In this episode, Jeff Emmett, author of Exploring MyCofi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond, shares insights on how fungi can inspire the redesign of governance and economic systems. As a co-founder of the Common Stack and token engineering researcher at BlockScience, Jeff has developed tools and blueprints for communities to tackle collective action problems. Drawing on natural patterns, he explores how mycelium-inspired frameworks can increase institutional resilience, enable regenerative economies, and foster mutuality.

The conversation touches on the intersections of ecology, distributed technologies, and governance. Jeff discusses how lessons from fungi—such as resource allocation, fractal structures, and adaptogenic resilience—can be applied to human systems. He also examines experiments in decentralized finance, governance models like conviction voting, and the potential for nested economies.

Jeff explores:

• How mycelial principles inspire new governance and resource allocation systems
• Why diverse, local, and fractalized economies are more resilient
• What regenerative finance can learn from ecological cycles

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Themes

• Mycelial Design Principles – How fungi’s resource allocation and coherence can inform economic and governance systems.
• Fractal and Nested Economies – Building resilient, decentralized economies that scale from local to global.
• Alternative Governance Models – Exploring conviction voting, bonding curves, and trust-based signaling.
• Mutual Credit and Generosity – Lessons from ecological support networks for economic cooperation.
• Adaptogenic Principles – Translating resilience and adaptability from biology into organizational design.
• Decentralized Finance and Inclusion – How distributed ledgers and offline transactions can enable bottom-up economies.

Timestamps

• 00:00 — Institutional neuroplasticity and Mycofi principles
• 02:06 — Introducing Jeff Emmett and his work
• 03:07 — Background: from distributed systems to fungi
• 05:45 — Fungal coherence and resource allocation
• 07:34 — Six design principles inspired by fungi
• 09:41 — Beyond money: multidimensional value systems
• 12:35 — Lessons from fungi for governance in times of abundance and decay
• 15:21 — Underground networks and mutual credit
• 17:57 — Governance mechanisms and biomimicry
• 18:35 — Streaming trust and adaptive governance models
• 22:12 — Global experiments in governance: Taiwan, Ethereum, and beyond
• 26:33 — Conviction voting explained
• 29:54 — Bonding curves as economic membranes
• 32:35 — Distributed ledger tech and shifts in power
• 37:29 — Nested economies and ecological parallels
• 40:19 — Stable currencies without violence-based enforcement
• 42:09 — Wealth Defense Industry and resource distribution
• 45:23 — Arbitrage and mushrooms as natural equilibrators
• 47:01 — Gradients of mutualism and economic incentives
• 49:53 — Subsidiarity and supersediarity in governance
• 52:24 — Adaptogenic principles and psilocybinetics
• 54:59 — Trophic levels and upcycling of energy
• 56:53 — DeFi and resilient bottom-up economies
• 59:01 — Offline transactions and financial inclusion
• 1:00:28 — Designing ideal bottom-up economies
• 1:03:46 — Validated data, experimentation, and the future of governance
• 1:04:13 — Closing reflections

Resources

• Exploring MyCofi: Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond – Jeff Emmett
• Paul Stamets
• Merlin Sheldrake – Entangled Life
• Toby Kiers – Research on fungal markets
• Michael Zargham
• Bernard Lietaer – Community currencies
• Elinor Ostrom – Principles for managing commons
• Donella Meadows – Thinking in Systems
• Astrid Scholz - Tackling the Wealth Defense Industry
• Audrey Tang
• Michel Bauwens

Transcript:

Jeff Emmett (00:00)

If these adaptogenic mushrooms help our brains grow new neural pathways as individuals, maybe if we apply these Mycofi principles in organizations, they can increase institutional neuroplasticity. They can allow for new ways to sense things, new ways to cohere around what's important and new ways to act by creating these sensing governance pathways and these acting funding pathways and allow them to proliferate in new organizational forms.

Lucas Tauil (00:32)

Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil where we explore mutuality in conversations towards a world that works for everyone.

Lucas Tauil (00:50)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information, and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.

During my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend Hailey Cooperider pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (02:06)

Today we welcome Jeff Emmett, the author of Exploring MyCofi, Mycelial Design Patterns for Web3 and Beyond. Observing natural patterns, Jeff has been modeling novel governance and economic patterns. Co-founder of the Common Stack and token engineering researcher at BlockScience, Jeff designed tools and blueprints for communities to solve collective action problems. By targeting governance and incentives alignment, his work supports communities towards economic sustainability.

