Monty Merlin grew up in the English countryside. His mother co-wrote The Green Consumer Guide, and he was a teenage hacker who nearly got kicked out of school for breaking into its system. That mix of environmentalism and technology led him to regenerative finance at university in Bristol, and he has stayed in the space for more than five years with ReFi DAO.

We recorded this on his last morning at the Agartha residency in Fools Valley, Portugal, in a valley full of wind turbines, we sat down talk about designing new regenerative systems and what it takes to rebuild the economy from the ground up. We got into why finance may be humanity's most powerful coordination tool, and why paper straws won't fix a system built on endless growth.

Monty explains bioregional financing, where communities organize around watersheds and soils instead of national borders, with examples like the Indigenous-led Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, and the network layer that isolated eco-villages still lack. He talks about his new work with Localism Labs and the handful of Web3 projects he thinks are actually delivering, like Regen Network and EthicHub. The centerpiece is Kwaxala, which worked with the Canadian government on a new kind of forest license in British Columbia. The license protects the forest as an asset on the balance sheet, and the credits it earns go first to the Indigenous communities who look after the land.

The conversation ends with how anyone can start living a little more Solarpunk, a reading list, and Monty's dream campus, where a permaculture food forest sits next to a robotics lab.

Host: Nico · Guest: Monty Merlin

References Mentioned:
- Kwaxala, an indigenous nature regeneration network
- The Green Consumer Guide by Julia Hailes
- Bioregional Financing Facilities by Samantha Power and Leon Seefeld
- John Fullerton's principles of regenerative economics
- Doughnut Economics
- Sacred Economics and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
- Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
- Gelephu Mindfulness City, Bhutan

SHOWNOTES
00:00 — Last day at the Agartha residency in Fools Valley
01:08 — Growing up with The Green Consumer Guide
02:45 — Teenage hacker, economics, and finding ReFi in Bristol
04:08 — Finance as a coordination tool, and why paper straws won't cut it
05:15 — Where Web3 fits, and bridging to traditional finance
07:47 — Who's getting it right? Bioregional financing facilities
11:32 — Eco-villages and the missing network layer
12:28 — Localism Labs: local resilience in a world of shocks
15:27 — Web3's YOLO moves, and a more critical lens
17:35 — Kwaxala and the right to regenerate
22:22 — Five years in ReFi, and breaking out of the bubble
24:52 — How to join the Solarpunk movement
27:00 — Start small: composting, community gardens, visiting
28:45 — The Solarpunk reading list
30:25 — Magic wand: a food forest meets a robotics lab
31:58 — Bhutan's mindfulness city
32:42 — Thanks and goodbyes

CONNECT
Join our group chat: https://t.me/agartha_one
Read our blog: agartha1.substack.com
Explore the map: agartha.one/map
Follow our Instagram: instagram.com/agartha_one
Follow X: x.com/agartha_one
New episodes every other week.

We get into the four stages of the nomad journey and where "multi-local" comes from, why Prospera's regulatory sandbox let him take 15 families and 35 kids to Roatán, the ten buckets of people a functioning society needs, temporary infrastructure and desire pathways as a way to build places that don't fight their residents, subscription economics at $400 a month and land that vests over three years, plus the cold start problem and the party-starter theory of how any of it gets off the ground.

Hosts: Nico and Jeremy · Guest: Daniel Thompson

CONNECT
Join the group chat → https://t.me/agartha_one
Read the blog → agartha1.substack.com
Explore the map → agartha.one

For our third episode we sat down with Christine Peterson, co-founder and former president of Foresight Institute. She helped bring molecular nanotechnology into the world as a serious field, co-authored Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work, and advises MIRI, the Global Healthspan Policy Institute, and the National Space Society.

She also coined the term open source software.

Forty years of watching frontier technology arrive, up close, from inside the room. We talked about naming things, molecular machines, why dystopia might be a public health problem, and what she’d tell a young builder today.

For those who prefer their podcasts on other platforms, we’re there too!

