Season 10. Episode 4: Meaning in the 21st Century with Ellie Hain | Greenpill Podcast
Release Date: 11/05/2025
NN Ep:14 - Networked Diasporas: The Case of SeeDAO with Helena Rong
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Helena Rong, Assistant Professor at New York University Shanghai, to explore SeeDAO as a real-world case study of a proto Network Nation. They unpack how SeeDAO evolved from a Web3 startup into a translocal, diasporic community rooted in Daoist philosophy, kinship, and the pursuit of a “good life.” The conversation dives into co-presence, emergence, non-coercive governance, social ledgers, on-chain identity, and how SeeDAO blends digital infrastructure with physical...
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VDAO Ep.7 From Software to Soil: Health, Food & Building Real Resilience with Danilo Da Rosa
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller speaks with Danilo, a software engineer who left city life behind to rebuild his health, relationship with food, and sense of resilience through permaculture, natural building, and community living in Uruguay. Danilo shares how a health crisis pushed him to rethink his lifestyle, why growing food changed everything, and how moving closer to nature reshaped his understanding of resilience. They explore food autonomy, water catchment, natural house building,...
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NN Ep:13 - Intentional Communities & New Jurisdictions with Jessy Kate Schingler
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi is joined by Jessy Kate Schingler, co-founder of the Embassy Network, to explore how intentional communities and new jurisdictions can give Network Nations real-world grounding. Jessy shares lessons from over a decade of building translocal co-living communities, explains why the Embassy Network thought of its spaces as “embassies to the future,” and how identity, culture, and entanglement emerge without formal membership rules. The conversation then turns to jurisdictional...
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NN Ep:12 From politics to protocols to protocol politics with Santiago Siri
GreenPill
In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi speak with Santiago Siri, founder of Democracy Earth, DemocracyOS, and Proof of Humanity, to explore a central question of the digital age: Can we escape politics with protocols or do protocols simply create new political arenas? Santiago shares his journey from building Argentina’s internet political party Partido de la Red, to creating open-source democratic infrastructure, to running one of the most ambitious on-chain identity and governance experiments in Web3. They discuss identity as the core bottleneck of digital...
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NN Ep:11 Let a Thousand Societies Bloom with Vitalik Buterin
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer are joined by Vitalik Buterin to reflect on one of the most influential experiments in recent community-building history: Zuzalu. Vitalik shares the motivations behind Zuzalu, what actually worked (and what didn’t), and why many pop-up cities risk drifting into “long conferences” instead of becoming real communities. Together they explore kinship vs telos, culture vs mission, permanence vs mobility, governance by forking, and how zones, tribes, and regulatory...
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NN Ep:10 Burning Man: Seeding a Network Nation
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, Primavera De Filippi explore one of the most influential community experiments of the last 40 years: Burning Man. They’re joined by Erika Blair, who leads engagement and network strategy at Burning Man, to unpack how a one-week event in the Nevada desert evolved into a global, year-round network of communities bound not by territory, but by shared principles, rituals, and identity. The conversation dives into the origins of Burning Man, the emergence of the 10 Principles, regional burns around the...
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S.10 Ep.8 Hyperstitions: How Beliefs Become Reality in Networked Systems with Jake Hartnell
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki sits down with Jake Hartnell reality engineer, builder, and the mind behind ENOVA to explore the idea of hyperstitions: beliefs and narratives that become real by spreading through networks. Jake explains how hyperstitions operate as a new coordination primitive, why technologies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and AGI can be seen as successful hyperstitions, and how tools like hyperstition markets blend prediction markets, incentives, and storytelling to drive collective action. They discuss ENOVA, egregores,...
