Building the Future: New Cities, Bold Governance & the Rise of Infinita City with Niklas Anzinger

with Niklas Anzinger

Jan 1, 2026 · 00:45:08

Today's guest is Nicholas Anzinger. He is the founder and CEO of Infinita City, the general partner of Infinita VC, and he's based in Prospera, Honduras, which is a special administrative economic zone on the island of Roatán in Honduras. And Nicholas is doing some cool stuff. He is working in a biotech center attracting some of the best and brightest people, and some people have called it the highest concentration of interesting people on the planet. If you're an entrepreneur with big dreams and big ideas, you definitely want to tune into this episode. And if you like what you hear, give us a comment, subscribe, and like. Thank you so much. Welcome to The Total Entrepreneur Mind, Body, Spirit, where we turn cutting-edge science into practical strategies for entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Dr. John Torrance, Entrepreneur Inc. 5000 honoree and professor of entrepreneurial practice at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Each episode, we dive into mental, physical, and spiritual health with expert guests offering actionable insights to help you thrive and perform at your highest level. Let's get started. Nicholas, great to see you. Thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, John.

Let's start by having you tell us what Infinitas City and Prospera are all about. Well, what are these?

Yeah, sure. So for many listeners, this might be something very new. So is it possible to build new cities and even new legal and governance systems? I didn't know it was possible until 3 and a half years ago when I visited Prospera for the first time, right? So Prospera is an actual place. It's located on an island called Roatan. That's part of the country of Honduras, but it's not kind of what people associate with Honduras. The island is a Caribbean island. It's very safe. It has daily direct flights from Miami and Houston that last only about 2 hours. The infrastructure there is quite decent. The island has about the size of Hong Kong and has about 100,000 people living on it. And Prospera has land about the size of Monaco. It has like 2 very beautiful spots that are side by side. One is a pretty high-end resort and private villas and all of that, that actually used to be or is still a golf course. And the other territory is kind of a greenfield development project, right? So the idea is to build a new city there, kind of a Hong Kong for Latin America. And when I mean Hong Kong, it's not just the physical build-out, like you can come there, you can visit. But the interesting part about it is the legal system. Right. So the thesis is that loads of countries in the world are held back because of corruption. And where does corruption come from? And all sort of political strife? It comes from the way we solve conflict. And this has to do with the legal system. And the idea is that places like Hong Kong or Dubai or Singapore developed really well because of British common law, which is sort of a very business-friendly way of doing law. Right. And countries like Honduras and most Latin American countries are civil law countries. The United States is a common law country, although a lot of it is superseded by civil law. So the idea is really to bring modern institutions to a development country like Honduras, right, as a new way to catalyze economic development. And PROSPERA has been especially remarkable because it introduces like very innovative ideas that legal scholars have talked about for decades. such as flexible insurance and things like that. And my journey with Infinita City, and before that, Infinita VC, was really realizing that there's a lot of technology out there, especially in finance and crypto and biotech, longevity, also in things like hard tech, like energy or drones and robotics, that could really benefit from that innovative legal system. And that's why I got here in the first place. And that's the thesis I'm building Infinita City on, really focusing on building a biotech industry here.

How did you get this idea? I mean, it is a big idea to form a city with its own governance and currency. And so it's really fascinating to me how you came to this. I'd love to hear that.