Youtube  ·  X (Twitter)  ·  Apple  ·  Spotify

[episode links to add]

The word that had to change

Before “open source” there was “free software” — accurate, principled, and a catastrophe in English. As software moved from a movement to an industry, non-programmer customers heard free, assumed zero dollars, then got an invoice for support.

Christine — a non-programmer herself — could see the trap and also see she had no standing in that community to fix it. So she handed the new term to a programmer friend, who did something quietly genius: he didn’t propose a rename, he just started using it. Others picked it up within days.

Her lesson for builders is that naming isn’t the thing you do after the real work. It is part of the work: “It’s your job, not just to build great new technologies, but to figure out how to communicate their benefits. Because without that, the thing is dead in the water.”

Two teenagers and a very big idea

The Foresight origin story starts in the late ’70s with an MIT biochem undergrad who’d discovered she was terrible in the lab, and a friend named Eric Drexler reading her textbooks. Journals were filling up with nature’s molecular machine systems — the ribosome and its relatives, real machinery moving atoms around to make life happen. Eric came from aero-astro, from machines made of metal.

He put the two together: if machines can work at that scale, why do they have to be soft and floating in water? Why not build stiff ones, out of carbon, designed by us? And then the consequences unspool — manufacturing, computation, environmental cleanup at the molecular level, repair of the human body at the molecular level.

Marvin Minsky and Arthur Kantrowitz took them seriously. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist told Eric it was physically impossible — and a few years later the scanning tunneling microscope proved you can manipulate individual atoms with that precision.

This was pre-internet, so they wrote a book — Engines of Creation — and printed an organization name and a PO box in the back before they’d even incorporated. People mailed in letters. Then a paper newsletter, then the first conference in 1989. This is Foresight’s 40th anniversary year.

Builders are gonna build

We asked Christine to distill Foresight’s thesis. Her answer is the most concise theory of change we’ve heard in a while, and it isn’t the one most people reach for:

The way you do that most effectively is not through passing laws and regulations or protesting in the streets. The best way to do it is to find the cutting edge builders in the space, try to do some screening on ethics, and then facilitate their work toward positive goals.

Because you can’t stop the building:

Innovators and builders, they’re gonna innovate and build. It’s like artists. Artists are gonna make art… Just like an elephant. An elephant’s gonna do elephant things.

If you don’t fund them toward something regenerative, someone else funds them toward something offensive, and that’s what gets built.

Read hard science fiction, even when it’s bad

If you want to think in decades, Christine’s advice is to borrow other people’s imaginations. Hard science fiction — scientifically conservative, technologically ambitious — is her forecasting tool of choice, and she’s unsentimental about the prose. You’re not there for the characters. You’re there for the concepts. (For software futures, she points to Greg Egan.)

If you want to be not surprised by what’s going on in science and technology, read hard science fiction. And then when these things show up, you’re like, well, here it is. I’ve been waiting for it, and now we’re here.

Which took us straight into the thing we most wanted to talk about: almost all mainstream sci-fi is dark.

I think part of the reason why so many young people are depressed is there’s so many dystopian narratives all the time. They get nothing else pretty much… There used to be more things like the original Star Trek. It was very positive in its vision. So there’s a real hunger for that. We need to step up and provide those positive visions.

Foresight’s answer is Existential Hope — a whole initiative devoted to collecting and commissioning futures worth wanting. Not existential risk. Existential hope. It’s the same instinct that produced Agartha’s own good-aliens mythology, which Nico laid out on the episode. The shortage of good myths is a real and load-bearing problem.

Nodes, not headquarters

On April 1st, 2026, Foresight did something it had never done in forty years: it got a place. Two, actually — AI Nodes in San Francisco and Berlin, focused on AI for science and safety. Science, because AI is currently the likeliest unlock for longevity, healthcare, ecological repair, and space. Safety, because “our whole civilization is dependent now on software. If the software is undermined, all of our systems will fail.”

