Bryan Johnson

Submission 5,506

Featured Episode

About

Bryan Johnson is an American tech entrepreneur and multi-millionaire famous for his search for ways to extend his natural lifespan and reverse aging with unconventional techniques, many of which are controversial in the medical world. Johnson made his fortune through the online payments company Braintree, which he eventually sold to PayPal in 2013. He then turned to health technology, testing a variety of approaches to make his body younger, including blood transfusions from his teenage son — which has closely tied him to the slang term "blood boy." A series of videos and photos he posted of his body and his projects in 2023 brought Johnson to wider attention online after they went viral.

Career

Johnson was born in 1977 and worked as a Mormon missionary in Ecuador, before attending college and getting involved in the credit card processing business. He ran his online payment processing start-up, Braintree Venmo, from 2007 to 2013.^[5] After selling the company to PayPal and receiving a large payout, he moved into venture capital and health technology projects. These included Kernel, a headset system that tracks and monitors brain activity.^[1]

In 2021, Johnson started Blueprint, investing millions of dollars in a project to reverse his chronological age. Calling himself a "rejuvenation athlete," Johnson is considered by many to be using himself as a guinea pig to create a series of anti-aging approaches and technologies. With a team of scientists, he measures how many years he has supposedly "de-aged" himself.^[2]

Johnson's work with Blueprint has involved a number of unconventional medical practices. He has swallowed a pill-sized camera that took over 33,000 images of his digestive tract (seen below), fasts for up to 18 hours a day, transfers blood from his teenage son into his own veins, and keeps a meticulous record of all his health data on a public website. He claims that he is "the world's most measured human."

Online History

In the late 2010s, Johnson started posting a series of manifestos and essays on platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium. For example, on May 15th, 2018, he published a "Plan for Humanity" on the microblogging site Medium, proposing that humans should improve their bodies through data-driven approaches in order to keep up with artificial intelligence and confront challenges such as climate change.

Johnson's philosophy focuses on trying to transcend the limits of the human body and the biases of the human mind. He also seems to believe that any and all things can be measured and optimized. To this end, he is sharing his own physical transformation as a "methodical public science experiment."^[3]

On his YouTube channel, which started in February 2016 and as of July 2023 has over 64 million views and 392,000 subscribers, Johnson posts videos about his lifestyle choices. In a January 30th, 2023, video (seen below) that was since pinned to his profile, Johnson explained his plan to reverse his own aging. The video received over 1.1 million views in six months.^[6]

Johnson also posts videos about general health topics, such as improving posture. His video on this topic received almost 750,000 views in one month after being posted on June 7th, 2023 (seen below).^[8]

Blood Transfers

On May 22nd, 2023, Johnson posted a video about injecting his teenage son's blood plasma into his veins and then injecting his own blood plasma into his father's veins. This "multi-generational plasma exchange" video received almost half a million views. It touched not just on the story of the blood transfer, but on the relation of Johnson's family to the Mormon religion and his response to mean tweets online.^[7]

The blood transfer video went viral across TikTok and other platforms, generating considerable discussion and controversy in the following months.

Penis Shock Therapy

On August 3rd, 2023, Johnson shared to X that he was beginning a "penis rejuvenation" therapy in order to reverse his penile age to 18 (seen below).^[9] The post received almost 1,700 likes over the course of two weeks. Johnson, in the replies, appeared to joke around the idea of rejuvenating his member.

On August 12th, Johnson shared his "baseline measurements," including the amount of time he had an erection during the night as well as the usual firmness of those erections (seen below left).^[10] He claims to be using shockwave therapy to electrocute his penis and reverse the aging of the organ. On August 12th, he tweeted an infographic (seen below right) to help people perform the treatment at home.^[11]

A few weeks prior, Johnson was profiled by Fortune magazine and shared that he was having trouble with his dating life due to this eccentric lifestyle choices. Johnson cited his obsession with getting to sleep at the right time, always sleeping alone, and eating all his meals before 11:00 AM as major obstacles for his love life.^[12]

Blood Boy

Blood Boy is a slang term given to a younger person who regularly gives blood and plasma transfusions to older people, typically very wealthy individuals. The term, taken from a 2017 episode of the HBO series Silicon Valley in which they parodied real-world events surrounding billionaire investor and tech mogul Peter Thiel, began to be used online after startups began performing the procedure of young blood transfusions despite it often being criticized as pseudoscience and studies predominantly being done on mice.