Yeah, so I'm not the founder of Prosper, right? So Infinita is kind of the biotech district within Prosper as Prosper is building the city. I just found out about it about 3 and a half years ago. I read about it on a blog by Scott Alexander, who's a very famous Bay Area blogger. And I was just, and my mind was kind of gravitating towards these ideas. Like from a very young age, I, you know, I read science fiction and I was having kind of a fire burning in me, the kinds that leads people to become entrepreneurs. And the ideas of space exploration or building underwater or cloud cities, all of that, I was just kind of looking for the frontier where these things are possible. But when you kind of look around into the real world, it didn't seem near or it didn't seem something feasible or tangible. Like, I didn't want to do something pie in the sky, but something that can have a real impact. And sort of my first career, which is actually where we intersect a bit, right? I went to the Maxwell School in Syracuse, was in policy, right? So I went to school, to grad school there, and I went to intern at policy think tanks in Washington, DC. Later public sector management consulting. But I felt like these systems are kind of stagnant, right? They're not like improving. And we're developing all these great ideas, especially at school. But then like implementing them is a whole nother story. And there's all these only incremental changes that result from it. And after that, I went into technology and entrepreneurship. And I found that much more empowering in terms of like catalyzing really large change from starting very small. And that was in B2B AI SaaS, right? So we had like a terrific company that I was feeling very proud to have been a part of for almost 5 years. But then I was looking when I wanted to be an entrepreneur and founder myself, where do my kind of intellectual interests and now my practical skills as an entrepreneur come together? And there was a search process, right? So I was looking a lot into healthcare analytics at the time because it was COVID. But, I kind of felt like anything I could possibly build would just be a Band-Aid. So, the real fundamental reasons why many of these new solutions and technology and science that we have don't take off is really because of our regulatory structures. Not many people know that, but Ozempic, for example, GLP-1s, they're actually delayed by several decades. The first approval for it was in 2003. And, that was for diabetes and later it was used off-label for other things, which is a whole story on its own. And, the science is even older. The first trials happened in the 1980s. And, when you kind of look around mRNA vaccines, similar story. So much of the science comes from the '60s and '70s. So, it's really that there is a very big delay between the science and technology and this innovation kind of entering the clinic. So, I didn't know what to do about that until I really heard about Prosper for the first time. Prosper is in this space, kind of a zero-to-one. So it's a first of its kind, sort of having the ability to work with this kind of limited legal autonomy, being able to create a new set of regulations. I haven't heard about that before when I did that, but I kind of realized, okay, now that's there. Now all these things that I've been thinking about for a long time are possible.

So how is it structured? Is it, it's not its own nation. Is it sovereign? It's an administrative district. So what is Prosper and what does it look like? Organizationally?

Yeah. So in many ways, you can compare it to Hong Kong, right? Hong Kong is a special administrative region with much of their own legal autonomy, right? It is a deliberate creation. It is a subdivision of the Honduran state. So Honduras went through a legal process that started in 2009 and lasted until about 2013 that created these special economic zones. And the creators of these laws were Hondurans. They didn't come from the outside. There's a very famous TED Talk by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer, who gave a TED Talk at the same time in 2009. And he went to Honduras and helped a bit with the creation of that process. And lots of people think that he was kind of the author of this legislation or the main driver behind it, which is actually not true. It was actually very bright, very educated Honduran attorneys that really thought from first principles How can we make this poor country that just went to a coup, that's at rock bottom, what do we have to offer? What can we do different? And they looked at the examples of Hong Kong, of Shenzhen, China, of Dubai, of Switzerland, right? And it's about governance, it's about creating better institutions. And we're building really on top of the legacy of the Honduran founding fathers of that legislation, right? So Prospera is has a special status under the Honduran constitution. You can compare it sort of to municipality, just with an additional set of rights and autonomies. It's not the only of its kind, by the way. There's 2 more of these special economic zones in Honduras that are also worth mentioning in their own right. So Prosper is more sort of the high-tech version of it, but there's also a blue-collar manufacturing version of it that has 300 residents. And before the recent Honduran government came to power, it was just 3 and a half years ago that Honduras elected a socialist government that didn't like these zones and sort of the ideas of capitalism that it would ultimately bring. And there were 27 more applications for zones like that. So that speaks to kind of the quality and the potential of these zones, especially In a couple of weeks, there's new elections, and it's expected that this government is transitioning out and we have a new government that will be more friendly to these zones. And this could be a very big story for Honduras as one of the innovators in governance, right? So Honduras is not the first thing that ever comes to mind for anyone when you think of something world-leading or world-changing, but Honduras could be that.

Right. It really sounds like it. So how does— what's the relationship between Infinita and Prospera then?

Yeah. So Infinita is formally just an independent business within Prosper, right?

Okay.

