Psychedelics, Religion, and Bryan Johnson
On the dystopian, unsettling, and strangely religious 5-MeO-DMT livestream
Bryan Johnson did 5-MeO-DMT on a sunday afternoon, livestreamed it, had an incredible/indescribable experience, and then plugged his manifesto and a URL.
I will start by saying, I have long been a fan of Bryan Johnson. I am incredibly intrigued by the idea of biohacking1 and pushing the bounds of n of 1 studies and believe he has the mental wellness and resources around him to be able to liberally experiment as he sees fit. I have held this view for years, amidst a sea of hatred and eye-rolling of the guy, and I have found his willingness to experiment and discipline to his “craft” net incredibly good for humanity and the hate on him as most often people looking at someone doing their thing that is different than their own worldview as a bit small-minded or just hate-filled.2
Perhaps I am falling into that trap now after certain personal life experiences, but this moment felt quite different and felt vaguely more important/substantial than prior stunts.
A few thoughts:
A dystopian moment
The entire stream felt very cyberpunk/dystopian. Perhaps it was because I was watching/listening to it on a walk home from a birthday party in Brooklyn, but the idea of some guy taking the god molecule and live streaming it with a ridiculous looking banner, on X, as I strolled past the Gowanus Whole Foods was some type of “how the fuck did I end up here” moment. No further comments cause I think you can get it.
On religions and movements
“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
- Paulo Coelho
Enough ink has been spilled on this topic from public intellectuals to techies to new-age shamans etc. but people are clearly searching. Something is in the air that is multi-generational and creating a sense of discomfort with very little place for people to know where to put it.
Millennials feel like they got a raw deal and carry a sense of quiet anger/disdain, Gen Z feels like the deal doesn’t even matter and carry a sense of nihilism, and the world looks towards Gen Alpha to see how things turn. At the same time, Boomers are probably going to spend down their savings more than anyone seems to appreciate as they either eject from discourse or lock into CNN/Fox News and inflame their anger with minimal desire to do anything to change the world around them.
This jaded enough?
There are a cascade of datapoints that relate to this feeling that the world is getting worse for everyone (despite quality of life data improving) and people are turning back to religions and movements of all types in an attempt to reverse things like the erosion of hump-shaped happiness, among others.
Each of these religions (both classical and neo)3 draw lines of where to look for meaning, whether that’s internally, externally, or some combination of where a god sits within you/above you and how to fill the gap that things we believed would give us meaning but haven’t, have left.
Without having to prove this point, I think most would agree that the confluence of factors leading to instability and volatility today creates a clear window for new places of meaning (religions/movements/communities/cults) to emerge.
The question is what level of spirituality you lean on, because you must have something intangible and perhaps unprovable in order to long-duration pull people into a belief system.4
In discussions with friends I’ve come to believe the optimal approach is to take the parts of existing religions that people love and remix them with lower barrier to adoption/adherence and similar focus on community. Many people struggle with traditional religions but love the idea of something new that doesn’t carry the baggage, divisiveness, or guilt of prior centuries5
Of course, all religious movements are at their best when they have gods that seem better/more-dedicated than the average member.
Looking at the Don’t Die movement shows a few interesting pivots/progressions that have been quite intentional in pushing the scale and palatableness of this new age movement.
This progression can simplistically be summed up as:
Establish credibility with intense scientific grounding/experimentation - This worked well in at least getting people intrigued by what he was doing but over time Bryan noticed two main weaknesses if you are to build a new cult/religion of approachability and meaning. Thus…
Increase approachability - As scientific rigor’s user acquisition asymptoted, the first lesson to solve was that aesthetics still matter. Bryan very famously has said the he had to add fat back to his face and have better skin tone in order for people to want to follow/engage with his system. Ease of approachability also matters. Blueprint shipped products that lowered the barrier but this paired with all of the technology, time, and cost quickly wore out desire to truly live the Don’t Die mindset. The narrative quickly shifted towards a few approachable goals paired with commentary on good sleep being the main thing that matters for health, with a sprinklings of aspirational family values starting to pop up, most famously shown by his incredible/loving/deep writings about his partner (romantic and business) Kate Tolo.
