Inside My First Longevity Pop-Up City: Physical Community for Life Extension

Caring about the science of healthy longevity in most modern societies can be a deeply alienating experience.

While friends and family eat late, carb-filled dinners cooked with seed oils, down bottles of alcohol, and avoid exercise like the plague, you can start to feel a little like a freak. 

Here you are, tracking your biomarkers religiously with multiple different kinds of wearables, carefully measuring every bit of nutrition you put into your body, reading scientific papers for fun. 

And yet you’re constantly having to endure media bloviating about how Bryan Johnson is going to die despite all his efforts at longevity, hearing friends joke that they’d rather die five years earlier than forego that piece of cake, being asked why you won’t break your fast “just this once” to try that new restaurant.

The truth is, most people, in most places, aren’t aligned with the idea of increasing human longevity, if they’ve even heard of it in the first place.

And I used to think that was just the way of it. If you were interested in longevity you could connect with the small (but growing!) online community of fellow spanners, or try to find that one friend who doesn’t give you the side-eye when you mention wanting to live to 1,000, but otherwise you’re stuck practicing your life extension regimen in relative isolation.

And then I visited my first longevity popup city.

I attended (and actually helped produce) the Viva Frontier Tower longevity popup city for about three weeks out of its six-week run between June 20th and August 4th, 2025.

And it was eye-opening.

Viva Frontier Tower

The event was run by Viva City, for whom I’ve been doing some marketing consulting (I’ll have another post detailing Viva City—a fascinating attempt to create a special legal jurisdiction to accelerate longevity therapies—later).

It took place in the Frontier Tower, which is a 16-story office tower in downtown San Francisco, recently purchased by some German entrepreneurs (with the help—if rumors are to be believed—of crypto bigwigs like Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin). It boasts coworking, tons of events, and eventual coliving space.

In fact, the Tower is an intriguing project of its own; designed to be a “vertical village” for frontier technologies like AI, crypto, and, yes, longevity. The founders hope to turn it into a model for other towers in other cities, eventually linking them all into a “network state” of aligned futurists, entrepreneurs, and technology optimists.

It’s still early days (the Tower purchase was only concluded in April this year), but already the building has over 300 “citizens,” each belonging to one of the themed floors. Longevity is floor 11, and will eventually feature a longevity clinic with interventions like a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and red light therapy offered to members.

Yet even now the Tower’s been built out to a remarkable degree. The bio lab on floor 8 is fully functional with a clean room being installed soon, and I got to witness some biotech floor citizens casually making a follistatin gene therapy (the same one longevity influencer Bryan Johnson takes in his Don’t Die Netflix documentary, but without the $25,000 price tag) after a chance invitation at a Tower rooftop rave. There’s also a makerspace, arts floor, robotics lab, AI floor, and a floor for “human flourishing” replete with infrared sauna, snacks, and massage table.

And the vertical village aspect is already very much present. The Tower itself feels like a true community. Everyone you meet is genuinely welcoming, interesting, and helpful (total strangers will help you carry heavy boxes when they see you struggling in the entryway). And every chance encounter seems to lead to something interesting, whether a formal event (like a robot cage match, DIY CRISPR workshop, or talk by Tibetan monks) or something casual like a community dinner or the aforementioned gene therapy synthesis.

The Viva popup city turned all this up to 11.

What is a longevity popup city?

The idea of pop-up cities is relatively new, although, as with most good new ideas, it combines many old elements.

The pop-up city movement (and it is a movement now, there are dozens of pop-up cities happening worldwide) traces its genesis to Zuzalu, a two-month pop-up city hosted by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in Montenegro in 2023.

From that seed have grown scores of new pop-up cities, focused on everything from culture and art, to crypto, to longevity, and more. Here at Longevity Advice we even covered Vitalia, the first longevity pop-up city, in our article on top longevity events and conferences (and right before Viva Frontier Tower, SF hosted another longevity pop-up city called Vitalist Bay!).

A pop-up city, as envisioned by Vitalik, is distinct from a conference, fellowship, or retreat, but blends elements of each. 

It is meant to be one order of magnitude longer than a conference (4-6 weeks instead of 4-6 days), and an order of magnitude larger than a hacker house (200 people vs. 20). It is essentially a bridge between a weekend conference and a permanent community. Almost like a dry run for a full-time city. 

And a longevity-specific pop-up city is just that, where the community, environment, and programming are all designed to optimize for healthy habits, interesting connections, and new, life-extending projects.

The experience at my first longevity pop-up city

Imagine you wake up to an invitation on your phone to join a 7am run (you decline because today is a resistance training day for you—sorry Derrick!). 

You go to the community kitchen to make yourself a green tea (sweetened with allulose) and on the way run into another popup attendee who is building a longevity education non-profit for recent college graduates. She invites you to a talk she’s hosting about new methods to detect and kill cancers using “radiotherapeutics.”

Tea in hand, you grab an open desk in the shared co-working space to get a little work done before lunch. Next to you another attendee is building a functional age testing app using studies you had shared with him from a project you’d put together before. It’s already being used by attendees in a friendly competition to see who can lower their functional age the most during the pop-up.

