Notes from the Edge (Esmeralda)

Notes from Edge Esmeralda

Coming out of Edge City, I have so many learnings. It was a month-long altered-state experience in many ways, at once foreign and exhilarating and like a long-lost home. Here’s an initial reflection on some of the gems I’m taking away. Many will develop into longer pieces over the coming weeks and months. Let me know if any feel particularly interesting to you.

Edge Esmeralda Women’s Nourishment Dinner - one of countless offerings that invited deep connection and presence during the month-long pop-up Community.

What Edge Esmeralda was

Edge Esmeralda was a month-long pop-up village in Healdsburg, California, part of Edge City’s broader ambition to be a kind of “society incubator”: a lab for new ideas, technology, culture, experimentation and ways of organizing, all in service of human flourishing. It gathered people from the frontiers of tech, consciousness, science, and culture to live, build, and experiment together, grounded in a few core principles: multidisciplinary, multigenerational, co-created, and healthy by default.

That last principle of the four core principles, healthy by default, really captured my imagination: an environment designed so that just going through a normal day leads to optimal health, rather than having to go out of your way to create it. It invited me into a question that has been alive for me and has taken deeper root over the last months: what does real health actually mean? I didn’t agree with every idea I encountered about the answer, and I didn’t have to. What I treasured was the high-agency, bold experimenting and embodiment in many different direction.

Each week of Edge Esmeralda had a different theme, and the topics blended and blurred as the weeks went on.

• Week 1: Protocols for Flourishing: Health & Longevity, Consciousness, Wellbeing, Bio & Neuro.
• Week 2: Intelligence & Autonomy : AI, Governance & Coordination, Hard Tech, Privacy
• Week 3: Emergent Futures & World Building: Art & Culture, Decentralized Tech, Creative AI & Technologies, Spatial Computing.
• Week 4: Environments of Tomorrow Focus: New Urbanism, Education, Energy & Climate, Food Systems.

‍

Over 250 people were there for the full month, with more than 800 attendees in total. Scientists, artists, engineers, educators, researchers, founders, military vets, and community-weavers shared the same tables, and the walls that often keep those worlds apart dissolved. The whole village was itself a prototype — a living test run that will inform the culture of a permanent land-based community called Esmeralda being developed nearby.

Beyond the handful of potent offerings the Edge City team curated each week, a slick scheduling app opened the floor to the whole community. It reminded me of a giant Agile Learning Center, and I sense that’s why my family felt so at home here.

Participants contributed their own sessions, spanning embodied experiences in yoga, meditation, and consciousness; academic and intellectual offerings across an incredible range of topics; and more playful invitations: trips to the hot springs and river, bike rides through Sonoma County, Acro-yoga in the plaza, an ‘Urban Joy Safari’, shared meals, late-night dance parties, a foraging and plant walk in the hills. All told, over 800 offerings appeared across the four weeks.

Woven through it all were recurring events that gave the month its rhythm: a town hall on Sundays, community dinners at local cafes, lunch in the plaza, and the ever-energizing Demo Day, when people gathered to share — in about five minutes — whatever projects they’d been working on while at Edge.

Add one more textural layer: the Residencies — application-based deep-dive tracks, often with participants living together inside the broader Edge Esmeralda experience. They ranged from a Consciousness Residency for researchers to explore what Consciousness is to a solar-punk “Touch Grass” Residency, from an Inflection Point Residency for people at a major life transition and a Zee Prime Residency for Founders with ideas too risky for traditional venture capital, to a Vibe Coding Residency that mentored Edge participants and local Healdsburg businesses in ways AI could support their initiatives. These tracks added depth and intimacy, and they enriched the wider community through what they shared back — relevant findings, unique offerings, experiments, dinners, house parties, and more.

During the “Building New Worlds” week, Jon and I shared the Agile Learning Centers model and found ourselves among people circling the same questions we keep asking: how do we build cultures worth living inside of, and what is the invisible infrastructure of these contexts that can actually hold thriving for the human and more-than-human world?

Edge Tomorrow: our kids

The Edge Tomorrow Residency was a context specifically designed for younger members of the community to experience and live into Edge City principles, and it was intergenerational by design, not a “kids program.” I’m pretty picky about the educational contexts I’ll put my kids into, and they’re pickier still, so the fact that we were all deeply satisfied by the experience says a lot. We were joined by a family we love from Gainesville which set all our kids at ease from Day 1. Trey, the oldest resident attending for full month, surprised us most: he stepped into real leadership with the younger kids, and showed a particular skill in process design that I couldn’t have imagined. And Leo had a lifelong dream come true, and is still wearing his Edge wristband weeks after leaving – he says he’s going to start a collection of them from all the Edge City events he’s going to attend.

The gems I’m taking away

Move from inspiration, not from fear. Everywhere I looked, I could feel the future that’s possible: my 8-year-old vibe-coding a game in under 30 minutes, painless at-home biomarker testing, new “network” countries, virtual reality learning environments, regenerative urbanism. When I look for things to fear, they’re abundant; when I look for things to be inspired by, they’re equally abundant. I want my focus and energy nourishing the inspiring future, not habitually focused on the things I want to avoid.

