Edge Esmeralda, Popup Villages, and New Towns

Transcript

[Music] Hello friends welcome to the very first episode of The Edge City Podcast my name is teore and we're going to use this series to explore the ideas and projects that are pushing at the edges of tech science and Society by the end of every episode you'll have a clear understanding of an important innovation that's set to shape the world in the years to come today we have the perfect guest to kick off this series I'm joined by Devon zugal and Janine leer to discuss Edge Esmeralda which was a pop-up Village experiment that we organized earlier this year we'll explore the inspiration for edes meralda the highlights some of the challenges

and the broader implications of these types of experiments for society just to briefly set the stage with quick backgrounds Devon is an amazing writer she has a background as a software engineer but has always been interested in cities and is now working on a new town project called as meralda which you will hear her describe Janine is my co-founder at Edge City she led the Grant's program at gitcoin and most recently was a co-creator of zalu which she unpacks as well with that let's get to it I'd love to start with how do you each describe what you do these days like if you meet someone new and they ask you what you're up to how do you answer and Devon maybe we start with you yeah so I'm building a permanent New

Village for families called Esmeralda um and it's going to be a cross between the urbanism of an Italian Hilltown with the programming and events of something like a college campus or a family summer camp except it's um all year round and edes Moralo this June was a prototype of the kind of community that we are building um and I felt very lucky to get to work with Janine teore and the whole Edge City team to make it happen and what about you Janine well teamour you know pretty well that when I introduced myself to people at the moment I say that I'm building Ed City I'm one of the co-founders with the with te War Coast is we're focused on building these temporary campuses that we're calling pop-up Villages that we're hosting across the globe and the aim is to bring

together 200 to 500 amazing humans across the frontiers of tech science and Society to think about what it looks like to share and experiment with new ideas new technology building new culture and all of it being dedicated to accelerating human FL we were lucky enough to partner with Devon in building Edge Esmeralda as this sort of precon to what could be possible at Esmeralda in the future yeah and maybe just to set the scene and and give some context what exactly was Edge Esmeralda maybe Janine you can just kind of keep keep riffing on that yeah so um Edge Esmeralda was a

monthlong POA Village that we hosted in Hillsburg California back in June it feels like a lifetime ago and the month itself felt like a year I'm sure Davon could agree with me a a very fun very fun year I very and essentially the focus was around bringing together multiple Generations so we brought together families we had some locals from the town that were retired and ultimately built this monthlong Festival of ideas um and build those ideas into real life projects where people on a day-to-day basis were living their healthiest life we tried to

um call it so we had people running in the morning with one another doing cold plunges and saers then going into a day of work followed by a shed Community dinner and in the evening we have a number of different sessions across many different themes all the way from hard take to the cities of tomorrow and look at health and biotic and Longevity so it really hit this range of intellectual Curiosities that people could go down rabbit holes in Devon any other thoughts yeah the way I like to think about it is kind of like it's the best parts of living in a small town and the best parts of living in a city where you know it had this small town feel where everyone would gather around the plaza

in the morning you'd like cross paths with someone as you're getting your morning coffee or buying like bread in the morning but at the same time it's just full it was full of interesting activities and you're learning things all the time there's always something to do and I think one of the the sources of inspiration that we had was like college campuses where a lot of people feel like college is one of the happiest times of their life and our view of why that is is because it's a place where you're usually like walking and biking around and seeing your friends there's interesting things to do all the time you're learning and growing as a person and you're doing it with other people around you um and so we were kind of trying to recreate that like college experience except for people of all generations in particular for families

totally I think a really interesting aspect of it was that a lot of people actually came in almost expecting a conference and that's not a word that we even came close to using just now in the description and it didn't feel like that on the ground which I thought was interesting even though we did have these themes that we talked about around Frontier Technologies hard Tech Health AI crypto Etc so that was a really interesting aspect for me it kind of felt like for the people that work in those Industries and also for their families and friends Etc it's kind of felt just what life could just be like you know and I think something that's interesting to touch on here is the potentially the historical context here and and then just in general the inspiration you know when we're creating

