Why Bryan Johnson, Dave Asprey, and the Other Longevity Bros Are Obsessed With Penises

If you have dipped a toe into the very strange waters of longevity culture, you may have noticed a theme: There’s an awful lot of dick.

Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson—he of the “don’t die” motto—is particularly obsessed with the ways his penis might help him live forever. The data Johnson collects on his johnson includes ejaculate volume (just over a half teaspoon, apparently double the norm), sperm count and motility, and nighttime erection quality, which he then compares with his teenage son. His regimen to keep his penis in tip-top shape includes shockwave therapy and Botox injections.

He’s not alone. Dave Asprey, the self-proclaimed father of the biohacking movement and the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, plans to live to 180. He treats his penis to injections of stem cells and acoustic wave therapy. For the latter, he helpfully suggests a DIY version: “Grab the cock and slap it against your leg on the left 67 times,” he said on his podcast, The Human Upgrade. “And then on the right….And you lightly slap the balls…The shock waves stimulate the cells. All of those are good for testosterone and good for enhancing what’s called male energy.” (Urologist Dr. Leon Telis, director of men’s health at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, said he “would not recommend” this.)

If that sounds like too much work, Asprey also promotes at-home shockwave wands, along with a cock ring that records data: “firmness, duration, and recovery time,” according to his website. Like an Oura, but for your schlong.

The current political moment is perfect for penis-hacking. If there’s anything that excites longevity enthusiasts and biohackers more than untested stem cell treatments, it’s the MAHA promise to demolish regulation and bring red-blooded American masculinity back, creating a world where everyone is free to swim in sewage runoff wearing jeans before injecting whatever they want straight into their dicks. There’s a zeitgeisty Venn diagram here—MAHA, the manosphere, messianic tech-bro culture run amok—that makes it feel like the perfect 2025 storm.

But Jonathan A. Allan, a professor at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, who has written a cultural analysis of foreskin and is at work on a book about vastectomies, says that the penis fixation isn’t unique to this particular group of enthusiasts. Instead, it’s an abiding archetype in the quest for immortality. “It’s extreme,” he says of the current culture. “But it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing this for at least a century now.”

At the turn of the 20th century, a tall, dark, and handsome Russian-born surgeon named Dr. Serge Voronoff was working in Egypt, where he noticed that eunuchs—men who had been castrated as boys—seemed to age more quickly than their intact peers. In his book, How to Restore Youth and Live Longer, he wrote that eunuchs’ “physical decline appears to have affected every organ.”

Voronoff extrapolated that testicles and sex glands generally were the secret to remaining young. Other physicians had come to the same conclusion, but a problem remained: How to revitalize aging testicles. Freshly dead young donors were scarce, and one couldn’t exactly ask living young men to donate theirs. Voronoff came up with a novel solution: Since chimpanzees are closely related to humans, why not implant young chimp balls into humans? That’s how thousands of men came to have lumps of chimpanzee testicles sewn into their own scrotums as a life-extending therapy. The operation made Voronoff into a celebrity, with a long waiting list.

In another book, The Study of Old Age and My Method of Rejuvenation, Voronoff included step-by-step photos showing exactly how the operation worked. First, he anesthetized the chimp and used a local anesthetic on the man, as they lay side-by-side on adjacent operating tables. He then shaved and washed the chimp’s genitals (“This must be done with the utmost care because of the dirty habits of the animal”) and opened both the human and ape scrotums before slicing each chimp testicle into four equal lumps, then sewing them into the man.

In 1922, Voronoff lamented the increasing cost of a chimp in The New York Times ($500!)—a problem he eventually solved by purchasing a castle in Italy, where he farmed monkeys and performed the operation on site. Amid the mania, Voronoff tried to manage expectations: “I do not pretend to transform the aged into youths, but I can push back a man’s age twenty or thirty years, making his faculties more vigorous.” But once you’re transplanting chimp balls into human men, nuance tends to go out the window. In 1929, a British illustrated newspaper covered Voronoff’s operation with the headline, “Gland of Hope and Glory.”

Slowly, it became obvious that the chimpanzee testicles were not, actually, the Holy Grail—obvious in that the men who had the simian augmentation still died, right on time.

The idea didn’t go away, though. Like all good archetypes, it’s a deep human longing: the hope that the penis is the most powerful force in the world. “The intersection of tech culture with longevity culture hinges on power, associated with masculinity,” says Mar Hicks, an historian of technology and a professor at the University of Virginia. “To essentially be the lever that moves the world.”

Around the same time as the chimpanzee testicle craze, Dr. Eugen Steinach, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize at least nine times, started marketing the vasectomy as a new and improved way of extending life. Thankfully, vasectomies are relatively straightforward—certainly easier to perform and undergo than a monkey-ball transplant. This, too, inspired a furor. “Steinach was, at this time, a world-renowned doctor, like Dr. Spock or Dr. Oz,” says Allan.

Steinach was cagey about the particulars of his procedure—it was simply referred to as “the Steinach operation”—but he was not shy about claiming that it could reverse aging. Sigmund Freud had the snip in the hopes that it would prevent his oral cancer from returning. (It didn’t.) The poet William Butler Yeats also had the operation, and felt it gave him a “second puberty” that revitalized his sex life, health, and writing. The only thing a vasectomy can do is prevent pregnancy, but the placebo effect is real.

In 1936, a credulous New York Times announced: “Aging is Reversible, Dr. Steinach Asserts. Vienna Biologist Declares That His Experiments Afford Hope of ‘Reactivating’ Body.” It was a headline that did not age well.

Chimps bred for their testicles by an eccentric surgeon in an Italian castle may seem like the stuff of Wes Anderson, if he made horror movies. But none of this is actually much weirder than the penile ideas knocking around today. Maybe the biggest difference is in reach, and therefore, risk: The unholy confluence of MAHA, longevity culture, and tech-bro pseudoscience can be broadcast into each of our palms, fracturing confidence in reality and expertise.

Peter Ward, a journalist and author of The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, says that longevity circles have always been heavily male and filled with easy marks. “Longevity has always had scammers, since the dawn of time,” he said. “It’s the most fertile ground for scams.”

And ultimately, those scams all end the same way. “The thing about Bryan Johnson,” adds Ward, “is that one day, he is absolutely, definitely going to die.”