Consciousness and intention matter more than ever. The stories we tell ourselves about what’s possible already dictate the life we experience, and that will only become more evident over the next 50 years. We’ll each face many crucible-moments in the coming decades, and our capacity to meet them from presence, trust, and connection will shape the reality we individually and collectively create. Who I am now is not who I’ll be in 10 minutes, let alone 10 years. I don’t control the external circumstances I experience, but who I become as I navigate them is mine alone to determine. I want to walk through these initiations with consciousness, intention and presence - and recognize them as the opportunities they truly are.

The old paradigms are coming with us. We carry fear- and control-based systems deep in our unconscious, in our nervous systems, even in our fascia, and we’ll recreate them in subtler ways with the powerful new tools we’re stepping into. Nearly every human system we’ve built rests on foundational misinformation about how life actually works, and technology layered on that flawed foundation won’t “fix the problems,” it will reveal them more rapidly. Real transformation asks us to examine the underlying assumptions and embody something new, and be in honest relationship with results. Practice partners in this are invaluable at reflecting blind spots and navigating the inevitable uncertainty and discomfort skillfully.

The 100-year glitch. I recently heard the last hundred years described as a “glitch” in human history: a strange stretch when humans had to act like machines because the machines hadn’t caught up yet. Now that they have, the machine-work goes back to the machines, and humans go back to being human. It’s disorienting to face a future where the things we’ve built our identities around lose their old value. Skillfulness in releasing those old identities — and being fully present with what’s emerging in the moment — feels like a key to navigating the coming transition with grace and trust.

What does it mean to be human? This question only gets more interesting from here, and the value I most want to pass to my kids is that all of this wild innovation is extra. On a very basic level, we are animals; this natural world is our actual home, and our bodies evolved over hundreds of millions of years to thrive within it. The things we really need are gifted to us in abundance. All these other layers and tools are wonderful to play with — part of creation, not separate from it — but the practice is to keep tending your animal nature and re-orienting, again and again, from scarcity and fear back to abundance and presence. Sometimes, the answers are so simple it’s easy to miss them entirely.

What is the purpose of education? As the existing systems are increasingly exposed as inadequate to prepare young people for the world they’re entering, I’m deeply with the question of what I want for my own family, and what I want to support in the communities and systems I’m part of. Contributing the wisdom I already hold to contexts that grow high-agency, high-integrity, creative, purposeful, and powerful people — who aren’t looking for permission and are also highly skilled at interbeing and relating — feels like an inspiring invitation. Edge City offered a tantalizing taste of one prototype. If you’re developing another experiment, consider me a resource, and know that I’m rooting you on.

The Role of Parenting in this Age: For years I've navigated a tension in my role as a parent. Am I a guide, helping my kids discover the insights and ways of being that have been meaningful to me? Or more a spaceholder, inviting them into their own insights and paths, even when those don't feel meaningful or aligned to me? I can see the value of both, and I've certainly vacillated between those poles. I’ve long sensed it’s not one or the other. What's coming clear now: my role is to help them develop the patterns and habits I believe will help them thrive — while making visible that they are just patterns — and to help them become skillful at recognizing and breaking patterns that once served them, or served me, but no longer do. If they can do that, they can create a meaningful life in any context, by their own definitions. Which particular patterns we develop doesn’t feel as important as knowing they are patterns and knowing how to make new ones when we want to create something different in our lives or our world.

Never a big fish in a small pond again. Reading through everyone’s intros before arriving at Edge Esmeralda, I felt an unusual feeling for me: intimidated. Being surrounded by so many wildly interesting, creative, and accomplished people was a tremendous growth experience, and I left with many of those same folks as friends, collaborators, and cheerleaders. I never want to be a big fish in a small pond again.

AI as a coordination tool. I got a crash course in working with AI and a sneak-peek at what people at the frontier are building. Each of us had our own agent, briefed on who we are and what we’re looking for, that could “talk” to everyone else’s agent and connect us to people with projects and intents aligned with our own. In another experiment, Simocracy, we each created a digital twin that voted our values to help distribute a $10,000 pool, refining it daily to track our intentions more closely. I even vibe-coded a version of the Agile Learning Change-up meeting for use in bigger communities, and I’ve since created apps for my family that support self-direction and growth even when we’re spread across the globe. You really don’t need to know a thing about programming — but discernment and clarity about what you want to create are critical to using AI well.

For me, there is a very interesting thread running through all of it: until now, coordinating across large groups of people has depended on pyramidal hierarchies. The technology now exists to coordinate without those pyramidal power dynamics — and that opens whole new worlds for how we organize ourselves.

What’s next

Let’s GOA!!! This lifestyle and context is a great fit for our family. Convening the Regenesis Incubator in Galápagos last year was a highlight of my life: Jon and I focused 40 hours a week together on a shared creative project that aligned with our values and our deepest gifts, with our kids fully integrated in the experience. Edge City checks those boxes on a whole new scale, and it offers something that’s felt elusive for a long time: how can I play like this without being at the center of it? The next Edge City is this October in Goa, India, and we’ll be there. We’d love to invite others to join us. If you have questions, reach out or comment here and I’ll respond.

Know someone who might LOVE to join us at Edge City Goa? Share this post!

These are the standout gems I already know have changed my life, and I bow in honor of the ones that will reveal themselves over a much longer timeline. The real fruits of experiences like these come from seeds planted along the way that continue revealing themselves over a lifetime. Deep gratitude to Rae & Justin Hancock for jumping into yet another crazy adventure with us and making everything flow like a dream, and to Kianga Ford and Zach Anderson for knowing me well enough to point me toward this Edge. What a gift.

‍