Arnold Schwarzenegger is getting candid about how his self-esteem has taken a toll as he gets older.
During an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” Wednesday, the former bodybuilder opened up about how he has struggled to come to terms with his changing body after being in such great shape in his youth.
“I kind of smile because every day I do look in a mirror and I say, ‘Yep, you suck,’” the seven-time Mr. Olympia winner told host Howard Stern.
“I look at this body … look at those pectoral muscles that used to be firm and perky and really powerful with a striation in there. Now they’re just hanging there. I mean, what the hell is going on here?”
Arnold Schwarzenegger, 76, said he looks at himself every morning in the mirror and says, “‘Yep, you suck.’” Getty Images for SiriusXM
While Schwarzenegger, 76, knows most people deal with the same existential crisis, he argued that they don’t know what it’s like to go from “Superman” to an average man.
“It’s one thing to see yourself get older and more and more out of shape but most of the people have never been in shape. So what does it mean getting out of shape?” he said.
“When you’ve been hailed for years as this supreme body, and you have the definition and you see the veins coming down your abs, and you see veins on top of your chest and then … you roll the clock 50 years and you’re standing there and you don’t see that anymore,” Schwarzenegger continued.
Schwarzenegger won the Mr. Olympia competition seven times in his prime. Getty Images
Although the “Terminator” actor admitted that he looks better than the “majority” of people his age, he still isn’t satisfied.
“I never, ever thought about that when I was 30 years old or 40 years old that this [was] going to happen,” he added. “It just sucks.”
Schwarzenegger says everything changed for him after he had open heart surgery at 50, leaving him feeling like “damaged goods” for the first time.
Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur and Founder of Blueprint, poses for a portrait at his home. Johnson follows a strict diet and lifestyle routine in an attempt to reduce his biological age. Philip Cheung for TIME
In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, similar homes, filled with mortals spending their finite days on the planet eating pizza with friends, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, and binging late-night television. Halfway down the street, there’s a cavernous black modern box. This is where Bryan Johnson is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”
Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls 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. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”
Johnson is not the only ultra-rich middle-aged man trying to vanquish the ravages of time. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel were both early investors in Unity Biotechnology, a company devoted to developing therapeutics to slow or reverse diseases associated with aging. Elite athletes employ therapies to keep their bodies young, from hyperbaric and cryotherapy chambers to “recovery sleepwear.” But Johnson’s quest is not just about staying rested or maintaining muscle tone. It’s about turning his whole body over to an anti-aging algorithm. He believes death is optional. He plans never to do it.
Outsourcing the management of his body means defeating what Johnson calls his “rascal mind”—the part of us that wants to eat ice cream after dinner, or have sex at 1 a.m., or drink beer with friends. The goal is to get his 46-year-old organs to look and act like 18-year-old organs. Johnson says the data compiled by his doctors suggests that Blueprint has so far given him the bones of a 30-year-old, and the heart of a 37-year-old. The experiment has “proven a competent system is better at managing me than a human can,” Johnson says, a breakthrough that he says is “reframing what it means to be human.” He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice.
But when I showed up at Johnson’s house one Monday in August, I wasn’t really there to figure out if his elaborate age-defying strategies actually worked. I assumed that given my family history of cancer and personal fondness for pepperoni pizza, I probably won’t live long enough to find out. Instead, I spent three days observing Johnson to learn what a life run by an algorithm would look like, and whether the “next evolution of being human” would have any real humanity at all. If living like Johnson meant you could live forever—a big if!—would it even be worth it?
Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson follows a strict diet and lifestyle routine in an attempt to reduce his biological age.
Kate Tolo opens the door to Johnson’s house and welcomes me inside. Tolo, a 27-year-old former fashion strategist who is originally from Australia, is Johnson’s chief marketing officer and most loyal disciple. Two months ago, she became the first person aside from Johnson to commit to Blueprint, making her the first test of how Blueprint works on a female body. Tolo is known as “Blueprint XX.”
