Issue 42: First Week at Edge City Patagonia

Fitness, authenticity, working, balance, good hikes in nature and more [10/20 - 26/2025]

Introduction

This is a series of weekly posts, that are personal, that summarize highlights of my week in my world of a digital nomad developer in crypto and AI, as well as essayistic tangents on various topics. I write this with the tone and intention as if it is to my Mom, or to my future self, who is curious about what I’m up to and what I’m thinking.

First Week at Edge

Time is moving fast here, as you’re having so much fun, meeting so many interesting people, discovering new fascinating topics you want to rabbit down, getting new ideas, being pushed out of your comfort zone. The first week feels like a roller coaster ride, by two thirds into the week you’re at the peak and feeling exhaustion set in and want to spend a few hours staring at the wall, this was the case with me.

Some highlights worth remembering:

Morning Run Club: on Tuesday and Thursday, hosted by me. We ran for 45 minutes. Afterwards I joined the Meditation Artifacts Residency for a cold plunge in the lake.

Morning Gnosis Sessions: Hosted by the coaches Paul Kuhn and Dr. Erica Matluck. This is a session involving yoga, breathwork and elements of scream therapy and sound healing. The room is usually full with more then 40 people. The experience here was very demanding, and many people had deep response to it. Even after many experiences with practicing breathwork and similar, this felt really good, I found myself much lighter afterwards, having more clearer channel with my intuition.

Lemon.me mini app workshop: San Martin de los Andes is the place where Lemon app originated. This is the most popular crypto app in latin America with 5 million users.

Ice plunge in the lake: On Tuesday and Thursday I plunged into the lake with the Meditation Artifacts Residency.

Gym Sessions: Nearly every day I went to the gym and did my typical routine, sometimes with other Edge City participants.

Soccer Tournament: Great opportunity to connect with others, everyone was very competitive. My team ended up not winning but I contributed by blocking every single goal on defense for one game. It was cool to see all these different crypto people competing in this physical sport. There was a wide verity of people. I connected with one designer that had similar story as mine, nomadic crypto user, and he ‘red pilled’ me on using Farcaster, a twitter like platform I signed up early for but haven’t been active on. I vowed to post more on there, connecting with the crypto community there. I got to chat with a few other people, it was a great opportunity to not be laser focused on your own work and forge bond that can be very useful in the future.

Discovering Cyber Valley: I met the founder of cyber valley, a network state in Bali and a person with a very interesting background. We actually met at Devcon in Bogota three years ago, and now we had an opportune moment to share a meal and discuss things. Then they presented on their work with creating a network state in Bali called cyber valley. Their history in activity in crypto stretches back to the early days of Bitcoin, having met Vitalik before Ethereum was launched, and managing cyber fund, a crypto investment fund that was an early investor in nearly all the current major crypto projects. The eye opening take away, one that I had known since the start, but it is difficult to get the courage to accept (because of all the unknowns that come with it) is that investing in nearly any good crypto project early, will bear major fruit in a few years time. This is inspiring and I can see myself participating in the Cyber Valley in the near future. They are opening it up to outside contributors in February 2026, and that is something I can see myself taking part in. Exciting!

Murmur Co-working experiment: Nearly every day around 2-4PM at the coworking space, I joined the experiment, where we did a pomodoro session, shared what our goals were at the start, and checked in at the end of the quiet work session. This was good to connect with others and learn what they are working on while also having the space and motivation to work on my own work. Being around other people that are focused kicks off your own motivation and super chargers your ability to concentrate.

Saturday Hike with Agartha: Advertised as a ‘two hour hike’ this was what I needed on a Saturday morning, to get into nature and a break from my coding marathon over the last day. It was an opportunity to connect with new people. I chatted with a match making professional, an old friend from Launch House that was building a crypto infrastructure protocol over the past three years and hearing about her progress was inspiring and was so good to reconnect with someone that I had experienced more then one hacker house and hackathon before in crypto (shout out to Doris!). Seeing the nature and connecting with new people on the topic of crypto, network states, psychedelics and personal growth was nourishing. This is such a special time, it fills the heart and soul with all the things you need, the connections, the kindred spirits on similar journeys, searching for the call of the intuition, that will lead us to survival in the long term. Actually, this may seem doomer, but in the long term, on the long view of history, we live in a brief period of peace and prosperity, in the long stretch of continuous catastrophic cycles. Few are awake to this truth and feel the call of their anxiety to bring them out to places like this in Edge city, the pop up city that is searching to innovate with new technology and new ideas, to survive with our values and freedoms intact, in the current shifting global geo political order. I chatted with the co-founder of Agartha house, a project that hits on all the things I have been interested in over the past three years. I suddenly described why I feel interested in things like blockchain and network states, and I commented that just two days before the prime minister of Singapore publicly was talking about how we are in a transitional phase in the world order, away from the leadership and dominance of the USA and in a state where there is another competing systems, that of the CCP of course, which has cultivated a powerful society that values scientific research, production, growth, which has seen the centralized state bear fruit in a dominance of production of technology, while subjugating the individual freedoms to the plan of the state. On the other hand the system of the USA has given fruit to decentralization technologies like the internet, cryptocurrency and AI, which present an opportunity to develop new worlds, but they do require individuals to dream them up and build them.

