It is Wednesday in Los Angeles. The air is balmy, the Dodgers have a home game, and tech mogul Bryan Johnson is preparing for his fifth penis injection in 10 days. In other words: business as usual.
Johnson, 45, has the chiseled, taut body of a teenager, which he has earned through a punishing fitness and diet regimen and constant medical intervention. His objective, he says, is clinical, not aesthetic: to optimize the human body for performance and longevity.
“We take an organ by organ approach in doing this…whether it's the heart or the lungs or the liver, and of course, the male reproductive system.”
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Johnson—who got rich selling his payments company (which owned Venmo) to eBay for $800 million—says that generally, when people want to take care of their health, they “walk the aisles of the grocery store and try to choose things based upon what we know to be healthy.”
Instead, he says, “we decided to turn that on its head. And we posed the question: ‘If the body could speak, and it could actually do the grocery shopping and determine what it wanted to eat, what would it say?’”
As Bloomberg characterized Johnson’s mission in a January profile, “He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, tendons, teeth, skin, hair, bladder, penis and rectum of an 18-year-old.”
Johnson is but the latest ultra-rich tech bro enamored with longevity; previous devotees include Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. He has been documenting his travails on social media—he has 371,000 Instagram followers—earning him legions of fans and a healthy volume of ridicule over his shirtless pictures and brutal lifestyle.
Johnson’s methods are not yet proven, but he claims that he has become “the most measured person in human history through biofluids, MRI, ultrasound, devices, fitness tests. And it's allowed us to have a granular look [at] the biological processes and organs in my body.” The penis injections are simply the latest element of this grand experiment.
The treatment consists of three weekly sessions of “focused shockwave therapy.” According to unspecified “randomized controlled trials,” Johnson tweeted on Wednesday, the therapy can improve erectile dysfunction. He wants to see whether it can enhance “total time nighttime erections, subjective sexual performance, sexual satisfaction, and medical imaging-based penile markers.”
The painfulness of the treatment, Johnson casually explains, clocks in at a seven out of 10, though “towards the tip of the shaft it’s probably 9.5 out of 10.”
Less than two weeks in, he has noticed greater urination strength and an increase in nighttime erections. But he does not yet know “if that is a temporary effect, or if that is going to [be] enduring.”
Johnson is aware this all sounds nuts, and clearly, at this juncture, it would be unwise to widely replicate his regimen. Though to the extent people are laughing, he says he’s in on the joke.
Last week, Fortune ran a story centered on his beleaguered dating life. “There’s quite a bit of acrimony and vitriol in the world, and this is something I think that we can all have fun with,” he shrugs.
But there is also reason to take him seriously, he argues. “When my stepfather and my father are in cognitive decline, that’s not fun,” he says. Through the research, “I hope we can get to the things that we all care about.”