Welcome, Jeff. It is a pleasure to have you with us.

Jeff Emmett (02:50)

Thanks very much. Happy to be here. Always enjoy our conversations.

Lucas Tauil (02:52)

Nice, nice.

Yeah it's always a pleasure to be with you Jeff. Jeff shall we start with your background? What led you to distributed technologies and the world of fungi?

Jeff Emmett (03:07)

Good question. ⁓ a succinct version of that. I mean, they didn't come at the same time. They kind of, ⁓ myciliated together at some point, ⁓ along my journey. ⁓ I, wasn't necessarily looking at distributed systems necessarily in the beginning. I was, I was wondering why, why the world seemed to be falling apart. ⁓ that, you know, these, we, we seem to be rolling backwards all of these, ⁓ sort of advancements that, that we kept talking about, you know, and we were having narcissists in the White House and economic trade wars and Brexit you know, not that there aren't a lot of reasons for these kind of failures of coordination. It really led me down the rabbit hole of blockchain technologies as sort of the, at least at the time, what I understood to be a way to be, to rethink those coordinative structures as protocols rather than as say corporations or nation states.

And that kept leading me down the rabbit hole. Actually the first blockchain conference that I went to, I stood outside the whole time and learned about Holochain and the agent centric as opposed to data centric ontology really, really sung true to me. I mean, on a parallel track, I had been very interested in mycelium. I was reading, you know, Paul Stamets’ work Merlin Sheldrake and Alona Hapsing, a lot of these sort of researchers, ⁓ Toby Kier's, her work is fascinating, looking at the sort of the market structures of fungi. So I mean, this was kind of a parallel track of interest that at some point, they merged actually, I think it was at a, it was at a collaborative finance conference. ⁓ Cofi is, one of the, you know, defy refi, Cofi is a new, ⁓ meme in the, mean, I wouldn't even call it the web three space in the monetary theory space.

And while we were at the Cofi conference, you know, it was an unconference. So everyone was encouraged to speak if they had topics. ⁓ the topic that we came up with, for my talk was, was Mycofi, was just a play on, on the COFI ⁓ but that really kind of got the sparks, going about how actually there are very, you know, stable long-term resilient patterns of positive, some regeneration in mycelium that have been going since, you know, the dawn of life on this planet.

And maybe we had something to learn from, you know, from these wonderful beings to bring into our own economic fabrics. So yeah, that's kind of where I think those two topics merged, but that was still fairly recently. So I don't know what kept them apart for so long.

Lucas Tauil (05:45)

Jeff, an evolutionary honed capability, both for collective coherence and intelligent resource allocation. Could you share with us how those mechanisms work?

Jeff Emmett (06:02)

I mean, to be honest, I don't know that we know that much. Toby Kears has some really fascinating research. She's got a number of papers looking at the market dynamics of, if one mycelial mat has higher phosphorus and another mycelial mat has lower phosphorus, they will trade at different rates to trees sugars and whatnot.

So you have like walrassian market behaviors. There's also all sorts of like

physical, chemical, even down to I've heard mushrooms or the mycelium, the way that they interact with water molecules because they're continuously exploring, but also, you know, maintaining an internal pressure to in the mycelium, they use almost what is a fourth state of water. It's like a gel-like state that has hydrostatics. They're, really making use of all sorts of different

natural forces that I don't think we even understand that well, because these are happening at such tiny layers. and just that we have massively under sufficient amounts of study going into mycelium and, and how these organisms operate and how we can, what we can learn from them. So I think it's just a rich area of exploration.

Lucas Tauil (07:16)

Jeff, fungi allocate resources and facilitate coherence in genetically diverse collectives. What are the key design principles we can learn from them in designing our resource allocation processes?

