Bryan Johnson: I Just Took the Most Powerful Dose of DMT in the World... Here's What It Was Like

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Bryan Johnson, thanks for being here.

**Bryan Johnson** (0:01)
Yeah, it's good to see you.

**David Friedberg** (0:02)
How are you feeling? Maybe just share with us what you did a few days ago and...

**Bryan Johnson** (0:05)
Yeah, I did five MEO DMT, which is the most powerful psychedelic on the planet. It's somewhere between five and ten times more powerful than DMT. And so, yeah, it's been 48 hours. I'm still learning how to talk about it.

**David Friedberg** (0:29)
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**Bryan Johnson** (0:58)
Two things. One, mostly as a longevity experiment. So when I started this project five years ago, the approach we had was go through all the scientific evidence ever published on health and longevity. Try to find the interventions that have the best evidence. And for effect size, and the reason we went down the list from top performing on down. So of course you start with exercise, nutrition, sleep, and you work your way down to things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy and sauna. And then rapamycin, metformin. And so we never actually had on our radar psychedelics. They were always either an ancient medicine, you know, being used in ritualistic practices or being pointed at things like depression and anxiety in certain trials. But it was never understood as a rejuvenation protocol, something that was for anti-aging. And so we found a preclinical evidence in mice on psilocybin. We thought that's interesting. So we did the world's most studied, the most quantified experiment doing psilocybin, three doses at 25 milligrams of psilocybin.

**David Friedberg** (2:00)
Which are pretty high doses.

**Bryan Johnson** (2:01)
Yeah, it's a clinical dose, a very, very close to a hero dose. And we found that we think it's a longevity therapy.

**David Friedberg** (2:08)
Let's get to that data in a minute. But then you decided to try 5-MeO this weekend.

**Bryan Johnson** (2:13)
Yes.

**David Friedberg** (2:14)
Walk me through the experience because you televised the whole thing. It was live streamed. You looked amazingly calm going into it. And going through the process, walk us through your experience.

**Bryan Johnson** (2:27)
Yeah, I think those who have done 5-MeO would probably relate with me that it feels like an impossible task to explain what it's like. So that caveat said, I'll give it a go. I'm stunned, absolutely floored, speechless. You basically experience raw consciousness and raw intelligence. It's this. So whatever, when I say these words, take these words that I committed to you, take that idea, multiply it by a thousand, and then move out infinite depth, infinite width, infinite width and then dimensions. And like that gives you kind of like a rough map of like the size and space that you deal with. And it was incredibly hard because you get blasted into this space that is so foreign, you don't even know what's happening.

**David Friedberg** (3:22)
It happens very quickly.

**Bryan Johnson** (3:23)
Like you inhale it. I did nine milligrams of intramuscular and then 18 of it of vaporized. And it hits you within 10 seconds. You're just out. And so, but what happens is you get in that space and then you-

**David Friedberg** (3:39)
Visual changes every-

**Bryan Johnson** (3:41)
Very little visual. You see it on DMT. It's a very visual. You'll meet the, you know, like the elves or whatever else. This is not a visual experience, but you get in this world and you lock in to basically you either panic because you feel like the gates of hell are going to open, that the, the con- the stream of existence is just gonna just tear you to shreds. It's gonna shard you. And if you give up-

**David Friedberg** (4:10)
Like break your brain.

**Bryan Johnson** (4:11)
Yeah. You feel like it's gonna like threaten your sanity. Like, is it gonna chop you up into little pieces? And so in that moment, you have to say, do I try to wrestle this and I need to just like wait it out until it's over? Or you just relent, you say, yes. And you have to in that moment, you have to say yes so thoroughly. You have to release all attachment, all preconditions, all want, all desire. You have to release self ego control. You just have to just relent entirely. And then when you do that, it opened up this unimaginable bliss and euphoria.