a novel new environment like this it's interesting to think about where did this actually come from and maybe Devon would love to hear your thoughts on what the inspiration was for you for Esmeralda potentially initially and then also you know this event yeah so one thing I loved about working on this is that uh the City team and then also Esmeralda on on my side of things we both came with our own Inspirations that were different but also really complimentary so from my perspective a huge inspiration was a small town that I grew up going to every summer called shiaka my grandmother lives in shiaka and uh it's this really Charming small town in Western New York that has about 8,000 people and in the Summers they have nine weeks of events they have um lectures and workshops and performances

and um you know I remember when I was 8 years old uh Jane Goodall came and talked about chimpanzees and that blew my mind and you know the Beach Boys came and performed and um they have their own like Symphony Orchestra even though they're this Tiny Town in the middle of rural New York to me shako is just so normal growing up and it's it's actually been interesting trying to explain Edge Esmeralda to people and and the future plans for Esmeralda the permanent community that I'm building because I think a lot of people are like we I don't really understand what it is to me it feels like such a natural natural thing because I grew up going to a place just like this as a kid so it's been really fun to have that comparison point but also like a challenge cuz not everybody's been to to shitaka so being

able to explain sort sort of what it is um but I think that was one of the reasons why I enjoyed so much actually doing Edge Esmeralda with you guys because it it gave me a way to point at something very concrete to people and say you know this Esmeralda thing that I'm building well here's like a little prototype and the things you liked about this that's what you're going to like about the permanent place um once it once it's full fully built yeah honestly learning about shitaku was such a surreal moment for me early on in our conversations because it just felt like this is exactly what this is exactly how I want to raise my kids right you know a month or two a year I'm actually curious maybe if you could just touch on how did it start did it just kind of

spontaneously come out of nowhere or what was the actually it's funny you ask that because my grandma just sent me this adorable little little like pamphlet called shitak what which is adorable uh andagua found was founded 150 years ago this is actually its 150th um anniversary and uh it was founded really just as a summer camp where for families where they'd go to the the lake shiaka and set up tents for I think it was two weeks initially and they had such a good time learning from each other and spending time together and enjoying like Lake activities that they just kept coming back and coming back and ultimately they ended up putting down re roots and um building HMS and turn it

into a permanent town and uh you know early on some of the early attendees of chaga were people like Thomas Edison and Lewis Miller and Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford they would they would go to shiaka with their families and they saw it as a place where they could learn and be around other people who who valued learning but also something that could include the entire family as opposed to you know the boardrooms of the Ford Motor Company like it's probably not super kid-friendly but if you can bring your kids to this place then they get a little bit of the taste of what what it looks like to to learn new things and build things so shiaka I I could talk about shiaka endlessly know there's this whole little booklet that has a lot of good stuff in it so should we start reading it yeah it's really good I read

it yesterday over over my morning tea so one final thought on that one thing that really stood out to me when I started reading more about it is that it didn't just stay in this one place right and and just in summers it almost became a noun like a thing that people did and is spread all over the US right am I getting that right like 500 different towns have their own shakas there's there something called uh traveling chakas because one of the big things that Shaka did was it was it has um actually the oldest continuous uh book club in in America would it was this sort of like National book club where there's like a reading list and it was a way for people to get access to books in a time when it was actually really challenging to get books and some of the

little rural towns around America that were part of the shiaka book club ended up being like hey what why don't we do our own chiqua here like we we can't make it all the way to New York it's you know we're in Idaho or you know or or somewhere like that but why don't we pop up our own shiaka and then there were also these sort of like traveling shias that were like circuses almost they weren't they weren't circuses like they didn't have an elephant or something but they were like traveling circuses in that same way where they would put up a tent and someone like Mark Twain would you know give a a talk um or or read something from his most recent book um so that was a really important piece was sort of yeah yes there's this like core shiaka in Western New York but then they

