 Hey everyone, Ryan O'Shea here with Lifespan News and welcome to the launch of Making Time. This is a series that has been in the works for a while now and that will feature long-form interviews with interesting figures, involved in topics that impact longevity science, and our quest to help everyone live longer, healthier lives. The goal is to make these conversational, informal and largely unedited, so that you get to hear from leaders and pioneers from a variety of fields in a way that goes beyond soundbites and talking points and gets into the weeds and explores nuance and tangents in whatever comes up. Our first episode features Nicholas Ansinger. Nicholas is the founder and general partner of the Infinita VC Fund, which seeks to support founders in overcoming regulatory bottlenecks by utilizing startup cities, network states and crypto rails. Infinita is based in Prospera, the startup city in Honduras that Nicholas also calls home. This conversation explores decentralization, web3 and network states, and how startup cities like Prospera and pop-up cities like Zuzaloo can help speed up innovation and advance longevity science. We also discuss a new project that Nicholas is working on, the creation of a longevity network state, and how you can get involved. Make sure to subscribe to Lifespan News so you don't miss out on more videos, such as this recent one from Emmett Short, critiquing the AI future envisioned by controversial longevity figure Brian Johnson. And now on to my interview with Nicholas Ansinger. You do so much with the Infinita VC Fund and your podcast-stranded technologies, and you are involved in this exciting emerging world of network states and pop-up and startup cities like Prospera and Zuzaloo, and we'll get into that a lot more in this interview. But first, I want to get into what is your focus and your mission and how do your various roles and responsibilities fit into what you're doing with all these hats you wear? Yeah, hey, great. And thanks for having me on, Ryan. I'm really glad to be here. I very much appreciate the work of Lifespan.io. Yeah, so let me maybe tell a bit the origin story of Infinita VC, right? Previously, I had kind of two phases of my career. The first one was more on the idea side, more academia, public policy, think tanks, and management consulting. So I was studying philosophy, economics, I worked on large infrastructure, projects, and things like that. But it felt to me not like dynamic enough, not hands-on, not entrepreneurial, and specifically not fast enough, right? So I felt like I couldn't expect things to change in the policy process. But I've thought a lot about it. And then the second part of my career, I went into technology and entrepreneurship. And I had some really cool runs at startups as an operator. And I created a product that later raised the CSB with 36 million. So I learned in technology and entrepreneurship, things are much more fast paced and changing. And it's just, I could see how I could use it as a method to effectuate large-scale changes. So it inspired me a lot. And then I went on to think what's going to be my big dent that I want to make in the universe, the biggest possible and ambitious mission I could go on. So for about one and a half, two years, I dabbled in various things. But I learned to my frustration that things, especially like healthcare, which was very present to me because of COVID, was really messed up in many ways that don't seem fixable as an entrepreneur, right? With so many things that you know that's what you need solutions for, the problem is really policy, right? So it's specific barriers that are put up by public health institutions, by organizations like the FDA. So that frustrated me a lot. And then I got into the rabbit hole of like C-studding, Scott Alexander, and rationalism. And I found out about Prospera. Scott Alexander wrote a fantastic article about it. And it talked about really fundamentally changing the legal operating system of society, right? So it talked about regulatory flexibility, about insurances, assessing regulatory and business risk, and about like 3D property rights and air rights on the blockchain and things like that. It was like, this sounds so wild and fascinating. And this has to be too good to be true. So I got to check this out. So last year in April, I organized the first Bill Prospera summit. I wanted to bring some other people, some other entrepreneurs to well see what it looks like and what's going on there. And so to give Prospera an incentive to bring their whole team to in a short amount of time. And I was just amazed by the quality of the team and the community that they have built there. They're already a couple of really awesome entrepreneurs there. There's like a bank that's using API access and also it's crypto friendly. There's a drone logistics company. There's a construction tech startup and also a team therapy company called Mini Circle. That's where you're well known in your circles. And that is using kind of these regulatory advantages in Prospera. Not no regulation, but better and a more flexible and more rational approach to regulation. And I think that key innovation just fascinated me so much that inspired me to well pitch a VC fund at the first Prospera conference because I always do a pitch competition. And it's like, hey, we need to bring more entrepreneurs here and all of these over regulated sectors and like healthcare, but also hardware, drones, robotics, and also in the crypto and then the finance space. Anything that's sort of, we see a lot of bottlenecks by the SEC in the place right now as well. And Eric Brim and the CEO said, that's what we're thinking of as well, and we need someone to do it. So let me help you get it set up. And so here I am now. And since then I created a Finder that we see almost done raising the first fund and made the first eight investments in these three sectors that I mentioned. And I'm going around the world and organize events in Prospera, but also in Montenegro and in Zanzibar very soon. I'm producing a lot of content, my own podcast, because I want to kind of build a larger movement for more of these jurisdictions and more startups that see these kinds of advantages and utilize them to unleash a new wave of technological progress. That was a great overview of everything I think we're going to touch on in more detail in this conversation. I had to stop myself so many times of asking you to go into more details of any of those one things. We're going to get into all of that into this interview. And I think one of the things that stuck out to anyone listening to that there was how many different aspects and components of things are coming together to create these startup cities that we're seeing what they need to succeed. I've long been talking about the concept of combinatorial innovation, which is this idea that when silos get broken down and aspects of different technologies come together and converge cross-discipline and cross-domain, that's really when we see things start taking off. So we need to break down those silos. Organizations like XPRIZE do a great job of incentivizing this and speeding this up with their prizes. And I think industries like robotics are great examples of this where you have the convergence of AI and hardware and sensors and software. And all of those have dozens of subcategories. And I think even biology is another one where we're seeing biology converge with the digital transformation in computer science to really become this what I think is going to be a biological revolution that replaces and surpasses what the digital revolution was. We're seeing the start of that now. And I think it'll really