Dance Class: On Friday I joined the dance class. I was feeling happy and confident. Since a few years ago, I started to feel an expression of freedom in dance and self expression. Up until then I could only dance in my room to really exceptional music like Odesza. Now I find I can tap into a part of me that is real, feeling, the honest heart of a living being, with all of its grief, wounds, hopes and longings. I could tap into this, move my body, hum a little, talk a little, and establish some self-regulation, some playfulness, some sense making, inside the free interpretive non-language expression of dance. We watched a video of a early 1940’s African American style dance that was called the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. In my mind, I saw echos of “The Wedding” by a poet in early 1900 Poland called Stanislaw Wyspianski, that described a wedding between a city native groom and a village bride, how the interplay between someone that is connected to the ‘old world’ roots of the Earth, with a person that is ‘Cosmopolitan city dweller’ how one can be free in the body, how the other is more in the mind. The intersection of the two, which I believe I exhibit sometimes, when being free and expressing my self through dance, is the most powerful faculty you can have. This is the balance between the civilized and the native, also talked about in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’. I danced with a few ladies, and we laughed, some I felt very nervous, others I was able to manage it and be present and tap into a cosmic sense, performing like a signal receiver from a deeper reality. Performing in the range of roles between the confident man and in the timid boy that strives to overcome his nervousness. This is how you make the best art, being connected with your true feelings, honoring the sacredness of your feelings, your anxiety and at the same time, being able to step back, let it dissolve and be open to what else is out there that you have inside you, and out there that you can channel. It doesn’t matter if that’s dance, video content, or creating apps, it’s the same artistic process. It’s when you let yourself relax, and let the Universe move through you. This is what Steve Jobs talked about when he said: “The biggest value generation in the twentieth century will be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.” The thing is that when you have an observer, this changes the state of the vibe and it can make it that your receptiveness to the signals are disrupted. This is the quantum nature of our world.

First Opening Sunday Dinner: On the first Sunday after the kick off. The intro, residency presentations and hang out, and the dinner after was really eye opening. I didn’t have a lot of prior knowledge coming into Edge City, I didn’t imagine what the culture here is like, now I can say it’s about bringing people together that really care about innovating a better world, in various areas, not just building technology, also in other scientific pursuits and at the cultural level. People here care about putting in the work and effort to build a better society. We are in an evolving world, and the future depends on the decisions and the work we do today, it doesn’t happen on it’s own, the question every one of us has to answer is, who am I and what am I here for? There is no one answer, everyone has to find out for themselves. With authenticity we find out what it is that we really want, who we are and how we want to be in this life.

At the opening dinner we got a very warm welcome from the mayor of San Martin de los Andes. It was incredible, I could feel that here the people, in this frontier town, really got that we as humans depend on survival for the tools we use and that the tools are always changing, that we have to keep innovating, and at the same time not lose our humanity, but integrating with our roots, with all parts of ourselves, and all sentient beings, because we all are part of the greater whole, and our individual survival depends on the well being and survival of the whole system. The whole Earth. We have to be in touch with all parts of ourselves, the emotional heart, and the analytics mind.

Building Augmi Your Digital Self: On the first Sunday, there were presentations of all the individual experiments that were happening. This fired up my imagination about what I could build here in this month, to contribute to the furthering the ‘edge’ of innovation. Over the past 2-3 years I have been experimenting and iterating on AI startups that I feel would be the best to build in this special time. I realized that the ‘AI twin’ concept was really powerful and here would allow us to connect with more people and explore more connections by augmenting ourselves with an AI version of yourself. One year ago while living in SF, a friend of mine created an experiment called ‘AI Simulated Party. Participants would sign up, answer a few questions to create a digital version of themselves, they would be put into a 2D ‘AI Town’ like world and watch themselves interact with other participants over the span of one week, at the end they would all meet an in person event and get the top 3 people to meet and 3 to avoid. I thought this was amazing, this is the future, it was a really cool experience. So I want to bring it to Edge, imagine if the pop up city had a digital version, and you could interact with an order of magnitude more people then ordinarily. I built a prototype and demo’ed it on the second Sunday. The feedback was positive and I am going to build it fully during my time here, envisioning this becoming the standard way that individuals interact with the digital world. This is my humble contribution to the pop up city world. I sincerely hope it will be useful, fun and helpful to people. With every day I put in work on this project, I set my intention to push humanity further with this AI augmentation tool, fittingly called Augmi.

Conclusion

The first was intense, it was eye opening, I learned what the culture of Edge city was like, and it’s way better then I could have imagined. I resonate strongly with the values of using both your heart and mind, in an effort to build a better world, and in truth, to increase our chances of survival, because yes right now in our live times, most of us in this group have had very privileged lives, but we live in a small island in the history of cycles of cataclysms, and it makes absolutely no sense to believe that somehow it’s different this time. The thing that’s different now is the exponential explosion of technology, it is changing our world, but it depends on us to make it happen, to create it in accordance with the values we have and with the vision for the life we want to have. The future is uncertain, but by putting in our effort into self discovery, to getting better at knowing how to make good decisions for ourselves, decisions informed by our intuition, the heart and the mind working together, we can guide ourselves in the good life, an authentic life, feeling the freedom of the dance, feeling connected with ourselves, and the world outside. At the end, I wish to be able to say, I came to this world, I discovered what is inside me, what is out there, and I lived an authentic way, in a way that is significant for me, with self compassion and compassion for others.