And then there are internet experiments, and then there is whatever Bryan Johnson was doing the night he decided to live stream his mushroom trip to thousands of strangers. Johnson, who’s already made a name for himself by treating his body like a science project in the pursuit of immortality with supplements, routines and devices and scheduling, opened an entirely new chapter: psychedelic audience experience that felt half performance art, half midlife crisis therapy session — completely surreal.
I hadn’t intended to sit through the whole thing. I clicked in, with the sort of curiosity that arises when somebody hails you saying, “You’ve got to see this, it’s weird.” But once I hit play on the stream, I couldn’t look away. It was Johnson at his most raw, drifting through waves of emotion and self-reflection with a camera in front of his face. And the chat was lapping it up. At some point someone typed “we like you even more on shrooms,” and for some odd reason, it seemed to capture the entire vibe. It wasn’t a glossy wellness guru moment. It was a human one.
Watching him move through his stages of the trip was like watching someone tear away the layers of their public persona in real time. The man who typically holds forth in the vocabulary of metrics, biomarkers and cold data points sounded suddenly warm, goofy and indirectly poetic. He rambled about patterns and memories and the weird ways in which the mind reorganizes itself when you take a seat and let go of control. He laughed at jokes no one else could see. He grew silent when the trip turned inward. He raised questions nobody could answer. And the audience went with him, responding to each shift in sentiment as if they were strapped into the same roller coaster.
He was nothing like the Bryan Johnson I know in typical mode — the hyperoptimized guy who frets constantly about aging, monitors his blood levels vigilantly and can quantify every slight biological shift like a machine learning algorithm gathering training data. This was a rawer, less calculated version. He wasn’t selling a protocol. He wasn’t pushing a product. He wasn’t attempting to shape the narrative. He was floating along and just letting it be with whoever happened to look.
It was therapy, broadcast to the world. He spoke openly about pressure, identity and the strange burden of being the person people mock or admire or meme, depending on the news cycle. Psychedelics have a way of dissolving the scripted version of yourself, and for an instant you could also see him as someone seeking to understand his own story rather than shape it with endless optimization.
And the audience wasn’t there to passively watch — they were part of the scene. They cheered him on, taunted him, comforted him. The chat swung from chaos to tenderness. People joked that mushrooms made him “the most relatable he’s ever been.” Others said that at last they felt like they had a handle on him. A small number of them even said they were on psychedelics themselves, making it the sort of portentous digital tribe moment that life loves — thousands of strangers syncing up their curiosity around one man’s trip.
But below the humor and absurdity, there was something revealing going on. Johnson has spent years engineering control over all parts of his biological life. And yet here he was, willfully relinquishing control, allowing a substance to scramble his assiduously policed boundaries in full view of the world. Inside, you could feel the struggle between the perfectionist and the human being. It was messy. It was uncomfortable. And it may be the realest thing he’s ever streamed.
And in the same way that the trip mellowed out and he began to return to baseline, so too changed the vibe of the chat. He got thank-yous from many people for telling them about the experience. Some said they now felt closer to him. Others said they saw a side of him they really liked instead. And maybe that’s the real narrative here — not the mushrooms, not the trip, not the shock value, but this strange testament to intimacy that materializes when someone takes off their filtered face and shows you who lies beneath.
Bryan Johnson’s mushroom livestream isn’t going to change the world, but it did expose something important — about him, about internet culture and perhaps even all of us. For a night, the quantified-self biohacker leapt off the pages of his project and became a person — confused, curious, emotive, puzzled and human. The strangest thing is, the world didn’t hold it against him. They hung in, they heard him and they liked him more for being incomplete.
Maybe that’s the experiment he never intended to run — what happens when you throw away optimization, let people see you without the numbers.
