Immortality-seeking tech mogul says new 'Gen Zero' of humanity will transcend 'all human norms'
Bryan Johnson said he's criticized for promoting an idea 'fundamentally offensive at every single layer of what it means to be human today'
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Tech mogul Bryan Johnson claimed on Monday that he has figured out the basics of his program for immortality, and now is working to establish an entirely new "blank slate" for humanity's future.
Johnson, an entrepreneur in his 40s, has worked to reverse the aging process by spending millions of dollars on a team of experts monitoring and conducting experiments on his body. A Time magazine article last year described aspects of his regimen as "downing 111 pills every day," "collecting his own stool samples" and "sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections."
But now, in 2024, Johnson has "moved on from the basics" of the Blueprint Protocol program he devised, and really wants to "go after culture" because he believes humanity is moving towards a new age.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"I think it’s really possible that this could happen faster than any of us imagined, and so I want to start laying the groundwork to say, ‘We can do this,’" Johnson said on "The Rich Roll Podcast."
Bryan Johnson spoke on a recent episode of the Rich Roll podcast. (Screenshot/Rich Roll Podcast)
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"In the same way we imagine unadulterated ambition for our technology, can we start having that same aspiration for ourselves? Can we start feeling bullish about the future of being human?" he asked. He contrasted with a potential future where humanity is "succumbing to AI, where it’s going to be on universal basic income, but we’re all useless."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}After describing how numerous scientific breakthroughs of the past reshaped humanity’s view of reality, he envisioned "Gen Zero," a more ideal era where humanity itself has radically changed.
"So, I call this ‘Gen Zero,’ and this is to basically say, ‘Hey everybody, we’re right now in a moment, at the last moment where things kind of have been like they have been, but they are about to change radically, and in this new future we can't predict what’s going to happen,'" he said.
"We no longer have the ability, and so we’re living in the Zero’th world, and so Gen Zero is a group of multi-ethnic, multi-national people who rise up, and they say, ‘We are willing to courageously step into the future, and we’re willing to divorce or open to divorce from ourselves all human norms, all human customs, all human thought, and we’re willing to say, ‘We’re wide open about everything,’ absolute blank slate."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Bryan Johnson paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to infuse his teenage son's plasma into his own blood stream every month. (Bryan Johnson )
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He went on to say, "Now that is impossibly hard to think about, because we have the things we care about, we have our preferences, we have our beliefs, we have our wants, and to basically say, ‘We’re open to this being a blank slate of existence’ is the most challenging thing one could ever do."
He argued this mindset is a major reason he faces so much public critique.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"I think this is why, on some degrees, I get so much flak. Like, I think people kind of see this, where I’m proposing something that is so fundamentally offensive at every single layer of what it means to be human today," he said. "Take every single thing we consider to be sacred, and I’m challenging that head-on, and I’m saying, ‘The reality may be the exact opposite.'"