come into fruition in the next few years. But I guess that was all kind of a tangent. But what I'm getting at is what you're doing and working on with these cities that you're working with is combinatorial innovation. And it's not what you traditionally think of as technologies coming together to create a product. But it's really the systems and structures coming together to create a whole ecosystem where that technology can be developed and can flourish. So it's creating those innovative emerging technologies as a byproduct rather than as a direct result. This is the convergence of things like Web 3 and DSI and laws and regulation and governance and health care. People spend their entire lives trying to master one of those domains and failing to do so. So it's very interesting to see these pieces coming together. And there's so much primer and background knowledge that people would have to know really to dive it deeply into these topics. We don't have time to get into all of that. But as a quick high level bit, what is what is this all about? What is a startup city? What's a pop up city? What is the network state? How would you best explain those to people who haven't heard that concept before? Yeah, sure. So let me start with the network state because that's an entry point for many people. They've heard about it by Laji Srinivasan wrote the Skatebook and it's a highly aligned online community that develops in-person civility and crowd funds physical territory to eventually gain diplomatic recognition. So what I typically do is I put this into context and say, look, this is a new idea in an existing space, the space I would call competitive governance. And I think for me, the starting point with Patrick Friedman, there's been, of course, a longer history ever since Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. But those weren't serious projects, I think, before sea-studding. I mean, maybe I'm doing injustice to some of the people that did it, but they were definitely not successful. And then I think the direct line to network states is from sea-studding to charter cities to network states. So sea-studding was the first attempt because governments own all the territory in the world. We need to go where they are not. That didn't work or it might still work in some small areas, but cost is a big reason. And also the legal autonomy isn't what you would wish for. And then the movement moved on to charter cities, which has been much more successful. And I think Rich now is actually a great inflection point. And the idea is that you work together with governments in partnership using the special economic zone model. So think Shenzhen China, think Dubai, think to some degree Singapore or Hong Kong, and kind of super-charged economic development, which governments ultimately also benefit from in the form of taxes and the sort of greater wealth for their population. And I think it's a great model. And that's sort of the model that Prosper has also based on. The challenge with the model is it has very high barriers to entry or upfront costs, right? So Prosper required like 10 years of foregoing experience and like government engagements, like very deep expertise and legal, the ability to raise large amounts of capital, although not as large as you'd think. Prosper started with a few million and started buying a few barren rocks, but was also very lucky getting the Honduran ZD legislation, which is one of the best, if not the best in the world. So it's very high upfront costs and a lot of resources required. So Balaji saw that and was like, hey, why don't we flip the model on its head? We don't start with the full stack with government partnerships, with legal, with regulatory, with real estate and land footprint, and then build community. We flipped the model on its head. We first built community. So in a good example as Afro-Politan, they have a community of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands diaspora Africans who are united in their mission to provide better governance for Africans around the world. So you have the community first and that community gives you leverage, right? So you can go with a couple of thousands, tens of thousands of people to existing governments and say, hey, we bring talent, we bring activity, we bring GDP, why don't you give us a place where we have the degree of legal autonomy we need, right? So it's an innovation and an iteration on the strategy, right? I think these two models are out there and they coexist. But I think these are sort of the strategies that we see right now that many of these projects pursue. And I think the network state idea is newer and less proven. But Afro-Politan practices are great examples that I think have a very good shot at very sustained success in their field. And I think it's also attracting a bigger movement, sort of the crypto, the tech communities. I think that's great for the space. That's exactly what the Charter Cities movement also needs because it's a space that has a lot of experience, a lot of credibility. It knows how to negotiate with governments and get infrastructure, but that hasn't yet spawned a bigger movement. And I think with Zuzaloo, with Montenegro, with Vitalik Buterin, with the book, the network state, now we're at a point where we have a chance to make this a bigger movement that's getting more, more talent from the crypto and from the tech space. And maybe because you're also asked about Zuzaloo, so there's kind of an adjacent category, co-living in pop-up cities. So you could say they're the same there, or they're a bit different pop-up cities, like BlackRock City, Burning Man, and Zuzaloo in Montenegro, kind of how would it look like to have an impermanent structure somewhere that we set up a new. Happy to talk more about Zuzaloo. I think it was a key innovation in that space, right? And that's there's a lot to learn from that. But the other adjacent category to network states and charter or startup cities is also co-living, right? So Cabin or Cohere, these are not sort of requiring a high degree of legal autonomy. They're using existing jurisdictions to realize moral innovations from like the crypto web three space around ownerships, around sort of how to live together. So these are also kind of part of the same movement. Yeah, I think that was a great overview explanation. And there are so many different resources for people to learn more about this. You mentioned the book, the network state, or Apology has the great eight hour podcast on Lex Friedman's podcast going into this. So there's so many resources out there to learn more. And I will put those in the show notes and description. And you also mentioned some specific other projects that are happening, whether they're the co-living spaces, the pop-up cities, startup cities. You recently put out a great ecosystem map visual graphic that represents the different categories and the different players within those categories. I will link that in the show notes as well. I think that's a great way for people to see what exactly is happening in that space. But it also made me think there are a lot of options out there, a lot of areas for people to go to get involved with this. How did you end up at Prospera? What is special about that or what spoke to you specifically about what's happening there? Yeah. So Prospera is the most advanced project in the field. It is the zero to one. So it's open for business. Anyone can go there and join become a resident or an e-resident. And it's already very successful at attracting businesses. It has 130 registered businesses and created 1,100 direct-in-the-direct jobs. And so there's a lot to learn from the success. Now, we really