PSYCHO-NOT*
The Mushroom We Saw vs. The Mycelium We Didn’t
The Mushroom Breaks the Internet
“The psilocybin experience is a way to connect with the universal consciousness and tap into the power of the universe.” – Alex Grey
On November 30, in the year of their lord 2025, six hundred thousand people tuned in to watch the most measured multimillionaire alive, longevity prophet Bryan Johnson, take psilocybin on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Huzzah!
Well played, Bryan and co. I commend you. Now allow me to comment, if you would be so kind as to join this wandering pilgrim down a path of possibilities.
It was billed as “for the benefit of studying the longevity effects of the compounds,” and Bryan did not shy away from saying so. In his own words:
“This is an experiment to measure how psilocybin impacts my biomarkers, brain activity, and overall longevity.”
For clarity, and for those of you on an X-sobriety protocol, here are a few more lines straight from the horse’s mouth, or at least from his collaborators’ thumbs:
“I’m doing magic mushrooms this Sunday. One dose every month for 3 months as part of my longevity protocol experiment.”
“The goal is to understand how these compounds influence my biomarkers, brain activity, and overall longevity.”
“We are exploring whether psilocybin can produce measurable changes related to aging, inflammation, brain health, and emotional regulation.”
Let me be clear. I am not throwing shade. Who am I to judge. When I have done heroic doses alone by a river, I usually end up naked on the sand, spitting in my hand, negotiating with my daimon, and using viscous saliva as a bio-pad HUD to relive past traumas. JK. But I digress. This is not about my persons. I am just the mushroom.
As Terence McKenna once said,
“The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.”
Bryan’s livestream had intention, and has established himself as a high-tech psychonaut by facing death by consuming natures great decomposers via his gut-biome. The clinical, barren, minimalist set and setting worked for the stream, even if those of us who once ate caps out of ziplocs and walked with thirty psychonauts into The Narrows at Zion might have needed a lot more nature and privacy. Yet Bryan laid it bare for all to see and took it like a champ by bearing it all in front of the world. As far as I know, beyond some Discordian art exhibit, SouthPark creators Oscar appearance, or avant-garde film, no one has done this at this scale. Bravo Bryan.
So let us treat this as a fresh lobe of the old perennial ball of gnosis. It is now in our court, fellow psychonauts. The question worth exploring is simple.
Do we participate in what comes next? Or not?
Bryan’s experience on Sunday (great thread here on the specifics) came with high production value, featured all the X livestream toys, and leaned into a kind of deliberate self-satire with comic headers, graphics, split-screen guests, and Grimes providing a less than ideal trip-track. In my humble opinion I prefer the bubbling of rivers or anything from East Forest ‘s catalogue. The whole event felt very late 2025; and just what the shaman ordered.
But the point of these words is not to review Bryan’s set design, but the implications of what he raised to our awareness. It was historic. A new modality appeared before us. Live-tripping. A door no one had fully opened until this moment. Before GTA6 arrived, we got a live mushroom ceremony as spectator sport.
Bryan Johnson, Longevity Subject Zero, joins the long line of white fellers with resources who shaped the mushroom’s Western story. Wasson, the McKenna Brothers, Stamets, and many others have fruited metaphorically in the tangled backwoods channels of Western culture. Yet this mushroom, in the age of Twitch celebrities and YouTube archetypes, pushed itself through a corporatized cultural dirt for an over-dopamined, instant-gratification zeitgeist to consume. A dirt, not living soil, I would argue, lacking nutrients like weirdness, sacredness, and Indigenous context. Let me know in the comments if you concur or raise objection.
Let me spell this out as if it were an Erowid trip report or a Fusion Anomaly node.
What everyone saw on 11/30/2025 was the mushroom, the 1% flash, the fruiting body. Bryan’s mushroom popped because the mycelium willed it. The mycelium being the mushroom community: all those unseen lineages, centuries-deep threads of curanderas, basement alchemists, Burning Man wizards, and quiet stewards who spent decades feeding the network so that one cap (processed pouch) could break the internet in 2025.
My request, Bryan, you cracked the Livestream of Perceptions. Now wedge it open, brother. Prop it with a rock so more psychonauts, urban mystics, and Indigenous valley shamans can pass through without the monetization of the mycelium.
Because the real question is not “What just happened.”
It is “What happens next.”
Not dystopian rabbit holes. Not another tech-bro extraction fantasy.
