Bryan Johnson's Two-Dose Psilocybin Experiment: 249 Biomarkers and the Case for Mushrooms as Longevity Therapy
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson has built his life and his "Don't Die" / Blueprint project around control: precise routines, measured inputs, and tracked outcomes. In this video he describes why he took two large, medically supervised doses of psilocybin, the fear he had about what it might do to his identity and mission, and what his team says it measured. He calls it the most quantified psychedelic experiment ever conducted. By the end he concludes that magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy. He also stresses that his results are first-in-human observations from one person that need replication, and that the video is not a recommendation to take them.
Why Someone Built on Control Considered Psychedelics
Johnson says he had no major interest in psychedelics for a long time. His work is about precision and measuring cause and effect, and psychedelics seemed subjective. What changed his mind was a study showing that psilocybin helped human cells live longer in a dish. He says this stood out because most such studies are done in mice. His first reaction was not to go take mushrooms. He wanted to know why the effect would happen, and reasoned that if it was legitimate, something real was happening biologically.
He was also thinking about mental health. When he looked at how people deal with depression, anxiety, and cognitive rigidity, psilocybin kept coming up as a potential therapy. That created a tension for him. His project depends on control and discipline, and this therapy works by temporarily suspending both.
He did not want to rush, so he posted his findings and thoughts on social media to see how people reacted. The response was large. Based on that enthusiasm, his team reviewed the psilocybin literature and designed a protocol meant to measure the experience as thoroughly as possible. He says he does not think anyone before him has measured 249 biomarkers before taking magic mushrooms. The categories included brain activity, inflammation, hormones, metabolism, heart vitals, stress markers, sexual function, DNA, and cellular aging.
Johnson argues that people tend to see magic mushrooms either as recreation or, more recently, as a possible treatment for PTSD or depression, and that almost no one has looked at them through a longevity lens. If society made that reframing, he suggests, it could matter a lot. The video also includes a skeptical line: psychedelics "fix broken things" and "don't make things younger." That is the hypothesis the experiment was set up to probe. Johnson says the goal was to learn the truth, not to have an experience.
The Fear: Losing the Mission
Much of the first half deals with Johnson's doubts. He worried he might come out no longer caring about Blueprint, with changed values, or as someone unrecognizable. Blueprint runs on consistency, and he describes psychedelics as built on entropy, spontaneous flow, and uncertainty. The possibilities he names include psychological instability, losing his motivation for the project, or coming out asking, "Why am I doing any of this?"
He says the concern was not hypothetical. His phone filled with messages from people warning him about founders who did "journeys" and then checked out: they stopped finding meaning or wanted to go off-grid. He noted that if he "crashed out," it would leave a hole. He also admitted he did not know what 5 grams meant or what to expect.
He points to cultural history as well. In his account, psychedelics were once studied seriously, then pushed to the margins for decades and associated with chaos, rebellion, and loss of control. None of that fits how he lives. So he asked himself whether he was pursuing this because it was interesting or because it might reveal something true. He also wondered aloud whether this was a force he had never dealt with, one more powerful than his sense of self, his will, or his desires.
He resolved it this way. He came to see the fear as being about identity rather than mushrooms, and fear as a sign that something matters. If psilocybin could improve mental health, brain function, and biological aging, avoiding it out of fear would not fit the mission. And if he was going to pursue longevity honestly, he could not be overprotective of his current beliefs. He had to be willing to test them, even if that meant questioning his mission and existence. He frames the decision as an explorer's question: is the journey worth taking?
The First Dose
Johnson describes preparing for the first dose with his usual method. He planned a wind-down routine the night before, turned off his phone, went to bed on time, and woke naturally at 5:04 a.m. He did not want poor sleep or a bad mood carrying into the experience. He also says one thought kept echoing: he had approached this as an experiment about data and outcomes, but not mainly as a question of how he would change as a person. That was all anyone else could talk about. He wondered whether he had fully sized up something that could be "a one-shot situation" in which he might change irreparably. Sequencing the measurements correctly while managing the psychological uncertainty, he says, was a lot.
The first dose was 4.67 grams of dried mushrooms of the "B+" strain, containing 24.98 mg of psilocybin. He notes that some would call this a "heroic dose" and that it is not a microdose. He said he was nervous, because people who had done similar things told him even one to three grams is significant and five is "next level."
