There is something slightly unsettling about meeting someone who doesn’t seem to negotiate with himself. Most of us do it constantly. Five more minutes. Tomorrow instead of today. Maybe when the timing is better. We learn to make peace with the voice in our head that tells us to give ourselves a bit of grace.
Arda Saatçi doesn’t seem particularly interested in that harmony.
For TITLE’s September 2026 Digital Cover, we imagined Arda as our Berlin Psycho: a modern-day interpretation of obsession, control, and relentless self-construction. Not Patrick Bateman. Not Wall Street. Not the violence or emptiness of American Psycho. This is Berlin. Here, the enemy isn’t sitting across the table.
It’s you. Arda knows that opponent intimately.
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When he arrived on set, Berlin Psycho stopped being a mere visual reference. He understood the character seamlessly and carried it from beginning to end. His athleticism brought a physical precision to the images that could never have been staged artificially: controlled movements, repetition, tension, and an awareness of his own body that comes from years of training every muscle.
Arda calls himself a Cyborg, and when you watch him work, you begin to understand why.
His body is a tool. His mind is another. Both are continuously trained, challenged, and recalibrated. Yet underneath that machine-like discipline sits something deeply human: the knowledge that the person he has to defeat, over and over again, is no one but himself.
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When we sit down with Arda, we delve right into the mindset behind his unwavering approach to performance and self-improvement.
TITLE: Why is losing against yourself your biggest disappointment? What expectations do you have of yourself, and why is it so important to exceed them?
ARDA: “Because I’m with my thoughts 24/7. I deal with myself more than anyone else. First and foremost, I have to live up to those thoughts and live up to myself before I can live up to other people.”
The Berlin Psycho is not a man obsessed with defeating everyone around him but someone who is locked into a lifelong competition with the person that he was yesterday. It’s you vs. you, and there is no finish line.
TITLE: Was there ever a moment when you felt like sport might not actually be your passion?
ARDA: “No. Not at any point.”
TITLE: So you never wanted to do anything else?
ARDA: “No. It was never up for debate.”
“I’m with my thoughts 24/7. I deal with myself more than anyone else.”
Arda Saatçi
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It’s rare for someone to possess such certainty these days. We belong to a generation that is constantly encouraged to reinvent itself. New careers. New cities. New identities. New aesthetics. Arda’s story offers almost the opposite proposition: What happens when, instead of constantly looking for another path, you go impossibly deep into one you’re already a part of? Is it obsession? Is it discipline?
From the outside, it would be easy to construct a familiar narrative around him: athlete, entrepreneur, public figure, community, and recognition. But we wanted to know what success really means to him and whether he reached his personal goals.
TITLE: Is the life you’re living today the life you manifested for yourself?
ARDA: “That’s a crazy question. I haven’t arrived yet.”
TITLE: What chapter are you in right now?
ARDA: “Chapter two.”
TITLE: Chapter two? How far into chapter two?
ARDA: Still relatively close to the beginning.
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Maybe that tells us more about who Arda is than any list of his achievements ever could. For him, success doesn’t seem to function as a destination. Every achievement simply moves the horizon further away. What is already accomplished becomes less interesting than what could still happen. The Cyborg is never satisfied.
That curiosity about what lies beyond the known is already embedded in the motto Arda lives by: No Risk, No Story.
TITLE: What does “No Risk, No Story” mean to you?
ARDA: “Risk, for me, also means stepping outside of your comfort zone. As soon as you leave your comfort zone, you enter a sphere where things can happen that you can’t influence anymore. That’s obviously a risk. But sometimes the most beautiful stories come from those risks. That’s why: No Risk, No Story.”
It reveals an interesting contradiction. The Cyborg believes in control but deliberately seeks unfamiliar territory. The Berlin Psycho is disciplined enough to prepare for anything and curious enough to take a risk to reach the unknown. Perhaps that is what makes Arda such an interesting figure for a generation growing up surrounded by shortcuts, overnight success stories, and carefully edited versions of achievement. And he does it with a philosophy almost aggressively simple.
“As soon as you leave your comfort zone, you enter a sphere where things can happen that you can’t influence anymore.”
Arda Saatçi
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TITLE: Outside of training, how do you deal with that voice telling you not to do something?
ARDA: “It’s basically the same as with anything else. Even outside of training, with everyday things, when I don’t feel like doing something, I still try to do it as well as I can. I try to get my tasks done, whether it’s in training or everyday life.”
There is no secret formula or productivity hack to jailbreak the necessary discipline. It all comes down to relentless determination and repetition. Over and over again.
But Berlin Psycho becomes most interesting when the machine cracks open. Because for someone whose identity is so deeply connected to physical ability, Arda talks about his future as something much larger than his body. But even the strongest experience struggles.
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TITLE: During your first major ultramarathon from Berlin to New York, we got to see a much more vulnerable side of you. What does it feel like to share your biggest fears in front of millions of people watching from home?
ARDA: “It feels honest. It feels truthful. It feels like I’m doing the right thing.”
Strength, in Arda’s world, apparently does not require pretending that fear doesn’t exist within him. The machine is allowed to feel. The same becomes visible when we talk about his family. For all the visibility surrounding his own life, Arda deliberately tries to keep the people closest to him outside of the public eye. Nonetheless, they are deeply connected to why he keeps pushing.
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TITLE: What does building success across generations mean to you?
ARDA: “That’s the most important thing to me. That’s actually what gives me the energy to keep going.”
Suddenly, legacy means something different. Not simply becoming bigger. Not simply becoming more famous. But building something that extends beyond himself.
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And so we end with a hypothetical.
TITLE: If your legs gave up tomorrow, what would come next?
ARDA: “Everything I can do with my arms.”
It sounds like a joke, but we know, with his determination, that he’s completely serious. So we push further.
TITLE: And where would your life and ambition take you if your limbs no longer worked?
ARDA: “I’d still somehow want to become a face of sport, one of the most influential athletes, just in a different way. To continue the legacy. And to become a good dad.”
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There it is. The humanity within the Cyborg. He isn’t invincible. He has doubts, fears, and experiences failure. Yet he keeps striving for more. His life represents an increasingly rare kind of obsession: the willingness to continuously confront yourself. To find your limit, reach it, and then become curious about what exists behind it. For a young generation watching success increasingly happen through screens, Arda offers another version. One built through physical experience, discipline, vulnerability, risk, and the willingness to keep going without knowing exactly where the story ends.
He calls himself a Cyborg. We call him the Berlin Psycho. But perhaps both names describe the same experiment: How far can a human being go when the person standing in their way is also the person staring back at them in the mirror?
Luckily for us, Arda says he hasn’t arrived yet. We’re much more curious about where he goes next.
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Talent: Arda Saatçi
Creative Direction & Styling: Neslihan Değerli
Photography: Pascal Behring
Director of Videography: Furkan Çetin
Line Producer: Zeynep Dilek
Content Manager: Nola Syla
Editor: Maya Morgan
Hair & Makeup: Jasmin Oliveira
Makeup: Ahmad Rasoul
Lighting Operator: Gregory Chobanyan
Production: avec nous Berlin