have a template for other projects like that to emulate. I also, that's why I think it's the most important success story to get right, especially right now, because it's politically challenged by the current Honduran government. Right? So last year Honduras changed the government. Right now the government is hostile, but Prospera has very good legal cards dealt and they're right now winning on that front. But it's still, I think, very important for people to focus on Prospera and helping make it succeed. Because if we don't make it succeed, that will set back the space for a couple of years, I think. So what attracts me about Prospera is that, that I think it's right now the most important point really behind. And it already delivers on what I want to see, which is these regulatory innovations and advantages. Right? So I think that's where it is the most to learn from, but ultimately Prospera can succeed on its own. Right? So we need more projects like that in more countries and more jurisdictions to prove the model, to make it more credible, to make it more legitimate. Like any of these things like longevity and biotech as well, probably you start a bit on the fringes like, hey, can we really achieve mortality? But then you make it more credible, more mainstream. You build products that people can use to deliver actual benefits. And this way you enter sort of a larger audience or a larger market, which should also be the goal for startup cities and workstates. You mentioned longevity and life extension there. That's obviously somewhere where my focus is, a lot of my attention goes, though I'm interested in emerging science and technology in general. And there are a lot of startups from various industries in Prospera. You have robotics, you have FinTech, you have these various things. But of course, healthcare is a major part of that. And within healthcare and medicine, longevity is a major part of that. What's the relationship now between Prospera and the longevity community? You mentioned Mini Circle. Is there, are there other companies working in this space? Talk about the relationship going on now. Yeah. So I think Prospera is ideal for the longevity community to engage with because of that system of regulatory flexibility. Right. So we know you face extensive and lengthy FDA approvals and bureaucracy for new drug development. And for like giving therapies to people in Prospera, Mini Circle has been really the trailblazer, a gene therapy company. They're doing early stage clinical trials together with the Garm Clinic. That is a stem cell clinic led by an American, by American physicians that have an IRB, meaning they're authorized by the FDA to conduct early stage clinical trials. So they're keeping everything the same and even better when it comes to the safety of the clinical trials and the oversight. The only thing they can cut on is to bureaucracy. Right. So they can reduce the cost to the second best option by like 90, 95% and 99% compared to the United States, which is fantastic because that gives them a much greater amount of pipeline. Mini Circle will very likely and probably continue clinical trials in other jurisdictions in the United States to get approval in larger jurisdictions to bring their drugs to market, which, but they have more pipeline. And the second advantage is medical tourism. So a man by the name of Greg Nakagawa, a very seasoned and very experienced biotechnology entrepreneur with several successful exits is starting to build a regenerative medicine hub in Prospera. Right. Sort of to bring more clinicians, more doctors to set up clinics there and sort of work off of a provide therapies that are very advanced, that are otherwise very hard to get, very expensive or just takes too long to get approval, even though we know in our communities, you know, in our communities, we have a lot of PhDs, we know the science behind that. And we don't need to prove it for like 10 years. So we can read the studies that gives us enough confidence or gives us enough risk awareness to, to recommend these things within our community or do it do them to us. So that's, I think, a massive opportunity for the longevity community to use Prospera as a hub for that. Let's get into a little bit more specifics about some of the regulations there and why pop-up cities and startup cities are needed. I heard a podcast interview with you where you had said that sometimes you wake up at night thinking about how regulation is stifling innovation. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. In the United States, we have regulatory agencies like the FDA who are big in this space. Some people love them. Some people hate them. It's clear that they are impacting innovation in some way. What are your thoughts on institutions like this and how does Prospera handle the questions of regulation? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm actually thinking about writing a book right now and the tagline is I want to move away from regulatory monopoly to regulatory pluralism, right? So the solution isn't no regulations. The solution is a different approach to regulations. The key idea behind Prospera is that insurance is assessing business risk and regulation because they have an incentive, right? They don't want you to mess up because otherwise they need to pay, but they also don't want you to not be able to do anything, right? So they have the best incentive to provide more rational regulations and sort of foster a competitive market for it, right? So some insurers just want to say, you know, this regulation has been tried and tested in so many other countries, they give you very low premiums for it. But if you think that's not good enough for you, you want to have a more innovative approach to the regulation that your business is under, you can propose that in the Prospera Council and get approval for it. You need an insurance to agree with it. Of course, you might need to pay higher premiums for it because the insurance says we have to make more risk assessment, invite more experts to assess this. So I think this can sort of lead to a competitive market that delivers on the efficiency gains that we see in many other areas where we have competitive markets, as opposed to regulatory monopolies like the FDA, right? So the problem with the FDA isn't necessarily the safety regulations, right? So safety regulations are good. Many of these regulations are fine, and they should go to safety testing through animal tests and through human trials. The problem is the incentives around it and the bureaucracy, that's the result of these incentives, right? So the FDA has the downsides, gets the downside if something goes wrong when they release a bad drug to the market. And even that happens too often. But they don't get the upside if they're fast. And if the drug ends up saving people's lives. So that's the massive incentive problems of organizations like the FDA. I think that book idea sounds great. I look forward to reading that when it comes out. That's something I'm very interested in. And I think we saw a lot of the shortcomings with the traditional regulatory process during the COVID-19 pandemic and how that was very quick to get things to market in relation to historical things. But really, it was slower than it needed to be and could have been. And I think there's a lot of opportunity to improve things there. A lot of my background is talking about human augmentation and especially kind of like biohacking type human augmentation, kind of self-directed evolution things. And what I always bring up in my talks is that there are two very divergent paths when it comes to regulation. We could strictly regulate everything, make