Jeff Emmett (07:34)

Yeah, I think there's, there's a number of them. ⁓ the six that we identified in, the book, ⁓ I mean, that these are networked infrastructures, ⁓ which not like our economies aren't today. I just don't think they are very healthy network infrastructures. You have some players that have asymmetrically, you know, more power, ⁓ and a lot of, you know, groups that are underserved in, in current economies. ⁓ the fact that they're fractal in nature, that we can, we could probably have much more resilient.

economic systems through a plurality of diverse local economies that fractalize up into larger groups through their sort of pooling of resources, of funds, of assets, which also creates the ability for emergent coordination. It's not a top-down dictation from, let's say, the central bank to subsidiary banks about what the rate will be, which then impacts the economic behavior.

the economic behavior could, could be much more responsive and dynamic to the actual productive labor in an economy. ⁓ if, if we were to use the same principles as, ⁓ as mycelium, I think also the amount of flow, ⁓ our systems today, actually, I mean, there are, there are organic, parallels to our current economic system and it would be probably a cancer, you know, something that grows and grows and grows, ⁓ can't stop growing, ⁓ until it likely.

kills its host. So it's not saying that we don't have any, you know, organic resemblance in our current system, but I think we just need to choose sort of the more healthy directions and making sure that, you know, it's interesting mushrooms, mushrooms don't get cancer. They evolve too quickly. Their cells outsmart the, the never ending growth cells. So if we can embed that,

property into our own economies, our local economies that fractalize up into larger and larger bio-regional or biomes or regions. I think we potentially address some of the biggest crises that capitalism is currently pushing us towards.

Lucas Tauil (09:41)

Yeah, on that line, Jeff, the present monetary system relies on a single notion of value, money. As Michael Zahrham pointed out in his praise to your book, nutrients can be waste in one context and a resource in another. recognizing this guide us in designing more regenerative resource allocation in our monetary system?

Jeff Emmett (10:10)

Yeah, good question. And I think that's the wonderful thing about ecologies. When we study a forest ecology, we are looking at the flows and resource transferring of many different assets, whether it's nitrogen, oxygen, water, different metals, sugars. So there's always a flow and there are different stakeholders in that ecosystem that bring

resources from one part to another. Mycelium often play a role in that, but so do various insects, birds, animals, even humans, trees. So there's all sorts of different needs within these groups. Waste for some group is food for another. And this is how you get the closed loop in that ecology that you have basically a production cycle, a metabolism of the sort of ecosystem. And I think our

current economies are too unidimensional, which causes everything else to kind of get optimized out. We can learn, we make our balance sheets more sophisticated over time. We now actually account for not just profit, but also risk. And I mean, maybe carbon is kind of coming in, but maybe more broadly like biodiversity credits and even more so, you know, local sustainability, economic sustainability. I think all of these things can be.

valued and priced and put on balance sheets. We just need to be willing to do that. And I think protocolization can greatly help in that. It doesn't have to be one-off, you can be, well, I suppose it's evolutionary.

Lucas Tauil (11:54)

Yeah, iterative, right? Yeah.

Jeff Emmett (11:57)

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Tauil (11:59)

On the line of excess of resources, excess of resources can quickly become toxic and numbing, making people out of touch and dissociative. Given that this day's political power walks hand in hand with financial power, this seems to accelerate the downward spiral we're in. The present money-driven paradigm appears to be approaching an inflection point.

What are the fungi lessons that will help us rethink governance on the upcoming paradigm?

Jeff Emmett (12:35)

Hmm. Yeah, I think, it's interesting to think what, what mushrooms do in the, in the presence of, ⁓ you know, a singular resource or too much of a resource in one area. ⁓ they're often the transporters, they're the ones who break down after a forest fire, for example, mushrooms are some of the first on the scene. They're breaking down all of the charred wood, all of the waste of that, of that event and then transporting it.

through the network to where it might be needed. So they're kind of pulling it or arbitraging. And I think we, mean, maybe arbitrage is too financial a term for it. But I think when we see the death and decay and overturn of a paradigm and in the financial system, as we know it today, I think is in the throes of that. It may still continue for a long time, but now we actually have, you know, since the advent of

cryptocurrencies and mean, e-money even before that is, is there's alternatives. They may be very small today and they may be very niche. wouldn't say they've hit use cases that, you know, many people can be proud of. I'm sure there's lots of money in crypto projects. This isn't necessarily the place that it needs to be. They're probably more Ponzi's and casinos than.

you know, legitimate projects, but I think this also just speaks to the early-ness, the, the nasancy of the technology that we haven't learned to connect it properly, the economic rails to the production rails. And actually Holochain and the, the HoloFuel Reserve account, you know, pricing algorithm was such a fascinating experiment to me to connect the economic power of a token and economy to the productive power of

what it's what it's putting out the the hosting power, the compute, the storage, the bandwidth, anything like that. And I think that pattern can can replicate to many other things. It may be a little bit more difficult or less difficult to measure the outputs of those things. But I think this also gives us a lot of opportunity to experiment like the mushrooms would in alternative theories of value prior to these technologies. This wasn't possible to do.