He reflects that control had been the main lever in all his experimentation and in how he built Don't Die, and that he was now putting it down on purpose. Right after taking the dose, he called one of his children to say he loved them and would see them in a couple of hours.
He describes the moment when you realize you can no longer steer the ship, and you can either fight the experience or welcome it. What surprised him most was not chaos but the opposite: openness, connection, and a childlike excitement he had not felt in a long time. On camera he delights in the sound of leaves crackling and says it reminds him of childhood. He says he revisited his fear of no longer caring about his work, but instead of losing clarity he felt "cohesively aligned," not euphoric or irrational.
During the session he spoke about having been in very dark places in his life and about people who show up for you without judgment. He also said he thought this was a special moment for humanity, which he sees as transforming into something else, and called it "the most spectacular time to be alive in history." In the days after, he says, the feeling stayed: gratitude, curiosity, energy, and a clearer view of his mission. He then frames feelings as data and asks whether the biology agreed.
First-Dose Results: Cortisol and the "Afterglow"
After the first dose the team measured everything again. Johnson says some markers did not change, which he calls important, and a few stood out.
The first was cortisol, which he describes as the body's main stress hormone, affecting sleep, recovery, and metabolic health. They tracked it through the day. He had his normal circadian morning spike, and then for about three hours after the dose it peaked again, three to eight times his normal noon levels. By evening it was back at baseline. Johnson reads this as a healthy response: a short, contained burst followed by a fast recovery, with no prolonged stress.
The bigger surprise, in his telling, came five days later. His morning cortisol had dropped 42%, and DHEA, another marker of adrenal activity, had dropped 45%. He calls this the "afterglow," which he describes as a measured biochemical state of calm after a psychedelic experience. He says it is not numbness or sedation but being "less stress-primed," and that it matched how he felt. In his words, his emotions had been "a choppy sea" and psilocybin smoothed it to glass, taking out the edges of emotional deliberation and concern.
Brain Imaging with Kernel Flow
Johnson was especially pleased that the team used Kernel Flow, the neuroimaging device he says he spent seven years building, to map his neural activity before, during, and after the experience. He notes that psilocybin is known to disrupt rigid neural patterns and says that is what they saw. His default mode network, which he describes as "the command center," the self, went quiet. Meanwhile, sensory, auditory, and language regions began communicating with each other. He says the technical term for this increased activity is entropy, and he describes his brain as more flexible, exploratory, and childlike, "more like a younger brain."
He connects this to his subjective experience: consciousness turned up to "10 out of 10," hyper-awareness, awe at touch, flavor that "exploded" in his mouth, and a brain that wanted to share, study, and marvel. He describes it as feeling like a "factory reset" back to childhood perception, dissolving the numbness that comes with age. What he found notable was that the data matched the experience. In his view, fixed patterns built over decades had given way to something new.
An Unexpected Signal and the Decision to Repeat
Johnson says something appeared that the team had not thought to look for: his blood sugar control changed significantly. They did not fully understand why, but he calls the change clear and dramatic. He also mentions reduced inflammation among other positive movements across the 249 before-and-after measurements.
He is careful to say none of this was definitive. A single dose does not prove a theory, though the early signs were consistent. Had the results been neutral, he says, it might have been time to stop. They were not, so the protocol was expanded. He frames the choice as treating the findings as an anomaly or testing again, reasoning that one experiment can be noise but repetition creates signal.
The Second Dose: Larger and Livestreamed
The second dose came three weeks after the first: 5.35 grams of the same B+ strain, containing 28 mg of psilocybin. The team added 136 measurements, including thermal imaging and continuous brain scans before, during, and after.
The biggest change, Johnson says, was that this session was public. He announced he would livestream it, and the reaction was intense. People called him reckless, performative, and dangerous. He disagrees. He says transparency is the cornerstone of the project and that the public deserves to see the real thing, "not a performance," highlight reel, or summary. His argument is that psychedelics spent decades in the shadows: briefly studied, then dismissed, then stigmatized. If they are to be taken seriously again, they have to be tested seriously.
The setting was also different. The first dose was in a small room with trusted people nearby. The second had family and friends joining virtually while the world watched. Johnson says that mattered emotionally and also biologically.