Let us write the mythic sequel instead. A golden-age sci-fi where the mycelium wins. Where elders and algorithms sit in the same circle. Where longevity bio-hackers help fund channels for wisdom keepers to speak in real time to thirsty masses. Where the stealing of Manly P. Hall and Charles Fort research for “likes” comes to an end, and the thumb-scrolling dopamine class hears something better than grifters repackaging stolen axioms.
A future where the next evolution of humanity is rooted, relational, and tripping on reciprocity instead of spectacle.
That is the door Bryan Johnson just kicked wide open. Again, for the second time. (He has one more trip folks.) From there… the content charlatan copying circus will commence. So before it get’s out of hand I felt the need to speak out on behalf of the quiet:
Please do not let it close behind a paywall or a procession of grifters LARPing borrowed spiritual truths unearned by the cut & paste soothsayers.
Now, I am going to give my observations. Not because I am a self-aware narcissist, nor because I find myself exceptional, nor because I want to join the carousel of carbon-copy content on Twitter, Insta, TikTok. I offer this written-word because it is the only thing I am actually qualified to speak about: being a human who has taken mushrooms.
I have been in this body for 47 years. I have experienced every moment through its filters and appendages. So I use this vessel to articulate what I believe may matter to the collective human organism. And we shall see if you think so too.
Let us not go “down a rabbit hole.” That metaphor, like the “Matrix,” has run its course. Let us adopt a new one.
“Let us slip into the spore stream.”
ARE YOU(tube) EXPERIENCED?
“Psilocybin can help us break down the barriers between ourselves and others and foster a sense of empathy and compassion.” – Katherine MacLean
Please proceed for entertainment purposes only.
You are now about to witness the strength of shroom knowledge.
There is more to reality, and with psilocybin and its freaky cousin dimethyltryptamine the edges get thin enough to peek through. You do not have to take my word for it. That is the great thing about these technologies, biological or spiritual, however you frame it. You can experience it yourself. To hell with the messenger… have a look.
I am not telling anybody to take anything. But anyone who has walked that inner terrain knows what I am talking about. And if we know, then we also know it is time to pull up our britches and get to work. No one out there is going to build a saner, kinder, more coherent society for us. They will monetize our longing before they ever nourish it.
If anyone wants to say this is irresponsible, let me be clear: children with undeveloped frontal cortexes should not be ingesting psychedelics, seed oils, alcohol, or Tiktok.
I did eat a lot of drugs, and it did not make me smarter. It did give me spiritual Dungeons and Dragons attributes; maybe….IDK. But it came at a cost: psychological, physical, relational. I have been a lousy boyfriend, an inconsistent friend, and an even worse caretaker of my own soul and credit score. Not recommended to eat substances if not grounded or independently wealthy.
Here is my actual point. It is irresponsible not to explore every possible avenue when ecological collapse is accelerating, psychological collapse is already here, and the world is a tangle of beings, animal, human, fungal, noncorporeal, all calling out for help.
So if you are reading this as a psychonaut, I invite you to level up, for in this vast forest of Earth we are rivaled at every turn by the psycho-nots* -
not-willing to speak up for our mycelium roommates. not-willing to take on exploration of reality for the sake of all who share this planet. not-willing to give credit where credit is due: honoring the elders, and traditions which have cultivated and preserved this relationship with the fungal kingdom for ages.
I am not-advocating at all for Earthlings to join the Psychonaunt Corp, I was just prompted by the aforementioned historic livestream to share something I believe benefits the living ecosystem we all find ourselves dependent on.
If you choose not to partake in the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms I absolutely honor that, I would say without question it is not for everyone. Few of us will research, rescue, or wrestle with Nature as Steve Irwin did, yet his observations and spirit gave something to all of us. Sharing is caring.
Bryan’s sharing revealed the profundity of these experiences. He gathered a great deal of data that benefited not only himself but all of humankind by doing it live and showing the reality of what a person undergoes when taking this ancient sacrament. His openness and put-it-all-out-there vulnerability show the real power in communal ritual, which this truly was.
Now let us talk about the word itself: PSYCHONAUNT.
The word psychonaut may sound arcane, inane, or like the title of a mid-tier video game franchise, or just “that guy at the party who will not shut up about DMT.” As an unlicensed, unregistered retired psychonaut myself, all of the above can be true depending on the night and the location of the planets; and your car keys.
Really, though, the term is German-Greek cosplay for what a lot of us, you know who you are, have actually been doing.
Let us get rhizomal, or granular, or mycelial. To borrow from Young MC at the skating rink, let me “break it down for you fellas.”