The only way to deploy a currency, I mean, was to either be a nation state or a gigantic corporation, you know, which are now also the most powerful and influential types of organizations in the world today, probably for that reason. So I think that the proliferation of that affordance to any organization, even down to maybe an individual size, just makes the whole economic exploration environment much more mycelial in nature.

Lucas Tauil (15:21)

Jeff, on that line of thinking, how can the underground economic support network of fungi inspire mutual credit initiatives?

Jeff Emmett (15:33)

Well, I think there's there's so many ways. And not not that a lot of these don't already exist in some form or another. So I don't think oftentimes that the mycelium, I mean, they may have new things to teach us. They may also just validate some of the ideas that we already have. Things like profit pooling or loss pooling. Actually, this is also backed up by a mathematical theory called the ergodicity.

which is gaining some popularity in the past few years, saying that, you lot of our calculations of risk and benefit are not accounting for the fact that our systems are not ergodic. We're kind of making a category error in our business plans and the profitability that we expect from businesses. And actually that is greatly mitigated, that error is greatly mitigated by things like profit pooling among firms.

⁓ so you can, you can get to your ergodic maximum if everyone profit pools, ⁓ at 100%. Of course, this may be difficult to get everyone to agree to do. ⁓ but the, the more that you pool, the more, ⁓ statistically likely it is for everyone to succeed. So I think this is one of those things that we also see in, mycelium. ⁓ but to me, this isn't necessarily, ⁓ something brand new. It's just providing validation that.

yes, we see this work in nature, the mesh network, the mesh support of basically the underground socialism of the forest. A tree can literally be cut down and its root mass underground kept alive for centuries. It'll be fed by the surrounding network. And I mean, it kind of makes sense. If you are a tree buried in the ground next to your friend who's been there with you for a few hundred years, you might just continue feeding him.

So I think we can we can really and this might be difficult to do at a national scale It's very hard to I think relate to a nation scale of people but at our neighborhood scale I think this would be much easier. I think if we had systems of institutionalized generosity Where you can see the people who are not only hurting but are being helped by that generosity I think we can we can change the game of how our economic fabric

encourages coordination over kind of this dog eat dog competition.

Lucas Tauil (17:57)

Yeah, what I find interesting is that in nature, biology regulates the rates of extraction and the rates of contribution over millions of years. In human systems, we are much faster. much more agency, so we can break things. governance is structural for that.

What are the mechanisms of governance that can help us adapt those biomimicry learnings and make use of them on a sustainable form?

Jeff Emmett (18:35)

Absolutely. And I think this is one of the most interesting things of these technologies as well as they are not just tokens representing say dollars or even resources. They could be tokens representing trust where I delegate my trust to you and my tokens flow to you over a rate that that trust increases. For example, you know, and I don't think there's one answer to

You know, what is the right way to do governance governance? Actually, I think there, there, you know, there's the no free lunch theorem. There's some arrows and possibility theorem. we know that there's no perfect way, so we can stop looking for that right off the bat. but I think what mycelium offer is a lot of things that just didn't work under the technical debt of our old voting systems. You know, when you, when you have a voting system or you have to check on a box, ⁓ you know, this person or this person.

you can't give real time input because you know, it would be prohibitively costly and everyone would have to be paying attention to it all the time, which would be terrible. ⁓ but under these systems, we can now stream, ⁓ not just our preference over, let's say policies, but also our preference over who should have what weight over making those policies. You know, if I thought you were an expert on a topic, I could stream my trust to you. My trust increases over time.

