Snake Venom, Urine, and a Quest to Live Forever: Inside a Biohacking Conference Emboldened by MAHA

You put ghee in your coffee. You’ve been in a cryochamber. Maybe you even start your day with some near-infrared light therapy. But you’ve still got a long way to go to match Dave Asprey, Bryan Johnson, or any other of the longevity-obsessed throngs who call themselves biohackers. For Wired, Will Bahr heads to Asprey’s annual conference, a Mecca for self-experimenters—and a testament to how “do your own research” has a funny way of butting heads with “follow the science.”

In these circles, autonomy is gospel. But if there is a preacher to this sermon, it is Asprey. Grinning cutouts of him greet you at the tops of escalators; his products stock the ad space in conference pamphlets. Patrons roam the halls in his signature anti-blue-light glasses, the auburn lenses making their eyes look like flies, trapped timelessly in amber. Asprey’s personal goal is to live to 180 years old—“50 percent better than our current best,” he clarifies, referring to the oldest person ever recorded at 122. And he is working on it, hard. He claims to have spent $2.5 million of his multimillion dollar empire—generated largely by his Bulletproof coffee brand and diet plan—on reversing his age via a specialized diet, rigorous exercise, a torrent of supplements, countless stem cell treatments, baths in frigid ice water and shimmering red light, and injections of his own filtered urine as allergy therapy.