Psyche: mind, soul, breath
Naut: sailor, navigator
Think of it like this, a psychonaut is:
a sailor of the soul
a mind-raft pilot
a mental dirigible captain
a person who straps into the inner starship hoping this simulation includes unlimited lives.
The term did not drop out of a geodesic dome at Burning Man. No shade, I have babbled inside a few of those in my day. It emerged around 1970–71 when Ernst Jünger, war-philosopher turned astral anthropologist, was riffing with ethnomycologist Jonathan Ott. Jünger published the word in his 1970 book Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch, essentially saying:
“We cooked this up while talking about drugs and consciousness.”
Oh, to be a fly on those walls, or in German, Mäuschen spielen, “to play the little mouse.” Which, to be honest, is exactly what I was doing during Bryan’s second livestream.
That is the origin story: two intellectual weirdos looking for a name for the human impulse to explore inward like it is an uncharted continent. With that, the psychonautic inner-space race launched beside NASA’s outer one, with Project Paperclip on one side and ceremonial magic on the other.
Are we ready to go off the map. Not the United Nations map, the other map. The internal one.
Fast-forward to psychedelic renaissance 1.0, the 80s and 90s.
The person who carried psychonaut from a niche German concept to “everyone’s AIM username in 1999” was Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary’s quieter collaborator. Metzner used it constantly in his books, especially Maps of Consciousness. When psychedelics went underground, Metzner and the Green Earth Foundation held the line. His workshops, newsletters, and conferences basically handed the term to the next generation, mine included.
Then the internet arrived. See my online crush, Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human for more on that.
Hard to imagine now, but once upon a time the network was mostly for government continuity plans, early AI experiments, and swapping dirty pictures. Another article entirely.
Psychonaut went viral before viral was a thing.
Sex seekers and psychedelic pathfinders have always been early adopters in the temple of data. There are many ways to skin a cat, and more than a dozen ways to generate a peak state.
The Internet Era: How “Psychonaut” Entered the Collective Bloodstream
Late 90s through early 2000s:
Erowid, the unburnable Library of Alexandria of trip reports, used “psychonaut” constantly.
Bluelight made it standard slang.
Reddit’s r/Psychonaut launched in 2008, eventually passing 600k members and becoming one of the largest consciousness communities online.
By the early 2000s, calling yourself a psychonaut was no longer fringe. It became the accepted badge for those exploring consciousness with intention, not just using psychedelics as nostalgia fuel at a bachelor party or as rocket propellant to dance until sunrise.
Academia followed the subculture. Typical.
Imperial College London, MAPS, and psychopharmacology journals now use the term casually. Psychonaut replaced “acid head” or “tripper” because it implies purpose, exploration, skill, not “that guy at Coachella who took too much and cried in the porta potty.”
How We Scrolled Into This Moment: The Western Mushroom Timeline
“The psilocybin experience can help us access parts of ourselves that are normally hidden from view.” – Paul Stamets
Let us take this journey into the experiences that laid the framework for Bryan to trip on twitter. From here, we follow the mycelium back through time. No one needs a pedantic history lecture so I won’t dilly-dally. But for those of you like me who need a “Previously on Western Culture’s Mushroom Trip” before every episode, here is the quick recap:
London, 1799.
A dad pops out to Green Park for breakfast mushrooms, grabs a fistful of liberty caps by mistake, and accidentally kicks off the Western world’s first recorded psychedelic family dinner.
1914.
While empires collapsed overhead, a lone Englishman known only as Mr. W swallowed liberty caps, felt the veil thin, and calmly mailed his report to Science magazine. The mycelium had been whispering long before the West was ready to listen.
1955.
J. P. Morgan vice-president R. Gordon Wasson flies to Oaxaca, sits with María Sabina, and eats the flesh of the gods.
1957.
He drops “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life magazine and “accidentally” turns a thousand-year-old sacrament into front-page news.
1958, Sandoz Labs.
Fresh off his LSD revelations, Albert Hofmann isolates psilocybin and psilocin from Heim’s lab-grown Psilocybe mexicana, maps their structures, and hands the West the chemical keys to Mazatec mysteries-that, Wasson had just paraded into the spotlight.
1970.
Nixon signs the Controlled Substances Act, slamming LSD, DMT, MDA, psilocybin, psilocin, mescaline, peyote, and cannabis into Schedule I, the legal coffin labeled “no accepted medical use.” Overnight the mycelium is driven underground for two generations.
