“Homo sapiens should be fired!”

In his opinion, it is time that AI takes over the task of saving the earthQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKAHe swallows 111 pills a day, is a researcher and at the same time his own guinea pig. Tech tycoon Bryan Johnson wants to stop ageing and is calling on humanity to start a revolution. His slogan is: “Don’t die!”

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It was an operation that went down in medical history: on 12 June 1920, the French star surgeon Serge Voronoff cut the testicles of a chimpanzee into slices and implanted them into a man’s scrotum. The aim of the operation was to permanently rejuvenate the patient’s body. Voronoff charged 100,000 gold francs for his procedure, however he failed to produce a verifiable result. 

Now, the American multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, 46, is one step ahead in the fight for eternal youth. This morning, he has invited the two reporters to his black and grey concrete bungalow in Venice, Los Angeles. The interior feels as cold and sterile as an operating room: no family photos, no personal objects that would reveal anything about their owner. If you were the set designer of a Hollywood film, you’d have a cyborg living here, that hybrid of man and machine which has seeped into the collective imagination through blockbusters such as “Robocop”.

ICON: Mr. Johnson, you grew up with four siblings in a small Mormon community in Utah. Were you a happy child?

Bryan Johnson: There was a traumatic and a happy phase in my childhood. When I was three years old, my parents got divorced. My mother earned very little and had to support five children. When we needed new clothes, she would sit at the sewing machine out of necessity. Five years after the divorce, she married a freight forwarder who owned several trucks. From then on, we were part of the middle class and were accepted members of the community.

US millionaire Bryan Johnson swallows 111 tablets a day for rejuvenationQuelle: Markus KlinkoWhat were you like as a teenager?

In seventh grade, I understood how the student body was divided into groups: the stoners and school failures, the sports aces and the top of the class kids. I drew a sociogram and marked the students who were at the epicentre of power in their respective groups. My plan was not to have friends only in individual groups. I wanted everyone in the school to see me as their friend. It worked. After a few weeks, I was the most popular student, became captain of the football team and an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts, the highest rank you can achieve in that organization. Once a year, the girls at school voted for their favorite. I was number one in that competition as well.

After finishing school, you were a Mormon missionary in Ecuador for two years.

I lived among extremely poor people there. When I returned to the comparatively rich environment of the US aged 22, a fire burned inside me: I wanted to revolutionize the human species. Natural selection has been tinkering with living bodies for four billion years, and there is no reason to believe that Homo sapiens is the final stage. Look at my bookshelves. I read mostly biographies – from Plato, Lenin and Stalin to Harry Truman and Dante to Winston Churchill, Warren Buffett and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Each of these men, in the judgement of their contemporaries, did something completely unexpected – and went down in history as a result.

Until you were 34, you belonged to a Mormon denomination called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. Does this explain your saviour ambitions?

No, the decisive factor was something completely different. I became the way I am today sitting in front of you because of my severe depression.

Johnson sticks to a strict diet and lifestyle to reduce his biological ageQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKAHow long did it last?

Ten years. I drank too much alcohol, was 25 kilos overweight and suicidal. My brain told me every day in an endless loop: “Bryan, your life is worthless. Kill yourself sooner rather than later. But before you do, quickly have a big bag of brownies and a few drinks.” The worst were the Sundays. No work to distract me and then the endless church services. I broke out in a cold sweat every time. If I had been watching porn on the computer, I went to confession as if by remote control. I had been implanted with feelings of shame and guilt from an early age.

At the age of 24. I had founded Braintree, a company for payment systems on the Internet, which was growing rapidly. My marriage went downhill just as rapidly. After work, I would lie in bed paralysed or argue with my wife. I went to psychotherapists, but that didn’t help either. I led a life without any hope.

On the contrary. The Mormons consider themselves the only true church of God. If someone in our congregation became apostate, no one would talk to them again, for the rest of their lives. When I was 24, I married a Mormon woman with whom I had three children. In the years that followed, I inwardly stopped being a Mormon, but to speak out my disbelief would have meant my divorce and exclusion from social life. I didn’t have the courage to leave until I was 34. I divorced and sold my company to Paypal for $800 million at the same time. My depression disappeared.

No, I don’t care about money, and I don’t have any expensive needs. I own this house and an electric car by Audi. I do not aspire to own more. The fact that I am involved in around 50 biotechnology companies is merely a means to an end. I use the profits to finance visionary ideas and my voyage of discovery to eternal youth, the greatest biological revolution since the dawn of life.

Do you see yourself as a kind of superhuman who has taken the place of God and is rewriting his plan of creation?

That is an exaggeration, but it gets to the heart of the matter. We believe that death is inevitable for each of us because all people before us have died. Climate crisis, refugees, wars – with each of these problems you can resign yourself and say: “Oh well, what the hell, sooner or later we’ll all die anyway. After us, the flood.” Religions serve the same function. By holding out the prospect of eternal life in paradise, they turn us into passive spectators. We do not act but wait for a higher power to redeem us. The revolution to which I call every human being can be expressed in two words: don‘t die! It is more than a joke when I say that Jesus Christ is my main competitor. After all, it was he who talked us into death as our final destiny. I, on the other hand, say that death is a technical problem that can be solved.

