The Stash - by Adam Lewis

Intimate updates and learnings from my time in Healsburg, California.

Volume 011: Living on the Edge - Watch Video PS Blooper at the end

🪄 Edge Esmerelda: A month-long gathering for people building a brighter future

I’m sitting at the airport flying flying home San Francisco currently processing and reflecting on what was an incredibly expansive and inspiring week. As introduced in my last post, Edge is a month-long, pop-up village where ~1,000 humans across tech, health, science, governance, and consciousness are prototyping the future.

It’s a place full of systems thinkers, artists, AI builders, philosophers, founders, parents, and innovators. And let me tell you, it did not disappoint.

I went in open, curious and hungry. I’ve come to be madly in love with my life back at home. All things health, wellness, Mancamp, Merkaba, Pluto and living a really full and vibrant life in Toronto. While still enchanted by it, this week at Edge gave me a profound opportunity to step out of this beautiful bubble and connect with an incredible collection of exceptional humans who like me, are building a brighter future for us all.

Over the course of the month long experience at Edge, each week has a specific “track” or theme that the speakers, panels, workshops and activities all fall under. This week’s theme “Cities of Tomorrow” was as relevant and exciting for me to participate and co-create within as it gets.

Some cool examples of events include:

• 1 + 1 = 3: The Next Generation of Spirituality and Religion & What we Pass On

• Panel on Alternative Housing: Coliving, Cohousing, & Pop-up Villages

• Alternative Schools Discussion & Stories from Parents Redefining School (Panel: Kelly Smith, Arielle Zuckerberg, David Kirby, Courtney Klein, Moderated by Rina G. Patel)

• Building a Marketplace of Innovative Schools

There were many many more and I have a huge shoutout to send to Edge founders Janine and Timour for the legendary curation and the rest of the team at Edge for a masterclass in how the whole society is being incubated.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Friendships of the Future

My first day at Edge, we started off by launching an experiment for Pluto called “Friendships of Tomorrow” where we kicked off our week-long experience with 18 participants who came to help us unpack 3 hypotheses.

1. Human potential is unrealized

2. Personal growth done within community accelerates the process

3. Realized growth in community strengthens bonds and integrates the personal + collective transformations

My partner, Graeme runs a retreat and personal transformation process out of Switzerland (actually the top rated per bookretreats.com) - so we based the human potential realization and personal growth programming off his methods.

The intake of our participants then involved using a ‘values discovery’ web-app one of our friends at Edge built on Replit - using these values as the primary factor for sorting the participants into 3 separate pods.

The rest of the week was guiding the pods through this methods, while also encouraging independent co-creation of activities to share with Edge.

As I said, Edge is like Burning Man meets Stanford - for at the core of the experience is co-creation through the celebrated free-expression and genius that lives through all of us. All participants are invited to host events, workshops, talks, or anything they want to add to the calendar of things for attendees to check out.

The experiment itself posed challenges as the duration was quite short and replicating a week long intensive retreat method into 5×90 minute sessions a day proved to be challenging, but nonetheless, the greatest value came from the direct feedback we got from our participants while also being able to take this feedback directly to more experts and curious builders at Edge working on similar problems as us, addressing social behaviour and belonging in cities.

Some of these experts include a Harvard Grad student studying and building an institute focused on rebuilding the social fabric in the US, the Chief Creative Officer at Powder Mountain as an expert in community design and architecture as well as people who have built and run communal living spaces and even establishing their own cities.

Endless insights and intel I’m taking home including the necessity for landmarks, rituals, and all the ingredients for serendipity to occur for high-agency people via the facilitation of helping high-quality people find each other in high-quality experiences and crossing paths along the way.

Ultimately, most of us are chewing on the same unsolved problem yet of figuring out what the optimal social structure looks like to address the meaning crisis by incubating and creating new societies.

The future of cities will require experimentation of how we create and activate new and existing spaces as well as the values and interest that we sort and organize ourselves into as well as the ways we gather to nurture these connections that are intentional, emergent and expressions of our individual selves and the world we are looking to inhabit. My friend Sam Wolf illustrated all of this beautifully in his presentation explaining why Edge felt so magical.

It has become abundantly clear to me what this means for building Pluto. It is effectively an evolved layer of societal behaviour (software) that will be operating on top of the existing infrastructure (hardware).

The whole experience was quite meta, having formed some beautiful friendships at Edge myself with truly inspiring and genuinely wonderful souls. Many of these were crystalized at a cacao ceremony/party the Toronto crew of Graeme, Amer and myself hosted on my final night. The container of play, movement and connection served as the ultimate opportunity to deepen these connections and end the week in a truly celebratory fashion.

Sometimes the best learnings from an experiment aren’t from the experiment themselves, but the outcomes on the edges of it that takes some time to slow down, play and patiently realize.

🥩 Regenerative Food, Agriculture and Technology 💻️ 

I haven’t even begun to speak to the food part of things, this is something I will write up separately. I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel put together by Dawn Musil titled “Envisioning a Regenerative Future” exploring how land, tech, art, and systems thinking can reshape how we feed the future, rooted in regeneration and community.