Thermal Imaging and Cumulative Brain Effects
Johnson says no one had previously recorded a thermal profile of an intense psilocybin experience. His team found his core body temperature rose 1.5 to 2°F, with heat moving inward toward the center of his body, which he says is consistent with deep autonomic activation. He says the changes across his face and upper body suggested a blend of intense joy and deep insight, along with a subtle thread of melancholy. He did not expect the melancholy, but he says he felt it.
The brain data showed what he calls cumulative effects. His baseline scan three weeks after the first dose still showed traces of it; his brain "hadn't fully recovered." When the second dose hit, the effects built on the first: entropy went further and integration went deeper. The largest shift was in auditory, speech, and language networks. He ties this to the setting, since those were the regions active while he talked about his feelings and listened to love and support from family and friends on screen. He describes it as a moment when the technology he built to study aging was recording what connection felt like.
With two doses showing repeated signals, stronger the second time, Johnson says the question shifted from whether something happened to what it means.
The Metabolic Finding
After the second dose, the team reviewed everything: pre-dose baselines, post-dose measurements, short-term shifts, and sustained effects, across two doses, hundreds of biomarkers, and months of data. Johnson says brain changes were expected, but the "metabolic reset" was not.
He wore a continuous glucose monitor that read his blood sugar every few minutes. Comparing the three days before the first dose with the three days after, he reports that mean glucose fell 8%, day-to-day variability fell 11%, and time above 125 mg/dL, a threshold he says you want to stay under, appears to have gone to zero. His estimated HbA1c fell from 4.7 to 4.4, a relative drop of 6.8%. He says this moved his glucose control from the top 2% of the population to the top 0.2%, better than 99.8% of healthy 18- to 25-year-olds. He says the effect held through day three.
Johnson calls this the first documented human evidence of improved blood sugar control with psilocybin. For comparison, he says improving glycemic control usually takes months of daily medication such as metformin, while his improved after "a single neuroplastic event." He speculates that the experience may have triggered a downstream reset in how his liver and pancreas function, possibly mimicking or exceeding some of the most prescribed drugs in the world in one dose. Asked about his first reaction, he says it was exciting because the project had taken so much "hate and trash talking." The team wondered whether they had discovered something original, and they felt proud.
Inflammation, Hormones, and the Microbiome
For inflammation, the team measured hs-CRP, which Johnson describes as a marker of the low-grade stress and damage the body carries. His level was already low at 0.23. Five days after the first dose it fell below the detection limit of 0.15, and it stayed suppressed after the second dose. He explains why he cares: he calls chronic inflammation one of the fastest accelerators of biological aging and says it is strongly associated with cardiovascular disease, all-cause mortality, and insulin resistance. As far as the tests could tell, he says, his inflammation was effectively erased.
The hormonal pattern also repeated. The 42% drop in morning cortisol and 45% drop in DHEA after the first dose recurred after the second. He calls this a measurable, durable shift toward a calmer resting baseline.
On the brain, he restates that the effects were cumulative. He says aging is associated with rigid neural patterns and they saw the opposite, which looked less like "a passing high" and more like "a structural reset."
His gut microbiome also shifted. Several species associated with stress, anxiety, and insulin resistance declined, and a new species appeared. Johnson admits they don't really know what this means long term, only that the gut was another system that changed.
Johnson's Interpretation: Convergence Across Systems
Johnson's central argument is that these signals were not isolated. He lists the brain, hormones, metabolism, inflammation, and the microbiome as a system "cooperating in whole." He names stress, hormone dysregulation, metabolic dysfunction, and chronic inflammation as primary drivers of biological aging and says the two doses produced measurable shifts in all four, in a body that was already optimized.
Asked what this coordination means, he says many of history's great accomplishments came from observing something new, and that measurement is often the barrier. Earlier generations could not measure the microbiome or brain the way his team can. He describes what they did as pointing modern tools at psilocybin, which he says has been used for thousands of years as a medicinal and ritual practice, and putting it "under a scientific microscope."
He claims two firsts in humans: continuous glucose evidence of improved blood sugar control after psilocybin, and a thermal profile of an intense psilocybin experience. On that basis he says he believes magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy. His reason is not that they change how you feel but that, in his view, they measurably alter the systems that drive aging.
