looked nervous. On Sunday afternoon, in a white room on Bowen Island in British Columbia, he prepared to livestream himself smoking what is widely considered the world’s most potent psychedelic, 5-MeO-DMT — which has been said to simulate death — in an attempt to find out whether such an intense trip might also return one’s brain to a younger state.
The 48-year-old self-proclaimed “healthiest person in the world” and Trump supporter has said that his body “largely operates at elite 18-year-old levels,” thanks to spending an estimated $2 million a year on an extreme anti-aging regimen. That includes taking more than 50 daily supplements (many from his own Blueprint brand), using shockwave therapy on his penis, and swapping plasma with his son and father. But his brain stubbornly remains at the anatomic age of 42. “The brain is really hard to rejuvenate,” he lamented on Instagram Live prior to his trip.
In smoking 5-MeO-DMT live on social media “for science,” entrepreneur Johnson, who sold payments company Braintree Venmo for $800 million more than a decade ago, is taking psychedelic exhibitionism to a new frontier. In a digital age where the process of healing seems increasingly performative — everything is potential content — it was only a matter of time before psychedelic trips became fodder for the algorithm. But his experiment also speaks to how psychedelics are being recast as optimization tools which might not only reduce depression but also sharpen the mind. And as chaos and violence rage around the world, perhaps there is something refreshing about an influential man like Johnson exploring the mysterious nature of consciousness, even if it might be just for clout.
On Instagram Live, Johnson was wearing a hoodie and cargo jeans and stood flanked by his girlfriend and business partner, Kate Tolo. Johnson explained that ahead of the trip he had rigorously recorded his current state of health across two MRIs, an EEG, and a reading on his own brand of brain scanner — along with taking blood, saliva, stool, and hormone samples — to assess the effects of the drug.
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On Sunday 22 March, they directed viewers to go to an appropriately-named website purpose built by Johnson’s team for the event, immortals.com, to watch him smoke the consciousness-dissolving molecule, which is illegal in the U.S. Alternatively, people could tune into his quest to find the skeleton key to everlasting life via an X stream, though he feared it might get censored. But then a 45-minute delay due to a technical issue left almost 100,000 people looking at a screen with a graphic of Johnson in a meditative posture on top of a lotus beneath the banner “The Ascension of Unc,” as handpan music drifted in and out.
The lengthy disruption gave us time to click on the links on the webpage: Johnson’s “Blueprint” supplement brand, his longevity advice chatbot “BryanAI,” and his new “Immortalism” manifesto. “If humanity chooses wisely, the ancient promise that once lived only in temples and scripture may finally find expression in the physical world,” Johnson’s treatise says, sketching out an AI-powered, psychedelic-assisted transhumanist future. “Don’t Die,” he ends the blog post. “A prophecy fulfilled.”
When Johnson returned to the screen alongside Tolo they blamed “machine elves” and a computer breaking down for the hold-up. The botched start to the live-stream did not inspire confidence, but they quickly sought to make up for lost time. “It’s been a few months,” Johnson acknowledged. That was since he claimed his 5 g psilocybin mushroom trip in November to investigate its possible longevity benefits led to metabolic and anti-inflammatory benefits, even while it significantly decreased his sperm count.
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Under the care of two guides at a psychedelic retreat center, Enfold, just off the coast of Vancouver, Johnson would be vaporizing 18 mg of 5-MeO-DMT, along with ingesting a 9 mg intramuscular injected dose “to provide a smoother, longer experience.” The overall amount was higher than that given in clinical trials and psychologist Dr. Joseph Barsuglia later called Johnson’s experiment “a megadose with unproven safety” and warned that “copycat psychonauts could be severely harmed.” Fellow psychologist Dr Bianca Sebben criticized how “we are obsessed in the modern western world with more being better” and said it was better to go “low and slow” with such an Earth-shattering drug.