sure it goes through clinical trials, make sure it's proven safe and effective, whatever we determine that means. And in that case, things will be safe when they are made available. They will be extremely expensive and they will not be available to many people. Or we can make it completely democratized. People can make and sell and insert and do whatever they want from licensed doctors or not from whatever organization they want. Things will come to market very quickly. Innovation will speed up dramatically. It will also be very dangerous and you don't know what you're getting. There's of course a middle path there and that's what we need. And I agree with your idea of pluralism there. I would love for a company to be able to come out with a drug or an augmentation which is not tested on humans in any way. And if you want to use that and you know that it's not tested, you should have the ability to do so. But there should also be numerous consumer organizations existing saying that, yes, this particular project meets our requirements, they get our stamp of approval. I think that's a great way to go about this, which kind of splits the difference there, leaves bodily autonomy and the freedom of association out there and doesn't stifle that innovation, but also gives people a safe path to have the level of regulation they want. Perhaps there are some people out there that want stricter regulations than the FDA currently advises and they should be able to do that too. Exactly. The example I always give is what if you have like four different FDAs? One is like the current one or even like more conservative one that's testing for 10-15 years. And another one is really fast tracking. Like they test like for a year or something like that. And then your doctor can look at that and say, here it really got just fast stricter approval. So here's what we know, here's what the science says. Now with AI, you can get that information also much better and much easier and much faster. Here's the risk you should know about. It's your decision to take it or not. That would be kind of an ideal or better scenario. Health is just very important and people feel very uncomfortable using things that haven't been tested before. So something is in your body, it's just very scary. So people want safety. They want oversight and they want these companies to be liable if they mess it up. Or if they were like fraudulent claims or something like that. So it's good to have a system like that. But right now the kinds of provisions we have in place are just simply very inefficient and ineffective in some ways. And I might also add deeply immoral. So there is a fantastic book by Jessica Flanagan, also on my podcast, Serenity Technologies Podcast, episode four, that's called Pharmaceutical Freedom. And it poses that ethical question. And if we take the norm of informed consent seriously, then why are we not allowing people to take drugs that they think are right for them? So the example that I like to give is Steve Jobs in cancer treatment. So Steve Jobs had late had cancer and there were treatments available that might have cured him. But he said, no, I don't want that. I want natural treatments. Right? Is what anyone say it's justified by the doctor to enforce the treatment on Steve Jobs, even though there might be good arguments, right? It would be very good for society, right? Steve Jobs is one of the most productive members in human history. So there's massive positive externalities for society. But no, but we people would say Steve Jobs has the right to make a bad decision for his life. Right? So why do we not have a right to take bad decisions for our bodies? We make bad decisions all the time when we choose to stay to be on the couch and eat potato chips while playing video games. We shoot best choose bad life partners. We do very risky things like climbing the Mount Everest. So why don't we allow that for drugs? And not only would that be ethically better or more permissible, it would also lead to a more efficient and even safer system when it comes to allowing new drugs to the market. I agree. But let's get into why these charter cities you think would be necessary. Do you think that it's possible to reconfigure existing governments to have this mentality? Is it realistic to abolish the FDA in the United States and go towards a more open, privatized regulatory structure? Or do we need to expand beyond that now at this point? Yeah, that's a great question. So when it comes to convincing existing governments, we've made tons of progress. So I had Patrick Friedman on my podcast who's been a pioneer in the space for like two decades or more. And he said, well, for the first time in the history that he's been in this space, there is a mismatch of available government deals and entrepreneurs willing to do it. So there's more governments willing to do it right now than entrepreneurs will fill in the spots. So there's several governments in Latin America, in Africa, potentially Montenegro, that are willing to and several others in Asia as well, that are willing to do that because it's been a successful development model for China, for Dubai. So it creates positive externalities for these governments and for these countries. So that gives me a lot of hope, also with the zero to one with the success case of Prospera. But again, we have to prove it out, right? So we have to make sure that we show what we do and the metal locker front is as safe or even safer than the existing standard, while more innovative and more efficient, right? So we need to be very conscious and very diligent when it comes to the ethics of it. And in our sort of transparency, right? We need to be able to very confidently show what we're doing. Hey, we take safety and ethics very seriously, even more so than in other in existing jurisdictions. And I think then we do have a real chance to influence policy in the existing jurisdictions or governments. Not sure the FDA will ever be overhauled in my lifetime, but I think I can think of a couple of sort of very agreeable kind of proposals that could move the needle a lot, right? So for example, what if the FDA allows medical reciprocity, right? So if it's allowed in this list of 10 different jurisdictions like Japan or Germany or Norway, like regulators, we have a lot of thrust in, it's also allowed here. That would be tons of progress already. Right. And if you have that, then you're also not so far away from saying, hey, you can also do it like you do it here in Prosper. And then you kind of have more legal options. Or you can think of things like, I think many people within the FDA are also aware that efficacy trials are sort of where the inefficiency comes from, right? It's like two thirds of the cost, right? So maybe it's something more agreeable to have fewer requirements around efficacy trials. That doesn't seem to me to be a crazy proposal, right? Or right to trial laws, right? So there is an active patient rights movement in the United States since the 80s, since HIV, since the FDA basically killed people, HIV patients by withholding life-saving drugs from them. So there has been some progress in right to trial legislation. And that could go even further. My hope is not super high to change it through the existing process in the United States, unless you have a lot of or until you have a lot of positive examples from other countries to show for, I think that can really give the reformers inside the United States or in other jurisdictions like the UK, the fuel, to make their case. The UK is actually an example, right? So the UK has allowed human challenge trials, which are also something that from an ethical point of view