Increase spirituality/meaning (WE ARE HERE) - In order to truly resonate for a long time many need a sense of meaning and aspiration tied to their belief system. The experimentation with psychedelics under the framing of longevity has been an interesting pivot, crescendoing with the experience on Sunday.
I personally think all of these are worth noting under the backdrop of the rise of AI progress, societal awareness/disruption, and fear. In order to truly create a novel belief system you need something that exists away from you and compounds your work for you and your mission. AI doomerism and uncertainty does an incredible job at that, and Bryan has used AI as a “why now” input to his mission over and over again, progressing from the idea of abundance all the way to meaninglessness.
I find a lot of this echoes other cultural writing including the recent essay by Toby Shorin on Body Futurism which stated that as software utopianism failed to deliver on its promises, tech’s utopian energy migrated from the screen to the body, as well as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn in which he writes that a scientist in crisis “will often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess.”
That’s a pretty good description of watching someone go from blood transfusions with his son to livestreaming 5-MeO-DMT on twitter.
On psychedelics
Note: I find it incredibly cliche and cringe to write about psychedelic experiences publicly despite finding them important and fascinating. Alas, I find writing from personal experience is helpful. Perhaps this is why I had such a strong reaction to yesterday.
Earlier this year, I did a 1-1 journey built around psilocybin. In preparation for that, a lot of work was done by my guide to understand me and my worldview via interviews and pre-work in an effort to better guide the journey. A lot of these questions and discussions weren’t novel as someone who has done therapy consistently for years. Amongst both of these practices (but especially the psychedelic experience) a consistent message was that regardless of the breakthrough or intensity of the experience, this was merely another tool inside a broader goal of understanding myself and the world around me.6
A thing that stuck with me pretty deeply about this experience was the desire and direction to let the time afterwards merely fizzle instead of immediately rushing to put words around it. Yes I journaled a bit, but I found that this guidance of not forcing conveyance was both helpful as someone who likes to quickly intellectualize things, and also probably dominant if you truly respect the process of going through introspection. Recognizing that one shouldn’t just focus on what’s immediately in front of them in certain important moments.
Interestingly, the nature of a livestream means that you are both showing people an experience that you’re having as some sort of proof-of-work, while also engaging with people to further advance your cause. Again, I don’t criticize Bryan for doing this and understand the need to do so, but I did find it quite interesting that, merely 15 to 20 minutes after coming up from his experience of a heroic dose of one of the strongest psychedlics in the world, he was back in sales mode.
Prior Art in psychedelics and life
One thing that has struck me across experiences with altered states was a constant wondering of how much prior art shapes what we feel. Across life broadly, we are influenced heavily by cached verbiage/understanding/expectations on what an experience is supposed to be and our minds are uniquely great at storing these references and hilariously, as psychedelics may teach you, can hold things we aren’t totally aware of.
Bryan livestreaming and popularizing 5-MeO-DMT to hundreds of thousands of people, then immediately putting specific words and goals around it, does something that I think is under-appreciated. It pre-loads the experience for everyone watching who might try it next. It creates a cached representation of what this drug “should” feel like, and that representation is now potentially inseparable from his brand and his mission. The reception on twitter has very much been one of “wanting to try,” and those people will go in with Bryan’s framing already installed.
Amongst many conversations it has been incredible to me how much consistency of experience, framing, and word-choice happens around psychedelic medicine. Becoming one of the dominant frames overnight with a livestream is a kind of trojan horse of tying the drug to the movement before people have had the chance to encounter it on their own terms.
I think this, in some ways, is in conflict with how one should think about novel life experiences, but is very much in concert with the idea that people are looking for fast feedback loops and fast reorientation of their minds.