also went around like spreading the seeds of the idea across the whole country I think this is really important actually something Janine and I talk about a lot and Janine would love for you to touch on this but like creating a piece of culture in one place and then have it actually spread wider so yeah Jan would love to hear about your inspiration and what you brought into this yeah and and quickly just to touch on like dein talking about like shiaka and traveling chiaka really feels like similar to ismeralda and Ed City in a way where Edge city has actually in the current form being almost like the the traveling shiaka whereas ismeralda is more akin to like building shiaka nor itself and what I'm fascinated by is

like us building these things in parallel versus having one thing happen first and then taking it elsewhere um and seeing if we can take this model and almost you know move it at a different as at a crazy like techno optimistic future um that we're painting but kind of Devon going down the path of sort of like her history and like where so much of like what is moral is going to be has come from with this inspiration of shitaka I've got sort of two areas to pull from one more recently which was zuu and then actually sort of going all the way back to uh growing up and I'll start with sort of growing up I grew up in South Africa and like my sense of community was so rooted in culture there

where all of my family and my family friends doors were open at any given time for you know families to seamlessly move through one another's homes I just remembered always going home with different friends and you know spending the afternoons doing homework at their homes or playing Sport and play group at a different friend like my my mom had a um babysitting group growing up so I never had like an outside babysitter was always from the group of families that would would be Babys set by so was this like deep sense of community um and learning from many different adults at any given time and fast forward I came over to the states for college um and I

was so shocked by how the nuclear family was such a whole thing in the US and there wasn't the sense of like Community as like a family friend ecosystem I remember going home to a friend's house for Thanksgiving and it was like crazy that they had someone from you know but that wasn't part of their cool Family Day for Thanksgiving it was just like unheard of thing whereas it was like very standard in South Africa with going home with friends for Christmas or for a holiday of sorts um so that really shaped like being on this Quest when I got to the US of like how do I find community and how do I dive into different subcultures um and I spent time living in Co Ops I

traveled ac across Europe working at a art residency and then for this like Festival a yoga festival and then staying in um this like yoga commune of sorts for a while and just recognizing the value of community around these subcultures that were developed to push forward that subculture in some capacity and then after learning from so many other subcultures I ended up you know starting to experiment with like what does it look like to build my own co- Living Spaces um we moved between mountain towns uh when when I was in my early 20s and lived with friends we had about 30 friends living together across

mountain towns during covid and during that time I just saw how the love of a specific shared idea or project um which in our case was biking and spending time outside how it really accelerated certain people's careers in that field we had someone who started in the group who wasn't a professional professional cyclist and she ended her time in Co being like the absolute top cyclist in the US and it was this kind of interesting thing of like oh you can actually accelerate progress in a given field when you bring people together in close proximity with a shared love and passion for for something specific and started to think about like what does

that look like at scale you know we done this with like 30 people but like how do you grow that and started doing these weekend Retreats uh where we would have like 150 people come together around just play like the idea was like if you get people together for play you can reduce just reduce the idea of you know bringing anything serious to the table and play was such a cool piece of these adult summer camps that I started putting together in Austin Texas where after this traveling commun life lifestyle my husband and I settled and it was this real pivotal moment of like you can really bring together large number of people around shared ideas

around fun around play and get them to just like open their minds and be so much more Curious and that really led me to thinking how can technology help create like coordination around things like this so that it's not just over a weekend but it's over a longer term period and there must be mechanisms out there that work and that had me sort of dive into crypto and the ethereum ecosystem and I worked at a place called gitcoin where it was focused on funding public goods and this idea of public goods that we' almost lost in a lot of ways like religious centers community centers are in a way a public good that have just sort of born by the wayside um in our current generation and I see the