1998.
Swiss neuroscientist Franz Vollenweider confirms LSD and psilocybin bind primarily to the brain’s 5-HT2A receptor.
1999–2006.
Beneath the radar at Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths plants the first legal psilocybin studies in decades. In 2006 his landmark paper lands. Psilocybin reliably catalyzes mystical states. The mycelium breaks the surface again.
2009–2014.
Robin Carhart-Harris restarts UK research after forty years. Charles Grob shows psilocybin softens death anxiety. Carhart-Harris’s fMRI studies reveal the mushroom loosening the brain’s default-mode straitjacket, letting silenced regions sing again.
The mycelium, after half a century underground, begins threading itself back into the light. And by “light,” I mean commodification, branding, conference, and the cannabis-style corporate takeover that moved the culture from - patients to profit. See my doc Higher Stakes for that storyline as it relates to cannabis.
Now the legal landscape, or the Government’s “supposed” concern for our well-being:
Oregon (2020). First U.S. state to legalize supervised psilocybin; services launched 2023; partial reversal in 2024.
Colorado (2022). Prop 122 establishes regulated access; first licenses issued March 2025.
New Mexico (2025). Medical Psilocybin Act signed April 7; rollout expected 2027–2028.
California (Dec 2025). Fully illegal statewide; Schedule I; possession still criminalized.
Local decrim only: Oakland, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Berkeley, Eureka, Arcata.
[End boring bulleted history lesson.]
“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.” -Terence McKenna
Psychedelics went from sacrament to illegal to MKUltra toy to underground to clinical and, like all things these days, into content. The content age is helpful for the neophytes and annoying as hell for us Gen-Xers who have seen more than most Gen-Z TikTokers will forget to remember.
We were “tuned in” before Y2K fizzled, the elites fought the sequel wars, and made the plebs stand six feet apart; incidentally the same distance they buried the dead beneath our feet in the old underworld; where all connections open and close.
On 11/30/2025, the mushroom kingdom’s decomposing panspermic allies became a livestream attraction with an audience the size of a small nation.
Is this more or less important than UFO disclosures or the damning Epstein files. I have no idea. I will let the counterfeit AI gods file it accordingly at a later, earlier, or simultaneous time.
Because none of this history prepared us for what happened when 600,000 people watched a mushroom ceremony in real time.
Or did it. Because that whole arc, from Green Park in 1799 to Oregon in 2020, is exactly what set the stage for Bryan’s mushroom to appear on your phone.
The Good, the Bad, and the Influencer
“The psilocybin experience is a way to connect with the natural world and gain a deeper appreciation for our place within it.” – James Fadiman
If you really want to understand what happened on that livestream, you have to trace the hyphae. Follow the tiny threads back to the source.
We like to brag about our cell networks, satellites, invisible frequency fields, and underground fiber optics binding us together. Yet a handful of mushrooms can plug you straight into the original network, the mycelium, and the strange, shimmering data stored in your own biofield. Trust me. I read it on the inter-webs.
Imagine if we did that with intention.
Imagine connecting to each other the way forests do: to solve the big problems, the social ones, the ecological ones, the spiritual-purpose-sized ones, even the robotics debates and the psychic abilities we pretend we do not have.
We do not need Neuralink.
We are already linked.
We just need a service provider.
You want one.
Go get your SIM card.
Pluck it from a cow patty and log the hell in.
Now, look, and yes, I repeat myself, I am dyslexic and therefore redundant by constitutional design. Let us give credit where it is due.
Bryan Johnson did not do a sloppy “look at me, I am tripping” stunt. He approached this like a monk-scientist with longevity spreadsheets running through his mitochondria. He brought a well-financed, bio-optimized earnestness into the mushroom space and offered it publicly.
He treated the experience like a Tijuana ibogaine season and a lab report had a child through IVF.
He showed harm reduction.
He had a Goth sitter. [Sorry, had to throw in the goth thing as its so ridiculous but they embraced it. Much love to you two.]
He did not sensationalize it, memeify it, or turn it into algorithm chum.
He made it peer-to-peer, human to human, instead of paywalled guru content or “I discovered mushrooms in 2025” hubris.
He demystified without disrespecting.
But here comes the turn.
The mushroom was televised. Yet…
The mycelium was missing.
What we did not see were the deeper fibers connecting us to the source of the mushroom. What we did see were familial ties, which moved me, because these experiences should be shared in families and communities, not only with strangers. His incredible focus in recording all the data he could, from bloodwork to brain scans, from gratitude to reflection, and his willingness to put himself out there made this truly groundbreaking.
