WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?

Tech mogul Bryan Johnson pops 80 pills a day, lives on a diet of mushed veg and infuses himself with blood donated by his teenage son – all in his quest to be 18 again

- CAROLINE GRAHAM

THERE’S something otherworldly about Bryan Johnson. His skin is luminous and taut, his eyes unnaturally bright as he stares intently at me.

Transfixed, I search for a wrinkle, blemish or flaw – but there are none. Unbelievably, this eerie perfection is not down to  Botox,  fillers or the skill of a surgeon’s scalpel.

At 45, Bryan, a tech mogul who sold his online payment business Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800 million (then R8,8 billion) almost a decade ago, is spending an astonishing $2m (R36m) a year in his quest for eternal youth, dubbed Project Blueprint.

Bryan has a team of more than 30 doctors who routinely measure his blood, heart, liver, kidneys, brain, blood vessels and sexual health.

He gobbles down 80 vitamins and minerals a day, eats 31kg of puréed vegetables a month and goes to bed at precisely 8.30pm every night. He has taken more than 33 000 images of the inside of his bowels.

Bryan’s goal is to biologically become 18 again. He limits himself to consuming 8 300 kilojoules a day, including almond milk, walnuts, flaxseed and berries; exercises at least an hour a day; and, two years into his anti-ageing experiment, claims he now has the heart of a 37- year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the fitness of an 18-year-old.

Does he think he will live forever? 

“I currently have no plans to die,” he tells me. While some say he looks creepy critics have compared him to Patrick Bateman, the self-obsessed serial killer in Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, a vampire and even an elf – the eccentric man opposite me radiates health and happiness.