Edge Esmeralda 2026: Month in Review

Four weeks of living, learning, and building together in Northern California.

July 8, 2026

Parting Notes & Gifts

Photos & talk recordings: All photos and talks from EE26 can be accessed in the drive here.

Free copy of Free Agents book: Cosmos Institute, our research partner on the experiment, is giving folks interested in the future of agents and AI a free copy of Free Agents, the upcoming book by Brendan McCord and Harry Law on retaining human autonomy under frontier AI. Claim your free copy ahead of the Q1 2027 release: https://edge.cosmos-institute.org/

Feedback: we’d love your feedback for how we can improve in the future.

Edge City India: runs October 11 to November 1 in Goa. Apply here and follow along on X or Instagram for more updates.

Overview

For four weeks, 850 residents gathered in Healdsburg for the third edition of Edge Esmeralda. They came from AI, biotech, health, urbanism, education, and the arts to prototype the future they want to live in, together.

From metabolomics studies to AI agents to new city models, the month worked through the ideas shaping the next decade, alongside familiar rituals like Hotel Trio saunas, weekend redwood hikes, and community picnics in the plaza.

Here are some of our highlights.

By the Numbers

850 residents across the month
60+ countries represented
48 kids
4 thematic weeks
800+ sessions, talks, workshops, and experiments
10 residencies
200+ residents hosted their own programming

Programming Highlights

Every week's anchor track was shaped by partners and collaborators who brought deep expertise into the village. Some of what they built with us:

Vital Futures, our health and longevity anchor track for Week 1 led by Justin Mares, brought together Nathan Price of the Buck Institute on computable healthspan and Akshaya Dinesh’s Women's Health Summit. Cyan Banister and Mike Wang taped a live show of Reframe that became a community ritual by the end of the week.

Psychedelic Futures Summit, co-curated with Daniel Tarockoff (MAPS) and Katya Levy, closed Week 1 with more than thirty speakers from across psychedelic science, medicine, and policy, including Robin Carhart-Harris of UCSF, Betty Aldworth of MAPS, and Bia Labate of Chacruna. Sessions ran on entactogens, sound ceremony, and group decision-making, alongside a Shulgin Lab and farm tour.

Intelligence & Autonomy, our AI, neurotech, and governance anchor track for Week 2, opened with Sondre Rasch of SafetyWing on Building a Country on the Internet. Additional sessions came from Ivan Vendrov (formerly of Anthropic) on Supercooperation, David Shor of Blue Rose Research, Joscha Bach's Machine Consciousness Salon, and Yaniv Tal of Geo on collective memory.

Into the Neurome, hosted by Zachary Miller and running through Week 2, gathered neuroscientists and hardware builders for daily working sessions on brain-machine interfaces, foundation models of human state, and open-source neurotools.

GenJam, a four-hour AI film hackathon co-hosted with Machine Cinema, invited residents to learn AI filmmaking tools, sprint on team shorts, and screen what they made on the theme of Dream Town: a trailer for a future worth living in.

Environments of Tomorrow, our anchor track for Week 4 led by Kevin Fishner and Devon Zuegel, closed the month on cities and the people building new ones. Devon spoke on Esmeralda (the permanent town project), Ryan Johnson on Culdesac (the car-free neighborhood in Tempe), and Jeff and Brandon Beck on Bennet, alongside talks from Phil Levin on housing, Jonathan Hillis on public safety, and Elle Griffin on utopian cities.

Notion at Edge Esmeralda, our first year of formal partnership with Notion, ran a Small Business Lab that paired Notion's team with leading Healdsburg restaurants, wineries, and shops, alongside a month-long Buildathon on Notion's newly launched developer platform with custom agents, deep dives, and free credits for residents to build with.

Emergent Futures & World Building, curated by Justin Melillo (CEO of Mona), focused on what worlds we should be making. The week opened with a fireside between Justin and Robert Scoble on what the world looks like five years out, followed by keynotes from Philip Rosedale of Second Life and Dasha Navalnaya, and two live tapings of the Endgame podcast by Amanda Cassatt.

Future of Education, curated by Andrea Gallagher and running through Week 4, convened school builders and reformers to share alternative learning models, with sessions from Sam Chaltain on the purpose of school in the age of AI, Katie Caves of ETH Zurich on the Swiss apprenticeship model, and Kam Bellamy of Springboard on microcolleges.

Residencies

The month-long popup format gives residencies something that's hard to curate elsewhere: a live community of peers, ongoing programming, and hundreds of adjacent fields to draw from, all in the same place at the same time.