technology is almost taking taking that place in the future and in doing so I got connected with connected who's the founder of ethereum and a number of different people in the ethereum ecosystem that had this idea of doing something called a popup City it was this totally New Concept um of bringing about 150 people together for a full two-month period and we did that in Montenegro last year in 2023 ultimately from that there was just so many learnings of bringing people together in close proximity that have a shared value of just curiosity and kindness and an openness to learn and

create and build could unlock so much more than one would expect if you just have people all over the world doing so remotely online and that has been sort of this inspiration of a seed of an idea that was planted that we have taken forward with ag city and what we building these monthong to two monthong periods of bringing people together in close proximity around shared ideas and values yeah amazing great great description so coming back to Edge Esmeralda I'd love to touch on maybe one way to enter this would be just to hear some of the highlights that you guys had and maybe a couple of things that you

feel like we should 100% definitely do next time Deon curious if you have thoughts there yeah and there were so many highlights it's honestly it was it was only 30 days but as Janine said it like felt like a year worth of exciting stuff but I think one that really jumps out to me is that um uh Nick Foley and ANS and youu who were two attendees they took it upon themselves to pull together a crew and build a solar A-frame which was like you know it's exactly what it sounds like it's like two solar panels like put up together like this and then it creates this like Little Shelter that you can camp in and they they started it not even in the first week of of edges merald I think they started it in the second week and

they ended up like working their butts off so that by the last week of the month everyone could come up there we there was a this really cool golden future Night Market which was all solar powered and like had delicious food that people made we had our closing ceremony up there and the thing I love about that I mean honestly I love everything about it but but I think I love that they took it upon themselves to do something really cool we we didn't tell them to do it like we I think when when Nick first suggested it to me I was like cool that sounds great like how can we be helpful but but really like they just did it all themselves and just bringing their creativity and building something and and actually like using the month to do something that they might not have

otherwise done Nick had said that he'd been meaning to do a project like this for a really long time and he felt like Edge as moraldo was the right container for it and it was just it was sort of asking to be to be done and he ended up also getting a lot of help from people which accelerated happening and and and took brought a huge crew of people up to to help him out so that I love and I'd love to see them build even more cool stuff I'd love other people to build cool stuff that doesn't necessarily have to be a physical like structure like what they did it could be it could take so many different forms but the idea of using the month as a container to actually put something together and build it I mean I I'm thinking you know

next week is is Burning Man and so many people spend like their entire year planning for burning man putting together an awesome art car creat something and I think the flavor of what people do for burning man is a little different than than what we're doing so it's not like we if you want to bring an art c car to Edge esmalda we are not going to say no um but like heberg might yeah heilsberg might not be so into that but but I think the ethos of like taking it upon yourself to be like what can I contribute here what can I build and what what is not only can I contribute but what can I learn from the experience and and get out of it and use this as an excuse to to make something really cool do you feel like as an organizer now

let's say thinking about next year uh spoiler alert there is a next year we'll talk more about it but as an organizer do you feel like there's something that we can distill there in terms of you know we're not going to say okay next year we have to have an A-frame again that we have to recreate this but what is the principle we can take into the organization that allows things like that to flourish I think there's probably a few one one that jumps to mind is like think about a prompt for people could be like to think about what's something that you've always wanted to do but you just haven't like said set aside the time to do it or you haven't had the the support or or maybe it would be helpful to have a few extra hands and like you don't usually

have a few extra hand hands lying around so you can get some other people to to to help you out with it or another prompt could be like what's a skill that you want to learn is there someone else who's attending who knows that skill who you could work on with them and and and and build it I think another one is like doing things that are physical is especially cool like love every single session that people that we did like the all of the the talks and things but I think that because we have this longterm period of an entire month as opposed to just like a weekend like most events are it's like what what could you actually go and build and and put together so that other people can experience it as opposed to just sort of conceptually talking about ideas like how do you go