And perhaps if you act in a way that betrays that trust and I take those tokens away, well, then my, my trust decays probably faster than, than it grows because that kind of mimics our, our human systems, right? We grow our trust in small bits over time with reliable behavior. And then if you lose that trust, you, you, might lose it all at once or very quickly. So we can, we can now embed those kinds of charge up and discharge dynamics.

into our governance systems. Maybe we have a continuous delegation system where people just actually grow or shrink in the weight that their voice has. And there doesn't have to be any like winner. get the, the power for four years, which just seems like a, really, it's very fraught with danger. know we need consistency to be able to get things done. Certainly. But I think a lot of the assumptions of sort of

representative democracy are really outdated, including things like one person, one vote. I think we could have one person, 100 votes, 1000 votes. You could quadratically cast those. You could delegate them to different people for different authority areas. We could have, you know, bottom up grassroots participation where you can cast your own vote if you have the time, but if you don't, you just delegate it. And that's immediately recallable.

You know, if someone starts enacting policy that you disagree with, then you just point that trust to somewhere else, to someone who is making policy you agree with and their vote, their voice gains in prominence over time. So I think there's all sorts of experiments we could do with signaling, using these tokens, not just as money, which is its own form of signal. Maybe money is the wrong term as currency, but also as governance, as trust.

where we can signal who has authority to speak where. And of course you could overlay, you know, degrees or, you know, all sorts of other, you know, real world authentication systems that we have now. But I think allowing this sort of delegation and trust and waiting, ranking different proposals continuously could open up a whole new world of how we make decisions as groups, which is much more natural.

Lucas Tauil (22:12)

Jeff, on the last 11 years since the sunflower movement in Taiwan, Taiwan has been this exceptional ground for experimenting with new governance models and opinion polling Audrey Ting, their former Digital Affairs Minister and now their Digital Affairs Ambassador, is doing exceptional work on that regard.

What other spaces of experimentation do you see out there where this is happening?

Jeff Emmett (22:44)

Yeah. Yeah. Audrey's been doing some great work and his influences is clear in the Ethereum community as well. His work with Vitalik and Glen while, radical exchange has been doing some very neat, experimentation there. they had a good, ⁓ quadratic voting visualization tool. I think there's, man, there's so many great experiments. The challenge is they're using the tools rather than explaining and understanding the tools. And I think there's, ⁓

We first need to gamify and play with these tools so we know where they work, where they don't, where they break. Because I think iterating the tools and then using the tools simultaneously to like make organizational level decisions creates a lot of challenges. We often have like insufficient tools, which are then, you know, the outputs of which are taken as, you know, immutable blockchain outputs. Meanwhile,

they were just experimental. needed to like validate that they even did what we thought they were going to do before we put it into use to, you know, cement the governance of this ecosystem forever. So I think there's, this was my first foray into the web three space was building these tools and deploying them to see how we could use them. We did deploy a bunch of V1 things, which was great, but I don't think the UX was there for people to really understand tangibly what

they were interacting with. The smart contracts on the backend were doing all sorts of neat things, but the people on the front couldn't really, and I mean, it led to some faux pas where money was spent that it wasn't meant to be because things weren't set up properly. So I think there's still a lot of room for playing with, gamifying these things, visualizing these things, and then putting them to use in very small scale. I'm far less interested in what, DAO tools.

we use, now kind of shrinking down to like even the small working group, know, six people working group. how do you manage the things that you manage? A lot of the tools are actually kind of a fractal shadow of, you know, it's still maybe a bonding curve or conviction voting or, or any of these primitives, ⁓ just assembled in different ways, ⁓ at different, ⁓ scales of group where I think the inputs and the outputs can be much closer, ⁓ correlated.

a few of the other groups that are really innovating in interesting ways in the blockchain space are groups like, you know, the token engineering commons.

this was one of the first, augmented bonding curve deployments with conviction voting, sort of this dynamic governance primitive, ⁓ Giveth also experiments like rapidly. used a quadratic rank choice voting tool that was kind of custom built. ⁓ but I, know, it just gave me a taste of the future that we could build an app that does quadratic rank choice voting, bring your own token. ⁓ and actually I feel like a lot of these things could be turned into, you know, voting.

products or dashboards views on different ways of collective decision making. have a feeling we're on the cusp of some really interesting. One last group I'll point out, because I think they're building a toolkit that's quite interesting, filled with these kinds of components is inverter network. And they're taking a lot of the work that the common stack and the token engineering commons, a lot of these same tools, turning them into sort of a deployable toolkit where you can take different modules and plug it together.

and then launch your own governance system, token system, any number of combinations of these primitives in the toolkit. So yeah, lots of really interesting development going on. And I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg as well. There's so much going on in different groups below the surface where the mycelium are.