Below are some of the residencies that ran at Edge Esmeralda 2026.

Long Journey Residency

Long Journey Ventures returned for a second year to co-run the Long Journey Residency, bringing together ten founders for a month of building together. Residents ran weekly demo days and prototyped projects ranging from orbital refueling and ocean robotics to AI memory systems and clinical-trial intelligence.

Meet the Long Journey Residents →

Consciousness Residency

Hosted at the Calderwood Inn and led by Wyatt Rodgers, the Consciousness Residency gathered fourteen researchers and practitioners working at the edges of neuroscience, contemplative practice, chronic-pain resolution, and the science of consciousness. Supported by the Consciousness Foundation, Mays Family Foundation, and Spirit Tech Collective, the residency ran research guilds, technodelic experiments, and weekly sessions on democratizing consciousness science.

Meet the Consciousness Residency →

Contemplative Futures Residency

Meditation Artifacts returned for a second edition of the Contemplative Futures Residency, four weeks of programming that followed the village's weekly themes: mind science, transformational tech, reframing the metacrisis, and meditation future-building. Luca and Charlotte McAdams, both from Harvard Divinity School, co-led 8 to 10 drop-in sessions each week alongside a small housed cohort of rotating researchers and practitioners.

Touch Grass Residency

Hosted by Nico Shi and Jeremy Dela Rosa and run with Artizen, the Touch Grass Residency, also known as Agartha, was the village's home for artists and makers, and one of the most active tracks of the whole month. Residents created across art, film, music, and the joyfully strange, then shared the work at weekly showcases where projects pitched live on Artizen for community cash awards. One group even authored a collective mural on canvas that anyone can now project onto a wall anywhere in the world through their phone, a single page in a growing book written city by city.

Follow Agartha on Artizen →

Zee Prime Residency

Curated with Zee Prime Capital, the Zee Prime Residency was a month-long testing ground for eleven deep tech founders working on the kinds of unconventional bets Zee Prime is known for. They stress-tested what they were building with real users, real feedback, and real peers, from autonomous agent systems to new DeFi primitives to tools for changing how the internet is owned and operated.

Meet the Zee Prime Residents →

Inflection Fellowship

Led by Lucas alongside Long Journey Ventures, the Inflection Fellowship gathered six builders under 25 for a fully-funded month at the village, serving as the inflection point at the start of their careers. This year's cohort tackled frontier problems across human-computer interaction, machine learning, and healthcare.

Meet the Inflection Fellows →

Vibe Residency

Back for a second year, the Vibe Residency turned a house into a hub for building with AI. Led by Jack Mielke, Mariella Torres, and Noah White, it ran weekly build sessions and a multi-track buildathon spanning world building, DeFi, energy, and meditation tech, and taught the village's kids to vibe-code alongside the adults. The residency also took its tools into town, running an AI series for Healdsburg's own small-business owners that closed with a local demo day at Craftwork.

Uniswap Crypto Academic Camp

In partnership with the Uniswap Foundation, the Crypto Academic Camp returned to Edge Esmeralda, gathering a focused cohort of crypto researchers and academics for a week of concentrated work in the middle of the month. It gave leading academic minds in the field a rare stretch of dedicated time to go deep on open problems in decentralized finance and protocol research, right alongside the wider village of builders.

Meet the Crypto Academic Camp →

Video Creator Residency

The Video Creator Residency brought filmmakers, hosts, and content creators together to document the month. Residents filmed across the village, hosted creator dinners, and ran sessions including Ida's Manifesto 101 on founder-led storytelling, with regular crossover with GenJam, the Vibe Residency, and Agartha.

Edge Tomorrow: Kids Residency

Led by Mitra Martin, Edge Tomorrow ran as our intergenerational residency across the full month. Kids ran their own daily programming and built alongside the adults: they opened a kid-run snack business (Snackfé), vibe-coded with the Vibe Residency, and closed the month with Escape-meralda, an escape room the adults could play.

Experiment Highlights

A number of experiments ran on-site through the month.

The Agent Village Experiment — Residents set up personal AI agents for the month, in the largest live human-agent cooperation experiment to date. By mid-June over 250 residents were running one, together processing more than six billion tokens. A research collaboration between Edge City, Cosmos Institute and Index Network (with grant support from the Foresight Institute), built with Joshua Pham, Geo, SimpleFi, World, Protocol Labs (Simocracy), and Circleback.