Now we need:
The elders.
The lineages.
The seasoned psychonauts who carried this medicine through colonization, prohibition, ridicule, rave culture, and the performative wellness circus.
For his third trip I want to see the human network that kept the flame alive for decades so a pioneer in human prosperity in 2025 could livestream a trip to hundreds of thousands.
This is what I want to see included next time: the stewards on the set, the roots beneath the fruit.
Because a mushroom without its mycelium is just a prop. And I know props.
My suggestion, include the roots, the teachers, the lineages, the actual mycelial network, and you get something to expand the data something else entirely:
A ceremony instead of a spectacle.
The Missing Ingredient: Lineage
“We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.” – Terence McKenna
I am not auditioning for the role of anything. Nobody wants to see a middle-aged dad LARP as the bouncer of the mushroom mysteries. {I mean.. if you do, LMK.}
I am only trying to pitch in on the collective narrative unfolding, because this moment did not materialize out of nowhere.
Long before microdosing became the productivity hack of the blue-light class.
Long before psychedelic startups pitched VCs like they were selling fermented kombucha futures, the mind altering vig, there were people out there keeping this medicine alive. By medicine I mean relationship between kingdoms. Man and mycelium. Cultivation. Ceremony. Communion with our squishy cousins, not quite plant, not quite animal, the fungal kingdom, gave us our first metaphors for transformation.
The Mazatec. The Mixtec. The Zapotec. The indigenous protesters at the MAPS conference. Curanderas who carried generations of prayer in their breath. Shamans and plant doctors who held space long before “set and setting” became a TED talk slide. Elders whose ceremonies were not recorded, monetized, optimized, cross-posted, or chopped into vertical videos for engagement farming. The indigenous holding space with the fungal entheogenic clan I would love to see invited to these livestreamed events.
Then there are the underground Western guides, the syncretic, unlicensed, quietly devoted practitioners who have been doing this work to heal addiction, trauma, spiritual paralysis, or just live their best lives. The technoshamanic chaos magicians building their own rites when no one else would, these too, should be invited to the table.
The early Erowid days, when the site looked like it a Usenet message board, were not easy. People hid behind aliases, terrified of getting arrested because they possessed two grams of cosmic insight. I remember being concerned about taking pictures of mushrooms for the repercussions now someone can zoom a 4K lens into a box of mushrooms on a livestream and the only backlash they get is a bot calling them a psy-op, a poser, or controlled opposition. All just rage-bait to keep the scroll-wheel spinning, because nothing sells better than: projection.
But in this case I think there were more positive responses than negative, I have no way to quantify that, it’s just the vibe I got from my neural dip into the grok algorithm in the last few days as I wrote this in between making three meals a day and doing endless dishes. Here’s another take for context.
These O.G. psychonauts: the trippy tribal elders, the logged-in lineage bearers, the underground post-guru guides, have scars, not subscribers. This is what I’m hoping to raise to the surface:
let us open the livestreams to the smaller tributaries in the living cosmic psychedelic ecosystem. [I’ll name names in a follow-up piece.]
They are the stewards.
The human hyphae.
The mycelial part of the Homo sapiens sapiens neural network that survived colonization, prohibition, mockery, the D.A.R.E. era, synthetic-everything, and the wellness-commodification circus.
They need our support, people, if we’re going to truly honor our relationship with the tryptamine and psilocybin networks of opportunity waiting for humanity just behind our eyelids. They can help us navigate the invisible terrain that lays in the frontiers of consciousness / space-time exploration - without going insane.
Meanwhile, a new class of mushroom influencers is emerging. Picture ten thousand tech bros in orange blue-light blockers, growing out monk beards, repeating Terence McKenna and Alan Watts quotes their parents once rebelled against. Some sincere. Some LARPing. Some lost. Some bots. Some… soma.
And it is only going to get more commodified and more vanilla (yes, I am looking at the mirror at you, white people) if we do not kick open the dams of well-financed influencers and democratize the livestreamed trip before it becomes another energy drink sponsored extreme sport or webcam carnival sideshow.
The ones who actually keep this network alive are still underground. Still tending the roots.
Let us get them on a livestream. Monthly. Regularly. Let us actually have a global mycelial town hall, not just a celebrity trip-cam. Which is what I fear will happen after Bryans brave new world opened up the notion to the Alphas.