He pairs this with caveats. These are first-in-human observations that need replication, and both the size and duration of the effects need more study. He also says psilocybin does not replace the fundamentals, which he lists as sleep, nutrition, movement, and discipline and calls the "power laws" that do the heavy lifting. In his framing, psilocybin expanded the framework rather than replacing it. He says the video is not an endorsement or a recommendation to try mushrooms, and that everything was done legally and safely under direct medical supervision in a controlled environment.
Why He Measures
Near the end, Johnson answers why he measures so obsessively and spends millions doing it. He says he often feels that he isn't running the show, that "something else runs me," and that he finds out after the fact. He says this was also true when he was depressed and seriously considering suicide, lying on the floor at night thinking, "I'm done." He describes years when he couldn't get off the floor, couldn't see a way forward, and wanted to end it all.
He says he started measuring his body not to live forever but because he wasn't sure he would survive the way he was living. Don't Die, in his account, began as a way to stay alive. So when he saw inflammation fall below detectable levels, a brain that looked younger, and convergence across five biological systems, he took it as more than a longevity finding. He saw it as a possible tool for people who feel now the way he used to feel.
What Remains Open
Johnson closes by saying they probably learned less than they didn't. Telomere length, epigenetic age, and other cellular aging markers are still being tracked, and he expects those results to raise more questions. The experiment isn't finished and the protocol isn't fixed, which he says is the point: longevity is about systems working together, not one breakthrough, and any tool that measurably restores those systems "belongs in the conversation." He says psilocybin "earned its seat at the table."
What surprised him most, he says, was not the experience but the convergence of effects in an already optimized body. He ends with plans for more tests, more data, and more evidence, pursued for truth rather than novelty.
Everybody is unquestionably confident that I'm going to emerge as a different human.
Psilocybin is a powerful, powerful drug. Within a trip, it can be both heaven and hell. A profound effect on one's sense of reality, including one's sense of self. This is the tool for understanding the mind.
I don't know how to anticipate this.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Bryan Johnson. Bryan was on a mission. A mission to save life. To protect the planet. To make the world healthier. And to solve one question no one had ever solved before. How to not die. Bryan believed aging was a problem. And like any problem, it could be measured, studied, and solved. So, he tried everything science would allow him to try. Some things worked. Some things didn't. But the quest never stopped.
Then, one day, Bryan discovered something unexpected. A potential therapy. But this therapy challenged the very thing his mission was built on. It risked clarity. It risked certainty. It even risked the mission itself. But it also hinted at something else. A way that might unlock something biology had been holding on to all along. To discover the truth, Bryan would have to set aside control and take a step into the unknown. This is where our story begins.
For a long time, I had no major interest in psychedelics. My work is about control, doing things with precision, measuring cause and effect. And psychedelics don't fit in that framework. They felt subjective. Then I came across something really interesting. A study showed that psilocybin helped human cells live longer in a dish. Most studies are in mice. So, this was different. This caught my attention.
In seeing this, I didn't immediately think I should go out and do magic mushrooms. I thought, why would this be happening? Now, if this effect was legitimate, there was something real happening biologically. At the same time, I kept on thinking about the mental health data. People's challenges with depression, anxiety, and cognitive rigidity. What did they do about it? Psilocybin kept on coming up again and again as a potential therapy for these problems.
This created a real tension for me because on the one hand, my project is about control and discipline. And this therapy was doing the exact opposite, temporarily suspending both. So, I didn't want to jump into anything. So, I decided to post my findings and thoughts on social media. I wanted to see what other people thought. And damn, was there a reaction.
That's a big dose. Magic mushrooms like Bryan Johnson again.
Based upon this feedback and enthusiasm, my team and I decided to review all the literature on psilocybin.
Interesting.
So, we designed a protocol and wanted to extensively measure it, the most quantified psychedelic experience in history.
This most likely is the most measured psychedelic trip in the history of the human race. I don't think any human before me has measured 249 biomarkers before they took magic mushrooms. 249 biomarkers. Brain activity, inflammation, hormones, metabolism, heart vitals, stress markers, sexual function, DNA, cellular aging. Yeah, it's a lot.
People think about magic mushrooms as a fun thing to do, like a fun psychedelic trip. Or recently, they've been looking at this for PTSD or depression, but no one's thought of psychedelics in the form of longevity. So, if society reframed its understanding of psychedelics to longevity, it might be a big deal. Because psychedelics fix broken things. Psychedelics don't make things younger. The goal wasn't to have an experience. The goal was to learn the truth.
