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Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Meet Jim O’Neill, the longevity fanatic who’s now RFK Jr.’s right-hand man


“The healthiest societies in 2030 will probably be on the ocean,” O’Neill instructed an viewers at a Seasteading Institute convention in 2009. In that presentation, he talked up the advantages of a free marketplace for well being care, saying that seasteads may supply improved well being care and function medical tourism hubs: “The final greatest hope for freedom is on the ocean.”

Some within the longevity neighborhood see the last word purpose as establishing a community state inside the US. “That’s primarily what we’re doing in Montana,” says A4LI’s Livingston, referring to his profitable lobbying efforts to create a hub for experimental medication there. Over the past couple of years, the state has expanded Proper to Attempt legal guidelines, which had been initially designed to permit terminally sick people to entry unproven therapies. Beneath new state legal guidelines, anybody can entry such therapies, offering they’ve been via an preliminary part I trial as a preliminary security take a look at.

“We’re doing a freedom metropolis in Montana with out calling it a freedom metropolis,” says Livingston.

Patri Friedman, the libertarian founding father of the Seasteading Institute, who calls O’Neill “a detailed pal,” explains that a part of the thought of freedom cities is to create “particular trade clusters” on federal land within the US and win “regulatory carve-outs” that profit these industries. 

A freedom metropolis for longevity biotech is “being mentioned,” says Friedman, though he provides that these discussions are nonetheless within the very early levels. He says he’d probably work with O’Neill on “altering rules which can be below HHS” however isn’t but sure what that may contain: “We’re nonetheless making an attempt to analysis and outline the entire program and collect assist for it.”

Will he ship?

Some libertarians, together with longevity fanatics, consider that is their second to construct a brand new experimental house. 

Not solely do they count on backing from O’Neill, however they consider President Trump has advocated for brand new financial zones, maybe devoted to the assist of particular industries, that may set their very own guidelines for governance. 

Whereas campaigning for the presidency in 2023, Trump floated what appeared like an analogous thought: “We must always maintain a contest to constitution as much as 10 new cities and award them to one of the best proposals for improvement,” he mentioned in a recorded marketing campaign speech. (The aim of those new cities was considerably imprecise. “These freedom cities will reopen the frontier, reignite the American creativeness, and provides a whole bunch of hundreds of younger individuals and different individuals—all hardworking households—a brand new shot at homeownership and actually the American dream,” he mentioned.)

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