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S.10 Ep.7 Prosperous Software: Rethinking Open Source Funding Through Licensing
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Greenpill Podcast, Kevin Owocki talks with Raymond Cheng software engineer, researcher, and co-founder of Open Source Observer — about the Prosperous Software Movement and why open source licensing needs to evolve. Raymond explains how today’s open source economy underfunds its own foundations, why existing licenses fail to reflect modern financial realities, and how a new class of revenue-sharing licenses could sustainably fund open source dependencies. They explore the history of free software, the limits of voluntary public...
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NN Ep:9 A New Political Landscape in the Digital Age with Nick Srnicek & Sofia Cossar
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the Network Nations mini-series, host Felix Beer is joined by Nick Srnicek (author of Platform Capitalism and Silicon Empires) and Sofia Cossar (BlockchainGov) to explore the emerging concept of Network Sovereignty. They unpack how power is shifting from nation-states to digital networks, why platforms now function like political infrastructures, and how algorithms, protocols, and platforms increasingly shape governance, speech, and economic life. The conversation examines platform empires, AI infrastructure, state power, civil society...
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VDAO Ep.6 Everyday Resilience Building Anti-Fragility in Suburbia with Gardner
GreenPill
New @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌐 In this episode of the VDAO × Greenpill Anti-Fragile Network States mini-series, host Kris Miller talks with Gardner, a tech founder exploring how local resilience and self-sovereignty can be built without going off-grid. Gardner shares his hands-on journey of transforming a suburban home into a more resilient system from rainwater harvesting and food forests to community reciprocity and mindset shifts. They discuss why resilience doesn’t mean bunkers or isolation, how small actions compound, and why investing in community, not fear, is the real...
info_outlineNew @greenpillnet pod out today! 🌍
Kevin chats with Ellie Hain writer, facilitator, and co-founder of the Meaning Alignment Institute (MAI) about how we can rediscover meaning, presence, and purpose in the 21st century.
Ellie explores why so many people across modern society, tech, and culture feel disconnected, and how re-attunement to life, community, and ritual can help us restore the sacred in our everyday lives. Together, they discuss the meaning crisis, why it’s emerging now, and how new institutions might integrate purpose, beauty, and values into the systems we’re building for the future.
🎧 Links:
🌐 greenpill.network
🐦 @ellie_hain
| @owocki | @greenpillnet
🎥 Exit the Void: by Ellie Hain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqB-1ABZJSM
🌿 Timestamps
00:00 – Welcome to a new Greenpill season: exploring technology, coordination & Protopia
01:00 – Introducing guest Ellie Hain, co-founder of the Meaning Alignment Institute
02:20 – How Ellie began her journey into meaning, mysticism, and systems
04:30 – The tension between inner experience and societal expectations
05:30 – Exploring meaning as attunement to life
07:00 – Sovereignty and interdependence: dancing between individuality and the web of life
09:40 – What attunement feels like presence as a lived experience
11:00 – Exercise: reconnecting to meaningful moments
13:00 – Embodiment, resonance, and listening to life’s signals
15:00 – Why meaning is our birthright, not something to earn
17:10 – The “meaning crisis” why so many feel disconnected today
19:00 – From numbness to re-sensitization: healing modern disconnection
21:00 – How modern systems desensitize us to what’s sacred
22:40 – The resilience and strength in seeking meaning
25:00 – Designing extitutions: new systems that embed meaning and purpose
27:30 – Moving beyond homo economicus: building for homo sapiens
30:00 – Institutions as reflections of human nature and sensitivity
32:40 – The concept of containers for meaning and how they become corrupted
34:10 – What new containers for meaning look like in the 21st century
36:00 – Community, ritual, and story as ancient technologies for belonging
38:30 – Raves, festivals, and modern rites of passage
40:10 – The search for a new unifying narrative in the digital age
41:30 – Why the quest for meaning is the defining work of this century
43:00 – Facing pain and shadow as part of transformation
44:20 – Allocating meaning and capital together through rituals & community
46:00 – Meaning alignment as the next frontier of institutional design
47:00 – Closing reflections: finding beauty, purpose, and connection in everyday life