I also started having real concerns. What if I came out of this and I didn't care about Blueprint anymore? What if my values changed? What if I became unrecognizable from who I am today? That risk was real. But the flip side is that if this therapy had that potential to improve mental health, brain function, and biological aging, then avoiding it out of fear wouldn't be aligned with the mission. As our deliberations matured, it became clear this was not about taking mushrooms. It was an explorer's question. Is the journey worth taking?
The experiment sounded simple on paper. Test the compound, measure the results, report the findings. But the thing is, psilocybin isn't just a compound. It alters perception. It changes how you see yourself and how you see the world. I've spent years building my mental discipline, every decision, and calorie, and minute. Blueprint is built on this consistency. Psychedelics, however, are built on entropy, spontaneous flow, and uncertainty.
There was a real possibility that something could go wrong. For example, what if I experienced psychological instability? What if I disrupted my motivation for this project? What if I came out of it and thought, "Why am I doing any of this?" This wasn't hypothetical. People were warning me with real-life stories.
My phone's been blowing up with messages of people who have been expressing concern that there have been founders that have done journeys and then they come back and check out. Yes. They don't find meaning anymore. They want to go off-grid. And so if I crash out then it leaves a hole to some extent. I don't know what 5 g means. I don't know what to anticipate.
And so I took these concerns seriously. There's also a cultural history here. Psychedelics were once studied seriously and they were pushed to the margins for decades. They were associated with chaos and rebellion, loss of control. None of those things are aligned with how I live my life. So I had to ask myself a hard question. Was I pursuing this because it was interesting or because it might reveal something true?
I wonder if this is a different force that I've not contended with before. I wonder if this force is just fundamentally more powerful than my concept of me or of my desires or my will or my wants.
I guess this shows that fear can be useful. It tells you when something matters. And the fear I was feeling wasn't about mushrooms. It was about identity. And so if this experience changed how I think or what I value I had to be ready to accept that outcome. Even if it meant questioning my entire mission and existence. And this was the paradox. And it pushed me in this direction to realize that if I'm going to purely pursue longevity, I can't be overprotective of my current beliefs. I have to be willing to test them.
The morning of my first dose, everything felt ordinary. The light through the windows, the sound of the trees, how my hands felt.
I was being extremely methodical about my routines because I knew going into the day I wanted to feel rested and well. And so, the night before I made a lot of plans to make sure I had a wind-down routine. I could turn my phone off. I got to bed right on time. I woke up naturally at 5:04 in the morning. It was a good way to start the day because I didn't want to enter the day feeling like I had an overhang of poor sleep or in a bad mood because I knew that carrying these things into the experience would have an effect. I wanted to feel great in my entire body.
I guess what kept on echoing in my mind was that I had been approaching this as an experiment focused on the data and the outcomes but I hadn't entered it primarily thinking, "How am I going to change as a person?" And that was all people could talk about. And so, that kept on echoing in my mind of have I appropriately sized this up fully knowing that this could be a one-shot situation and I may change irreparably. Thinking about all these things and how to sequence all the measurements, get all the measurements right to make sure it's scientific, and the psychological uncertainties of this, it was a lot.
All right, let's do this. The dose was 4.67 of dried magic mushrooms, strain B+. Hey guys, ready? And a concentration of psilocybin of 24.98 mg. As some would say, a heroic dose. Now, this level of magic mushroom is not to be confused with a microdose. This would be a full-on experience.
Some people ask me, are you nervous? Yes. I'm nervous based upon what I've read in your responses. That those of you who have done this or something similar have said that even one or two or three grams is a significant experience and five is just next level. It's unimaginable. So, yes, I'm nervous.
In all the experimentation we've done, control has really been our primary lever. It's how we've built the entire protocol. It's how I live my life. It's how we've built Don't Die. And now, I was choosing to set it down on purpose. Right after I took it, I made a phone call.
Hello. Hey Talmage. I don't know if you're watching the live stream, but your dad just took the 5 g of magic mushrooms. How are you feeling into it? I haven't felt anything yet. So, I probably have 10 minutes until takeoff. So, I just want to call and tell you I love you and I'll see you in a couple hours. I love you, too. I'll see you on the other side. Love you, Talmage. Love you, Talmage. Bye.
