It is September 3, 2025, when a microphone from Chinese state television picks up a bizarre conversation between Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. The three heads of state are making their way toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing to attend the massive military parade marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II.
“In the past, people rarely lived beyond 70, but today at 70 you are still a child,” says the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. The Russian president agrees: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be transplanted multiple times, and people can live longer and even achieve immortality.” At that point, Xi says that “according to forecasts, during this century human beings may be able to live to 150.”
Putin confirmed to the TASS news agency that he had discussed issues related to increasing life expectancy with his Chinese counterpart, reiterating that “modern medical and surgical methods allow humanity to hope that life can last longer than it does today.”
The Russian president himself, after all, has long been interested in longevity – and not just the political kind – and anti-aging remedies. In 2018, for instance, Putin explained the benefits of cryogenic chambers to then-Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, in which the body is exposed to temperatures as low as -160 degrees Celsius.
In 2024, Putin then launched a government initiative worth more than twenty billion euros called “New Technologies for Health Preservation.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian scientists and state agencies are reportedly experimenting with the three-dimensional bioprinting of living tissue and xenotransplantation, growing organs compatible with human beings inside genetically modified piglets.
All this clashes sharply with the fact that, after almost three decades of Putin’s rule, the average life expectancy of a Russian man is just 68 years, significantly lower than the European figure of 79. Economic, social and, of course, military factors weigh heavily on this grim statistic: according to estimates by Mediazona, between 240,000 and 352,000 people have died during the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin, however, is not the only rich and powerful person fascinated by technologies aimed at achieving immortality, or at least extending life as much as possible – with the exception, it is worth reiterating, of that of his soldiers.
The Russian autocrat is in fact joined by Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs, who comfortably surpass him when it comes to eccentricity and obsession with the subject. According to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, over the past two decades Silicon Valley tycoons have invested more than five billion dollars in the longevity industry and in the search for anti-aging solutions.
Among them is Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, who in the past has spoken of plasma transfusions from young people as a possible means of extending life. Over the years, Thiel has invested tens of millions of dollars in various startups and nonprofit foundations working on regenerative medicine, including Unity Biotechnology and the Methuselah Foundation. The PayPal co-founder is a member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which freezes its clients’ bodies until a technology capable of bringing them back to life exists.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has also invested a considerable amount of money – $180 million – in Retro Biosciences, a Bay Area biotech company that aims to slow down and even reverse the human aging process, adding ten years to average life expectancy. And then there is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who is one of the main backers of Altos Labs, another California company that has raised $3 billion and is experimenting with stem-cell-based therapies to extend lifespan.
As journalist and writer Mark O’Connell pointed out in a lengthy article in the New York Times, the products developed by these companies “occupy a middle ground between what seems plausible and what remains science fiction.”
It may well be, then, that some of these technologies will eventually become accessible to ordinary people too. But for now, O’Connell concludes, the tech oligarchs’ fixation on longevity is “first and foremost about themselves.”
In addition to funding this sector, several tycoons are devoted to so-called “biohacking”: they personally experiment with these supposed remedies, some of them highly questionable, in the belief that the human body can be treated like a computer program to be modified and optimized at will.
Entrepreneur Craig Cooper claims to eat five cans of sardines a day, because sardines – according to him – are “the number one superfood.” Evernote founder Phil Libin, meanwhile, goes days without eating, consuming only water, coffee and tea. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also practices an extreme form of intermittent fasting, which according to some doctors falls squarely within the realm of eating disorders. The aforementioned Sam Altman has said that he takes metformin – an antidiabetic drug – to “slow aging,” although there is no evidence that it is effective for this purpose.
None of them, however, comes even remotely close to the obsessive extremes of tech entrepreneur and influencer Bryan Johnson, who over the past few years has turned himself into a kind of living human experiment in longevity.
After selling his company to PayPal for $800 million, Johnson radically changed his life. First, he left his wife, who had been diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer; then he abandoned the Mormon faith; and finally, in 2021, he launched the so-called “Project Blueprint.”