Lucas Tauil (26:33)

Jeff, shall we share with the audience what is the meaning of those things? Shall we start with conviction voting? What is conviction voting?

Jeff Emmett (26:43)

Sure. Yeah. So conviction voting was, was originally, ⁓ put forward by Michael's Zargham as something he called social sensor fusion. so he did his PhD in robotics and multi-agent robotic systems. like drone's swarms that kind of stuff. ⁓ and of course they're, they're doing group consensus all the time, ⁓ through, sensor fusion. So they basically ever all of these sensors have, ⁓ fused together into a, understanding of what needs to go on, who needs to move where.

so taking that the same mathematics from that, but then using humans as social sensors. So in other words, if we are going around our community and we see things that need to be addressed by the collective, we can raise them. We can be a sensor to say, this, this pothole needs to be filled or this person needs to be fed or, know, any number of not that we need to put that to a message board. anyway, ⁓ so conviction voting is, a way that you can, ⁓

votes gain and decay in their weight over time. So in early DAO voting, there were some problems with last minute vote swings with whales in the system. They would come in and deposit, you know, a million votes on yes. One minute before it closed, people thought it was going to be no the whole time. Suddenly it switched to yes. So this was also a response to some of the early I guess, interaction failures of, of DAO voting systems and

Michael Zargham proposed that, you know, votes can actually be cast and then grow over time according to, you know, mathematical formalization so that you don't have this like discrete zero to 10 million votes. You have a smooth curve. And the interesting thing with smooth curves in aggregation, you know, if everyone has a smooth curve of, let's say their, their preferences, you can add all of those together. So you can now have like an aggregate or a cumulative

Maybe consensus is the wrong word, conviction, that a certain thing should happen or not. So that was the idea behind conviction voting is that the weight of your vote grows over time and decays when you pull it away. And you can allocate that across any number of proposals simultaneously. So each user is almost like a tap, pouring their preference into a cup, which each proposal was a cup.

And when your proposal gets enough conviction, then it passes and the funds start to flow. Yeah. So just basically a way of integrating the, the charge up discharge feature, which is actually prevalent everywhere in nature. know, in mammals we eat, we gain mass. If we don't eat, then we lose mass in neurons in cells. This, this works all over the place in nature. So it's.

basically an attempt to bring that into our voting systems because now we can do that. We could never do that before because they weren't on internet rails. was checks on a paper. So yeah, I think it's just one step into a huge space of exploration in alternative governance systems that include dynamic

Lucas Tauil (29:54)

Got you, got you. Jeff, what about bonding curves? What are they? How do they work?

Jeff Emmett (30:02)

yeah, another, another funny term for what is actually a very natural process. ⁓ I think anything that, retains like a, like a swale in permaculture, you know, when you have water running downhill, you want to make the most use of that water. So you dig, you dig swales so that the, water is retained and it's used in a garden and then it keeps flowing down and there's another swale. ⁓ I think basically bonding curves are like asset retention systems. They're kind of like piggy banks.

If you put in a dollar, it generates a token. If you put the token back in, you get the dollar out. So it's just sort of like a membrane between an outside system and an inside system.

whenever there is, something entering from outside, like, like dollars and then inside a token is, is generated. So if we think of this, like a biological analogy, the bonding curve is almost like the membrane of the cell. It, it, it allows some inflow outflow, but it's like, it's not, ⁓ complete, ⁓ permissionless you know, there, there's some,

rules that need to be abided by and that rule is basically like the pricing algorithm and that may be connected to a number of different signals from various systems. So if know if outflow exceeds a certain amount then you know it can be auto limited to certain currencies or certain user types or I think there's all sorts of interesting sort of like economic sense and response mechanisms and bonding curves are in a way this

smart contract, sort of like one-sided market. It exists just when people interact with it. And it always has the ability to respond to that. So I think we're almost talking about like economic life forms. I remember reading one time, the beginning of life was when there was a cell wall, because before that there was no difference between inside and outside. was just a bunch of chemicals. But as soon as there was a cell wall, you had...

something that was different than what was around it. And it could act in, in relation to that environment, but as a unique being. And I think bonding curves might be this sort of same membrane, an economic membrane that separates what's inside that from what's outside that. I'm really interested to think about what that could mean in a future of kind of like economic evolution and yeah.

organizational life forms that are much more responsive to the needs of their members and environments.

