Inside Vitalia: Innovation, Longevity, and Life in a Network State
The perspective of Vitalia's youngest resident
To all the folks who don’t know me, my name is Denisa, and I have been a Vitalia Builder for a week now.
Vitalia Builder <=> resident of Vitalia. Interesting way to connect people and form community, you’d say.
I typically hang around Europe, where I am finishing up undergrad. Funnily enough, my university was recently renamed to Constructor University, making me worthy of the “Builder” title (I guess?).
I fully consider myself a longevity person but I talk a lot about hobbies I brush up on here (art, meditation, AI) besides my main “business” (longevity).
This post recognizes the continuous origination and development of Network States, which Vitalia is inspired by.
Wait, Network States?
“The Network State: How To Start a New Country” by Srinivasan Balaji — influential figure in tech and crypto, who coined the term of Network State.
Nation states are the form of societal structure we predominantly have now: communities of ideologically misaligned people, whose main distribution is based on geographical location.
Network state = community of ideologically aligned but geographically spread people.
Such community is able to pursue and contribute to the goal it sets (e.g., health- and lifespan extension).
While it initially starts off digitally, it aims for land acquisition through crowdfunding.
It is typically based on a crypto-economy and passing its borders would require e.g. a cryptopassport.
Diplomatic recognition by at least one nation state becomes eventually crucial.
As you might intuit, there are tons of questions with blurry answers around the Network State concept: is the blockchain technology necessary? How much can network states physically grow? Will nation states interfere with such growth? etc.
Vitalia itself aims to create an environment biotech companies will strive to be part of, to accelerate their drug testing timelines and discover those longevity drugs we yearn for.
What is Vitalia?
The city that will make death optional. One day it might pop up in your country too.
Vitalia is a pop-up city (i.e., a temporary city that a collective of people move to) now located on the island of Roatan, in Honduras. Vitalia is made up of a few artists, a smidge of network state folks, crypto/AI folks, and a whole lot of longevity enthusiasts.
Vitalia is part of Próspera, a special economic zone designed to promote economic growth and job creation. Eventually, settlements like Vitalia would become permanent hubs – Próspera being one of many locations considered, making Vitalia a global decentralized initiative.
Próspera being a special economic zone brings its own obvious advantages, such as the recognition of Bitcoin as currency and conducting clinical trials that would otherwise be challenging or even illegal in other countries (or, nation states).
Nonetheless, there is great compliance to general rules of thumb (see the Legal Compliance of Vitalians): we all strive for maximal innovation, but picking the lowest-hanging fruit will pave the way for us to reach the most inaccessible pome. We wish to be bold in visions and research approaches, and adhering to logic and reasonability is painful but necessary. All in all, it’s a safe but not extreme playground for experimentation.
Experiencing Próspera: Why is it ‘unique’?
Coming to Próspera was different than I knew.
My month-long stay required me to register as a ‘Próspera e-resident’. (Required for any stay longer than 1 week). The e-residency provides access to business and governmental services.
Erick Brimen, initiator of Próspera, was inspired by the success of small countries like Hong Kong or Singapore; his incentive was to create a platform for talented individuals, particularly entrepreneurs, to use their strengths for the better.
Funds to build Prospera were raised through Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Peter Thiel invested considerably in longevity companies (Alcor, Metuselah Foundation, Unity Biotechnology) and is well known for his fellowship – is there any connection there? A mystery left to be uncovered.
It’s a safe gated community on a touristic island, yet the discrepancy between its inside and outside showcase Prósperan wealth and extravagance. Can these pour into the surroundings to help the “host” country prosper? I haven’t been to Hong Kong or Singapore, even less so other network states like Praxis, but I doubt there’s an easy way for this to happen.
What makes Vitalia important?
Shortening the timeline for the first longevity drugs.
Bringing drugs to the market is a long-term issue, as decades can pass between ideation, initial tests, and drug approvals and commercialization. Now, if this is the case for regular drugs, think about how long it would take to get a drug that fundamentally and explicitly alters the process of aging or that increases human longevity out on the market. The goal of Vitalia is to solve the problem of overregulation and shorten the timeline from decades to a mere few years. Functioning in a financially forward economic zone like Próspera helps achieve the overarching goal.
How is conducting clinical trials here more effective than in the US?
Costs are reduced in many areas; e.g., licensing lipid nanoparticles wouldn’t be necessary in Prospera, but would be needed in the US
The FDA is sometimes sleeping on drugs and devices, or regulates their distribution too strictly
Time is money, and the FDA can heavily prolong the duration of the clinical trials
The clinical trials would be just as meaningful and responsible
Goals aside, Vitalia is so much more! It is a space for creation and innovation, stemming from non-stop discussions about human healthspan/longevity, governance, artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto. When you meet someone here, the habit is to ask “which side brought you here?”, and roll with the topic brought up.
As someone here said, Vitalia is like a workplace, just without the bad parts. It is
Decentralized; the official organizers of Vitalia don’t act like bosses or authorities, rather, they have been for me older brothers, knowledgeable and open
A light-hearted environment; you can join whatever events you want; no mandatory work meetings
A home; you can build, create, and hold events as you please, as long as you conform to the rules
A place for people with the same goals and mentalities to come together and support each other; now, it’s a mix of longevity & crypto & AI, but more focused places are bound to sprout.