should be common sensically available and would make the system much more efficient. So that is already tremendous progress and shows there's hope also on the reform side as well. Yeah, when I mentioned the changes that could have been made to speed things up during COVID-19, I was specifically thinking of the example of challenge trials in that example. I think that's absolutely something that should have been rolled out in the United States and that was a missed opportunity there. So it's clear that we could spend an entire podcast episode talking about these topics. We're both clearly interested in them. But one other aspect of this I'll bring up is under the current system where something has to be proven safe and effective. There's a certain benchmark percentage of cases it has to work in. So there are certainly drugs that have been made, tested and denied that would save people today, but they're not going to save everyone. So they're not approved. And I think as we move more towards personalized medicine and perhaps eventually AI, understanding your biology enough to know that this is the molecule that will help that treatment for you, maybe not anyone else, but for you, we're going to have to get around these traditional systems that would not let molecules like that come to market because they don't work for 10 people. They only work for the seven people or something like that. So on the note of the longevity and life extension, I have a question for you on that, which is what is your personal take on this industry? And I guess that's a two-part way to look at that. One is as an investor yourself, what do you think of this emerging market and where it's headed? And what do you as an individual think about longevity and life extension? Is it something that you're thinking about today? Are you making decisions to try to extend your life? And what does that look like? Yeah. So I'm a bit bipolar on the issue, right? So yes, absolutely bullish on it from an investor perspective when it comes to my personal life, a bit less. And the reason is that I always from my entire life was living very healthy. So maybe I don't have the level of awareness that others have. I also think when it comes to sort of the sort of, there's a bit too much of a hype around sort of preventative health, right? Especially when you're young, right? So I think many experienced doctors are saying, well, you know, there's something to be said about fixing things when they're wrong, right? Because there's too many things to prevent for, right? I do think there is something to be said for very easy, low-cost interventions that can be preventative as well, not against preventative interventions. But I think sort of when it comes to my personal life decisions, I try to live healthy, right? So I just cut processed foods and sugar from my diet, for example. So that is great. I do, I'm from an investor perspective, very, very bullish on longevity, especially when it comes to the direct development and treatment side, right? So, you know, I think Brian Johnson is great. He shows or expands to human frontiers and boundaries when it comes to personal health and longevity. But the whole point is to make that easier to access for people, right? He wouldn't even disagree with that. I had a debate with him on an Apparatus Prosper conference. We do want better drugs and better treatments that give you the same effects faster. But of course, there's no magic pill. But if we have just much faster iteration times for longevity biotech, together with computational biology, with AI, with synthetic biology, we can make tremendous progress in the field, right? So before I did the VC fund or found out about Prosper, I wasn't that involved with longevity, I must say. But it was kind of given my focus on the regulatory side and everything that I learned about COVID and the medical system, it turned out to be the field with the highest level of urgency and alignment. Because it's just very obvious, not only do you have the problem of sort of the direct development pipeline, you also have a problem of even funding basic research, right? So that's why you have the decentralized science movement in Vitadao, because aging is not considered or recognized as a disease. So it's harder to get early stage funding for that. So as a child from the longevity community, there's a very high degree of urgency. There's a massive and big goal that's very credible, given the science and the technology that we have. I am longevity pills and I'm convinced and very hopeful that it's what we found about the hormones of aging and Yamanaka factors credibly provides some pathways to fundamentally hold or even reverse aging and make us fundamentally live longer. So that's been a massively interesting learning journey, thanks to people like Sir Bruno Meyer, who's been in my podcast, or Laurence Ayon from Vitadao. I felt we built a lot of alignment and influenced each other a lot in our thinking about sort of using special jurisdictions, using network states to expand different years of longevity and biotechnology. So that's kind of a state that I'm at right now. I focus a lot of my investment activity on longevity biotech. And I'm initiating an attempt to form a longevity network state, sort of using special jurisdictions, maybe like Montenegro, maybe Rhode Island, my proposal would be to do it in Latin America and three or four different jurisdictions. But I'm very excited to move that topic forward. Yeah, I definitely want to get into that some more. So talk about this longevity network state. What does that look like? What is your role in putting this together? And what goals do you have for this? Describe that program a little bit. Yeah, sure. So the starting point is as we discussed that the way things are right now, it's just too slow iteration times and too high cost for longevity biotech to succeed. So if it takes 10 to 15 years to get new drags to the market, the momentum that we have right now, right now we have good funding, we have narrative power. It's very exciting. It's a big goal. But if you don't deliver products that convince people to take them and that deliver positive benefits, then we'll run out of steam. So I don't want that to happen. So I think we need to look for ways to innovate faster. And so the proposal is to look at exit options, right? So we need to look for different places where we can do our innovations. We don't necessarily need to all move to places, but we can use places like Prospera that have better regulatory options. And as in the case of mini circle shows allows you to do faster clinical trials. You can do medical tourism. You can do bio pharmaceutical production and development and things like that. So my proposal is to not decide on one location because that's a single point of failure. You always have political trade-offs, right? So too many things out of the open window, you know, you eventually have to tone down on them, you know, Prospera gets hit pieces just for any mini circle that they invite, right? So that's just very hard for them to say yes to everything, right? Just from a PR perspective. So and also to build like a diversified modern industry, you need to be specialized, right? And to build that fast. I think we should look at jurisdictions that have an existing medical infrastructure, right? So Prospera is the best choice when it comes to the legal stack and autonomy, but not necessarily doesn't have existing infrastructure for like clinical trials, medical tourism and things like that. So my proposal was let's look at some other Latin American countries that I believe could have some of the factors that we want, right? And I made a list together with chat GPT where I looked like things like, hey, does it have other special economic zones just like Honduras? They exist, right? In like Uruguay and Panama and Costa Rica. Does it have spending on medical tourism, which speaks to the trust people put in the brand of the country? So Costa Rica, for example, is a popular brand for medical tourism. People trust it and go there. It has very good governance. Is there VC funding, right? Is there entrepreneurs? Are there startups? Because it's one of my core beliefs that we need to have a strategy that's mainly locally driven, right? So we do want to have a couple of entrepreneurs that built there that come from our communities, but they work together with local talent. I think that's the strategy that made Prospera succeed and we need that for other jurisdictions, right? So the idea is I made a list of like six countries. So Honduras, obviously, because of Prospera and also Zio D'Amoresal, another startup city, Puerto Rico, because it's advantageous for Americans. There's a crypto community. 