Measuring Your Dynamic Health Index (Christine Kuryla) — A month-long wearables study with up to thirty-five residents wearing Fitbits and Polar H10 chest straps and filling out daily questionnaires on mood, sleep, focus, and social connection. The goal: to develop a Dynamic Health Index, a composite metric for intrinsic health derivable from continuous wearable data.

Enveda metabolomics study — During Week 1, thirty residents had their blood drawn multiple times as part of a metabolomics study run with Enveda, a biotech company decoding the plant-derived molecules behind a third of all approved medicines. Participants received a metabolomic profile orders of magnitude deeper than a standard twenty-marker blood panel.

Healthspan Horizons (Buck Institute) — During Vital Futures week, Peyton from Nathan Price's lab ran small-group and one-on-one healthspan mapping sessions, exploring how systems biology and multi-omics can make longevity personalised and actionable.

Simocracy governance experiment (David Dao / GainForest) — A community funding pool experiment where AI agents and residents together allocated real money to community proposals. The agents debated, the people voted, and one of the first proposals to win real money was a new sauna.

Vasocomputation (Mike Johnson) — A super-resolution ultrasound study of whether the vascular system holds the physical imprint of stress and trauma in the body. In Week 3, the team mapped microvascular changes in participants before and after TRE (tension and trauma releasing exercises), looking for measurable shifts in vascular tension.

The Body Model Experiment (Prana) — Led by Aditya Lalchandani of Prana Health, a four-week experiment building each participant a personalised digital twin of their physiology. Residents modelled how their bodies responded to training, nutrition, and enhancement protocols like GLP-1s and testosterone, bookended by DEXA scans.

LEVU Morning Motivation Experiment (Cait Chizmar) — A month-long prototype of LEVU, a morning routine app built for ADHD that adapts to changing focus, energy, and motivation. Residents shared ADHD tips and tested the app in real time, feeding data directly into LEVU's development.

Plastic-chemical food database (Yaroslav Shipilov) — Yaroslav tested more than 300 foods for plastic chemicals and found detectable levels in 86% of them. The lookup database is live for residents to check their own diets.

Community Life

Beyond the programming, plenty happened around the village. A few highlights:

Weekend adventures — Russian River floats, Armstrong Redwoods hikes, Dry Creek Valley bike rides, and a beach day at Goat Rock.
The Intergenerational Hub, hosted by Mitra Martin, ran daily programming for kids in nature play, art, and vibe-coding. Kids built the City of Cardboard Whatever, turned it into an escape room the adults could play (Escape-meralda), and opened a kid-run snack business (Snackfé). An 8-year-old named Leo cooked a three-course dinner for twelve.
The Hotel Trio sauna returned as a nightly ritual, known as Proof of Sweat.
Long Journey's weekday programming ran across the month, including Joy Safaris with Cyan Banister and Mike Wang and a Listening Party with Arielle Zuckerberg that produced Edge City's first mosh pit.
Serj Hunt's daily tea ceremonies.
Cait Chizmar's Women's Nourishment Dinner cooked for forty at Calderwood. Rachel hosted a Cacao Ceremony at the Calderwood Inn, and Anna Gotskind ran a second cacao ceremony on June 21 with a Volkova DJ set and community-painted mural.
Sports Day at Badger Park opened Week 1, volleyball ran throughout the month, and a daily 7:30am run club from Hotel Trio closed out with a final Fitch Mountain climb.
A tree-net weave under the redwoods at the Vargas property, built by Sean across three sessions.
The Sphinx Riddle, an immersive community ritual by Mareesa Stertz and Cait Chizmar on June 15.
The Edge City Assassin game ran across the village in two rounds.
Closing Ceremony at Front Porch Farms gathered the full village for a potluck and a final night together.

Reflections & What's Next

Edge Esmeralda 2026 was another month of collaborations, connections, and community.

We'd love to hear how this village impacted your personal or professional life. Fill out this short form to share your experience.

What's coming next:

Edge City India (October 11 – November 1):** Our first popup village in India, three weeks on the beaches of Ashwem, North Goa, with hundreds of builders, artists, researchers, and founders co-living alongside eight themed residencies at the heart of the village. Timed between the Network State Conference in Singapore and Devcon Mumbai.
Edge City Bhutan (November 11 – 19):** A nine-day trip through Bhutan for an intimate group of thirty, with time at Buddhist monasteries, the Pelsung Innovation Lab in Thimphu, and the team building Gelephu Mindfulness City. A follow-up to our September 2025 expedition.

Thank you to everyone who joined us, hosted sessions, and helped make the month what it was. We hope to see you again soon.

– The Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️