Tech millionaire pursues quest for immortality, plans to reduce his ‘biological age’
By Alexander Hall | Fox News
Bryan Johnson, a 46-year-old tech entrepreneur, is trying to reverse the aging process by spending millions of dollars on a team of experts monitoring and conducting experiments on his body in order to achieve the body of an 18-year-old, according to a new interview with Time magazine.
Time senior correspondent Charlotte Alter described visiting and interviewing the entrepreneur in his California home.
"The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs," she reported. According to Johnson, he now has the bones of a 30-year-old, and the heart of a 37-year-old.
The journalist went on to describe Johnson’s restrictive health regimen to reduce his "biological age."
"That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections," she wrote.
Alter then described the spartan conditions of his bedroom: "The only two objects in the room besides his bed are a laser face-shield he uses for collagen growth and wrinkle reduction, and the device he wears on his penis while he sleeps to measure his nighttime erections."
"I have, on average, two hours and 12 minutes each night of erection of a certain quality," Johnson told the reporter. "To be age 18, it would be three hours and 30 minutes."
The journalist described numerous details of Johnson’s routine before 6 a.m., such as measuring his "weight, body-mass index, hydration level, body fat, and something called ‘pulse wave velocity,’" using a "light-therapy lamp (which mimics sun exposure) for two to three minutes to reset his circadian rhythm" and taking his "inner-ear temperature to monitor changes in his body."
While scientists and medical experts Alter quoted voiced skepticism about his project and methods, Johnson suggested he is more interested in the future’s opinions rather than his modern contemporaries.
"I have a relationship with the 25th century more than I have a relationship with the 21st century," he told Alter. "I don't really care what people in our time and place think of me. I really care about what the 25th century thinks."
The reporter recounted that such procedures have made his dating life difficult, noting he had listed "what he calls the ‘10 reasons why [women] will literally hate me.’ The reasons include: eating dinner at 11:30 a.m., no sunny vacations, bed at 8:30pm, no small talk, always sleeping alone, and, of course, ‘they’re not my number one priority.’"
Alter questioned whether one can truly retain their humanity when their lives are so regimented around an extreme health routine.
Johnson replied, "Whether we're talking about falling in love, or having sex, or going to the baseball game, you're talking about biochemical states in the body." He added, "You can remove everything and just say, ‘I'm experiencing this kind of electrical activity in my body and these kinds of hormones.’ We have a whole bunch of ideas about what it means to exist, we have all these ideas about what is happiness, and other things. We're walking into a future where we no longer have control," appearing to refer to AI, before declaring, "we are willing to divorce ourselves from all human custom. Everything: all philosophy, all ethics, all morals, all happiness."
When asked by the journalist whether eternal life would be tainted by losing all of one’s loved ones who are not in the same program, Johnson compared the feeling to "senior night" at high school, where, "We say goodbye, we have been together all these years, and we're probably not going to see each other again."
Alter responded that her "21st century Homo sapien brain was not convinced," writing that Johnson "seemed to suggest that for humans to survive in an AI-aligned future, they may need to sacrifice part of what makes them human in the first place."
Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
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