So we sometimes give the analogy to crypto. I'm not sure if your audience is very familiar with crypto, to a layer 1 and a layer 2. Or in other words, Prosper's building the city, we are building a district within it, right? So we bring a community, we bring people, we create an industry. And Prosper is actually actively looking, and it's actually their go-to-market strategy, to attract other district builders, right? So there's going to be a Bitcoin district, a wellness and longevity district, and many others.

That is fascinating. So within Prospera, and yours is, is it more the biotech? Is that, is that what Infiniti is about?

Yeah, exactly.

So tell me about some of the cool things that are going on there. I was, I was reading about them before we signed on. Just fascinating. I'd love to hear from you.

Yeah. So, we had a couple of notable successes. There is 2 companies that have available gene therapies to patients who want to come and visit here. One is called Mini-Circle. They're offering a follistatin gene therapy. And, follistatin is inhibiting reduction of muscles. So, it basically makes muscle growth more easy and bone strength and density. And, it possibly also has some longevity effects. Brian Johnson, famous longevity influencer, came here to take the therapy. It's also in the Don't Die documentary that is on Netflix. And, the other one is Unlimited Bio. That's a company that's repurposing a gene therapy that has been used already on more than 10,000 patients in Russia. So, we know it's safe. And, they're basically iterating, okay, what else could it work for that it's been approved for? So I think that's a really, really good use case for that Prospera legal system. And besides that, we've brought more than 1,500 people to the islands. We have about 30 to 40 permanent residents here on the ground. We have an online community of several thousand people. We have demo days here, and we brought very big names such as Naval Ravikant, Brian Armstrong, um, or Tim Draper and Vitalik Buterin. So, this kind of shows how much is possible already even though we have been under sort of the political situation wasn't that easy for us the last 3.5 years. Besides that, it's also our explicit goal or vision that we build multiple hubs around the world because having just one location is a bit limiting. We want to scale the kind of innovations we're creating to other markets. And, this is, by the way, why we've been involved recently in right-to-try legislation in the United States. So, we work with the state of Montana to pass enabling legislation under right-to-try, which would make the introduction of therapies that are proven safe but not yet effective by the FDA possible, as well as the state of New Hampshire, which also has recently come out with new legislation.

So, in Montana and New Hampshire, would they be building special administrative or carving out special districts kind like Prospera? Is that the idea?

Not entirely. Okay, that is a possibility that's actually there as well. It's not us pursuing it, right? So there's some other groups of people, um, that are pursuing enabling legislation that would make such economic zones possible in the United States as well. There would actually be very strong zones. The United States Constitution has a very powerful mechanism called interstate compacts that could really create some of the best special economic zones in the world. We don't need that for our purposes. States have the ability to regulate medical services, right? And we basically— the enabling legislation we work with lives under medical services regulation in states that have the ability to create these kind of regulations.

So, in other words, people in those areas or zones could take advantage of therapies and treatments that are not quite ready for the public based on the FDA's position, but they have been shown to be safe and people could access them.

Exactly. And, you know, right to try is a very powerful moral argument, right? So, there is— when you have a potentially life-threatening disease and there is not that many options available, why shouldn't you be able to try something even if it's not yet been through the gauntlet that takes like up to 14 years, right? So, um, there is a lot of people, and there's a very fair argument that a lot of people die just because it takes too long, right? The therapy doesn't reach them in time. In fact, this is a reason really that is, um, really should call for more reform of the FDA, really, which lots of people have tried over decades and failed because institutions are very inert and very hard to change, which is something that I learned from my time in policy and at Maxwell in Washington, D.C., right? So, this is one attempt to encourage broader reform, right? So, Right to Try is the first step. But, I think we can really show that there is ways to accelerate the process to translate biotech innovation to clinical innovation.

So, does Infinita get a lot of medical tourism? So, you said Bryan Johnson came there. So, I'm wondering if the treatments and therapies available there are largely accessible or are they still pretty expensive because they're not broadly available? How does that work?

Yeah. So, it's still expensive in absolute terms. So, the mini-circle gene therapy, for example, costs $25,000. But, it's actually really cheap in relative terms because most gene therapies in the United States cost upwards of $500,000 or $1 million, right? So, there's plenty of gene therapies approved and they're not very accessible to people. There've been a couple of hundreds of patients here that took some of these novel therapies, probably more that took therapies in the Garm Clinic, which is stem cell treatments. So, it is already starting to become a medical tourism hub, but it's still very early.

