Techie richie rich Bryan Johnson spends roughly two million dollars a year on his body. Blood transfusions from his son. Dozens of specialists monitoring his every bloodmarker. A diet so controlled it reads like medical protocol. He is, by most measurable metrics, reversing his biological age.

He also looks profoundly alone and, you can’t help but notice it… weird.

I have been watching Kara Swisher’s new CNN series and reading Burn Book back to back, and underneath all the noise about longevity supplements and cold plunges and NAD infusions, there is a quieter, older story she keeps alluding to. The one even the billionaires (who have you noticed they are all seeming to have started to look the same (again… weird) can’t budget for.

The best predictor of a long life isn’t your VO2 max. It isn’t your supplement stack. It isn’t even net worth, though that helps. It’s whether you have people. Real ones. Not your ChatGPT girlfriend/boyfriend. The ones who show up when nothing is optimized and everything is broken.

Swisher doesn’t say this softly. She’s spent decades in rooms with the most powerful people in technology and has watched, up close, what happens when intelligence and resources encounter no meaningful resistance. The biohacking world is full of men (it is mostly all men) who have solved for every variable… except the human ones.

I’ve been writing about self-improvement in this newsletter for a while now. Biohacking. Morning routines. The architecture of a better life. And I believe some of it. Creatine works. Getting sunshine in the morning works. If you can’t, vitamin D. Sleep is non-negotiable - which I learned not from a book but from LeBron. And basic gym consistency will do more for you than any protocol a longevity clinic sells you at four hundred dollars an hour.

I live in Medellin, Colombia. I have been here for years, building something I believe in, working on a novel, running this newsletter, creating content to put it all on the map, designing a life on my own terms. Most days it feels like the exact right choice. Some days it feels like the loneliest thing I have ever done.

My mother is in Texas. My brother is in California. We are a small family. There is no replacing that with a tribe you assemble in a coworking space, however good those people are. There is no supplement for the specific weight of people who have known you your whole life.

This is the thing the billionaires found at the end of their research. The thing your grandmother could have told them for free over a meal she cooked herself.

Connection is the variable. Not the dramatic kind, the whirlwind romance, the 7-day retreat, the ayahuasca ceremony. Not the high-performance networking event. The boring, geographically complicated kind. The phone call you keep meaning to make. The visit you keep pushing until the next quarter.

Building something is lonely. I don’t think that’s a bug. The solitude is where the work happens. But there is a difference between chosen solitude and the slow drift away from the people who knew you before you became whatever you are becoming.

Swisher’s billionaires optimized their way into the latter without noticing. Some of them are only now realizing it. Many of them probably never will.

I don’t have a clean answer to this. I’m not moving back to the USA. I’m not abandoning what I’m building here. But I am paying more attention to the phone calls and messages. To the visits. To the people who don’t care about my open rate or my share count or whether my personal brand is coherent.

That is not a “hack.” It doesn’t have protocol and you can’t buy it on a longevity clinic’s website.

It’s just the oldest thing we know about being alive.

Not everything needs disrupting.

Japan’s digital nomad visa is entering live rollout with a ~¥10M income threshold and strict foreign-employer rules, opening access but clearly filtering for high earners and short-term positioning.

🇮🇩 Indonesia
Indonesia is increasing enforcement in Bali against remote workers using tourist visas, with more inspections and rising deportation risk if you’re not properly structured.

🇬🇷 Greece
Greece’s golden visa now effectively starts at €500,000 in prime zones (Athens, islands), pushing investors toward secondary regions still offering €250,000 entry tiers.

🇵🇹 Portugal
Portugal is tightening enforcement on foreign income declarations post-NHR changes, with increased audits signaling a shift from attraction to compliance pressure for expats.

⚠️ Europe Airspace
This affects movement now: ongoing Russia–Ukraine escalation continues to disrupt Eastern European flight corridors, causing reroutes, delays, and higher costs across intra-Europe travel.

Check your target country’s official immigration page for exact income thresholds and application windows. They move quickly.

If the tech titans of Silicon Valley were hoping for a sentimental retrospective from the woman who spent thirty years holding their feet to the fire, they clearly haven’t been paying attention. In Burn Book, Kara Swisher delivers exactly what the title promises: a scorched-earth post-mortem of the digital revolution and the "techbros" who steered it into the ditch.

As a former Hollywood producer and a current novelist, I appreciate a narrative with a clear protagonist and a gallery of well-drawn (if occasionally monstrous) antagonists. Swisher plays the part of the veteran war correspondent perfectly. She was there when the internet was just a promise of democratization, and she stayed long enough to watch it be sold for parts by men who mistook their stock portfolios for moral superiority.

The gossip is real. Zuckerberg sweating through meetings, Musk's ego filling every room he wasn't in. She pulls no punches in describing how a small group of narrow-minded men, sheltered by unimaginable wealth, ignored the societal consequences of their "disruption."

It is a titillating glimpse into a culture that prioritized moving fast and breaking things, only to realize too late that the "things" being broken were the foundations of civil discourse. Swisher’s voice is as sharp as ever: cynical, deeply informed, and utterly unafraid to call a "genius" a "toddler." If you want to understand the DNA of the world we currently inhabit, start here. Just don't expect a polite apology.

I’ve spent a lot of time in these issues talking about biohacking. The pencils, the posture, the cold plunges, and now the Brain Wash. But there is a ceiling to our tinkering, or at least, there used to be.

The tech world’s "Auntie Mame," Kara Swisher, has been vocal lately about her intent to simply... not die. Or at least, to extend the warranty on her biology as far as Silicon Valley’s venture capital will take it.

It’s the ultimate high-agency play: treating mortality like a bug in the software that just needs a patch. While I’m over here trying to find the right "Brain Space Wash" on a Colombian island, the vanguard is looking for a way to never have to turn the machine off at all.

Is it a quest for infinite productivity, or the ultimate fear of missing out? Either way, it makes my analog Mitsubishi pencils feel very, very mortal.

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.