Week 1 Recap
A look back at programming highlights, community experiments, and village life.
Limited weeklong, day and weekend passes are still available! Grab yours here.
Over the past seven days, 250 participants have gathered in Healdsburg to prototype new ways of living and building together. The village has become a high-bandwidth space for ideas, relationships, fun and world-class experimentation.
Below is a snapshot of what’s been unfolding.
By the Numbers
~250 participants over the course of the week (100 full month residents)
65+ sessions hosted
8 active community led experiments across health, hard tech and new financial models
5 thematic tracks across consciousness, health, AI, protocols, and transhumanism
Programming Highlights
A few standouts from the week’s agenda:
Laura Deming led a Transhumanism workshop, where participants mapped technologies like brain-computer interfaces and AI across axes of nostalgia, innovation, and adoption.
Mike Johnson introduced his theory of vasocomputation, linking blood flow, consciousness, and trauma, with implications for human potential.
Jacob Peters, co-founder of Superpower, ran a blood biomarker initiative, testing 100+ metrics of health, longevity, and performance across the village.
Brendan McCord kicked off the Cosmos Institute seminar with a talk on truth-seeking AI, autonomy, and the future of epistemic infrastructure.
Protocol Worlds with Timber Schroff, Venkat Rao, and Tim Beiko previewed the future of open-source education with mock university courses on state capacity, climate, and AI alignment.
Experiment Highlights
As always, we want our villages to be places for experimentation of early-stage technologies. We’re already starting to see examples of projects that could have a huge impact on society in the future.
Avery Krieger launched Constellation, a pilot to build the first foundation model of brain state, aimed at curing mental illness and enabling next-gen brain-computer interfaces. Participants are wearing neural caps for one hour a day across a week, collecting real-world neural, behavioral, and physiological data.
Keoni Gandall piloted a DIY wet lab to automate biotech experiments. After building DNA assembly robots from scratch, he ran the lab’s first successful test on-site, confirming key DNA bands from water samples.
An off-grid solar datacenter is currently running on-site, powered entirely by solar energy and battery storage. Built by Ben James, the system supports GPU-intensive projects and invites participants to contribute hardware and experiment with sustainable, decentralized compute.
Community Highlights
Throughout the week, we’ve seen the community sense-make around new fields of research, push forward new initiatives and rally around shared experiences. Great examples of culture and momentum taking shape across the village.
The Long Journey Ventures team brought a series of immersive, presence-based experiences to the village. One night, a screening of The Matrix turned into a real-life “red pill” moment, leading some participants to a surprise sauna and health session. Later in the week, they led an off-script urban safari through town, centered on spontaneity and play.
Vibe [insert]ing has quickly become a community favorite. Hands-on AI experiments like vibe coding, vibe designing, vibe songs, and vibe friending. These sessions explore how generative tools can amplify creativity, connection, and collaborative building.
Community Town Hall kicked off for the first time this week, giving participants a space to share feedback, make announcements, and align on what we’re building together.
Demo Day followed with a rapid-fire hour of in-progress work across software, hardware, research, and beyond. Highlights included a vasocomputation white paper from Nick Ford, a collective intelligence bot from Jack Mielke, and Squaretower’s liquid markets for compute, shared by Neha and McKay.
Village Life
Outside of programming, the village continues to take shape through daily rituals, morning workouts, social gatherings, the presence of families and kids, and a shared focus on collective wellbeing.
Daily sauna sessions at Hotel Trio have quickly become a central evening ritual. First sparked at last year’s Edge Esmeralda, continued through Edge Lanna, and now revived, the sauna has become a cornerstone of village life.
Russian River rafting took the form of a 30-person float led by Telamon (four hours, no phones, all floaties tied together) creating a slow-moving organism of conversation, fun, and mild sunburn.
Kids Camp at Dragonfly Farm kicked off with a strong first week. From nature play and arts and crafts to DJing and learning about electricity, the kids dove into hands-on fun and found their own rhythm within the village.
Movement has been a daily thread! Run club, morning yoga, and strength sessions at World Gym, plus spontaneous HIIT workouts, trail hikes, and pickup games of basketball, soccer, ultimate frisbee, and volleyball.
What’s Next
This is just week 1/4, and the momentum is only growing. We’ll be sharing weekly updates and recaps as the village continues to evolve!
If you’ve been thinking about joining us at Edge Esmeralda, now’s the time. Programming runs through the end of June, with upcoming weeks focused on:
Reality Reinvented (June 1-8)
Environments of Tomorrow (June 8-15)
Emergent Futures (June 15-22)
Whether you’re a builder, researcher, investor, artist, or simply curious, this is your invitation to engage with some of the most thoughtful work happening across tech, culture, and community.
For partnerships, sponsorships, or press inquiries, feel free to reach out at info@edgeesmeralda.com. We’d love to connect!
– Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️
p.s. highlight video from Keoni’s lab!
Edge team — for protocol worlds it was 90% Timber Schroff’s work. Tim and I barely did anything :) Would appreciate an edit to that effect.