What is a day like in Infinitasity? Like, what goes on there? Like, what's your day-to-day like?

Yeah, so we live right now in this 14-story tower, right? And my wife and I bought an apartment in the tower, and the tower is really the center of gravity. Around the tower, you have a couple of smaller buildings. You have what's called a circular factory where robots make building materials, which is really cool. There's a hostel that's close by, another coworking space with a restaurant. But other than that, most of the things here are inside the tower. So, inside the tower, we have this coworking space which has really cool futuristic mural art that this local Honduran artist made. So, a lot of life is happening there. And then, we have a lab and makerspace where people can kind of tinker around with both hardware and software, right? So, there's like a 3D bioprinter there and like lots of gadgets you can build with. It's also often used for, you know, having social gatherings and parties and things like that. And then there's loads to do outside as well, right? So we're pretty well integrated with the rest of the island. There's loads of people in the local community that go in and out here, and we visit other places all the time, right? So you need a car from this part of the island, but then in 10 minutes you're out and you have large grocery stores, you have good restaurants. And you have amenities that, you know, tourists would go to. There's resorts and there's even bars and clubs, even especially on the west side of the island. The other part of the territory is slightly separate, right? So it's just a 10-minute drive or a 10-minute beach walk. But there, that's a bit more the golf resort, that's a bit more of a tourism hub, right? So there's people who go in and out that don't even necessarily know about Prosper. For all they know, it's just a resort. But in that part, there's also a couple of our residents that are living there, and there's one restaurant that's also frequented. And also the resort there is a bit higher end. So whenever we have visitors, especially VIP visitors, they stay there. In that part of the location, there's also the Infinita Dome, right? So we've built this geodesic dome that might be one of the largest in Central America. It can hold up to 150 people. people. And this is typically where we have conferences. We're aiming to relocate that actually to the other district, but it's there right now. And then that part, there's also a school, right? So it is family-friendly. The school has about 50 kids right now that are enrolled. Not all of them are from residents in the jurisdiction. It's also locals that send their kids to school there. It's a Montessori-inspired school, so it has a very good quality.

That's amazing. So if somebody's interested in learning more about the other zones and districts, right? You said there's going to be wellness and longevity, Bitcoin. Where would they find information about that?

Well, our X accounts, probably Infinitas City and Prospera Global. I also have a blog myself with a podcast called theinfinitacitytimes.com, and I regularly post information about Prospera there and guides. I wrote something called the Ultimate Guide for Entrepreneurs for Prospera. And so, there's resources available there and my podcast itself. It's a deep rabbit hole for sure. It's something very new.

Yeah. I mean, I spent a few minutes with it and was just fascinated. Sure. So, tell me about the Infinite Games. I was reading about that and that seems like some of the coolest competition around.

Yeah. So, the idea really came— so, in the past, we've organized these events called pop-up cities. So that is probably not familiar to everyone, right? So pop-up cities were kind of, are kind of an idea out of the crypto space. So Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has created a pop-up city about 2 years ago called Zuzalu, which took place over 2 months, right? So people have kind of an experience there that's between a conference and between a college experience, right? So, you know, one is a few days and one is a few years, and this is just 2 months. So people have really time to experience living together for a prolonged period of time during that time. And it was especially attractive for people in frontier technology areas such as crypto, such as longevity, synthetic biology, and things like that. So that inspired us to do a pop-up city as well, the first Vitalia pop-up city 2 years ago, which brought many of the big names that I mentioned. We did another one last year, and now there's a bit of a trend. So there's many pop-up cities around the world in places such as Buenos Aires, Argentina, or Chiang Mai, Thailand. There's different places in Europe and India. Pop-up cities have become kind of a phenomenon or a trend, which also compelled us to innovate and do something a bit different, right? So they speak kind of to a nomadic person typically who's into crypto and into technology. And with the Infinite Games, we wanted to do something with broader appeal, right? So we want to do something fun, something you can bring your friends and your family to. It still has a bit sort of the frontier edge, right? So we're doing competitions like electric knife fighting.