Lucas Tauil (32:35)

Jeff, in the past, every time technology opened a path towards new co-ordinative infrastructures, the world has experienced massive shifts in geopolitical structure. The printing press, the telegraph and the internet each transformed how information was distributed, reshaping geopolitical power. How do you see distributed ledger technology reshaping power?

Jeff Emmett (33:05)

the technological advancement from these offered by these technologies is, is quite fascinating.

The internet and the post office are ontologically very similar. They're just message routing systems. You have, you know, a sender, a receiver, you have some middle man that's, that's bringing a letter or a packet from A to B. But the difference of the internet and the post office is obviously fundamental because the speed of the internet, the lightness of sending bits compared to sending letters on horseback.

really changes the nature of, know, look at all the things that we can do that would really be impossible from, you know, hand delivery of letters. So although we're not necessarily like shifting what is happening in say moving from, you know, real world economic networks to distributed ledgers or traditional economic networks to distributed ledgers, the fact that we're doing it on rails of protocols that don't sleep, they don't.

You know, don't need bank tellers. don't, you know, if I, can't send money from my bank on, weekends or holidays, or it takes, you know, extra time, like this, this really makes no sense when you look at, know, the, opportunities afforded these new technological infrastructures. And while they're not, ⁓ they're not rethinking everything. It's just, it's just ledgers. You know, it's not even that, ⁓ you know, just moving from double entry to, triple entry accounting, perhaps, but.

I mean, even the shift from single entry to double entry was a revolution in, know, the allowed the Italian banking industry to flourish, allowed, you know, lot of the systems that we know, today to, to have come into being. So it'll be interesting to consider what the shift from double entry to triple entry accounting brings. ⁓ although it sounds very boring, ⁓ it's a, I think a revolution in, in potential, ⁓ coordination for, humanity.

hope by distributing it to the people at the bottom. I think this is really like lowering the barriers to access for a lot of these things aren't new in our society. The way that we issue tokens, fractional reserve lending, like any of these things, they already exist. I think they just exist at levels that are not reachable by most people, most organizations.

And I think we can do a lot with these technologies to bring them a lot closer to. I don't think a lot of the patterns we use in economics are even necessarily that wrong. I think they're just deployed at the wrong scale. The fact that we try to do it at the nation state scale or the corporate scale, the scale of those corporations that are able to like launch their equities tokens, which are kind of like super money. Some people call them. But I think the,

offer of this technology is, especially if it is in open source as protocols, this is where it can proliferate from the bottom up from as small as it needs to be. And then cluster together, moving up from there. So you could have, you know, a neighborhood currency that's a part of a community currency. That's a part of a regional currency. That's a part of a bio regional currency. That's a part of a global currency. And I'm only saying currency here as in some kind of, ⁓

credit unit of account, whatever, if that is a reputational based currency, it's interesting to think of, maybe can we have money that we don't have to spend to use? Like you think about, you know, love, if your mother loves you, that love isn't decreased when you go over for dinner, you know, or it doesn't, it doesn't get decremented from a ledger. And maybe similarly, we could have currencies that, you know, show that you are

an outstanding member, a contributing member of your community. And that just gets you free lunch or free coffee anywhere in town, or, you know, this, doesn't actually decrement. It can just be a, a signal, a new kind of yeah, currency is just not the right word for it because it may, I guess it flows in different ways. If we think of a Art's currency, we're seeing the currents of these various flows and forms of value.

Lucas Tauil (37:29)

correctly that you were describing nested economies?

Jeff Emmett (37:33)

Yeah, yeah, probably would have been a more succinct way to put it.

Lucas Tauil (37:38)

And what are nested economies? So I think it's a good segue for us to go into this.

Jeff Emmett (37:43)

Hmm.

Certainly, actually it's, let me see if I can recall the term. I just came across it in ecology, inquiline ecologies, I think. Inquiline, we should look that up. But it's an ecology within an ecology. So, I mean, unpleasant things like parasites, for example, they make a living space out of us as in their ecosystem. But this exists all through nature. have animals living within plants.

you know, depositing their feces and feeding the plant, but at the same time getting protection, it's kind of this ecological symbiosis in a lot of cases or parasitism in others.

nested economies are basically the, economic equivalent of these, ⁓ Inqualine, ecologies. have, ⁓ an economy existing within another economy. And I think we, we have this in, several ways already today, but, ⁓ I think it will be very interesting to, consider how, for example, Ethereum as a layer one.