There's this moment when you realize that you can no longer steer the ship. You are no longer in control. And the experience begins to unfold. And you have a choice. You can fight it or you can welcome it.
That's fun. Hearing that sound. I haven't heard your leaves crack like that for a long time. Really? I think this is what I remember hearing as a kid.
What surprised me the most wasn't chaos, it was actually the opposite. A feeling of openness, of connection, a kind of childlike excitement I hadn't felt in a very long time. At one point I revisited the fear, the idea that I might not care about this afterward, but instead of losing clarity, I just felt aligned. Not euphoric, not irrational, just somehow cohesively aligned.
I really wish all of you well, and I really sincerely mean that. I've been in really dark places in my life. And there are people who pull up for you in life that are there for you without judgment, and are soft and supportive and strong. And I think that this is a really special moment as a species, that we are transforming into something else, and it's this really wild time to be alive. It's the most spectacular time to be alive in history.
In the days that followed, that feeling stayed. It felt fresh. I felt gratitude and curiosity and energy. If anything, I was seeing my mission more clearly. But then again, feelings are data. The question was simple. Did the biology agree?
After I took that first dose, we measured everything again. The goal wasn't to prove a theory, it was to see what had changed. Some markers stayed the same. Interesting. That's important. But a few markers stood out. Cortisol, for example, let's start there.
Cortisol is the body's primary stress hormone. It affects sleep, recovery, and metabolic health. We tracked mine throughout the day on the first dose. I had my morning cortisol spike, which you have in your circadian rhythm. Following the dose, and for 3 hours after, it peaked again. This was three to eight times higher than my normal levels at noon. By the evening, though, my cortisol had returned to normal baseline. What we saw in the data is actually a healthy response. It's a short, contained burst of cortisol in response to the psilocybin. It was a very fast reset. There was no prolonged stress. The system fired and was able to recover quickly.
But that wasn't the part that surprised us. Five days later, my morning cortisol had dropped by 42%. Now, another marker of adrenal activity, DHEA, also dropped 45%. This is what researchers call the afterglow. This is a measured biochemical state of calm that follows a psychedelic experience. It's not being numb or sedated. It's less stress-primed. And it aligned exactly with how I felt internally.
My emotions were a choppy sea. And the psilocybin had just smoothed out the ocean, so it was glass. It took out the rough edges of the spikes of emotional deliberation and concern. It just kind of took my whole psyche and just calmed me down.
We also looked at my brain and to my great pride and joy, we got to use Kernel Flow. This is the neuroimaging device I dedicated seven years of my life building. We were able to use it and map my neural activity before, during, and after the experience. Psilocybin is known to disrupt rigid neural patterns and in my case, we observed exactly that. My default mode network went quiet. Now, this is like the command center, like the self. It went quiet and in that quietness, regions of my brain began talking to each other, sensory, auditory, and language regions. And the technical term for this increased brain activity is entropy. My brain was becoming more flexible and more exploratory and more childlike. It was more like a younger brain.
I remember the feelings, they were sensational. It felt like my consciousness was dialed up to a 10 out of 10, a hyperawareness and a hyperaliveness. I experienced sense of touch with awe. Flavor exploded in my mouth. My brain wanted to share and study and marvel. It felt like it restored my perception to youthful levels, almost like it was a factory reset taking me back to my childhood, dissolving the numbness that comes with age. And the cool thing was the data actually matched my subjective experience. The brain had been locked into these fixed patterns that had been built up over decades of time and now it was something entirely new.
And then, there was something that showed up that we actually weren't looking for. We hadn't thought to look for. My blood sugar control had changed significantly. We didn't fully understand why, but the change was clear and it was dramatic. So, more on that one later.
So, we had 249 baseline measurements from before and after the dose. We also saw some really positive movement in other markers, for example, reduced inflammation. Now, none of this was definitive. This was a single dose, it doesn't prove a theory, but the early signs were consistent. The experience wasn't just subjective, there was data. And if the results had been neutral, maybe it would have been time to stop. But they weren't. And so, we expanded the protocol.
After that first dose, we sat with the data and I really had a choice. We could treat what we had just seen as an anomaly, or we could test again. One experiment can be noise, but repetition creates signal. So, we designed a second dose, this time 3 weeks following the first. This experiment would have a dose of 5.35 g of dried mushroom, the same B+ strain, and 28 mg of psilocybin, an even larger dose of the active component. We also expanded our measurement profile, adding 136 additional measurements. This time we added thermal imaging and also continuous brain scans before, during, and after.