I saw that.

It's very unique.

Yeah, I want to hear about that for sure. Yeah.

Exactly. So, this is kind of coming from the biohacking underground in the United States actually. So, they have these taser knives that are made of rubber, so it's not dangerous at all, right? So, it's a bit like fencing, right? So, you tag someone 3 times. And, we started doing competitions with that and it ended up being really fun. And then, we have things like freediving, a Bitcoin chess tournament, right, which has a sponsorship price of 2 Bitcoin, right? So it's a very large prize. So we're aiming to make that chess competition accessible to young people from Honduras. So we're working with NGOs, um, in the chess world, um, that are aiming to bring chess to, um, to communities like that. Um, and then there will be things like golf and like soccer, like tennis.

Oh, so there's a reef photography competition or something? I saw that as well. Yeah.

So, Roatan has the second-largest barrier coral reef in the world. So, it's just really like a Grand Canyon of corals underwater. It's really beautiful. And most importantly for longevity, we do a longevity biomarkers competition. So, anyone who's joining has the opportunity to sign up as a longevity athlete and gets their measurements and testing done before and after for free. And, they can be part as a result of a study that's conducted by researchers from Harvard at Monash University under an official IRB. And, they have the opportunity to see, to take different lifestyle changes, sports, but also potentially some of the therapies that are available here.

And, how does that work? Do you just register for that? And, what does that cost and how long do you have to be there for to especially say for the biomarkers competition because that sounds really interesting and beneficial, right? So, if somebody's interested in being a competitor or an athlete, how would that work?

Yeah. So, you can just sign up. It's just on infinita.city or long-term.games, long-term.games, or on our Twitter. You find all the sign-up links to all the various competitions including the longevity biomarker one. So, entering the competition itself is for free. You're required to stay for a minimum of 1 month so we can get the measurements we need and it's enough for the investment in the testing that you need. You're still expected to cover your own costs when it comes to accommodation and travel and things like that. From the United States, it's especially easy to get here, right? So again, as I mentioned before, Roatan is just a 2-hour direct flight from Miami and Houston, right? So from New York, it's just like one layover in Miami or Houston and you're there, same from San Francisco. And then over there, the accommodation and rental, it's much cheaper than the United States. So, it's not like Honduras prices, it's still a bit of a higher end. We have a hostel option where you can stay for like $20 a night. And then there's private rooms for $40 to $50 a night, and sort of more higher-end villas for like $100 to $200 per night. So, you sign up for that. And what's kind of novel about this is we run the competitions on our own cryptocurrency, a stablecoin. token called Lives, right? It's the currency for people who don't want to die, right? And so, it's just stable, right? So, it's pegged 1-to-1 to the dollar. So, you buy these tokens and then you can use them everywhere here with more than 50 vendors, right? So, from car rentals to the accommodation to food and restaurants and everything. And, you can buy them at a discount, right? So, you can basically get everything here for now for 10% cheaper. And also by using the currency, you earn rewards basically as contributions to the community that you're making.

So you can buy the stablecoin with dollars, and do you put them in a crypto wallet, or you actually have— there's no physical coins, right?

Exactly. So we have our own wallet that's really optimized for making it easy. So you don't need any crypto experience. There's just some simple steps you need to follow. And we abstract away all the complexity. There's nothing like gas fees, or you don't need to know what blockchain the token is on, right? So it's just like a very easy wallet comparable to, you know, a bank account that you'd hold, but without like the signup hassle of a bank account.

Right. And these games are going on in February and March of '26, is that right?

Exactly. All of February and March. And you can really come for, you know, some people stay the entire time, but you can also just visit for a couple of days and join any of the competitions that kind of pique your interest.

Right. Is this the first one or has this happened before?

So the Infinite Games are the first of its kind. So this kind of competition in this format, I'm not aware of. It's of course inspired by the Olympic Games and the Olympic Village, right? So there is like several competitions going on in the same place and yes, you know, several sub-competitions and several athletes' competitions there. But this is kind of the frontier version of that.

Yeah, it's really cool. Have you, have you seen any registrations or are there any notable people who are already committed to participating?

