Hijacking Billionaires' Money to Build More Regenerative Communities

The next step for my mission

I’m writing to you from a pop-up village in San Francisco hosted by

Viva City

at a 16-floor building recently purchased to be a hub for technologies at the frontier of their field.

We’re vibing with other founders and builders that focus on longevity biotech, crypto, and AI.

Hosting a workshop here at the tower

I’ve been specializing in regenerative village design for 7 years now. I feel a turning point in my career, and my special-hobby hound dog has locked onto a new scent.

An extreme amount of capital is flooding into life extension, longevity biotech, biohacking, etc. It’s the billionaire fad.

And I intend to hijack it.

While I swirl around people pushing venture capital into regenerating the thymus gland to reverse aging and spending tens of thousands on tests to understand their toxic burdens, I understand that there’s a narrative that I can spin. Some of my pitches have sounded like:

• “You can’t live longer if you’re in a toxic, polluted, system, right?”

• “If you’re abolishing aging, you’re going to have to change the way you think about resource extraction.”

• “What if we lived in places holistically designed for long life?”

Recently I've created this term environmental wellness to refer to our intrinsic need to have a healthy, non-toxic environment in order to live longer. Combining architecture, environmentalism, and social systems for wellbeing, I hope to challenge the default ways that we create our built environment. After all, if you’re trying to live longer, you can’t be a NIMBY. If there’s pollution upstream, it’s coming to you.

helping people visualize what the future should really look like

In the past 2 years I’ve been exposed to projects like Infinita City, the Free Cities movement, and my friend Laurence Ion’s

Viva City

.

The absolute obsession for most of these projects is to get extremely friendly terms with the host government to allow for accelerated longevity research. Yet I am shooketh to learn that these people building “longevity cities” have barely considered what the built environment will look like.

To give them some credit, they have contemplated some cultural reinforcement of healthy lifestyles and integration of tech for health. But redesigning our cities/society at every level to eradicate life-negating practices? With holistic regenerative principles?

That’s where I come in.

Last week I designed and hosted a short workshop with the group discussing what it would take to build longevity cities. See the slides from the workshop + a preview of the regenerative longevity microcity I’m building at Pando (formerly Eternità).

As living longer becomes an actual scientific possibility, I hope to shift the narrative to horizon-thinking of how we treat our planet, and how we design communities as thriving ecosystems that support human and planetary flourishing.

IMO, one can’t exist without the other.

And we need to convince capitalists that we need a pristine environment all over the world if we are going to live longer.

---

A Personal Shift on the Horizon

This pop-up is awesome. I’m meeting amazing community builders like

Nico Shi

from Agartha and Charlotte Fradet from Protopian Convergence / Unity Coliving. Connecting with founders, tech geniuses, and overall rad folks. Come swing by SF, the pop-up goes until Aug 4th.

All that said, being exposed to the amazing energy here has given me the perspective that I may be stagnating in the enchanting little bubble in nature that is my current community.

The problem is that it’s slightly isolated. I’m a bit too young to be settled down in the country.

Some people would just say “travel more”, but I’m hoping to have a home base that is more central to regenerative activities and slightly closer to an urban center with high levels of social activism and change. I’m crushed, because I absolutely love Wild Seeds, but I am feeling the interesting pull to explore other places to live. A wanderer’s feet may never rest.

Invitations and recommendations for other communities are welcome <3