I can see the podcasters with studios and supplement companies now foaming at the lips planning out their psychedelic trip live telethons. Please GOD, frens in the interwebs, let this not happen without including real motha fawking G’s.
The West, bless our amnesiac goldfish brains, loves to repeat the same Fisher-Price loop by copying our archon gatekeepers MOM-E/DAD-E.
We need innovation not influence at this point in the post-historic, Mandela effect, spin-off, time-line, we find ourselves streaming.
{The year of the horse hasn’t even started and I’m beating a dead horse, I get it.}
The Mycelium Metaphor
“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. Because of the artists, who are self-selected, for being able to journey into the Other, if the artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.” – Terence McKenna
A mushroom is just the messenger.
The mycelium is the message.
That little cap popping up in a field is maybe one percent of the organism, a polite hello from a sprawling, ancient intelligence living under our feet, stitching forests together in an organic internet older than language. The original web, before DARPA, before AOL, before the algorithm learned to manipulate our nervous systems.
I cannot express enough how miraculous it is that we can eat this thing, literally ingest a node of that ancient network, and suddenly experience inner and outer revelations as if the universe slipped us its password for, like, 4-6 hours.
We are a culture of consumption, yet consuming psilocybin does something subversive. It makes you want to produce, create, explore, repair, not just sit back and enjoy the show. Usually. Not always. Some people have had rough encounters, some nearly died, so let us not pretend this is all rainbows and cosmic Pinterest. It frees up the networks of the mind, so be forewarned, if you are hiding something from yourself, be it lies, guilt, or whatever dark shit you try and bury in your grey matter, honey, you about to face that head on if you “trip.” So again, this is something for those amongst or populous that are able to interact with the universe on the head of a pin and still be able to dance.
In many cases, eating mushrooms functions like a linguistic FAFO rebounder. The kind Bryan ingested might have temporarily upgraded our collective signal from spotty Wi-Fi to full fiber-optic ethernet straight from the source. That’s why I believe it’s important we see this as a turning point. I’m hoping we make the right pivot.
A psychedelic lineage works the same way as a mushroom-before it is plucked.
The visible part, the mushroom, the livestream, the influencer moment, is just the fruit. The unseen part, the ceremony, the elders, the pilgrims, the practitioners, the psychonauts, the anthropologists, the storytellers, is the network that makes that fruit possible.
What we saw on Twitter was a single mushroom bursting into daylight. What made it possible were decades, centuries, millennia of human–fungal collaboration happening in the dark:
in mountain huts
forest clearings
monastery cellars
desert caves
tiny apartments with windowsill gardens and incense-swirled prayers
Every time a new mushroom pops up, whether it is María Sabina’s night-long velada or Bryan Johnson’s 600k-headcount livestream, it is because millions of threads beneath the soil are still alive, still pulsing, still feeding the organism we all belong to.
But every living network has a shadow under the soil.
The mycelium teaches connection.
The algorithm teaches consumption.
When those two worlds collide on a livestream with 600,000 viewers, something beautiful and something dangerous emerge at the same time.
We are at a threshold, the moment where psychedelics can liberate us or lull us. A moment Huxley warned us about long before hashtags.
When a mushroom rises into the glare of the global stage, as Bryan’s did, the roots start whispering a warning. Not to stop, not to scold, but to remind us: A culture that forgets its mycelium can lose the plot faster than you can say “soma.”
Psychonaut Inc: The Brave New World Warning
“Psychedelics are a way of shaking up the snow globe.” – Robin Carhart-Harris
Here is where the shadow creeps in. Not to spook us off the trail, but to remind us that every path has been shaped, sometimes gently, sometimes violently, by powers far larger than any livestream, influencer, or post-historic ceremony with comic lower thirds.
Aldous Huxley tried to warn us in Brave New World: Altered states can liberate, or they can pacify. It all depends on who is holding the ritual, and for what purpose.
Zoom out, just a pinch to scroll. The pattern snaps into focus:
Take a sacred tool.
Turn it into entertainment.
Convert that entertainment into commerce.
Call the commerce “progress”.
The story of psychedelics in the West is messy. Mushrooms and LSD did not simply wander into the counterculture; in several cases, they were nudged.
Stephen Kinzer, in Poisoner in Chief, spells out how CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb funded R. Gordon Wasson’s mushroom expedition, the same trip that wound up in Life magazine and detonated global curiosity. Kinzer calls Gottlieb “a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture.”
That is not stoner mythology. That is declassified paperwork.