To the prior point on religion, spirituality, and movements, psychedelics do an incredible job at this, both scientifically and ideologically. Being told you can blast off for 30 minutes and come back to a changed appreciation and understanding of the human condition is incredibly enticing to a generation of people focused on fast dopamine loops and seeking and searching, in the same way that taking an injection weekly to be hot is enticing to the modern human in ways we never fully appreciated until GLP-1s were properly unleashed into the mainstream.
After spending ~5 minutes talking about how indescribable the experience was Bryan said two things:
“Doing anything other than securing our own existence is ridiculous.”
and
“We’ve been talking about how existence is the highest virtue…and this is the moment and I just lived it. I wish everyone could have that experience”
These words felt very precise to me.
The progression of religions & movements + The manifesto
In my slightly older age one of the things I’ve internalized has been a general feeling of acceptance towards other desired paths that don’t feel aligned to mine. A simplistic framing of “don’t yuck others’ yums”. I perhaps wrongly believed that this level of acceptance is what made for some form of calmness or enlightenment, knowing that there is no singular way to live life and there is great joy in debating these things with people that can push your own beliefs (or at least allow you to see people better).
I worry that this does not quite work with the building of movements in 2026, as perhaps weaponizing and mobilizing against things is a necessity to create a certain level of community and reinforcing loop of feelings that can outlast the high optionality of the New Religion of the Week. One must feel their main way is the right way, which means there are wrong ways for things to be done as well.7 I frankly think this is a net-negative framing for society.
While in-person and online lectures (which Bryan has aggressively done) are great for pushing your message towards the middle nodes of networks, having a piece of canonical writing is important for disseminating ideology at scale. Bryan’s Immortalism Manifesto does a good job at this, while tying together all the various types of religious beliefs and also targeting modern feelings that impact us all.
The manifesto discusses a few core beliefs that stood out to me8:
“In its simplest form, the condition for life can be expressed as: A(t)≥B(t) where the total capacity to repair, maintain, and restore the system A(t) must remain greater than or equal to the forces that degrade it B(t). “
The manifesto very strangely but predictably reframes death as an equation and engineering problem, aligning with the longevity community (a problem to be solved vs. a natural conclusion) as well as pandering to the intellectual first-principles thinkers who populate tech and finance.9 This probably slaps for a subset of people but I feel like distilling mortality into an equation is…a choice.10
“Individuals optimize for income rather than health, productivity rather than longevity, and status rather than reproductive stability. This is a die economy.”
One of the things I’ve been most defensive of with respect to Don’t Die as a movement was that it hadn’t weaponized ineffectiveness yet (per my point above). That changed for me with this manifesto.
The manifesto introduces the concept of a “die economy” vs. a “don’t die economy.” This is where the movement shifts from science to ideology stating that modern civilization has “systematically organized itself around the degradation of the very biological systems that make civilization possible,” what he calls a “self harm society.”
The framing is powerful because it collapses all of modern life into a single failure mode categorizing too much work, bad diet, lack of discipline to the protocol as self-harm and participating in a system that is designed to kill you. If you don’t live towards this not so nebulous goal of immortality, you’re complicit in civilizational entropy. The moment alternative paths got framed as actively destructive, I worried the movement I once respected had crossed a line of sorts.
What perhaps annoys me the most is that this framing isn't new. Bertrand Russell made the same diagnosis in 1932's In Praise of Idleness, an essay I genuinely love, arguing that "the morality of work is the morality of slaves" and that industrial society had solved the production problem but kept the work ethic intact, redirecting human energy toward consumption rather than creativity and genuine thought. Russell wanted people freed into autonomous thought. Bryan's version of freedom is something waving at the singularity with a URL at the end of it.
Which leads to the manifesto’s ironic concept of “entropic prophets”, or basically people who are consumption-oriented or living in a capitalistic society. By his own framework, a man who takes one of the most powerful psychedelic compounds on earth and within minutes directs hundreds of thousands of viewers toward a manifesto and personal brand might qualify.