out and execute on it and maybe that's a physical object or or structure or maybe it's it's an essay that you wanted to write with somebody so I think those are a few prompts that come to mind that I think could get people's juices flowing about what to do next time yeah I also love the idea of bringing like this this concept of you know what Nick was able to do was he had an idea and he rallied a whole little ecosystem at aedes marala around him like he had you know like six people that were going out on a regular basis and being in the like scorching hot sun working moving logs and twigs and then putting up these a frams while there was so much going on on like quote unquote campus and seeing that like

dedication and that like excitement around this little ecosystem of Builders was something beautiful and seeing like more of more of those types of collaborations would be super cool another component I loved about that project was that they also worked with locals so they um there's there these lovely people who own um a formerly burned Redwood forest up in the the hills of Hillsburg and Nick got a hold of them actually through Linkedin of all random places that's a whole another story that I should let Nick tell how how he got a hold of them but it was this collaboration these people are Foresters who've been caring for this forest for a very long time it was this really cool collaboration where it was a combination of their knowledge of the forest and their willingness to try

something new and Nick's ability to to build something and an's ability to bring a bunch of people along that all came together and I think one of our our hopes and dreams for Edge Esmeralda is for for it to be something that includes Hillsburg locals and snowman County locals too which I think we achieved last year and I think we could do even more of in the future um yeah any other highlights Janine that come to mind so many two that I want to bring up uh one is around families the idea of actually like bringing in families and I remember ear on when we were all you know pretty strapped like our team was four people until a month before the event um and we're like let's make sure we get as many fames and everyone was like okay

what if we actually do when we actually do we have kids like what's going to happen and just saying yes and sort of seeing like what could be possible I think was incredible because we ended up having 40 kids coming out over the time and seeing kids being integrated into the environment that was being built seeing them on the green and you know kids playing together and family getting to know one another seeing them attend the the dinners um we had Allison who's also on our team her two two-year-old joined who was extremely shy on arrival she would look at anyone and say shy shy Alison kept being like Oh my goodness is my kid G to be social

by the end of this and that was the goal was like getting Winnie to to be friendly with people after and when by the end was walking around with Lolli Pops at our final sports day and she was like share share share and it was really cool to see her going from try to share over the course of the month um and I think what I really want to keep seeing more of is that it's not just about bringing families in and then repeating what we have in our current environments of like kids now go to school they stay separated you know they're retired go and stay in their retired homes and we keep everything segregated I think what was like beautiful about Ed Esmeralda

which is a thread that I want to keep pushing on from our end is this idea of like creating environments that welcome in and take both kids and the elderly seriously and recognize that each person has such a valuable contribution piece that they can bring to the table and I think we were just at the beginning of that and making steps towards like what does it look like for kids to give you know workshops what does it look like for some of the different adults to instead giving a presentation to adults about neurotic what does it look like to give it to kids and as sort of just like creating that environment of him the other that I

wanted to touch on oh actually DAV do you have something one thing I think actually we may have had 80 kids not just 40 if I remember correctly I might have that number I'm looking at it now you're absolutely CRA that's crazy that is wild but we'd love to have even more next year I mean 80 out of like over a little bit bit over a thousand is is good but we'd love to have even more kids and more families odly um and the other piece that I loved and I I'm sure both of you would agree were the Sunday dinners I think getting everyone together on a Sunday um Church kind of did that in the past and I didn't realize like how much I would just absolutely adore having a routine like this of bringing people together

touching on like what are we doing together what has been done this week what is possible in the week ahead like how can we do more how can we we'd be excited and connected super special and one thing we did that I would love to figure out like how do we keep progressing making sure that there was some sort of like social facilitation that happened to get people on the same page and connected um and meeting two to three new people on arrival on Sunday so we had a lot of people that would come for the week but then we had about 150 people that were there the whole month and those 150 people became like really important stewards of the culture and the community moving forward if anything

what I would love to push on for next year is make it potentially like mandatory or at least encouraged that people who are coming only for a week or two weeks show up on a Sunday and get there before Sunday dinner because of the importance of setting the scene for the week ahead I think something that's really interesting to me is that we had some of the world's leading Tech Builders scientists futurists there and one thing that struck me was that one it was just so cool to have kids around in that environment I think it actually creates a very different context for those kinds of conversations because usually the conferences where these folks hang out with their peers are very focused uh very short usually and very