Yeah, we just announced the details quite recently. So we have a couple of dozens of signups by now. We expect that we'll have like a total of about 500. That's what we had in the past. The stretch goal maybe is 1,000 because this time we also have like lots of sponsorships for us at the sub-competitions, like the chess tournament. So with each of those competitions, we're aiming to incentivize them to attract people to come to their competition.

That sounds really fun. I might— I've got it on my calendar, actually. I might have to come check that out.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what are you excited about? What are you— I mean, in a world of exciting things where you live, what excites you?

That's a very good question. It's hard for me to say because, again, this has been such an unlock for me to move here, right? So, you know, with the topic of your podcast, kind of my zone of zen or where my mind, body, and soul is kind of resting was always in a place of growth, in a place of progress, right? So I kind of came to the United States about 12 years ago aiming to find that, and it's still there in many ways. But I also felt in some ways there is internal struggles and politics and things like that. And places like New York and LA and San Francisco, they just have so many problems, right? And they're getting in many ways worse. So, I wanted to go to a place more like Hong Kong on day one or Dubai in the beginning, even though sort of the architecture is not so much my style. But or Singapore maybe, and experience really the growth or the birth of something really new like this. And this is kind of what my life here is like. So I'm really most excited about new people coming here, bringing their ideas and doing something real. Like there's always someone who builds like a new real estate project, someone who wants to make the drone delivery finally work. We've been talking about this and trying to make it work for, for a couple of years now, someone who brings a new therapy, a new scientific insight. This is like, I never stopped learning here, right? I don't know much about biotechnology or the sciences. And now I'm surrounded by people who are at the frontier of their science or their field all the time.

It's been described by somebody as the highest concentration of interesting people on the planet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really neat. So in terms of your own business and your VC fund, what types of deals are you seeing? What are you liking? And maybe, you know, talk about a cool success story you've been part of?

Yeah, sure. So my VC fund, Infinita VC, it's already outinvested, invested in 32 companies, several of which are here, where I kind of use the fund as kind of a brand for people to consider kind of moving here and checking this out. So the companies that I mentioned, Minicircle and Unlimited Bio, are certainly very exciting in that regard. There's some other companies here that are not biotech, right? So there's a bank here, right? So called the Network Bank. There's a company here called Westy that makes tax compliance much easier for small businesses by using the Prosper jurisdiction. So these are kind of the ones that are good to— that are very illustrative of what we're trying to build here. But this is sort of a broader network, right? So, not all the biotechs I'm speaking to or that I've invested in are here yet. So, it can be a very good option for them, but it needs sort of a bit more infrastructure or they're not yet in human trials. They're sort of in animal studies and things like that. So, there is a lot of biotechs for whom I want to create this as an option in the future. So, I constantly see a deal flow of companies, especially in bio, a little bit in crypto, even if they haven't yet moved here. And now what we're doing is we've built this basically a network of investors that are investing in the companies that are here instead of raising another fund because raising a fund is very time-consuming and I'm building a VC-funded company now, right? So we decided instead of raising another fund, we just forward it to our network of investors. And there's people like Tim Draper, or Adam Draper and Boost VC, or Balaji Srinivasan, a former a16z partner, who are just very keen on seeing more startups coming out of this. And they've funded dozens of the startups that came through here. So that can be a big advantage for a startup that is considering moving here or spending more time in this ecosystem.

Do you have one or two that you're especially proud of or really find exciting?

Yeah, I mean, my proudest success story is certainly Unlimited Bio, right? So this is a group of entrepreneurs from Russia and from Israel. So they are making, they're really having kind of the most clever use in terms of their business model that they're building by using Prospera, right? So almost all of biotech is kind of shoehorned into making new science, right? But, the science can't be too innovative or having too large effects, right? So, it's a very specific narrow pathway like better than standard of care and things like that, but it needs to very narrowly fit into the categories of the FDA, right? So, longevity and aging itself is not considered a disease and things like that. And, there's one big gap with that process. Which is there's a lot of drugs and treatments out there that we know are safe, and they're approved for something, and but they could work on other things, right? So GLP-1s are actually the best example. They were approved for diabetes, and then the company would need to go through reapproval again for a different indication, right? So this drug works for diabetes but also for weight loss, right? Or, this works for this one type of cancer and also this other. And, the company has the most information about that but they are not allowed to market that. They're not allowed to market the insights and data that they have. But, it's not illegal to do that. And, who's allowed to do that is clinicians and doctors. And, that's what we call off-label, right?