Lunch is a healthy mix of different top longevity foods like avocados, carrots, lentils, and salmon on a bed of lettuce and drenched in quality olive oil. It is held around a long communal table, and over food you get to talk to other attendees about everything from using crypto to fund longevity science, to which sleep wearable actually provides the best data.

After eating (and enjoying some more conversation about the nature of the universe) you join a group of people going down to the gym for an afternoon workout. In the gym, everyone encourages each other, pushing, spotting, and sharing techniques. It’s hard work but you all leave smiling and sweating.

At the cool-down session, again in the community kitchen, you drink some water with creatine from the shared stash of longevity supplements, while others make up batches of Bryan Johnson’s “nutty pudding” longevity dish for a post-workout boost. 

People are talking about how to use the Kernel brain scanning helmet recently loaned to the pop-up by the company’s CEO at last weekend’s Longevity Summit (where you got to meet and talk to some of your heroes in the longevity space, including experts like Aubrey de Grey and Greg Fahy). 

In fact, after doing a little more work, you sign up and get your own brain scanned by the $100,000+ helmet and its algorithm gives you a “brain age” score to track (and hopefully reduce!) throughout the next few weeks. While you do this, others are getting continuous glucose monitors implanted in the room next door, or using some of the onsite biological age test kits.

After attending the talk on radiotherapeutics, which is intimate and gives ample opportunity to ask lots of questions of someone building the bleeding-edge of longevity technologies, you share an ad-hoc community dinner with some of the other attendees. Conversation over healthy food feels effortless, because everyone shares similar interests, passions, and baseline knowledge. You meet someone who is starting a longevity clinic in Montana and discuss the opportunity to collaborate together.

Finally, as the day nears to a close, you join some other members for an evening longevity sauna session in the onsite infrared sauna. Conversation turns to philosophy, dreams, and projects.

You go to bed that night feeling accomplished, healthy, and alive.

The benefits of a physical longevity community

All of this, the healthy lifestyle, the serendipitous connections, the meaningful conversations, occurs easily, naturally.

None of it is forced, all of it just happens, because the environment and the community are optimized to allow it to happen with the minimum of friction.

You don’t have to make yourself go to the gym when five other people you’re eating with are planning to go together anyway.

You don’t have to make yourself eat healthy foods when that’s the only thing everyone else around you is having.

You don’t have to make yourself go out and meet new people, because all the most interesting people, doing and building things you’re curious about, are already around you every day.

Longevity is the default, and compared to the struggles of incorporating healthy habits while living in the “real world” it feels like emerging into clear sunlight after trying to fight through a sea of molasses.

And the community of people, more so than the availability of healthy food or of fancy longevity amenities, makes it that way.

For me, it was a revelation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald sums up my feelings best:

He was talking about the community that literature can bring, but I think it applies equally well to the community a longevity pop-up event can bring.

It’s hard to describe the frisson of energy that is created by being around other like-minded, optimistic longevity enthusiasts, all of whom are excited about the future and about building something meaningful.

This is probably not an earthshaking revelation for most people, but for an introvert who has been working from home the last six years and making do with only the ersatz community of the online, it is nothing short of miraculous.

Sure, you’re getting concrete benefits from a longevity pop-up city, like making business connections, and building a network, and possibly even getting investors during the demo day, but for me the intangibles of being part of a true community outweighed all of these.

Building alone can be incredibly disheartening, even with a supportive online community to interact with. 

Enough has been written about the atomizing effects of the internet era that I won’t belabor it, but I can hardly express the value of the inspiration, the energy, and the sense of optimism that being part (even just temporarily) of a physical community aligned with your beliefs can bring.

As Ayn Rand described in The Fountainhead:

It’s like a cold plunge for your soul.

And I know it’s a feeling I hope to recapture as and when my soul needs it.

What’s next for longevity communities

There are already additional longevity pop-up events planned for this year and next.

Edge City Patagonia will be likely hosting a longevity residency in October/November (no pressure Denisa!).

Cyprus may be the location for a longevity pop-up in October.

Late this year or early next, LA will be hosting a pop-up city focused on the intersection of longevity with arts and culture, and how movies and stories can get people interested in life extension.

And there are probably half-a-dozen others I can’t remember off the top of my head.

I’m hoping to attend at least one of these, if for nothing else than to reconnect with the friends I made at Viva Frontier Tower, and would love to see some of you there as well!

A Longevity Advice event

Finally, after experiencing the transformative power of physical longevity community firsthand, I know I’d like to offer something similar to the Longevity Advice community here. 

Maybe something next year, a retreat focused on actionable, accessible, affordable longevity habits. Maybe start with something small, 10 or 20 people over 3-4 days, and see how it goes.

Interested?

Sign up here and let me know in the comments!

See you in the real world.

I’m the co-founder of Longevity Advice and have been passionate about radical life extension ever since I was a teenager. Formerly I was a content marketing director in the B2B software space. I’m also a sci-fi novelist, wargame rules writer, and enthusiast for cooking things in bacon fat. My sister once called me “King of the Nerds” and it’s a title I’ve been trying to live up to ever since.

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