Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey discuss why calling longevity work "biohacking" failed, so Johnson reframed it as athletic performance instead. Asprey notes that claiming to reverse aging triggers strong public backlash, even from platforms like Joe Rogan. Johnson explains that behavior deviating more than two standard deviations from norms triggers predictable social and biochemical reactions.
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Now, let's talk about the biohacker thing. Professional rejuvenation. Athlete versus biohacker. What's the difference?
When I first started doing this, I saw that people were struggling to put me into a category that was intuitive to them. And so they would reach out in their mind and find a frame that they had. It was like, is this a biohacker? Is this a health enthusiast? Is this a blank and blank? And I didn't think that any of those things necessarily captured what we were trying to do. This was an endeavor trying to map the next phase of human evolution. And like all good structures in human organization, competition breeds engagement. And, you know, when. When you. Like, I did this for two years, nobody paid attention. And then it went viral, and then people freaked out, not understanding why I was doing this, what I was doing. But the. The disconnect was, if you observe an athlete like LeBron James and you see him taking care of his body and sleeping well and doing these things, no one's going crazy over LeBron James protocol. They respect him for his play on the court. And so I thought the thing to do would be to reframe this endeavor as an athlete, because people respect performance on the field, and what you do to achieve that is respected, whereas I was being vilified because they didn't have an endpoint to connect it to.
Welcome to the club, man. Saying that you're going to reverse aging or you're going to live longer than you're supposed to, it really triggers a lot of Muggles. And I eventually got to the point where I think it's kind of a game, like, oh, does it trigger you that I am planning to live longer than you are? That's okay. You'll be dead before I will. You know, like, there's just no rational argument for them. And I just realized they're not the people I'm trying to reach, the people who are triggered. But I have to ask you this, and this is a real thing. It took me a long time. Like, you know, Joe Rogan came after me for a while in a commercially related thing. I took a lot of hits in making biochemy. I mean, way more than most people will ever really comprehend. And eventually I got to the point of amusement, but it was only after a lot of pain. And that kind of pain is not good for your longevity. It's actually a negative. Right? You're getting some criticism, and you're also getting a lot of, like, what the heck is this guy doing? And it's usually vocal critics a small percent. How do you keep all the critics from making you old?
It's. The response is algorithmic. It's math. It's. It's mathematically predictable. You know? Okay, and so if you. In any given time over the past couple thousand years, if you take norms of human behavior and you plot a behavior that is outside two standard deviations from norm, you get a biochemical reaction and people responding to it. It's the same process that's been happening for thousands of years.
You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.