comparatively and don't have toddlers running around saying shy or share with lollipops and I think it just creates a very different feeling when you're thinking about the future to be like wait these are the people we're building this for we're thinking about this for I think this and some of the other things that you both just said really touches on this idea of social Technologies where we are a community of tech folks and science folks and we're thinking often about how to push Society forward but for the last you know 10 20 minutes we've been talking about Community dinners and being outside and having kids around and health and it's interesting that we're going back to those fundamental fairly obvious truths as

what we can actually to to to push Society forwards yeah interesting I'd love to touch on some of the learnings that came out of aalda things that we think we could have done better or things that maybe didn't go as planned or what we've learned from those experiences yeah so I think one of the things that some people who attended had a hard time with was sort of orienting themselves when they first arrived and understanding what it was I think from our persp perspective as or the organizers it was like kind of obvious how everything was going to work cuz we' been spending the last months you know thinking about nothing else but I think for some of the folks who arrived especially the ones who arrived in the

middle of the week when there was less um like structure I think they kind of weren't entirely sure where to go or where to find people and and so on and people ended up figuring it out it seemed that we want people to feel oriented from day one so that they understand sort of exactly how they fit into this and that understanding will evolve over time but feeling sort of like there's there's some security there and honestly I think just even understanding what the event is one thing I I found myself saying a lot this month was you know if if you had never heard of a college campus before and you had no idea how it operated it would actually be kind of hard to explain like what exactly is going on sort of the the level of the because it's an ecosystem it's not one like linear thing there's a

ton of things going on all at once and so I think yeah helping people get oriented one thing that we we will have the wind at our backs for this next time is now uh ,300 people have attended edes meralda and so they can explain it to the next person and when they when those people come back they'll they no longer will be confused like from the previous year yeah I think just like that that orienting and and giving people slightly more organized like moments to to get oriented in the space yeah I think the piece to continue working on is like how can people get activated earlier versus only when they arrive so like what can we do as group like what you know Deon was mentioning

around like berning man there so many people like prep the whole year to build something there and something we're excited about with Edge city is being able to continue some of the threads that we saw at Edge Esmeralda the other popet Villages that we're doing like and Thailand will continue some the experimentation with Community currency that we had with the with Zupas and this identity layer and the hope is by you know edj meralda we've both got like people who have learned from other AG City experiences but then also are thinking about it over the next year like how can I expand the project that I worked on or what did I not see last year that I want to contribute to this

year that's going to make it so much more amazing for everyone else and that's not just me being like well it's not about us it's about like everyone else helping build it but it really does take a village um to build something incredible and different together one other learning that I or and one other thing that I love to see evolve next year is having even more things for kids and for families I think this year it was really amazing to see how the first people who bought tickets and who who went in were were actually families with kids cuz they were like there it was PE it was typically people who they they love learning they love building things and they have a great community of of people who do that as adults but they always feel like their family life and their creative life have this Chasm

between them and they're really separate and so a lot of parents told us that this this felt like something that they'd been hoping for for a really long time and they a lot of them said like simply by inviting families I feel like you already like nailed it but I think we could do a lot more to support that use case and and create more cool programming for kids help people also find friends of the similar ages and similar interests uh like some of the the highlights for me when were when kids have um in like similar age ranges found each other and ended up hanging out for the rest of the time that they were at Ed esmalda and I think we the organizers could do a lot more to enable that kind of you know connection between the kids yeah totally and Sim to that

point I think another area that you know we wanted to push on was health and I think we did a we did a good job of creating these healthy dinners and those were wonderful and like we had a number of people being like wow it's just like nice that you know it's not just typical conference food um but I really want to expand on like you know we did blood tests but not everyone did did the blood tests we had some people working out in the morning we had some people doing cold plunges but like how can we push the balance of like what does it take to build a healthy City and both investing in Hillsburg and helping them just like be educated about reducing seed oils in the town as well as having cleaner water sources and just doing more around

