Immortality is for Sale (again).
Immortality is for Sale (again).
But watch out who is selling…
State programs, billionaire labs, and a $27 trillion industry — all selling the same promise. The question worth asking is whether any of them are selling what you actually need.
There was a man traveling the American West with a horse and cart. He stopped in every town and sold "snake oil." It was advertised to cure everything from joint pain and headaches to bad luck and a troubled future. People bought it. Not because they were foolish. Because the desire for health and long life is perhaps the oldest and most human desire there is.
The snake oil salesman realized something important: when fear meets hope, the wallet opens.
Fast forward to today. The cart has been replaced by press releases, state programs, and billion-dollar investment funds. The pitch has changed. The instinct hasn't.
The leader who wants to sell immortality
Somewhere in the world, a 73-year-old head of state, one who has spent decades projecting physical vigor through hunting, hockey, and motorcycles, has recently turned anti-aging into a national scientific priority. His government launched a program worth $26 billion. Formally titled "New Health Preservation Technologies" and unveiled in 2024, it spans organ bioprinting, xenotransplantation using genetically modified mini-pigs, cryotherapy, and gene therapy aimed at slowing cellular aging.
You almost certainly know who this is. I'm keeping the name out of it deliberately, because this piece is not about one person or one country. It is about a pattern. And patterns are harder to see when we're busy arguing about the people in them.
This new initiative aims to save 175,000 lives by the end of the decade. The math is worth pausing on, because that same leader's army has lost an estimated over 1.2 million soldiers killed, wounded, and missing in an ongoing war. One hand builds. The other erases. At apocalyptical scale.
The program is led by two figures from the leader's inner circle: his daughter, an endocrinologist overseeing state-backed genetics programs, and a prominent physicist. A previous personal physician, described as the leader's personal gerontologist and awarded one of the country's highest state honors, stated openly that his goal was to prolong the life of the leader whose death would throw the country into crisis. He also argued that humans were designed to live to 120, citing biblical scripture. He died in 2024, at 77.
Meanwhile, in the private sector
The unnamed leader is not alone in this obsession. He just has the most dramatic budget.
Silicon Valley figures including Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel have all shown sustained interest in anti-aging research, funding companies aimed at reversing aging at the cellular level. Bezos, together with investor Yuri Milner, put $3 billion into Altos Labs, a company researching cellular reprogramming. Altman invested $180 million of his own money into Retro Biosciences, with one stated goal: add ten healthy years to the human lifespan. Larry Page invested over a billion dollars to launch Calico, Google's dedicated aging research company.
Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur, spends $2 million per year on his personal anti-aging protocol and publishes his biomarkers publicly. Larry Ellison has donated hundreds of millions to aging research. Peter Thiel has spoken openly about cryonics as a personal plan.
These are not fringe figures. These are the people who built the platforms most of the world uses every day. The global longevity market is now measured in the tens of trillions, larger than the GDP of most countries. And it is growing.
So the question is no longer whether powerful people are chasing longer lives. The question is: what are they actually selling? And what will the money be used for?
Do governments actually want you to live longer?
This is worth sitting with for a moment.
Pension systems, healthcare budgets, housing policy, retirement age. All of it is built around a specific assumption of how long people live. If that changes dramatically, the whole model strains. I am not suggesting governments wish their citizens an early exit. I am suggesting that dramatically extended lifespans create a real financial and structural problem for every system designed before they became possible. That tension is worth naming honestly.
So when a government announces a $26 billion longevity program, a simple question is worth asking: why?
The answer, in at least one case, appears to be one person in particular. And that pattern, power funding its own survival, is not limited to authoritarian governments. It is visible across every system where resources concentrate in a few hands and lifespans are long enough to compound that concentration further.
Longevity, in the hands of the powerful, is not a public health program. It is a mechanism for staying in control longer.
Snake oil never went away
The snake oil tradition is not a historical curiosity. It is a recurring structure. Find the fear: aging and death, the most universal fears there are. Offer the cure. Collect the payment. Repeat at scale.
What has changed is the delivery mechanism. Today the pitch arrives with peer-reviewed language, government seals, and TED Talk aesthetics. Critics note that despite staggering investment figures, several of these programs have yet to produce substantial peer-reviewed research in major international journals. Without transparent data, the claims remain largely aspirational.
The more important change is reach. The snake oil salesman could only get to one town at a time. A state-level machine does not need to convince each person individually. It controls the media, the institutions, the scientific authority. It can manufacture consensus. And it does not aim only at the moment of purchase. It aims at every step of your decision-making: at the moment you first wonder if you are healthy enough, at the moment you try to make sense of conflicting information, at the moment of doubt.