Hmm.

So, through clinical experience, clinicians are figuring out there's other use cases for certain drugs and therapies that is seen at work in patients, they're basically doing sort of decentralized small-scale efficacy trials, you know, which— and this is why the discussion already points at that market mechanisms can actually sort out, um, actually can efficiently allocate resources to effective drugs. Right? So, it's not that there's medical anarchy if there's no efficacy trials. We already know that works. And, it's even a suboptimal process because the companies with the most data on it are not even allowed to market it. So, that company Unlimited Bio is basically realizing that and they're saying, hey, we're taking drugs that we know are safe and that are approved for something and just repurpose them on different indications. And, this is only possible in Prospera because there it's so cheap to do it. and to get to market right away for them as a company that can hold that data, right? So, this is a really novel and unique use case, but at the same time, it's so obvious, right? So, I really hope this can be an inspiration for many more companies to do the same thing really because this is, I think, really the way to build new big pharma companies, right? So, big pharmas virtually have unchallenged Um, it's a virtually unchallenged oligopoly because as a company you need to work for 10 years on the research and just on the product. And during that— and then you like sell. And during all that time you never interact with patients, you never create your own distribution, right? And then when you've done your research, the research for 10 years, you know, competing with Big Pharma on distribution, um, that is, that is really, really hard, right? Because that's what large companies and economies scale are good at, right? But if you start early and innovating on distribution mechanisms and direct-to-patient models, then you might actually have a shot as a startup.

That makes a lot of sense. And so I'm wondering, are there, are there certain drugs that, um, that this company is working on specifically? Like, you know, things that prescribers can prescribe off-label, but there's not a lot of data that the drug manufacturers can use to promote it for that indication?

Yeah. So, what they're doing is a VEGF gene therapy. So, what it basically does is it increases your blood capillaries. So, that increases things like oxygenation of the blood which can be used to treat all sorts of things. So, I'm not 100% sure what it's been approved for, but it can be used for skin rejuvenation, it can be used as a hair loss treatment. Right? It can be used even, and that's what they're actually working on right now, against erectile dysfunction. So, there's a lot of use cases for that. And, it's also known that the therapy is safe and it works. So, it's just making it work for something different.

Right. So, drugs that are safe and effective for various indications but you can't get them in the U.S. or other places because the government hasn't approved them yet. But, if you found a practitioner who is willing to prescribe it off-label, you could get it. So, this will hopefully make it much easier because there will be data. Is that the idea? So, does Infinite Bio, will they go ahead and sell that research and data back to the manufacturer or does it not matter because these drugs are already generic? Or, how does that interaction work between Infinite Bio and the original manufacturers?

Yeah. So, in our case, Unlimited Bio is a separate company.

Unlimited Bio, sorry. Yeah.

And, we're an advisor to them. So, this is where we hold equity and we benefit. How they get to large markets, that's kind of an open question, right? So they have a starting point here, and now they're working with other clinics around the world. So for example, they're working with a Mexican stem cell clinic, which actually led to their treatment getting used by Khloe Kardashian, right? So she recently posted about that. So Khloe Kardashian has been treated with a gene therapy that started in Prospera, right? So when you're a company that starts there, you can— you have different options in terms of distribution and go-to-market. With the IP itself, I'm actually not 100% sure how it works in their case because they're licensing the IP from someone else, right? But I presume that they have a deal where if they get like good data on it, they can sell it back to the IP holder in some way or form. Or it gets them, grants them like additional licenses for additional like regions or jurisdictions to give the gene therapy to patients there and thereby reduces their licensing costs. So it just gives you more tools in the toolbox as an entrepreneur without necessarily having like a— so this is still new and we're still figuring out how to make that ultimately work, right? And that's what the startup process is all about. Like it's discovering, it's discovering a scalable business model.