activities in the morning as well as healthy activities in the evening or even changing the light bulbs like what we learned from Andy brumberg at the everything is killing us lecture how how light bulbs flicker so much and affect us there's there's just interesting Health elements that I'd love to pull on um one of the important things with these gatherings is the engagement of the local community and I'm curious how did edes meralda engage with and potentially even impact the local community and maybe what you know how what learnings are there for future events there as well de well first I should say that in the end I was really

really happy with how it all came together and we ended up connecting with the local community and I think that many of them would say the same I will say like initially they were really skeptical uh when we first announced it several months before the event took place we said you know we're bringing this to your town we we made a point of trying to give them advanced notice so that they could have a heads up and frankly there was a lot of skepticism I think they were not really sure what it was that we were bringing to their their small town and we got a lot of really good questions about like you know what what is it that you're doing how many people will there be how's it going to impact us and so we decided that we wanted to really lean into some

relationships that we already had in Hillsburg Janine has these this amazing friendship with um Steve and Susan bargus who uh Steve is the local doctor in town so he knows a ton of people Janine's been been going to their house for Thanksgiving for many years and a bunch of other people that we know throughout Town who encouraged us to host it in heels workg and so we tapped into that that Network and said hey hey please introduce us to everyone in town that you can we want to talk to them we want to understand their concerns we want to include them in what's happening and sort of bit by bit we ended up talking to ultimately hundreds of people we had we had a a goal of talking to at least one local per day as part of our team leading up to the event and we I

think overall ended up getting people really excited about it some of the people who initially were some of the biggest Skeptics actually ended up attending the most sessions of anybody including like the Out of Towners and some of them ended up being great collaborators on projects and we we built a really positive relationship with the city we we made a point of going to like the city council meeting before the event started and presenting about what we were doing giving them a heads up we became members of the local Chamber of Commerce we had a local advisory panel of um people that we connected with who could give us sort of local perspectives about what it was that might create problems for the town or might be cool opportunities we also gave like very heavily discounted tickets to Sonoma County locals so in the end I think it actually ended up

being really positive and almost made the relationship like stronger because we because upfront it was there was so much skepticism we then invested a lot in making sure that people understood what was going on so I feel like I personally learned a lot through the experience and we are really excited about investing in the Hillsburg community in the long term and getting to know these people better and finding even cooler opportunities for collaboration next year yeah amazing and on that note next year here by the time that this podcast is released we will have already shared a save the date and an announcement for edges meralda 2025 the dates will be May 24th to June 21st we're all incredibly excited for it I'm

curious if you guys have any thoughts on what people can expect next year and um yeah just starting to get excited about it I think one thing we'd love to encourage for people to come longer know we ended up announcing edges marala just a few months before it um happen happened and we were thrilled that 1,300 people took us sub on it that was amazing and I think a lot of people who attended we had I think about 150 150 people who came for the entire month which was amazing but for people who came for much shorter periods of time a lot of them said man I wish that I had been here longer because I feel like I can't you know get the full experience and a big part of the ethos is about getting to know people and building trusting relationships so you can do

cool things together and so our hope is that by announcing it earlier this year it gives people more of an opportunity to plan around that and so we we strongly encourage you to come as long as you can I really feel like a week minimum is is like what you need but the longer the better cuz these relationships are things that grow and compound over time any other thoughts J anything you're particularly excited about aside from the fact that we are now probably 6 months more ahead of schedule than we were last time I feel so prepared just H I feel like there's there's so much excitement for next year already like we've had of people reach out about and get excited honestly kind of to the point of what does it look like to prepare ahead like what does it

