Bryan Johnson, the 48-year-old venture capitalist and tech company founder, is a strange and fascinating man. As regular readers of this column will know, he has for several years now devoted his life, and his considerable wealth – Braintree, the electronic payment company he founded, was sold to PayPal for $800 million in 2013 – to the pursuit of his own immortality.

His methods have variously included adhering to an austere caloric-restrictive diet; taking a prodigious number of high-end supplements; regular medical interventions to adjust various hormones to an optimal range; a plethora of dermatological and other cosmetic treatments; and receiving transfusions of blood plasma from his own son, who is called Talmage.

He has attracted attention and no small amount of ridicule for his practice of taking detailed measurements of his nocturnal erections, and comparing them, in terms of quality and durability, to the nocturnal erections of 19-year-old Talmage. (For more on the whole business of Johnson’s johnson, I refer you to a blog post he published last December, entitled How I’m De-Aging My Penis, wherein he detailed such matters of penile import as semen analysis, erection measurement and the assessment of maximum urination speed.) He spends, by his own estimation, something in the region of $2 million per year on the goal of becoming, in terms of his biological markers, functionally 18 years old. His rallying cry, which is partly a joke but also entirely serious, is “Don’t Die”.

Late last month, Johnson opened up a whole new front in his personal war on mortality – that of getting completely out of his gourd on magic mushrooms. The set-up was seductively bizarre: viewers were invited, via an announcement on social media, to tune into a live-streamed event........

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