Longevity event came at the tail-end of a crypto X alignment event (that ppl like Simeon_cps and Jessica Taylor and Tarun Chitra attended). There was supposedly a party with Grimes on that Sunday I missed.
I met Gary Sheng at the first breakfast (he does gitcoin PR and someone said he had the best webpage ever [idk if i agree]). I met some of the “alternative states/governance” people but not deeply
First catching up with Minicircle people (they are personally very important to me)
Catching up with the LEVF team - Caitlin Lewis is SO important and sensible (want to know her better) - she is more understanding of neurodiversity than most biologists!! I may be invited to the Ireland longevity conference in August.
She reminds me SO much of https://www.linkedin.com/in/haylee-johnson-b9682b202/ . She also remarked that she took an instant liking to me after meeting me the first time on Monday May 8
Also caught up with gero.ai team (and gerosense team) - their team might relocate to Serbia and then the US to get more funding. I think they want to find more funding from adventurous VCs
Some updates with the “Vassarites” (who also came)
And with Anton Kulaga and Newton Winter (who both offered to re-sequence my nebula genomics genome => convert to a more reliable vcf file) => also they need to rework on the PRS score algorithm
There are some Humanity Inc people who came, as did a grad student [Kristen] at UCLA who reminds me of a new Morgan Levine (Kristen).
Lots of exposure to Eastern Europeans (which is important - Eastern Europeans don’t have many of the cultural hangups/“need to be qualify or be apologetic” that Westerners do)
It’s not quite as advertised (in the sense that people are not really practicing pro-longevity practices there - the food is certainly not the most pro-longevity food possible [I saw people eat pizza dinners], and there aren’t enough pure vegetables => it’s mostly Lustica Bay resort food).
Some people went off for low-friction epigenetic age testing (and Humanity and Glycanage) testing - there were too few kits to distribute
A lot of bioinformaticians there! (even if not many GRC-like scientists). And meeting more of the VitaDAO extended team
There is the standard “people who talk more than they do” crowd [there’s def a group of “longevity groupies” who go to ALL the foresight/VitaDAO/LBF events that they can get ahold of], but ultimately bandwidth is limited by the amount of people you can talk to in a day, and there is more than enough of them to overwhelm the “longevity advocacy talkers” crowd)
Two events: One is the basic “longevity zero to one” event, and the second is the “biotech investing thing” (the one that Joe/Jean Hebert/etc go to)
Peter Fedichev being there means A LOT
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Many people are staying for several weeks (well beyond conference lengths) - which gives more room for chance unforced encounters with people over time [gives you time to digest why you want to meet someone before you force an interaction on them - this is important for me b/c I adopted “why greatness cannot be planned” (a very Taoist/“unforced approach”) as my profile picture].
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I didn’t get much distracted by the crypto people (too much noise), but some of the core Vassar/AI objectives crowd I did engage with at some level (nice to have it without forced interactions!)
Coworking space is REALLY NICE (with external monitors to plug laptop to)
It also helped me recover a lot from my serious accident/nicotine overdose last year (that’s part of the reason LN prodded me to go [eastern europe ALWAYS helps b/c it is more decorrelated with the west than other parts of the west are])…
*Michael Vassar has a baby in a baby cradle…" [for all the controversies and antisocial behavior he may have had caused to a certain community when he was younger, I think his having a family now makes him way lower-risk than he was before]. I overheard him saying that “controlling agents smarter than you” is what power-players do to nerds right now… He talks a lot to the “sensemaking” Daniel S
[there was a soundbath event yesterday that I msised due to seleping in dmanit]
God time flies so fast during this event… It’s not at all like previous times when I travel and when time feels to SLOW/the days seem to prolong a bit.
Also for a longevity-focused event, they could AT MINIMUM use plastic-free coffee cups… at least they label them “containing plastic” unlike the US…
[I also saw Vitalik several times but did not approach]