actually look like to start planning and if anyone listening is really excited about the idea of running a track like what we did with Eli's hard Teck on conference on a weekend or what we did with sort of um Laura deming's longevity Workshop weekend like if someone's excited about some project at the frontier of their industry or pulling up on a thread of research that they've seen in the past that they want to try something new around like if you're excited like reach out to us now um and let's see what we can do to start getting ahead of things and like building a program together around around your topic because I think that's going to be super impactful to what we

do on the ground and one prompt for thinking about that is like what are groups of people that you would love to pull together and you're kind of looking for an excuse to get them in the same room um what are what are pressing questions that you think that your field should be thinking about and who should be there to talk about it so we could put together probably a list of other prompts like that but hopefully that gets your juices flowing and and um we strongly recommend planning sooner rather than later because uh it's a lot harder as it gets closer to the closer to the date yeah Randy getting so excited it's a great call out so I would love to finish here with a quick couple of thoughts around long-term Visions so maybe Devon would love to start with Esmeralda and what you can share about

the project thus far Esmeralda is the the permanent location that we've been alluding to and I maybe you can touch on why this is a big idea and why it could be potentially very impactful since Edge Esmeralda in June but now it's uh mid August and we've had some really exciting updates we just announced that we have um an exclusive option on a piece of property about 15 minutes north of Hillsburg and so so now hopefully the name Edge Esmeralda U makes a little bit more sense to everybody not only is it a combination of edge City and Esmeralda it's also really quite literally at the edge of Esmeralda as I mentioned at the beginning of the show Esmeralda is going to be a permanent little village where

we we live like this all year round and being able to experiment and build this community in a place that is so close to where the permanent place is going to be what has been incredibly powerful I mean one of the things that we we were able to benefit from was Edge as morala gave us an opportunity to build relationships throughout Sonoma County and invite people in in the town that I should mention the town is called Cloverdale where where um where we have this this option on the property and uh we made a point of including the Cloverdale Community as much as possible in edes Malala in in the cities of Tomorrow track that I hosted in June I hosted the city manager of Cloverdale along with the city manager of hburg where they

talked about what it's like to to run a city in Soma County and it was this great way to come first as a community organizer and second as people who are building buildings and uh developing a physical Community because at the core having that that software that goes along with the hardware sort of the culture that goes along with the buildings that is really a critical piece of creating a new place and so yeah we've been really excited uh it's been very busy since edges ismeralda ended and I think it's only going to get busier from here and I feel very lucky to to be getting to do this with you guys yeah likewise we we feel similarly and maybe Janine just to just to take us home here I'd love to hear your take on

the vision for Edge City and maybe we could also tie in the fact that we are doing another popup Village this one's going to be happening in Thailand starting October 10th going till November 10th it's called Edge City Lana it's the next instantiation of our series of gathering and I feel like we have learned so much from The Edge as moraldi experience I'm excited to take that into this next one and have it in you know the next 10 years so curious if you have any thoughts there yeah well firstly working with Devon was a dream at jalda was such an incredible experience and it was kind of one of those like partnership that

you're like wow how incredible it is when you have this Synergy where the sum is so much greater than the two parts separately so we're super excited to partner with is morala for the longterm and kind of build Edge as morala for as as long as we can what's it going to look like when we're 80 things could get crazy and in in the meantime I think it's really shaped what we are thinking about as AG City you know we started as like let's just build pop Villages around the globe and bring together these like techno optimistic curious minds um um what we' really honed in on is this concept of like wow these strong Partnerships with people that are

building the cities of tomorrow around the globe are so important and impactful because shaping culture and shaping the future of culture being this techno optimistic culture that is celebrating new ideas um and celebrating change and the doers and the builders in our society is something we really want to kind of hone in on and and focus around so partnering with different cities of tomorrow around the globe and helping accelerate their future is something we'd love to be doing so building this culture around curiosity kindness and high agency um and that's a really

important piece to it all to build a truly a better future together is what we're hopeful for well I think that's a wonderful place to end it thank you thank you both so much for joining me thanks team this is super fun thanks St