Bryan Johnson, the longevity entrepreneur known for his controversial anti-aging protocols, believes artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape human identity and moral philosophy. In a recent conversation, Johnson explained why he thinks society needs an entirely new value system to survive the AI revolution.
“The entirety of my endeavor is about AI and how we as a human race survive this moment,” Johnson stated. “That is the only reason I’m doing this.”
Johnson traces his concerns back to 2016, when he first recognized AI’s transformative potential. “I gave this talk and I was like, look, if we look at this graph, it’s very clear it’s up and to the right and it’s big,” he recalled. “I didn’t care to get into the prediction game of like when it’s going to arrive and what it’s going to be. Just that this is a moment.”
Rather than fixating on specific timelines or capabilities, Johnson focused on what felt like an intuitive truth: “It feels big and it feels consequential and it feels like we probably want to be normal to get this thing right.”
Johnson’s most striking prediction concerns what he calls “the coming psychosis,” a potential civilizational breakdown as AI advances faster than humans can adapt. “The coming psychosis, a real possibility in the coming years, is that society becomes dangerously psychotic,” he warned. “We are already psychotic, ad*icted, fragmented, and self-destructive. But I mean clinically psychotic and on a civilizational scale.”
He pointed to warning signs already visible: “Record anti-depressant use, rising s**cide rates, rampant ad**ction, and global increases in loneliness and anxiety disorders. These are all biomarkers of a species whose cognitive environment has outpaced its biology.”
The problem, Johnson explained, stems from evolutionary mismatch. “Human cognition evolved under conditions of slow change. Our nervous systems and social architectures were shaped for a world that changed near imperceptibly over millennia. When things change faster than our native capacity, we lose coherence.”
Johnson illustrated how AI might destabilize individual lives: “Everyone has imaginations of what you want to be, become, what you want to achieve. As society progresses when AI starts doing various things, it’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that change happens that creates uncertainty for humans. What am I going to do? Who am I? What’s my identity? How do I feel secure?”
He described his own family struggling with these questions. “My 20-year-old son, he can go to school, he can get a degree, he can get a job, he can make money, he can find his own apartment, he can get married, if he wants to have kids, like the natural life progression. If he can’t quite see that structure anymore, who is he?”
The challenge extends across all age groups. “My dad who’s now his early 70s, he’s in the legal profession. The tools are getting so good, he just can’t hang… He’s like, what do I do? I’m now out of the game and I don’t feel any worth. I don’t have any identity. He’s struggling.”
Johnson’s solution is radical: rebuild society’s entire value system.
This isn’t just about personal longevity but about creating what he describes as “the world’s next major moral framework, an ideology that bridges human and machine, biology and intelligence, the ancient and the emergent.”
“We need a new moral philosophy that enables us to survive this moment,” Johnson insisted. “The philosophy we have now that drives everything is one built on death. We are inherently a d*e species. We seek death for the glory of immortality through our various games. The new moral philosophy I’m trying to create is Don’t D*e. When you give birth to super intelligence, existence itself is the highest virtue.”
Johnson sees health optimization as merely a language for communicating this deeper philosophy. “Above all, health is a language to communicate a new moral philosophy on what do we do as a species in this moment.”
Despite the ominous warnings, Johnson maintains hope that humans can deal with this new-age AI transition.
“People focus a lot on AI, is AI a threat, should we pause it, all these different questions,” he observed. “There’s an equal and opposite concern of what happens to human society when all this change is happening so quickly and we can’t respond fast enough.”
His framework attempts to provide stability amid chaos. “What Don’t D*e could be is this sturdiness beneath us to say it’s okay. Our identities are not tied up in our profession. They’re not tied up on our status in the community. It’s actually tied up by this virtue of existence that we’re going to fight this new game as a species.”
Johnson emphasized that the same human behaviors that drive current competition would simply redirect toward new goals. “When you say existence is the highest virtue, the same human behaviors that are stamped out throughout time, same archetypes, same players, same stuff every single time, just get the game right. This moment is so simple. Just get the objective function correct.”
Johnson currently plans to build community structures around Don’t D*e through regular gatherings, shared practices, and potentially a sovereign fund for collective investment. “We’re sorting on community connection, emotional, social in 2026.”
