Each of us has our own dreams and desires. For some, financial security is the goal. Others pursue spiritual enlightenment or aim for harmony in the world. However, many of us simply wish for a good night’s rest.

But for Bryan Johnson, an ex-Mormon missionary turned multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, his aspirations are quite distinctive. He is fixated on achieving longevity. More precisely, he plans to defy death entirely, aiming to live indefinitely and encouraging the rest of us to follow suit.

To achieve this, Johnson has invested five years and over £8 million in testing an AI-driven lifestyle plan on himself, a routine so strict that it may lead some to wonder about the purpose of living under such conditions.

So he gets up at 4.30am, goes to bed at 8.30pm, takes more than 100 supplements a day, eats three dreary meals of vegan sludge called ‘Meal one’, ‘Meal two’ and ‘Meal three’, avoids direct sunlight, exercises obsessively, sleeps under a collagen mask and that’s just the start of it.

He has also been injected with his then 17-year-old son’s blood plasma, regularly measures his night-time erections for length and strength and has repeatedly shocked his penis with ‘acoustic technology’ to increase its virility. As a result of this hard (sorry) work, Bryan claims to have knocked 5.1 years off his biological age and has reduced his ageing rate to 0.64 which, by his reckoning, means that, for every 12 months, he ages barely seven.

Even better news for his four million followers is that he happily shares his secrets and supplements through Blueprint, his multi-million dollar long-life start-up, so we can all snap up branded olive oil, blood-testing equipment and other products tied to his personal diet and recommendations to help reverse our own ageing.

All of which would feel enough for most of us to be getting on with.

But Bryan is only just getting started and recently launched his own religion: ‘Don’t Die’.

‘Dear humanity, I am building a religion…’ he writes modestly in one of his social media posts, ‘… the next great framework. It’s how we transition into the era of AI and solving death… It saves the human race.’

His disciples are lapping it up. Joining in droves. Buying Bryan’s special $39 Don’t Die olive oil. Meeting in their thousands for Don’t Die hikes and dance nights in their branded T-shirts, planning for their next 100 years.

So what a shame to learn – thanks to an investigation by The New York Times – that there’s a bit of a hitch in the future of forever. And that all is not well at the Blueprint/Don’t Die HQ.

For starters, it seems that Bryan is unhealthily obsessed with secrecy and control. So much so that his staff have been required to sign breathtakingly detailed confidentiality agreements about what goes on behind Blueprint’s doors. Agreements pages and pages long. And not just his staff. Bryan’s obsession extends to girlfriends, sexual partners, dates – one he asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement before they tried acid together.

Even an ex-fiancée, Taryn Southern, 38, who also worked for him, was made to sign. Though that relationship went south when she was diagnosed with cancer, Bryan reportedly declared her a ‘net negative’ and the pair were embroiled in nasty and public litigation for ages, over money, secrecy and whether he did, or did not, cure her of cancer.

There have also been bizarre ‘opt-in’ agreements, with staff allegedly pressured to sign contracts agreeing not to complain about Bryan wearing ‘little and sometimes no clothing/no underwear’ at work, inappropriate behaviour and the seemingly endless discussions about his erections.

On top of all that, Oliver Zolman, Bryan’s long-term ‘longevity doctor’ left quietly last year – reportedly unhappy with the efficacy of some products sold through Blueprint, particularly the best-selling $49 ‘longevity mix,’ which made a lot of people very sick.

There have also been swirling allegations that some of the data Bryan used to prove his reversal of aging might have been cherry- picked. And that despite all the evidence he has presented to the contrary, Bryan is still actually 47 years old. So I take a closer look at the many, many photos of his muscular body – some completely naked but for a strategically placed kettlebell.

And, to be fair, while there is no question that he is utterly ripped and you can see the outline of every bluey white muscle, he doesn’t look particularly young. In fact, he looks rather odd.

Sort of ageless, with his pale hairless skin, auburn hair (which he insists is ‘not dyed’), strange waxy face (caused by extreme lasering) and pink-rimmed eyes.

It can’t help that, by his own admission, he is constantly hungry and lives a worryingly solo life, thanks to the myriad restrictions demanded by the Project Blueprint algorithm. It wasn’t always so. Fifteen years ago, Bryan was a depressed, married workaholic with three children and a stalwart of the Mormon community in Utah where he grew up.

In 2007, with a young family to support, he founded Braintree, a payment-processing company which grew like mad and acquired Venmo (another payment processing company) five years later.

It was after he sold the combined business to PayPal in 2013 for $800million – personally netting $300million – that it seems his values shifted a bit and he embarked on a ‘period of exploration’.

He got divorced, ditched the Mormon church, lost 50 lbs, got his mojo back, started seeing prostitutes and, allegedly, dabbled in acid. Soon after, like so many uber-wealthy tech bros, he became obsessed with longevity.

Of course, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the rest of the Silicon Valley gang had collectively tried everything to eke out a few more years. But Bryan took it further.

In 2016, he founded Kernel, a neurotechnology company that uses a specially designed helmet to measure brain activity and which he uses for fun to measure the age of his brain – 37 apparently.

But not just his brain. Since 2021, he has put his entire body through it – extreme dieting, excessive exercise, gene therapy, human growth hormone, plasma transfusions with both his son and father.

Meanwhile, his extensive medical team has been repeatedly measuring the biological age of every organ. Then, last year, he became obsessed with his penis age. Not just measuring its ups and downs and sharing the results. But completing a course of experimental shockwave therapy that was extremely painful but made his penis feel ’15 years younger’.

One of the great definites of life has always been, of course, that we will die. But Bryan has never been short of self-belief. He is used to the hate. The backchat. The non-believers. His bluey white skin is as thick as leather.

Over the years, he has compared himself to explorers Christopher Columbus and Sir Ernest Shackleton – and Jesus Christ.

‘I don’t really care what people in our time and place think of me,’ he writes. ‘I really care about what the 25th-century thinks.’

Whatever is happening behind the scenes at Blueprint (and it doesn’t sound good), there can be no doubting the time, effort and money that Bryan has poured into his Don’t Die movement. All those awful grey meals. All those tests. All those agonising shockwaves. And now, it seems, all that bullying control.

But perhaps none of it actually matters. Because even if Bryan was on to something, and even if we could afford to live like him, bouncing about in our tiny shorts eating sludge and going to bed at 8.30pm draped in genital monitors, why on earth would we want to even for a week, let alone eternity?