It is a program designed to reverse the human aging process, conducted entirely on Johnson’s own body. The project is documented down to the smallest detail on social media – where the entrepreneur has amassed more than four million followers across various platforms – and was also the subject of a (heavily criticized) Netflix documentary titled Don’t Die, Johnson’s mantra par excellence.
As journalist Katie Drummond summarized in Wired, the entrepreneur follows an “all-consuming regimen” involving grueling daily workouts, constant testing of every organ in his body, hundreds of pills and supplements a day, a military-style sleep routine, various experimental therapies and a fairly extreme calorie deficit.
Johnson claims that his project strictly follows the “best available science”; in reality, however, many of the protocols he compulsively showcases on his social media profiles are anything but scientific.
The man, now 48, says he has become 5.1 years younger since beginning the project. That achievement, however, has been called into question by tests reviewed by the New York Times, which instead suggest that he has aged by ten years.
Johnson has said that he lost more than 27 kilograms through exercise and calorie restriction. The entrepreneur consumes only 1,977 calories a day – an amount calculated not on the basis of his actual needs, but on his year of birth. In a 2023 interview with VICE, he said that for him going to bed hungry every night is “a success,” adding that going out for pizza or getting drunk is “the worst possible experience.”
Johnson has also subjected himself to some remedies that are bizarre, to say the least. He received a transfusion of one liter of his son’s plasma, which produced no results; he has delivered electrical shocks to his penis to increase the duration of his erections, which he describes on his website as being “as long as the Titanic”; he has sat in extremely hot saunas with an ice pack resting on his testicles; he took a decidedly high – too high – dose of psychedelics on a livestream; and every day he regularly takes between 100 and 130 supplement pills, an amount no doctor would ever recommend.
Supplements, incidentally, are the beating heart of the business surrounding “Project Blueprint.” The store on the official website sells – at exorbitant prices – pills and various food products, including poor-quality olive oil. As an article in the New York Times revealed, some of these supplements caused vomiting, nausea and heartburn among customers, greatly concerning the company’s employees.
In this regard, the American newspaper also uncovered a disturbing aspect of Johnson’s business: the obsessive control of employees through the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements, or confidentiality agreements.
Essentially, anyone who works with Johnson cannot say anything publicly about Johnson, under penalty of having their salary cut or being fired. Employees were also required to sign another kind of agreement that prevented them from complaining or taking legal action over Johnson’s problematic behavior – including walking around the workplace naked (which is also his home), talking about sex and erections, and “flirting” with female employees.
Johnson downplayed the allegations, saying that this is a completely standard practice in the corporate world, adding that “nobody operates with full transparency” and reiterating that his workplace is perfectly healthy.
More recently – in parallel with his growing popularity on social media – the entrepreneur has taken a troubling messianic and pseudo-religious turn. In an interview with the New York Times, he explained that he considers himself “a performance artist trying to put a new philosophy into practice.” Speaking about himself in the third person, he said that “Bryan Johnson is the first prototype of Don’t Die Homo sapiens,” meaning one striving to achieve immortality.
As if that were not enough, Johnson announced that he had embraced Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State ideology, while also declaring his intention to create his own private city-state called, inevitably, Don’t Die.
In a podcast, the entrepreneur listed his five main goals: “The first is to build a society. The second is to create a country. The third is to found a religion. The fourth is not to die. And the fifth is to become God.” Johnson firmly believes that the decisive help will come from artificial intelligence, which, like many of his peers, he regards as a genuine synthetic deity.
Recently, Johnson’s project suffered a dramatic setback, and the culprit is none other than his own body. In early July, the entrepreneur announced that he had autoimmune gastritis, a chronic disease in which the immune system attacks the stomach. Displaying his usual optimism, Johnson wrote on his social media profiles that he would nevertheless try to cure it.
The diagnosis, however, delivered a very clear message: despite the millions spent, the experimental therapies, the punishing protocols, the protein shakes and the hundreds of pills he takes every day, Johnson is going to die.
Just like Vladimir Putin, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos and the tech oligarchs pouring money into longevity startups while chasing the dream of immortality.
None of them will achieve eternal life. None of them will become a “God.” Every single one of them, without exception, will meet the same fate as the ordinary mortals from whom they are trying so desperately to distance themselves.
Leonardo Bianchi