Now, all of these changes were important, but the biggest change this time around was the fact that it was public. I'm going to do 5 g of magic mushrooms. I had announced that I was going to live stream the second dose. The reaction was dramatic. People said I was reckless, performative, dangerous, but I saw this differently. I'm going to test something that challenges conventional thinking. And transparency matters. Transparency is the cornerstone to this entire project. And the public deserves to see what I'm doing. It's not a performance. It's not a highlight reel. It's not a summary. This is the real thing.
Psychedelics have spent decades in the shadows. They were studied briefly, then they were dismissed, then they were stigmatized. If we're going to take them seriously again, we have to test them seriously. The first dose was intimate in a small room with trusted faces nearby. This one was different. This was family and friends joining virtually, the world watching live. And that mattered, not just emotionally, but biologically.
But first, the thermal imaging. This had never been done before. Nobody has ever recorded a thermal profile of an intense psilocybin experience. And so, we were the first.
What we saw is that my core body temperature rose between 1½ and 2° Fahrenheit. My heat redistributed inward toward the center of my body, consistent with deep autonomic activation. And the patterns of change across my face and upper body suggested something more specific. It was this blend of intense joy and deep insight, but also a subtle thread of melancholy. This last one, I wasn't expecting. But I felt it.
And then, there was the brain. Three weeks following the first dose, my baseline scan showed traces of what had happened. My brain hadn't fully recovered. And so, the second dose hit, and the effects just didn't repeat. They built upon each other. The entropy went further. The integration went deeper.
The most dramatic shift was in the auditory, speech, and language networks. The regions of my brain that listen and speak. The same regions that were lit up because my family and friends were on the screen. Where I enjoyed expressing and describing my feelings and listening to the outpouring of love and positivity.
In this sweet moment, the technology that I'd built to study aging was now recording what connection felt like. We now have two doses, repeated signals, stronger the second time. So, the question changed. It was no longer, did something happen? It was, what does this mean?
After the second dose, we just sat down with everything. We had pre-dose baselines, we had post-dose measurements, short-term shifts, and sustained effects. So, we now had two doses, hundreds of biomarkers, and months of data. We expected things in my brain to change, that's obvious. What we didn't expect is the metabolic reset.
I had worn a continuous glucose monitor on my arm. It tracked my blood sugar every few minutes, every day. We then compared my blood glucose for the three days before the first dose, and then three days after. Surprisingly, my mean blood glucose dropped by 8%. My variability, which is the day-to-day swing, dropped 11%, and time above 125 mg per deciliter, this is for the top you don't want to exceed, zero.
This meant that my estimated HbA1c, this is basically a marker of my body's blood glucose control, dropped from 4.7 to 4.4, a relative reduction of 6.8%. That moves my blood glucose control from the top 2% of the population to the top 0.2%. That means better than 99.8% of healthy 18–25-year-olds. That effect held through day three. This was the first documented human evidence of improved blood sugar control using psilocybin.
Now, for context, to improve someone's glycemic control, it typically takes a few months of daily medication. For example, there's a drug called metformin. My blood glucose improved after a single neuroplastic event. A psychedelic experience may have triggered a downstream reset in how my liver and pancreas were functioning. Mimicking and potentially exceeding the effect of some of the most prescribed and powerful drugs in the world in one dose.
Bryan, when you saw the glucose data come back, what was your first reaction?
This was a genuinely exciting moment because we have taken so much hate and trash talking where people have just looked down upon this project as a nuisance to society. And in seeing that, we thought, did we just discover something original? And that was a big victory for the team. We felt very proud of that.
We also tested for inflammation. The marker for this is called hs-CRP. It's a marker of how much low-grade stress and damage your body carries at any given time. Now, my levels of inflammation were low to begin with, 0.23. Five days after the first dose, my levels dropped below the detection limit, 0.15. After the second dose, it stayed suppressed.
Why does this matter? Because chronic inflammation is one of the fastest accelerators of biological aging. It is strongly associated with cardiovascular disease, all-cause mortality, and insulin resistance. What we observed, as far as the tests could tell us, my inflammation was effectively erased.