Martin Lee, in the essential Acid Dreams, presses further:
“The CIA became obsessed with LSD as an espionage weapon… countless unwitting citizens were used as guinea pigs… and they could not prevent it from spreading into popular culture.”
Translation: spectacle without story becomes a perfect delivery system for control.
Not healing. Not empowerment. Control.
Even Ken Kesey, acid prankster, Merry Prankster, MKUltra guinea pig turned psychedelic Johnny Appleseed, later admitted:
“The government, the CIA, always has the best stuff… I’d gone through these drug experiments… and then began stealing the LSD to turn on all my friends.”
Beautiful blowback. Terrifying origin story.
This too is part of the lineage. Not just curanderas and shamans, but agencies, agendas, and now algorithms, shaping how psychedelics enter the cultural bloodstream.
This is why the warning matters: when psychedelics become content rather than communion, someone else starts writing the story for us. To hell with that.
Let us be honest. Some of the rails are already off.
Look at who bought Reality Sandwich - it went from artist, researchers, psychonauts, visionaries to adspace. And again, “don’t hate the playa, hate the game,” no disrespect to corporations doing what they do. Mushrooms are decomposers, I get it. Walk into any EDM festival and you will smell the DMT vapes and see how far the train has drifted from the tracks, is all I am trying to type here.
When mushrooms become just another wellness supplement, we drift dangerously close to Huxley’s soma society, a population soothed, not awakened.
None of this is an indictment of Bryan Johnson. I wanna shake his hand; maybe even arm wrestle him. I am all for iteration. I am just suggesting that as we migrate into the online Olympics of psychedelia, we include the trailblazers and Indigenous communities who held the line when possession meant prison and ceremony meant criminal.
If we forget the lineages, both the sacred ones and the shadow ones, we risk building a future where mushroom wisdom becomes just another optimized lifestyle product, stripped of reverence, ripe for manipulation. Our inner space is sacred and this needs to be a line in the sand, a rubicon that if we let the parasite elite class harness the power of the mushroom, Platos cave is gonna be like a VR IMAX 3D Idiocracy circus prison we’ll loose a lot of humanity too.
Psilocybin is not something we should automate so that our consciousness can check out while our hands let go of the evolutionary wheel. Humanity cannot go on auto-pilot.
So what am I suggesting? Instead of all my finger-wagging and redundant arguments, what do I actually want to see?
I would love to see someone wire up those mushroom-music electrodes to an untouched patch of mycelium and let the fungal kingdom DJ a sunrise set. We’ve seen evidence that plants respond to touch and remember who cuts their branches and leaves. If we truly want to take this into the next evolution, let us do more than measure our biomarkers. Let us measure the biofeedback of the little teachers we ingest.
Call to Action: Elders > Influencers
“We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.” – Terence McKenna
(Let’s Get Weird-er)
Douglas Rushkoff once asked the mushrooms, “here I am..waddya got?”
The mushrooms replied, “what do YOU got?”
That is exactly what I am getting at, you peoples in human meat suits.
We need to level up. Or, as my 12-year-old reminds me, as they shuffle in their seats in anticipation, when we are playing our two-player couch co-op, Split Fiction:
“Dad… you need to Lock In.”
So, humanity. Time to lock the F in. Not next week, not after the software update. Now. We are living inside the greatest co-op game in existence. Eat a mushroom and suddenly the game becomes couch co-op with your own consciousness, your body both partner and player two. This is serious play. Let us treat it as such.
I am speaking directly to the folks who actually have the keys to the gates: the technologists, the artists, the researchers, the psychonauts, the philanthropists, the platform-builders.
So let us return to a psychonaut with resources, the millionaire biohacking bodhisattva himself: Bryan Johnson, age forty-eight, acting biological age, eighteen.
This is not me asking for an invite to the next livestream, though Bryan, I do think I could give you a list of ten more articulate and better equipped people if you need data. What I could offer is only my unique experience and observations, as laid out here.
This is me asking for something bigger.
Let us throw our weight behind the wisdom keepers. The Indigenous elders. The medicine women and men holding quantum states of consciousness while still paying phone bills and tending community fires in the default world.
Let us get them the platform. Mr. Beast drills wells in Flint, MI in an alternate universe; blessings on that. Let us build the psychic wells uber-rich friends out there, in this Omni-verse. Do the right thing.