“Narcissism is not part of my measurement protocol,” says Bryan JohnsonQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKATwo years ago, you founded “Project Blueprint”. A 30-person team of experts is to make sure that your 46-year-old organs are 18 again – and stay like that forever. To achieve this goal, you swallow 111 pills every day and live an ascetic life. You eat your last meal in the morning at eleven, at 8.30 pm you go to sleep. At night, a sensor on your penis measures the number and duration of your erections. Who came up with this rigid regime?

Until recently, our brain was the most advanced thing evolution had produced. Homo sapiens was an unparalleled master architect, but for a few years now we’ve reached the limits of our capabilities. We are failing to deal with all the problems that threaten to destroy us and our world. That’s why we need something radically different, neither conventional doctors nor alternative healers. It is high time to appoint a new architect.

Artificial intelligence. AI is more advanced than the human mind: faster, smarter, more rational, more far-sighted. So, who do I let control my health – my moody monkey brain or an objectively judging software that just doesn’t fall for my tricks to get a large pizza with lots of cheese? My 79 organs are closely monitored every day. AI turns the measurement results into a rejuvenation plan. It’s not my unreliable brain but an algorithm that orders me how to live. Personalising this algorithm for other people is the heart of “Project Blueprint”. My 75 trillion cells are merely the guinea pig. I realize that giving up control to AI would be the greatest possible slight to the ego of humans. Evolution is being replaced by intelligent technologies. 99.9 per cent of our current life forms will be gone and forgotten in 400 years.

We have almost ruined this planet and therefore Homo sapiens should be fired. It‘s time for AI to take over and save the planet.

In the 20th century, life expectancy doubled. What is your roadmap to immortality?

By 2030, the age of my organs should decrease by 25 percent. As things stand, I will achieve this goal. My rate of aging is lower than that of 88 per cent of all 18-year-olds. My heart is 37, my bones are 28, my skin is 28, my lungs are 18. My blood count is almost identical to that of my 18-year-old son. If you think I’m making these numbers up, take a look at my website blueprint.bryanjohnson.co. My biometric data from the last few years is there and available for anyone to check.

My left ear is 64 – from shooting guns as a teenager. My right ear is 49 – too loud rock music as a teenager.

Anti-aging laser and light therapies are part of his morning routineQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKAWhy do you wear a so-called Adam sensor on your penis at night?

Because everyone also has a sexual age, and the Adam Sensor can measure that in men. With the help of shockwave therapy, I have been able to increase the total length of my nightly erections to an average of two hours and twelve minutes. My goal is to get to the time of an 18-year-old: three hours and 30 minutes.

In his best-selling popular science book “Homo Deus”, Yuval Noah Harari, describes our future as a steady succession of medical upgrades: “Every ten years or so we will march into the clinic and receive a makeover treatment that will not only cure illnesses, but will also regenerate decaying tissues, and upgrade hands, eyes and brains. Before the next treatment is due, doctors will have invented a plethora of new medicines, upgrades and gadgets. In this way, we’ll escape death in ten-year-steps.” Do you share his view?

Yes, it could go like that. The ten-year steps are speculation, of course. I suspect that in about 60 years there will be the first people who are immortal.

You have invested more than four million dollars in your “Project Blueprint” since 2021. Will a dramatically extended life be a privilege of the rich?

No, money isn’t crucial. The cost of my food and supplements is only $1200 a month. However, you need the unswerving will to live the way the AI calculates for you.

Let’s assume that people live to be 150 years old on average. How many separations, how much grief, how many losses can our souls endure?

You are making a typical thinking error by extending our present linearly into the future. AI will provide leaps in development in the next few years that none of us can imagine. There will be new ethics and morals that will shape our souls. That is why your question is pointless.

The fact that eight billion people live on earth has brought our planet to the brink of collapse. Will immortality only be granted to people who do not want to reproduce?

I don’t have a crystal ball in which I see the future, but I am convinced that AI will also provide the solutions to overpopulation, famine and the climate crisis.

AI transforms measurement results of all its organs into a rejuvenation planQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKAFor philosophers, immortality is another word for hell. Is eternity not infinitely boring?

Why should the opinion of philosophers be relevant to us? People seem to think differently, otherwise the anti-ageing market wouldn’t have these huge increases every year. I am the first astronaut to fly into the future in a rocket in front of everyone. Ahead of me lies a universe of questions to which there are no answers yet. One possible future could be that each of us will live thousands of lives. That doesn’t seem boring to me.

Are there ethical boundaries for you in “Project Blueprint”?

Douglas MacArthur was one of the top commanders of the US Army in World War II and one of the most decorated soldiers our country has ever produced. His most famous phrase is: “You are remembered for the rules you break.” Ethics and morality are time-bound cultural phenomena. It is not nature that has given them to us, but we ourselves. A society that fails to adapt its ethics to a changed world will inevitably perish.