50% of the GDP is in biopharma. My friend, Sebastian Brunermeyer is there, of course. So it has a vetoed out presence. And the others would be Uruguay, which has existing biopharmaceutical zones, right? And it has also a history of good governance, similar to Costa Rican Panama with existing infrastructure for clinical trials and medical tourism. So I propose we do a journey for two months, together with 40 to 50 entrepreneurs from our community that are willing and open to start something new and move to one of these places, right? So it could be medical tourism, could be drug development, could be sort of on the financing or funding side of things. But if we develop like three or four hubs where we have like three to five entrepreneurs each that start companies and build a local ecosystem, that's an interconnected. And we do like a mini Zuzalu each year for like one month in one of these locations. So we have enough of an in-person kind of cohesion. We get to all our hiring and that fundraising in that one month and people like Vitalik come. So it kind of gets brand recognition and attention and things like that. I think that could provide, that could be a good strategy for sort of making longevity biotech work. And I also think it's very exciting because these Latin American countries are just wonderful, right? They have very rich cultures. They're just progressing massively when it comes to innovation, when it comes to VC, when it comes to startups, they're very affordable, they're very nice, very beautiful. Spanish is relatively easy to learn. And all of these countries that I mentioned are very safe. So I think that's a very exciting kind of journey we could take. And I'm looking to put this together. I would love to put a link in the show notes where people can sign up and indicate interest. They don't need to commit yet. Absolutely. I think people listening to this interview here would be the exact type of people. They'll be great candidates to participate in something like that. I am so excited about the idea of a longevity network state. You can say that things like Vida Dao are existing quasi examples of that, but the fact that you are putting this as the goal, the goalpost that you're directing towards, I think is absolutely incredible. And I thank you for putting that together. And I look forward to following the progress there and seeing what comes of it. I think we'll be covering that a lot more in the coming months and years. So thank you for putting that together. But we've mentioned it many times now, Zuzaloo. Let's get a little bit more about that. I understand you spent some time there. What happened here? What was that all about? Yeah. So Lawrence, I am Vida Dao invited me and I had to juggle a bit between sort of running some conferences in Prosper and Zuzaloo. And boy, did I have FOMO that I couldn't spend the entire two months there. I spent a total of one month there. Zuzaloo I think was a major innovation in the space. And the major innovation is that it proved that with 100 to 200 people that come from a highly aligned online community, you can develop an exciting sparkling in-person civility. You don't need the density of a city with millions of people, right? In a city with millions of people with people like us with very niche interests, you know, you might have one or 0.1% of people that are into that. So you want to be in the same city. So there's enough of those. But Zuzaloo has proven you can bring them to the same place like 100 to 100 people and you get the same effect. You get sort of people running into each other in corridors, talking about synthetic biology, about longevity, about ZK proofs, and the newest cryptographic tech and start doing things together and start forming like bonds and friendships that sustain themselves after. So I think in that sense, Zuzaloo was a major success and it proved also a model that we could use further, right? So 100 to 100 people, one to two months, we can do that in other places, kind of to develop the kind of density that we need to do the kinds of projects that we're thinking about in other locations. So I was very happy and proud to have been a resident or still am of the community and of Zuzaloo. I organized a couple of conferences there, Longtivity and Special Jurisdictions. I did a DND session. I did, I organized a karaoke. The hikes were super fantastic and amazing. The cold plungers and I also did like the first conference that we're bringing together sort of the new cities and urbanism crowd together with the network state detect the crypto crowds. So it was really felt like a foundational moment in the great validation that this is really an inflection point for us as a movement to that makes it feasible to achieve these great goals and ambitions that we have. I agree that it's an inflection point and I think one of the major benefits of it was the press attention or intention in general outside of the community that this event got. More people are aware of this happening, are interested in this happening. It seems like something new and exciting now that many of us have been talking about for years, but now it's starting to enter the consciousness of people beyond the DSI and longevity communities. And I think that's extremely exciting right now. So Vitalik Buterin was very involved in Zuzaloo and is very well known in the longevity and crypto and DSI space. What relevance does he have to this movement? Is he involved in it and where does Web 3 and DSI fit into this overall? Yes, I think though crypto as a whole Satoshi Nakamoto and Vitalik Buterin as one of the great thinkers of our time have been blazing the trail and showing us what's possible to change existing institutions in very deep and meaningful ways. So I always like to make the comparison. So now it's within our reach and it's possible to have a decentralized financial system and free banking and private money basically. So Satoshi Nakamoto showed us it's possible. Before you had like academic critics that would say, hey, the system right now doesn't work. We need to do something else. But there was just no way for entrepreneurs to do anything about it. There was like, even if you had great technology, you would all hinge on like approvals. And then with Bitcoin, you have this permissionless decentralized system that is putting the technology, the product in people's hands without asking anyone for approval and showing it works and then growing by adoption. So I think the crypto and the blockchain space has been blazing the trail. There are ways. There's always hope. And I think that also attracts people like Vitalik Buterin or the