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.
Your citation for aging caused by COVID is correct.
It is one of at least three mechanisms - epigenetic methylation. And it costs on average about 7 years of biological age per infection. So yes, avoiding this damnable virus is the single greatest life extension thing we all can do.
There is more.
The first observed impacts on aging are the cognitive decline from long COVID and the related organ damage. These are caused by the toxicity of the spike protein. Surgeons have noted repeated that patients who have had COVID look like they have organs that are far older than their chronological ages. Scientific studies suggest that this is the equivalent of about 10 years of biological aging per infection. And they are additive.
So again, the best thing to do to maximize life span is to never get infected. The second best thing to do is to never get infected AGAIN.
But it so much worse. The third and largest impact on accelerated againg by infection woth SARS-CoV-2 comes from truncation of the telomeres which cap our chromosomes. The length of our telomeres is inversely correlated to biological age. Our telomeres are longest as fetuses. With every cell division they shorten. It is a sort of countdown clock to death.
The length of our telomeres affects the function of our genes. It is one of the programmed mechanisms that controls age related changes. And when the tears become too short, during cell division chromosomes tend to cross-link and the end. When this happens our bodies identify the cells as defective and orders them to die. This is the wasting at end of life.
This study is the sentinel study that correlated the length of tears Covid infection.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34200325/
what it suggests or shows, albeit with a small data set, is that there is a direct linear correlation between biological age and infection with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID), and changes in biological age.
However, this correlation does not intercept to zero. it just strongly that the worst impact is to the youngest members of the population. If this correlation is correct which it appears to be it implies that an infant infected and recovered from COVID becomes biologically 36 years old. This aging impact becomes less with increasing biological age.
There is no reason to believe or suspect of this correlation is to chronological age. Rather each infection and recovery increases the biological age, and that new biological age then becomes the basis for correlation with the next infection to the resulting biological age.
What this all means is that after three infections, no matter what age you start at, you are old, very very old. This has huge implications for individuals and more so for the population and society.
as we have had the pandemic ongoing for four years and most people have been infected at least 2 to 5 times, the impact of this aging is already locked into place. We now only await our bodies catching up to the aging impact which has already occurred. And then, to the impact on society at large. As you can imagine those will most probably be enormous.
And it appears that this is irreversible or largely irreversible. The harm has already been done.
However because our leaders and our experts so-called have decided to embark on a campaign of silence in order to get people back to work and shopping to "save the economy" we are continuing to accumulate even more damage which will further destroy society.
There is no solution to this problem, other than never being infected and never being infected again.
The next few years and decade will tell the tale. Do the genetic and epigenetic changes, and the biological damage to organs and brain truly correlate with age? We will soon know the answer to those questions.
I for one have chosen to be one of the survivors. How about you?
So this person reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42?
What impresses me more is how he reduced his maturity from that expected of an adult to that of the prepubescent.