Who comes here?
Vitalia will be around Roatan for a total of two months. (At least that was the original plan. Now, there is a possibility for a further one month extension. Imagine how many things you can get done in 3 months in a paradise island, with Builders like yourself.)
So who are the people with enough flexibility and an open mind and interest to relocate here for a short (or not so short) period of time?
non-traditional path followers (e.g. full-time employees in DAOs/the crypto industry)
roles that allow people to work remotely in biotech (e.g. founders, VC employees, few computational biologists,
barely any academics can be spotted
personally met a couple recent graduates and PhD candidates, no undergraduates
Biohackers and enthusiasts with other full-time jobs (e.g. personally met a bunch of biohackers who were video game coders)
Most people are either curious or straight-up involved in longevity, crypto, and network states, from any stance you can think of – lawyers, investors, nomadic freelancers and artists included.
This is great and all, but how can we get a better demographic representation of academia here? If funding is the issue, for students and others in need, financial aids are available. Commitments to physical location or academic duties are nonetheless hard to be given up on and the rewards of being here aren’t clear enough to be convincing, for most academics.
How’s this experience different for me – me being part of the underrepresented demographic of “undergraduate students” – compared to the others here?
Vitalia is a small village of quirky people. The free breakfasts are for meeting people; the trips and leisure activities are for building in-depth connections; the conferences and events are for collaborations. All of these have at the core the experience of learning. And it’s not the school type of learning, which makes it so much better.
Crypto and AI people are overrepresented because they more often have flexibility to be wherever, whenever, but this is an opportunity for crossing the boundaries of your own field and see where interests overlap.
People are open to meeting and hearing your story, since there has to be an unspoken overlap between what you are interested in and what they are interested in. Conferences are more about other overlaps – e.g. the work you do or the funds one has and one wants to give out – but here there’s an atmosphere of pure curiosity. I don’t know much about crypto, but I’ll listen to your rant about IP-NFTs because we take breakfast together or because I saw you at these two events and we started saying hi to each other.
You’re limited by how much time you can spend here, but this period of time is almost certainly longer than the average period you’d spend at a conference. This means people aren’t hurried in meeting one another, and they can listen to your story more closely. As an undergrad, you might not have much to offer in terms of information and investment money, but you are a rare occurrence with some time and energy at hand.
My first week here
People often ask me whether this Caribbean island is a productive place to be in, or I merely turned my time here into an unofficial holiday. The palm trees, sloths, and infinity pools do construct a fun place; that fact I can’t deny. However, the stream of people and events preserve a balance between lessons and distractions.
Days start early, around 6:15 am for those who meditate on the pier at sunrise. (I personally prefer to wake up at 5 and wait inside the house until the extravagant breakfast starts at 8; although the great distances your eyes can trespass when you look toward the ocean from the pier, and the alluring dynamism of the ocean are irresistible.)
Then come the events, up until about midnight — pick and choose whichever you wish to attend.
For your own well-being
To keep your mind clear: meditation (Chilli meditation is offered too, for those who want to involve their tastebuds in the process)
To keep your body active: fitness, HIIT (high-intensity training), sauna, martial arts, and aerial courses
Leisure activities: board games, Burning Man-like temple creation, art program, philosophical debates
The cool stuff
Biohacking gatherings
Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (GARM) Clinic visits
Conferences (one 3-day long conference every 2 weeks)
Journal clubs on the biology of aging
Book clubs (the first one turned into a 2-hour long discussion on network states)
Visits to other places around Prospera/Roatan
To keep Vitalia under control: Townhalls and office hours
To have fun: anti-longevity longevity parties and birthday parties
Key facts of the week
There are many apps to help you get going into meditation, like Waking Up, to assist you in a personalized journey. Starting small is efficient: scale up from 5 minutes of meditation before and after bed until you reach the much appraised anxiety-free states
Breathwork is more common here than eating carbs (by far). This is particularly true/evident given the 2-week long biohacker-run trial: they recruited a couple dozen people to wear continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) – devices that measure blood glucose in real time, typically prescribed to diabetics – who will be testing out a low-carb diet for a week, before jumping to their normal diet, or to experimenting with different drugs and activities (e.g. hot/cold temperature extremes)
The Network State book is the main piece of writing to be read on, well, network states; it contains definitions of the latter in one sentence, one image, one thousand words and one essay, and is freely available online.
Agoutis, cute rodents that run around Central and South America, are related to capybaras, guinea pigs, and chinchillas! The Roatan Island agoutis, alas, are an endangered species.
What’s next?
From Friday, Jan. 19, to Sunday, Jan. 21, the LongBio conference (Part 1) will take place. (Part 2 of the conference takes place at the end of February.) Having helped with the organization of this conference since its ideation, I am excited to share in an upcoming article the experience of it.
Have thoughts on this topic? We at LongX strive for collaboration on a Global Scale.
Reach out to the team at LongX and collaborate with us!
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