And tell me about your demo days. So you have demo days where— do you invite external biotech companies there? Or is it an incubator, like kind of like a Y Combinator model where they're there incubating, and you have demo days for them? Or is anybody able to go?

Yeah, so we do a mixture. So it is like you say, right? So it's kind of an incubator model, right? So we bring in companies here and on site, we do a bit of a program, we help them with pitching, with go-to-market strategies, with product development strategies. We— and then we have the demo day to present them to our network of investors. So we invite the investors to come to the island or online. And then we distribute kind of the most successful startups that we see during that time.

Gotcha. So you've got a network of investors who don't live on the island, but you bring them in to watch the demo days.

Exactly.

Yeah. Now, so you've been on Prospera now for 4 years?

3 and a half years. Yeah.

3 and a half years. Yeah. So prior to that, back up like 5 or 10 years, could you have imagined that you'd be doing this in this place?

Well, if you ask my diary, I have imagined things like that in the past. It's funny because in my high school yearbook, there's a section where you write about yourself, what you've been doing in 20 years. And I pretty much said that I will work on like some utopian city project somewhere. Wow.

Okay. So even back in high school, this was, this was clear that you were doing this.

It's at least it was somewhere in my imagination. I wouldn't claim to say that I made like a conscious plan to actually figure out how to do that. But at least that's kind of where my imagination and my curiosity guided towards me. And I'd say that's actually also an important lesson for entrepreneurs, right? Um, there is this great Paul Graham essay, you know, Paul Graham essays, anyone entrepreneur should read them, but it's called The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. And it's basically trying to, um, it's like a guide for where, in which area can you do your best work as an entrepreneur. And it's kind of not as you'd, not where you'd think, right? So Many people think, and probably in business school or whatever, people teach a very rational process where you go through different industries and just map all the problems. And then you're like, how scalable is it? How feasible is it? How much of a fit are we with this? Whatever. And to some degree that works. But Paul Graham said, actually, there's a different path. And the path is actually, it can be described really as following your curiosity. So where your mind kind of gravitates towards, and do not be afraid if it's something that people do not care about, and that does not immediately or obviously seem to be like a business idea. Like he invites you to like hold that thought. Don't think too much about that. Just go where your mind is gravitating towards, and that in hindsight was it for me. Like these. Sort of sprinklets from like the high school yearbook and things like that. But also, I've been, especially during the pandemic, been reading so much literature and so many books. Like I went into this deep rabbit hole into like governance and public choice and free market economics and all these things. And also all the startup lessons. You know, Peter Thiel talked about, you know, innovation in the world of bits, but stagnation in the world of atoms and things like that. So I just went into like a deep rabbit hole during that time while I was building kind of a rational software business that seemed to like be plausible and be aligned kind of with my skills or what I could do. But then I realized, hey, actually where my curiosity is leading me is something else. And it really took me to see that it's actually possible and that others are already doing it kind of to unlock, okay, here is actually where I'm meant to be. and where my curiosity is guiding me. It was fun because afterwards I did the podcast, right? And I had already read all these people before that I later invited on my podcast, right? So—

Yeah, it's just a really cool combination of, yeah, your interest in policy and governance and biotech and science. And it's just a really, really interesting story. And I appreciate you sharing it with us very much. So, if people are interested in learning more about you and your work, where could they find you?

Yeah. So, infinita.city, that's where you find the Infinite Games and also what's been going on here so far and a bunch of our content. Otherwise, check out X, right? So, it's just my name, Niklas Anzinger, not very hard to find. And, you know, check out our podcast, the Stranded Technology Podcast. Yeah.

And, if there's one thing you hope people take away from this conversation, what is it?

Be courageous, right? Be bold, right? You know, take— do not be afraid to take big shots in life and fail in the process, right? And then try again.

That is great advice. Well, Niklas, thank you, and hopefully I'll see you at the Infinite Games this winter.

Thanks for having me, John, and see you there at the Infinite Games.

Thank you so much for listening to the Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit podcast. If you liked what you heard or heard something interesting today, please give us a like, share a comment, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. Thank you.