Let us scan the elders minds, amplify the elders messages, transmit their coherence field to the ancestors and the Earth to millions of viewers. You, the resourced, the curious, the open, can help carry their signal, and make a real difference. This is real legacy stuff. An opportunity to not ride Bryans coat tales but to take inspiration and multiple his experiment for the benefit of all sentient beings.
They have the reconciliation gnosis the world desperately needs. Who’s game?
Proposition One: The Global Sync Trip
“If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.” - Terence McKenna
What if we gathered a cadre of psychonauts and everyone journeyed at the same moment.
Synchronized ingestion.
Shared intention.
A global mycelial handshake across the galactic information grid, what Lynne McTaggart calls “the Field.”
We run safety protocols.
We select the practitioners.
We set the objective.
We hit “Go.”
You want data. You will get data.
You want longevity insights. You will get those too.
You want the collective consciousness to actually move instead of doom-scroll its way toward extinction. This is how we start.
Because mushrooms are the original wearable tech.
The O.G. Neuralink.
The archaic wetware diagnostic system that plugs into the spiritual motherboard.
Brain–computer interface. Please. This is Earth–mind interface.
We have gotten so used to the novelty that we forgot how weird, ancient, and cosmically relational it really is. I do not want a Roland Emmerich finale for humanity when the geophysical event comes. I want a different ending, one we write together because we had the guts to listen, to sync up, and to act.
“We can will the perfect future into being by becoming microcosms of the perfect future.” - Terence McKenna
Meanwhile everyone is panicking about AI making art, while half of the greatest artists of the last 80 years quietly thanked psychedelics like psilocybin for their breakthroughs. Same with scientists. Same with mystics. Same with the folks suggesting Congress should not seat anyone in power until they have passed a supervised mushroom journey. Can we make that happen please. Hell, I’ll run for Governor, God knows I’d do a better job than the Smiler hand-tutter.
Honestly, if you cannot handle a trip, maybe you should not handle the nuclear football.
I am the same age as Bryan. I want the longevity protocols too. But I also want us to choose soul-continuity over hive-mind assimilation.
Let us fuse with the fungal intelligence that has been here for over a billion years, not with some beta version of a techno-collective consciousness whipped up in a Menlo Park conference room.
The mushroom kingdom might have helped terraform this planet or gift us language. Seems like a better alliance than whatever the adtech death-cult is cooking.
None of these ideas are original to me. My library burned down and I am rebuilding from memory and ash, so I can’t give proper source citation for most of these ideas. All I want to do, like the mushroom, is bring these ideas up to the surface so hopefully someone out there will eat them.
Because if this was the story of the mushroom on your phone, the next one has to be the story of the people who interpreted and interacted with the mushroom in the living soil. The indigenous elders. The psychonaut stewards. The ones who never needed a livestream - until NOW.
So here it is, plain:
Elders over influencers.
Reciprocity over optimization.
Communion over content.
Mycelium over mushroom.
Earth over algorithm.
A new story over recycled focus-grouped remake sloop.
We have hit a spore-drop moment in culture. A mushroom rose above the soil and boatload of human beings and bots tuned in.
Now the real questions:
Will we remember the mycelium beneath us.
Will we feed it.
Will we join it.
Or will we watch it fruit, scroll past, and call it progress.
“There is a wealth of information built into us … tucked away in the genetic material in every one of our cells … without some means of access, there is no way even to begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world and insights into its nature.” – Alexander Shulgin
I am adding my two cents because I have standing: thirty years of journeys, ceremonies with Indigenous elders, decades in community with Western psychonauts, the divergent narrative brain of a storyteller, and the lived experience of someone who has actually walked these realms, not just written about them.
Or as Killer Mike put it:
“I read the books, did the math, Don’t need a preacher preachin’ on my behalf…”
My aim here is to raise the conversation.
To reacquaint the collective field with this ancient relationship.
To remind the psychonauts out there to get weird, and report back. Pronto.
Because we need intel if we are going to hold the line against the technocratic takeover of mind and body.
We need ambassadors to speak to the Earth. To ask the oceans to cool. To ask the sun to chill. To plead, negotiate, and co-create the next chapter.
Until then:
Let us make great art.
Let us be kind to one another.
Let us honor every species in this cosmic bioregion.
Fellow Psycho-NOT-giving-up-on-humanity’s-potential…
…it is time to low-key lock in!
To all my cosmic relations: live long(er) and prosper. Yours in service to the great story inside us all,
Baza
Baza will return in:
PSYCHO — WHY NOT?
{This was totally like, a work of art, for you-know like, entertainment purposes, man.}