The reason there are two, in two cities, is the part we keep chewing on:

If you want resilience, you’ve gotta have decentralization… We don’t want all the power to be at a few high-tech companies. That’s not the right way to go here.

Nico put our sharpest open question to her: we’ve mapped dozens of communities already owning their means of production locally — communes, villages, co-ops, some running their own mesh networks — and every one has invented its own tech stack. How do you get a shared, sovereignty-preserving stack adopted globally without a McDonald’s?

Christine’s answer was disarmingly human. Ambassadors. People who’ve made it work, going...

Most of human history was lived in tribes and villages. Somewhere in the last century we traded that for the single-family home — and got a loneliness crisis in return. In this episode, Agartha's Jeremy Dela Rosa sits down with Gillian Morris, who writes the blog Supernuclear with her friend Phil, about how to live well together again.

Gillian traces how cars, cheap land, and a very deliberate marketing campaign pushed us into atomized living, why co-living isn't the scary thing people imagine, and what actually makes it work: do-ocracy over red tape, conflict treated as an invitation to grow, and restorative justice instead of exile. We get into her community in Puerto Rico, why a community that ends isn't a failure, Fractal's peer-to-peer university in New York, communal models for education and childcare, and a long, honest riff on whether you could ever measure care with a token — and why you might not want to. Plus the Solarpunk future she's building toward: abundance, regenerative agriculture, and interconnected villages, vertical ones included.

Hosts: Nico Shi & Jeremy Dela Rosa ·
Guest: Gillian Morris, co-author of Supernuclear
Instagram: @gillianemorris
X: @gillianim

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open — loneliness and the cost of living apart
00:35 Welcome to the Agartha Podcast
00:49 Meet Gillian Morris & Supernuclear
02:22 The mission: inspire and enable
03:42 The loneliness crisis
07:01 Multi-generational homes & what we lost
08:38 How we drifted apart: cars, capitalism & the 'nuclear' age
14:22 From fringe to 'tell me more'
16:57 The abundance of the commons
18:24 Forms of community living & finding them
21:51 Why a community ending isn't a failure
25:46 Nodes, not pyramids
30:25 Governance & the power of do-ocracy
33:45 Failures, safety & restorative justice
39:47 What's ahead for Gillian
42:00 The five-to-ten-year vision
44:03 Communal education: Boundless & Fractal University
48:08 The invisible economy of care
49:29 Could we measure care? Crypto, reputation & its limits
57:15 How to help + final advice
58:59 A Solarpunk vision of the future
01:00:19 Closing

CONNECT
- Join the community group chat → https://t.me/agartha_one/
- Read the blog → agartha1.substack.com
- Explore more → agartha.one

New episodes every other Tuesday.

We get into the meta-crisis and why it felt too big to ignore, three months living off-grid at Mars College, the visions that kept showing up in meditation, why most eco-villages drift toward isolation, whether any of this can actually coexist with capitalism, and the kind of people we're hoping to find. Plus the parts that sound insane — the aliens, and a plan to end the year with ten days of silence and an ayahuasca ceremony. We left them in.

It's episode one of a long journey.

Hosts: Jeremy Dela Rosa & Nico Shi · Guest interviewer: Richa Parikh

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
01:02 Welcome to the Agartha Podcast
02:20 Nico's origin: Venice Beach & the meta-crisis
03:44 Mars College & living off-grid
07:44 Jeremy's origin: from Blizzard to Web3 to the vision
12:08 Dreams, visions & the name "Agartha"
14:30 Why most eco-villages go culty
16:55 Can Solarpunk compete with capitalism?
23:44 The four pillars & the values that matter
30:04 Attracting the right people
41:35 Change starts with a story
47:00 The problem & the solution, in plain terms
50:34 Auroville meets Harvard
51:45 Abundance vs. scarcity
58:08 Goals for the year
01:00:17 The Techno Shaman Residency
01:03:20 How to get involved

CONNECT
- Join the community group chat → https://t.me/agartha_one/
- Read the blog → agartha1.substack.com
- Explore more → agartha.one

New episodes every other Tuesday.