Vitalia

Description

1. Jonathan Hillis:

"Vitalia, a network city for longevity, received a grant from the Zuzalu spin-off program. They hosted a popup village in February 2024 in Honduras. Vitalia was different from Zuzalu in two key ways: they focused the event mostly on one topic (longevity), and they did it in a place where they intend to build a permanent home base (Prospera).

By focusing more narrowly, Vitalia was able to attract an aligned audience and go deeper on longevity: a biohacking lab, workout groups, healthy food, cold plunges, a biomedical hackathon, and relevant speakers like Bryan Johnson and Aubrey de Grey.

Even more importantly, Vitalia was hosted at Prospera, a special economic zone in Honduras that has the ability to offer biomedical treatments not approved by the FDA. This makes Prospera a great permanent home for Vitalia and the companies in its community that want to be able to work on longevity treatments. By seeding a focused community with recurring popups and the intention to build a more permanent location, Vitalia has developed a deeper sense of purpose and permanence than Zuzalu.

It is also a strong example of the symbiotic relationship between existing states and special economic zones that provide favorable regulatory anvd legal frameworks, and communities that want to build on top of these frameworks. You can think of it a bit like blockchains, which have L1s with base-level security guarantees and L2 communities built on top of them."

(https://words.jonhillis.com/popup-villages/)

2. Toby Shorin:

Travel log from March 2024:

"Vitalia, the City of Life, has brought together a large cast of characters. Niklas, the large-bodied German investor and one of the main organizers of Vitalia, strikes a stern figure which is overcome by his kind disposition and long surfish hair. Morgan is a warm and noticeably intelligent woman whose extensive career through research, medicine, and cybersecurity betrays her real age; she looks no older than 25. There are the eccentrics, such as Jose Cordeiro, a noted futurist who frequently shouts IMMORTALITY! to the smiles and cheers of other Vitalians. It’s a slightly more diverse crowd than I imagined, both ideologically and ethnically. Participants are from many countries, including some from Honduras.

Most work adjacent to tech, some with medical backgrounds but also joiners from cryptocurrency and AI research. It felt nice to be in a place where I could just explain my own convoluted career with a line like, “I ran a research organization in crypto.” It’s not a group of people who overvalue credentials—thankfully, for I have none—but it’s a rather accomplished group nonetheless. Many are medical doctors or have advanced degrees in specialized fields of biology or neuroscience. In one town hall, someone asked, “How many of you have started a business?” About 100 hands went up and only a few stayed down.

I arrived on a Thursday, which is when Vitalia holds its weekly “builders update.” It’s a time for residents of the temporary city to give updates on their projects and to pitch ideas to the group. I sat through a few garden variety pitches: crowdfunding a massage table for the wellness room, starting a longevity-focused scientific journal, and so on. Then a very fit, bespectacled Russian man, Petr, stepped to the mic, and in broken English introduced his company’s vision: safe head transplantation. He stammered and gestured his way through a slide deck, explaining his recent advancements in spinal cord separation in rats and how head transplantation needs to be improved if artificial bodies ever become available. His stumbling English sentences somehow added to his charisma. This, I thought―this is the stuff I came to see."

(https://careculture.tobyshorin.com/field-report-vitalia-the-city-of-life/)