The Billionaire Who Wants to Live Forever Has Long Covid
The Billionaire Who Wants To Live Forever Has Long Covid
The billionaire who wants to live forever just admitted he has long covid. Specifically, covid wrecked his lungs.If you haven’t come across him, Bryan Johnson is a 46-year-old tech bro who cashed out a few years ago and now spends all his time trying not to die.He has been interviewed by most mainstream news outlets where he has documented his extreme and bizarre quest for immortality. From a story in The Guardian:“He rises at 4.30am, eats all his meals before 11am, and goes to bed – alone – at 8.30pm, without exception. He ingests more than 100 supplement pills daily and bathes his body in LED light. Two of the three meals he eats every day are exactly the same: boiled broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and garlic, nuts and seeds. He takes 54 pills in the morning, and the rest in between skin treatments and red-light therapy. He doesn’t drink alcohol, and doesn’t go out in the evening. He experimented with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18-year-old son Talmage.”Yet apparently none of the journalists at The Guardian, Time Magazine, the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post or many others who have interviewed him ever thought to ask if he had ever been infected with the pandemic virus. In a pandemic. No one thought to ask the anti-aging guy if he had been infected with a virus known to accelerate the aging process.And not once, in all these interviews, did he ever bring it up.The cultural pact of covid silence held firm.Today, for whatever reason, in response to a tweet I wrote about research showing covid ages a person biologically, he admitted a mild infection in November 2022 (months before those interviews) stripped him of 15% of his lung capacity.A 15% reduction in lung capacity is no joke.This is a guy that tweets about every other health gain he says he is making. Most recently he has boasted he reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42.Last summer he said he had reduced his epigenetic age by 5 years and that he has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old (which doesn’t appear to square with a 15% capacity reduction).He tweets that humans are on the cusp of an immortality revolution. That we can hack our bodies to forever life.That the future is going to be extraordinary.Just don’t mention the viruses.So why did he admit this now and not earlier? Who knows. I asked him, but haven’t had a response.We can guess.Vibes.Johnson is all about good vibes. Great vibes. Immortal vibes. And he is building a community of sorts around this vibe. He hosts health workshops, away days, training sessions and the like for the hopeful immortals.My guess is, if you’re building a career around hacking every organ and bodily function to make it younger, admitting a virus has crushed your lungs in spite of all the supplements, sacrifices and hacks really ruins the vibes. It kind of suggests a virus-avoidance strategy is actually the best investment you can make for your health. And no one wants to do that.Maybe Johnson is due some credit.Very few famous people are admitting they have long covid. Especially not those who have become famous from attempting to be healthier than any other individual alive. So there’s that. Will the mass media that flocked to do the PR for his dubious anti-aging brand report that ‘mild’ covid has shredded his lungs? It’s doubtful.But the moral of the story is pretty clear. Even a billionaire can’t spend their way to health, let alone immortality, in a pandemic.The frenzied individualism of people like Johnson is a big reason we are where we are.He reminds us, as if we needed more reminding, that health is a property of the collective, not of the individual.