decentralized science community to longevity, to health and to biotech, because it's basically the same situation that money was in before Satoshi Nakamoto. We've just become so used to a system of entrenched interests, right? Where it's like pointless to think about sort of new alternatives because that's academic, right? You can make you spend a lot of time reading books, writing papers about that. So the only way to get money for that is by being an academia. And there's been, you know, public choice theory, and economists, Alex Selvrock have been doing great work. But there was just no way for entrepreneurs to do something about it. And what decentralized science and Vita Dao are now doing is opening up that area of innovation. There are decentralized ways through funding, through crypto rails, by through DAOS, right? Sort of that creates sort of that blue ocean, that white space for people to innovate in decentralized ways to tackle some of these problems that affect the real world in like biology and longevity and biotech. And that's, I think, why they are naturally looking for how can we realize that innovation in the real world. And I think that's why that movement is ultimately moving from crypto to decide to network states as kind of the connective tissue to bring sort of the unshame, the crypto innovation to the real world. Yeah, I think Web3 and DAOS, like Vita Dao, for example, are great ways for people to get involved in the network state and maybe make their way towards a physical presence in a place like Prospero or participating in your longevity network state, because it's a way to become a part of this community without necessarily yet changing your physical location. I think taking advantage of the breakdown of the geographic barriers that are made possible through technology of today is a great way to get involved in these communities and have a stake in the game when it comes to these things without actually leaving the country where you currently are. And Lifespan.io, for example, is very involved in Deci with partnerships with Vita Dao and working with Gitcoin through their quadratic funding, funding mechanisms and grant rounds, which are, of course, the brainchild and really supported by Vitalik and others in the community. So I think this is a great way for all of us to work together with Deci and Web3 to boost up these decentralized projects and see where they can take us. And you're doing similar type conferences that you did at Zuzulu, you mentioned doing Summit Prospero. You have the HealthTech Summit in 2022, Supercharging Health in 2023. Who comes to these things? What happens there and are there any coming up that people should plan on attending? Yeah, so the ones that are coming up, one is not in Prospero, it's in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, on July 20 to 23. We focused there on African cities, African cities, new governance, technology and crypto. So that spawned out of Zuzulu as a direct result of it. And we do it together with our friends from Threefold, who are an amazing contributor to Zuzulu and to the conference that are organized. And they are starting basically a new kind of Prospero in the free zone in Tanzania. So they're massively positive new addition to the movement. So in Africa, it will generally be very important for the movement in the coming years. Much of the efforts of the Charter Cities Institute are focused there. We have new projects in Nigeria, in Zambia, in Malawi, and in Tanzania. So I'm very excited about that. Back in Prospero, I want to do many things in October and November, although we're figuring out still dates a bit because we want to coordinate it together with Zuzulu as well. What's definitely going to happen is Eastlet M in Honduras. On October 26th to 28th. So that is a super great opportunity for the country. And my plan is to do afterwards like a mini Zuzulu in Prospero, like a Prospero Builders camp, where we spend like four weeks together and maybe with about a hundred people to do something similar. So we want to run two conference there, Crypto X Futurism, and another one with Deci and Longtiviti. But I can leave a link out to a telegram group where I'll be announcing it, but the dates for that are not definitive yet. For the past conferences, I'm very happy and excited that most of the attendees were Honduran. So about 50%. I think there is a dormant scene for technology and entrepreneurship in Honduras. So there are entrepreneurs in the country with 10 million people. Talent is roughly evenly distributed, but there's not been a single institutional VC investment in the country. Right. So I'm going to be the first one. I'm going to announce the investment soon. It's in the health tech startup, not biotech. Sort of more on the telehealth side. But I want that to be a positive signal for the country. Because in the end, projects like Prospero succeed and so far as they create positive externalities for the country of Honduras and for locals there. And my focus is really on supercharging or helping Honduran entrepreneurs succeed. And the other half is international entrepreneurs. Right. So sometimes some are from our communities, from B-side, longevity, others from the crypto community. So that are attracted for the same reasons that I'm attracted or many circles attracted to it or sort of on the regulatory and voucher side. And also to see what's possible when it comes to pushing the boundaries of human liberty. Right. So because obviously we want to create a place that has a higher degree of personal autonomy and freedom and liberty. So these are typically attendees of the conferences. They're typically relatively small and intimate, 20 to 40 guests. And we, it's more unconference styles. So a lot of opportunity to organize yourself. And the last day is always a pitch competition. So you had a total of 48 pitch competitions as far and several businesses that came out of these pitch competitions that are now active in Prospero or using Prospero as a launchpad from, from other places around the world, or at least has gotten started new initiatives that people started in their own countries. So I think we need to address some of the potential controversy or, or misconceptions that some people have around places such as this. I think a good example of that is I knew and interviewed for my podcast, Aaron Treywick before he passed away, who was kind of a controversial figure in the medical or biohacking communities. Some of the criticisms of him is that he used the word cure when it wasn't appropriate and was potentially charging people to leave the United States for kind of medical tourism to get these unproven treatments, perhaps in hopes that it would cure any of their ailments. Now there's some of that criticism that also levied it potentially places like Prospero where what is the regulation to keep things like that from happening? How can we make sure that people aren't being taken advantage of if they're desperate? What structures are in place to prevent those types of things? And what are your thoughts on the morality and ethics of doing clinical trials or providing treatments in places such as Prospero? Yeah, yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I understand the radicalism of some people in the biohacking space, because I think personal autonomy to make even bad decision on like unproven treatments are justified, right? Same as it is for taking recreational drugs, right? So I don't think we should wage a war on drug users and putting hundreds of thousands of people in prison and destroying their lives and destroying much of Latin America by creating an illegal industry and drug hotels through drug