As one finishes the manifesto, Bryan does a masterful relaying of my prior thoughts on new religions when he says “humanity already believes in immortality and that it is achievable” co-opting every spiritual tradition simultaneously and framing The Egyptians, Gilgamesh, Daoism, and Christianity as all just early and imprecise versions of what he’s doing without the AI-driven breakthroughs to enable them. He then ends with a bible verse bridging the gap from science to spirituality to religion/movement.
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death”, followed by “A prophecy fulfilled.”
Whatever this is, it is no longer just about science.
The Finale
Bryan’s manifesto, before the bible quote, states “The next stage of life will not be written by natural selection alone. It will be written by deliberate choice.”
I truly do struggle with this feeling of mass-searching and seeking that I see every day and recognize that the current path is likely unsustainable. Even some of Bryan’s other points of peak-capitalism and the pseudo doom-loop of society actually resonate quite strongly with me these days and are in conflict with my largely capitalistic views.
But there's a difference between naming the wound and owning the cure. I hope the goal of experiments like these in psychedelics and pushing consciousness and reflection is to allow people to find themselves amongst a sea of competing thoughts and traditions, and to let the process breathe, instead of creating a rigid framing to potentially get one-shotted into an ideology at a time where we are most susceptible to it.
The best version of all of this is people making deliberate choices over long stretches of time, with real debate and real doubt, not a 30-minute experience followed by a manifesto.11
I hope the deliberate choices are actually theirs.
—
There was a certain point where the livestream was losing its steam and Bryan said he wanted to call it. Kate asked for his final thoughts to which Bryan said:
”Read the manifesto. Remap your identity…I just wish you pure goodwill, no agenda, just as sincere as another person can be to another.”
She then12 threw it to Bryan’s son, Talmage for the crescendo in which Bryan said ”As a father…ultimately you want the admiration of your son.”
Talmage, acknowledging his admiration, responded with “you got it.”
10 minutes after he had claimed his final statement was with no agenda, Bryan gave his last words:
“Become an immortal and let’s build for existence.”
We literally wrote an entire future projection of biohacking
Ignoring the class of people that just hate when rich people do weird things
Read Life after Lifestyle for higher order views on this, but think ranging from Catholicism to Yoga/Meditation to Soulcycle
This is written as perhaps bad, but it’s really not, it’s just a necessary feature
This is especially true for liberals in 2026. Disclosure: I am generally an outspoken centrist liberal, like many white upper-middle class people who live in brooklyn who haven’t become hardcore trump supporters
Many people like to ask why someone does a journey like this and what their intentions are going into a psychedelic experience. Candidly, a lot of my intentions were around wanting to experience this feeling that other people have had, with such strong positive associations (+ explore some thoughts on creativity and understanding). I also recognized that in life there are many different types of moments and experiences that create a sense of expanding boundaries or break through boundaries of understanding. Whether that’s clearing the mental cache with psychedelics or more “simple” acts like experiencing how someone with a deep sense of care for the environment, or intense streak of kindness, or abnormally positive view on the world move through their life. All of these, I think, are great inputs into just understanding what the edges are of the human experience and how we internalize it all. Of course, psychedelics at times are positioned as sometimes shattering those edges.
This is quite contrary to the heavily philosophized view on building movements around positivity and ‘building a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’
Tbh what disappointed me most is how AI-written it is and how he clearly ran out of context in the model based on how much the writing repeats itself. Insane to me people still are putting stuff like this out
Hilariously in his manifesto he even talks about Zeroth Principle thinking which I’m sure nerd snipes people even more, and that interestingly he wrote about in 2021
I’m reminded of Toby talking about how he told people he wanted to die for shock at Vitalia.
Admittedly, as I wrote this I kind of eye-rolled at myself, wondering when I became so idealistic but alas, I am soft now.
Honestly, masterfully.
As a regular Michael Dempsey reader I appreciated how partially formed some of this felt - you're reaching for something you FEEL vs KNOW (at this time). That's a beautiful thing in itself and even more beautiful to have the confidence to articulate it out loud