Now, for my hormones, the cortisol pattern we saw from the first dose was not a one-time event, that 42% morning drop. Also, we had the 45% drop in DHEA. It was shifting me to a calmer baseline. It repeated after the second dose, a measurable, durable change in how my body handles stress at rest.
Three weeks after I had taken the first dose, my brain had not fully reset. Three weeks after my second dose, the effects on my brain were cumulative. Aging is associated with rigid neural patterns. What we observed was the opposite. It didn't look like a passing high, it began to look like a structural reset.
The composition of my gut microbiome also shifted. Several species that are associated with stress, anxiety, insulin resistance, all declined, and a new species emerged that hadn't been there before. Now, what this means in the long run, we don't really know, but the gut is one more system that didn't stay still. It was evolving.
The brain, hormones, metabolism, inflammation, and the microbiome, the signals were not isolated. This was a system cooperating in whole. The primary drivers of biological aging are these. They're stress, hormone dysregulation, metabolic dysfunction, and chronic inflammation. After two quantified doses, we observed measurable shifts in all four. In a body that was already optimized.
Bryan, what does the coordination of all these systems aligning mean to you?
Some of history's greatest accomplishments have been the ability to observe something new. And oftentimes what prevents us from those things is measurement. And previous generations didn't have the ability to measure the microbiome or the brain. We now do. And so I think what we've done that's unique is we just took the tools and we pointed them at a specific thing. And psilocybin has been used for thousands of years. Maybe even more. It's been a pillar of society. And we took this ancient medicinal ritualistic medicine and we put it under a scientific microscope. And we observed something new.
This experiment produced two things that had never been done before in humans. The first ever was continuous glucose evidence of improved blood sugar control following psilocybin. It was the first ever thermal profile of an intense psilocybin experience. Both firsts, both unexpected, and both consistent.
All of this leads me to believe that magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy. Not because they make you feel different, but because they measurably alter the systems that drive aging. This was the most quantified psychedelic experiment ever conducted. Also, these are first-in-human observations, which need replication. Both the magnitude and the durability need further study. But ignoring the signal would no longer be aligned with the data.
This experiment did not begin with mushrooms. It actually began with a question. How do we extend healthy human life? I wanted to know what was real, not what was popular or culturally acceptable, but what actually moved the needle. Psilocybin did not replace the fundamentals. Things like sleep, nutrition, movement, discipline. Those are the power laws, the things that do the heavy lifting. What psilocybin did was it expanded the framework.
Now, I need to be clear on this point. This is not an endorsement of magic mushrooms. This is not a recommendation to go and try them out. Everything we did was under direct medical supervision. It was done legally, it was done safely, it was in a controlled environment. This was a measured experiment. What we have is a quantified observation. One that can't be ignored.
People ask me why I do this. The constant measurement, the obsession with data, the millions of dollars spent on all of it. I have this internal struggle all of the time. I don't feel like I'm running the show. I just feel like something else runs me. And I find out after the fact. This is also true when I was depressed, when I was really considering suicide. When I'd lay down on the floor at night, be like, "I'm done."
I haven't always been this person. There were years I couldn't get off the floor. Years I couldn't see a way forward. Years I wanted to end it all. When I started measuring my body, it wasn't because I wanted to live forever, it was because I wasn't sure I would survive the way I was living. The irony is that Don't Die didn't start as a mission to extend life. It started as a way to stay alive.
So, when I got the data back from this experiment, when I saw the inflammation went to below detectable levels, when my brain looked younger, when I saw the convergence across five biological systems, it wasn't just a longevity finding; it was a glimpse of a tool that might help people who feel now the way I used to feel. That matters, and that is worth measuring.
As much as we learned in this experiment, there's probably more we didn't learn. We're still tracking telomere length. We're looking at epigenetic age, markers of cellular aging. Those answers are still coming in, and we'll have more questions. This experiment isn't finished. The protocol isn't fixed, and that's the point. Longevity isn't about one breakthrough, it's about systems working together.
If a tool measurably restores those systems, then it belongs in the conversation. Psilocybin earned its seat at the table. What surprised me the most was not the experience, it was the convergence in a body that was already optimized, and that matters. Everybody is unquestionably confident that I'm going to emerge as a different human. It feels bigger than I can comprehend.
And so, the quest continues. More tests, more data, more evidence. Not to chase novelty, but to pursue truth and the expansion of Don't Die. Onward, Bryan. Onward.
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