Around 500,000 people follow you on Instagram. How do you deal with comments mocking you as a crazed Frankenstein?

Basketball player LeBron James spends $1.5 million a year on his body, and people are like, “cool, man!” I represent something that people don’t know about yet.

That’s why people stick unattractive labels on me like wacky biohacker, but I can live with that without any problems.

With your plans you sabotage God’s plan of creation. Are you afraid of being caught in the crosshairs of religious fanatics because of that?

It’s not yet so bad that I’m afraid to go out the door alone, but sometimes I think about hiring a bodyguard for public appearances. In this country, unfortunately, there are too many people who are haunted by delusions and who own guns.

I can’t think of anything. Instead of being afraid, I analyse the reasons that lead to fear. When people tell me about their fear, I can’t relate to that. I don’t know the feeling, nor do I understand it.

Suppose one of your children’s life is in the balance after a car accident – that is fear.

No, that’s not fear for me, it’s interest in my child’s well-being, and of course I have that.

The tech entrepreneur is the father of three children. His 18-year-old son Talmage lives with him. He had his son‘s blood injected, but without rejuvenating resultsQuelle: MAGDALENA WOSINSKAOn a safari, an elephant suddenly attacks you – you feel no fear?

No, for me this situation would be a strategy game about not dying.

Romantic love doesn’t exist. There is infatuation, but what people call love is a made-up feeling, the result of romanticisation and idealisation. Look at average marriages. The partners claim to the outside world that they love each other and are happy. If you look behind the façade, you discover frustration, unhappiness and open hatred. I know from my previous relationships how much animosity can develop in a partnership.

Has your heart never leaped with happiness?

It did, but those were biochemical stimulations of nature that called me to procreate. So-called love is a programming of our genes that arose in the course of evolution and serves to propagate our species.

Many, in fact. And don’t forget that I communicate with my three children. My 18-year-old son lives with me under the same roof. My eldest is currently on a mission trip for the Mormon Church. My 13-year-old daughter lives with her mother.

Yes, and that is why there is no bitterness and hatred in my life. When I was married, I lived in a world full of resentment. Two people thought that they were not being allowed to be themselves and therefore showered each other with accusations.

What would a woman have to be like to fit you and the “Project Blueprint” corset?

On Instagram, I once half-jokingly listed a few qualifying criteria: no sunny vacations because it ages the skin. Dinner at 11am. What and how much is eaten is determined by AI. Bedtime at 8:30pm. Scheduled sex only and no pillow talk. Separate bedrooms and no Sunday outings. The woman would have to understand that she is not my number one priority. In return, she has access to 30 health experts and can become young again together with me. I am neither interested in a classic relationship nor am I made for it. I don’t need a work-life balance either, because I’m on a mission. I am making my 75 trillion body cells available for a public experiment, and that experiment is: don’t die!

When we were welcomed into your house, we met a young woman. What does she do here with you?

Kate Tolo is 27 and has spent the last few years developing strategies for fashion companies. She is in charge of marketing for “Blueprint” and is also the first woman to take part in the project. That’s why I call her “Blueprint XX”. We want to find out what strategies work for women to reduce their biological age.

Your pale, completely depilated body is modelled by sophisticated work-out plans in an exemplary fashion. What do you feel when you look in the mirror: the curiosity of a scientist or autoerotic desires?

Narcissism is not part of my measurement protocol. I told you that for years I was 25 kilograms overweight. In other words: I was fat. Seeing my disfigured body in the mirror was self-sabotage. I hated what I saw and was ashamed of my failure towards myself. Today, my reflection triggers joy in me, joy at finally being able to accept myself.

Because I can. For Mormons, beautifying one’s body was considered a blasphemous sin. The list of things I was prohibited from doing was almost endless. The fact that I now paint my nails light blue on some days is part of my religious liberation.

We don’t want to offend you, but your hair is strangely tinged red and also is a little thinning.

Stress and mental suffering caused me to go grey in my late 20s. I don’t dye my hair, but am testing a herbal tincture to revitalise my hair roots and eyebrows. My grey hair is already reduced by 80 percent. My hair has also become fuller due to red light therapy, which stimulates blood circulation, and monthly PRP autohemotherapy.

Yes, I wear a testosterone patch. With the onset of andropause around 40, men’s testosterone levels continue to drop. The consequences are weight gain, mood swings and loss of libido. I also take 17-alpha-estradiol. A study on mice has shown that this non-feminising oestrogen significantly promotes longevity.

Would it be a mad irony of fate if you, the apostle of eternal life, slipped on a banana peel tomorrow and broke your neck?

Some time ago on Instagram, I asked for the funniest ideas for my demise. Way out at the top: I choke on one of the 111 pills I swallow every day. Being run over by a bus was also at the top of the charts.

Would a mundane death be the greatest possible insult to your ego?

No. There are countless podcasts, videos and Instagram posts in which I advocate my beliefs. AI has stored this material and, in this way, ensures my continued life after death. In other words: I am already immortal.