This is not limited to governments. It is the operating model of the entire longevity industry. The goal is to reach you before you have asked yourself the right questions. Because a person with clear self-knowledge is much harder to sell to.
Meanwhile, the evidence keeps pointing in the same direction it always has. Exercise. Sleep. Breathing. Consistent, daily, unglamorous, free. Not very fundable. Not very filmable. But decade after decade, it is what the data supports.
The math nobody is doing
Imagine a country of roughly 146 million people. Its government, backed by a powerful propaganda machine, decides to sell a longevity product. A supplement. A monthly health protocol. Priced at $19.99. Nothing outrageous. A bottle of vitamins costs more.
The machine goes to work. State television, government-backed science, doctors on payroll. The message is consistent and everywhere: this product extends your life. The state says so. The scientists say so. Your neighbour already bought it.
You don't need a majority. Let's be conservative: 15 percent of the population. That is roughly 22 million people at $19.99 a month. That is $440 million a month. $5.3 billion a year.
Now, what could a responsible government do with $5.3 billion a year? Genuinely good things, actually. Build public parks and green spaces in every major city. Fund national nutrition education programs. Create a network of free preventive health clinics. Launch ecological projects that improve air and water quality, things that extend real lifespans in measurable ways. On paper, it sounds almost noble.
And that is precisely the problem.
Because this same country currently spends approximately $545 million per day on an ongoing war. Since 2022, its total military expenditure has reached an estimated $532 billion, a sum that independent analysts describe as equivalent to 24 years of funding for the country's entire higher education system. A government with those priorities does not suddenly develop a passion for your mitochondria.
The wellness program and the war are not contradictions. They are two lines in the same budget. One generates revenue. The other spends it.
The snake oil salesman didn't invent this. He just proved the principle works. The difference between him and a state with a propaganda machine is not the product. It is the reach. He could get to one town. The state gets to every household, every screen, every doctor's office. And it doesn't need to persuade everyone. It just needs enough fear and enough official-sounding reassurance that 15 percent of people open their wallets.
The product doesn't even need to work. Ideally it doesn't harm, but even if it does, the machinery of disinformation is more than capable of handling that inconvenience. Every whistleblower becomes a foreign agent. Every critical study becomes fake news. Every doctor raising concerns becomes an enemy of public health. We have watched this happen enough times, in enough countries, to have no illusions about how effectively a government can silence inconvenient truth. The noise drowns the signal. The product keeps selling.
What can any of us actually do?
I am not a government. I do not have a billion-dollar fund. What I have is a small practice, a few frameworks that have held up over time, and a growing conviction that the most important work in longevity happens in conversations, not laboratories.
Can I prove my approach works better than a $26 billion state program? No. But I can ask you three questions that no state program, no supplement brand, and no Silicon Valley lab will ever ask you, because there is no money in the answers.
Why does this matter to me? Not to science, not to a state program, not to anyone's portfolio. To me, in my actual life, right now.
Where am I honestly today? Where the data, the honest self-assessment, or my lab results actually place me.
How do I improve, optimize, or maintain from here? This is the step the entire industry is racing to sell you. The first two are yours alone.
The framework behind our work, Temeli, which means foundations in Bulgarian, maps six things every person can actually improve on: Breathing, Sleep, Movement, Nutrition, Awareness, and Prevention. Not six products. Six practices.
There is something I have come to believe after years of this work.
You cannot scale personal longevity. The word personal is not decoration. It means exactly what it says. And the one thing that makes it work, the thing that no algorithm, no state program, and no billion-dollar fund can replicate, is another person who genuinely cares about you. Not about your data. Not about your subscription. About you.
I work with no more than ten clients at a time. Not because I lack ambition. Because that is the number of people I can actually care for properly. Caring takes time. It takes attention. It takes showing up for someone consistently, not just processing their results and generating a report.
Technology can inform. AI can analyze. But caring is not a feature. It cannot be automated, scaled, or sold for $19.99 a month.
And underneath all of it, under every framework and every protocol and every lab result, there is one thing I keep coming back to. The simplest thing. The most ignored thing.
You are what you do every single day.
Not what you buy. Not what you intend. Not what program you signed up for. What you actually do, today, and tomorrow, and the day after. Longevity lives in consistency. Not in breakthroughs. Not in billion-dollar programs. In the quiet, repeated, daily choice to take care of yourself.
That is not a product. It never will be.