prohibition. I think that's a massive injustice and deeply unethical by the ethical, by the existing system and establishment. So I can understand where people from that space are coming from and kind of the radicalism and impatience. That said, when you're out of the overturn window or at the fringes, that also invites fraud and scam and shady figures, right? So I think it couples most the most innovative and minds that you can find anywhere. But you need to watch out because people are looking to exploit kind of the most free and the most high trust environments, right? So this is why I think it's very important to have self-regulations and to have very strong ethical guidelines and to be just very aware that we're policing our space in a way that can be justifiable also to the rest of the world. That's why I said before, when it comes to things like safety, we should be as good or better than the existing standards and we should be very meticulous in making sure to document it because we have a very high degree of responsibility. I can't comment specifically on Aaron, I've never met him, but when you have a PR disaster, that's setting back the space, right? So that is just a risk you put on the rest of the community, right? If something goes wrong, if someone gets hurt, if someone dies, even if their reason for doing so was their own choice and was justifiable, whatever, whatever, you need to make extra, extra, extra sure because if we haven't made it sure, then that harms the rest of the community and destroys the legitimacy or credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world. The goal is not to stay on these fringes, right? So the goal is to make it more mainstreamable and make it acceptable and make it proven and make it something that the rest of the world can also use. So you mentioned drug laws there as an example. What level of autonomy does a place like Prospera have in transforming laws like that for those within its jurisdiction? I mean, I, for example, I'm completely in favor of the abolition of existing drug laws, I think they should be legal to use, but can that be made legal in Prospera or what limitations exist within what you're working with? Yeah, recreational drugs are unfortunately not possible because the limiting factor for Prospera is Honduran criminal law, right? So Honduran criminal law is for the most part fine, but it doesn't allow recreational drugs. So I would also love if that was possible, but currently it isn't, unfortunately. When it comes to drug approvals, again, it's sort of the system of regulatory pluralism that I described before. So how it works in detail is you basically have three options, right? So the easiest is just to accept common law legal liability, in which case you are technically not regulated or you're not regulated by like an agency or an explicit set of regulations, but you are regulated by common law, right? Common law is punishing you for fraud and is holding you liable in case something happens. And you were to blame for it, right? And actually the punishments under common law are quite harsh, right? So under Prospera common law, you would pierce the corporate veil. So you're personally liable. So you can work without like explicit regulations, but you have a very strong disincentive or an incentive to adopt some form of regulations beforehand. And then you have two options. One is you choose among existing regulations from the top 30 OECD countries. So you're saying, hey, I'm regulated by like Norwegian law or Japanese law, right? So which keeps things very simple because if you worked before in other jurisdictions and you do way of doing business optimized for that, then you can just pick the law of that jurisdiction and can do it there as well. And then the third option is regulatory election. So you can say I want to develop something new, right? So I want to combine the best aspects of the laws of Norway or FDA and X. And I'm proposing it, right? In which case you have to have an insurance company and a private arbitrator, agree to it basically. And then it enters basically precedence and you and others can use that set of regulations and your insurance company and the arbitrator holds you liable for it. Minisurc was actually developing their own regulations right now. We have a bank called Satchel Bank that developed their own financial regulation. So that is something that is, that is very feasible. One of the reasons I'm interested in life extension is I want to extend my own life to see how so many of these things turn out. And also because I have such a limited bandwidth now that I can't get involved in all of the different things that I want to get involved with and help support. And I'm sure you're kind of in a similar situation where there's so much interesting work happening in this space of decentralization and startup cities and new forms of governance that I want to be involved in all of it. What other projects are you looking at with excitement? What other people are working in the space that you're interested in and what's the succeed? Sure. Happy to give a couple of shout outs. I mean, in the longevity space, definitely big shout outs to Vita Dao, to Sebastian Brunermeyer, to Lawrence Iron, to Adam Grease, who've been really pushing things forward there. When it comes to new city developments, as I mentioned, threefold in Zanzibar, also Firmatown and Daniel Yu. In Zanzibar, these are very cool projects. In Qwashi, a charter city in Zambia, it's a very exciting project. In Nigeria, you have Temple Cities and Itana. So these are very exciting new projects, small farm cities in Malawi, so Africa in general will be interesting. Shout out to Vitalik and the Ethereum community in Zuzaloo. Balaji Sune Vasan, of course, because he's been, you know, getting, mimifying the space and getting a lot of attention to it. Well, shout out to everyone, you know, investors who put their trust in me and startups that are willing to, so entrepreneurs are really who carry the world on their shoulders, and I think the most important resource we have in the world to improve humanity. So big shout outs to every existing entrepreneur who is willing to do these kinds of things that push humanity forward, take the risk, take the personal risk and liability to push things moving forward. So I'm very excited to be working with such fantastic entrepreneurs. In the end, my work is all about that, whatever moves the needle and helping entrepreneurs succeed in these areas. So you mentioned the longevity network state, the various events that are coming up in Prospera and beyond. You have your own Stranded Technologies podcast. Where would you recommend people go to follow along with what you're doing to learn more about events that are coming up and get involved in the Submerging Movement? Yeah, so definitely the Stranded Technologies podcast. My blog also calls Stranded Technologies. I'm posting new events there. I have a link tree with some other links to join some of these other communities. I think one group that's definitely good to follow is the Build Prospera Summit and the Events group. This is where it's sort of lowest friction touch points to figure out where the next events are going on. Thank you so much, Nicholas, for joining me on Lifespan News and I'll forward to continue the conversation later. Fantastic, Ryan. It was really epic to be on. Hey, everyone. Thanks for watching the first Making Time interview. We plan to have many more of these, so please subscribe and stick around. Also, leave a comment and let us know what you thought and share this to help spread the word. I'm your host, Ryan O'Shea, and we'll see you next time on Lifespan News.