Some short nuggets I’ll share below:

The bridge between tech and agriculture needs to be paved with mutual love and reverence. One of the speakers brought up a generalized observation of how those in the tech/capitalistic space (generally) view the agriculture and regenerative space as a movement predominantly occupied by hippies and granolas - and vice versa, those in the ag space view those in the tech/web3/ai space as a bunch of greedy technocrats. While this is a bit of an extreme, having danced in both circles, it does resonate with some truth - and yet, therein lies what I believe to be the greatest opportunity for us in how we can establish an expectation of trust and collaboration whereby the future of food is supported and amplified by technology and in doing so, we may realize unimaginable amounts of value creation for this earth. My beliefs that in doing so, we must remain deeply rooted and in tact with our connection to the earth and its natural systems, rather than trying to invent our way out of it. Kris who I sat on the panel with shared some incredible things they’re working on at Fifth World building regenerative relationships between humanity, technology, and nature. I get gleefully optimistic seeing organizations like them and backers like Mad Capital helping bring this future together.

One of my favourite moments that seemed to underscore this was at a special dinner that was held by the good folks at Long Journey VC and Mission Barns.

Mission is another major challenger in the space of lab-grown meat - a concept I have a particular allergy towards (figuratively). We sampled some of the cultured meats provided by Mission at the dinner, enjoyed some rich conversations facilitated by Long Journey and before dessert was served, there was a handful of us crowded around the kitchen again as the chefs pulled out 2 beautifully marbled steaks that those of us more reverent of the real meat were hovering around like self-aware wolves. (Aware-wolf, get it?). Those were then perfectly cooked up in a cast iron and served up, satisfying the yearning I had for some real meat following the experimental products that were served prior.

The crescendo of the evening for me was finding myself in a conversation with Bianca, the Founder of Mission Barns (who ironically was enjoying the hell out of the steak bites with us) and Justin Mares, Founder of Kettle & Fire Bone Broth aka the bone broth baron of the USA.

The conversation evolved into a very polite and sophisticated kendo joust between team meat (Justin and I) and team lab (Bianca). A lot of it was Justin drawing on a library of facts stored in his brain validating the practicality of sustainable farming practices from an economic and land management standpoint in response to Bianca’s perspectives on meat consumption trends and behaviours globally and how it is unrealistic to sustain, even with evolved land management.

We all agreed that factory farmed meat is the worst and possibly the biggest culprit. The diplomatic conclusion at the end of the conversation was that the future will likely consist of both forms of meat (lab and real) being required to feed the population as regeneratively meat is quite unrealistic in areas where farmland is just completely off the table like in food deserts and parts of the world where raising cattle doesn’t make sense.

The best stat Justin pulled out was from an analysis that suggests that to make lab-grown meat account for 10% of the world’s meat supply, it would require at least 4000 facilities costing a minimum of $1.8 trillion.

Something we were left thinking about, is what if that $1.8 trillion was invested into regenerative farming and meal cultivation. Humans seem to be so quick to try and play God and invent our way out of problems that I believe nature already has the answers to. The incentives might not be as aligned with the capitalist system, but here again is the necessity for the collaboration between land and technology rather than at odds.

My master plan will be lived out in how I build a city-based society (Pluto) with a direct line and partnership with Merkaba Acres and if done right, open source everything to encourage other mini-societies to emerge and find other local regenerative farms to be their preferred food suppliers - thus solving for (a) challenge farms have for having a predictable and reliable customer base, and for the people of urban centers to engage in a re-imagined and revitalized connection to their food source. This my friends is regenerative and a key to vitality.

I'll close with what regeneration means to me in how its inspiring everything I do. It’s not about harm minimization and impact reduction, it’s about life creation and tapping into the abundant potential realized when we connect with the natural systems that LIFE itself is trying to emerge through. By finding the levers and opportunities to synergize and co-create. This is the future I am here to build and that I invite all of you to join me in.

I realize above I said some short nuggets to share but got a bit carried away writing and still feel like I’m barely elucidating all that is running through me on these topics and experiences.

A brighter future for human flourishing isn’t something I’m waiting for - it’s what’s being created in real time. Let’s do this folks!

🥳 Let’s Celebrate Together! July 6th at Stackt

This wouldn’t be a Stash edition if I didn’t share an event - as mentioned last edition, we’re celebrating the soft launch of Pluto with our collaboration with Othership and Daybreaker at our inaugural event, Fieldship. We’ve been pouring a lot into making it an exceptional morning at the legendary Stackt Market July 6th from 10am-3pm.

🎟️ You can grab your tickets here🎟️ - it would mean the world if you came out to support and celebrate human flourishing with all of us. You can use the code “LOVEADAM” for 15% off all tickets.

Connect and Share:
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🙏 Special Thanks This Week:

Today is father’s day. And in honour of that, this special thanks goes out to my father, David.

I am proud of the man I am today and know that I would not be who I am if it wasn’t for the man that raised me. The lessons are endless and ever evolving - as fatherhood dawns upon me in the coming years, I am sure my reverence and gratitude for my dad will only grow - and it is with this loving awareness and recognition for those that came before me that I know will inform how I nurture those who come after. Thank you dad, I love you. ❤️