— Bryan Johnson (@bryan_johnson) March 22, 2026
Sitting cross-legged next to banana plants with huge, draping leaves, Johnson said for the first of many times: “The dose I’m taking today is pretty big.” He already had some experience with the powerful psychedelic drug — to the extent he has a tattoo of the molecular diagram on his forearm — but it was unclear how many times he had consumed it previously. “People do some pretty unhinged things [during the trip],” he added, saying that “you should never do it without the help of a professional facilitator.” Tolo reassured him everything would be OK. “Bryan was born for this kind of exploration,” she told the growing audience. Tolo later warned: “It might be really intense to watch.”
The drug is unregulated in Canada, where Johnson livestreamed his trip, but remains illegal in the U.S., even while a 5-MeO-DMT drug candidate for depression recently received breakthrough status from the Food and Drug Administration after study results indicated its promise. In lieu of approval, an underground industry has emerged. Military veterans report that it helps address their PTSD, while psychonauts liken the effect to cosmic bliss. Bad trips of nightmarish qualities can occur if the drug is taken improperly, and despite there being a number of reputable facilitators across the world, there are also many unscrupulous operators.
5-MeO-DMT is traditionally derived from the Sonoran desert toad but Johnson clarified he would be using a synthetic version since the toads face serious conservation issues due to overharvesting. A disclaimer in the corner of the screen said: “Don’t try this at home. Must be 21 to watch. This stream is not advice or encouragement. 5-MeO-DMT is illegal in many places and carries real risk (medical and psychological). If you’re curious, speak to your doctor.”
The default mode network in the brain is the mechanism that regulates the ego and “keeps you you,” explained Johnson. “As you age it gets more rigid, so your patterns of thought become harder to overcome,” he said, “and so by dissolving it, it allows your brain to be in a more youthful, creative state, back in patterns that you might have felt in younger years.” Johnson then suggested that the experience of 5-MeO-DMT’s effects “could be as close as someone can get to experiencing the singularity … as we begin to be more integrated with our technology [and evolve] as a species.”
Leading psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist from University of California, San Francisco, joined the stream. “It’s certainly the most intense psychedelic by the profundity of the altered state,” he said. “A state of pure consciousness, ‘the God molecule’, the Everest of psychedelics, so it’s a very bold thing that you’re doing, and it’s fascinating, as well.”
Johnson’s 20-year-old son, Talmage, was then invited on-camera to provide moral support. “I feel like this is one of the best ways we could spend [time] as a family on a Sunday,” Talmage remarked. “Some people watch movies, some people go to the park, you’re going to potentially shake hands with the man upstairs.”
And with that, finally, it was time to ascend. A bespectacled facilitator, Steve Rio, wearing all white like a psychedelic prophet, measured out the dose and loaded the vaporizer and the needle. Johnson situated himself and closed his eyes as Tolo played with his hair. The tension was palpable as Rio’s wife and fellow facilitator, Austin, injected the dose into the top of his right arm. Johnson then sucked a lungful of 5-MeO-DMT vapor from a tube and lay back with his eyes closed. After several seconds, he exhaled. What followed was about 30 minutes of television akin to watching paint dry while Johnson traversed the frontiers of the mind from a prone position. By then, 200,000 people were watching live.
As he came around, he held his head with his hands in incredulity and sat up. “I am stunned,” he said. “I think that was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. This overwhelming desire to control, and a panic, and instead just say ‘Yes, I submit.’” Once he did that, he went to “the edge of existence” where he enjoyed a “blissful dance, everything was in perfect harmony.” He was enveloped by “pure light,” he said — “no want, no desire, no-one to become, nothing to do, nowhere to go, it just is.”
Whether this experience really was a fabled ego death may remain a matter of debate, but his report includes some of its hallmarks — even while the very same ego seemed to be perfectly intact soon afterwards, given he did not particularly reflect upon himself and his psyche. If anything, his inner journey simply confirmed for him that he is right to be doing everything he has planned.