And then all of these protocols and apps built on Ethereum using Ethereum grows the value of the Ethereum ecosystem to much higher. Similarly, you know, the US USD as the world's global reserve currency kind of enforced, kind of militarily enforced, creates massive value in the US economy. So

if we look at it from a more healthy perspective in a permaculture context, we can redistribute the flows to make sure that these things are long term sustainable from the local out, rather than sort of extract and dominate at the highest level and then, you know, dictate things down like interest rates or whatnot. I think there can be a much more emergent sense and response in our economic systems that

We'll look back at how we do things today and just wonder how it ever worked and that it didn't.

Lucas Tauil (39:44)

Yeah, what you just mentioned about the US dollar enforcement happening through army's power. One of the things that occurs to me is if we can come up with a tech that holds its ground by technological efficiency and doesn't depend on army's, what would the consequence of this be? know, what would stable

currencies that do not depend on violence enforcement be. This is fascinating, right?

Jeff Emmett (40:19)

it'll be interesting to see when these currencies, when these tools, these new ledgers and distributed technologies become useful to people such that they're willing to

You know, I'm interested in a day that we can invest in the things that I will need in the future locally for my, for my, as local as I can. ⁓ if I could invest in my healthcare, if I can invest in education, if I could invest in, and I mean, not to say that, you know, these things need to be, Ponzi's or, or, you know, ⁓ money making machines, these, know, generally infrastructure is, ⁓ costly, but important. And I think if we, if we subsidize those things, right.

rather than subsidizing war, fossil fuels, aging industries, protecting the status quo, basically, which is what we see in a lot of the progressive battles that are taking place on traditional political footing, is just that the incumbents have so much power that they'll squeeze everybody else out. So think we need to think of new ways where we don't have to ask the existing incumbents. We can invite them along because we think that

they will want a livable future too. And that that can be a profitable thing that we can bring about a future that we can, that we can actually live and survive in. I think that, yeah, but we, can't wait for the powers that be to, to grant us permission for that. We need to start innovating now. And I think we already have been, there's lots of information and failed experiments or successful experiments that are still ongoing.

that we can learn a lot from and continue iterating towards a world with more alternatives and possibility.

Lucas Tauil (42:09)

Yeah, the co-founder of Zebra's Unite, Dr. Astrid Schoots, recently pointed me to an article of hers called, Tackling the Wealth Defense Industry. The Wealth Defense Industry, it's a major force for inequality, right? Like, we all get shocked that venture

only funds white middle-aged males, right? But then venture capital is just 1 % of available capital. 99 % is in family offices, in foundations, in pension funds. So how can we shift the balance toward better resource distribution? How can we hack this industry? It's in the cloud for us, right? Like, yeah.

Jeff Emmett (43:00)

Yeah. And I think part of this is, you know, that that wealth is is really only a representation of what can be accessed with with it, you know, like we say, you know, the five five richest people in America own as much resources as the bottom 80%, let's say, but, know, they, can't physically have you know, that many apples or that much gold or that much steel, like you can't, you can't physically, you can have pieces of paper that say you have rights to those things. And that, holds as long as the society says that paper is good for that thing. ⁓ but when you go through major societal upheavals, ⁓ often that changes, or at least the number of those pieces of paper you need for that thing changes. ⁓ and I think we're, going to probably see, you know, not to say hyperinflation, you know, the, the, the throws of these kinds of systems meeting their, ⁓ kind of inevitable, you know, progression. ⁓ and we'll start to see alternative systems where, you can actually put, and this has been seen throughout history as well. The, the, VIR and the WIR was a community business currency basically in, in, ⁓ Europe during world war two, extremely successful, ⁓ because it held so much better against inflation because it was actually doing, you know, real world production. was businesses that were basically issuing these credits to each other rather than having to go through the financial system, the banks and using dollars. I think there are so many opportunities that we have with credit clearing. For example, like there's this is what one of the things COFI is bringing is that small businesses could save 30 to 50 % of their cash costs if they just did invoice clearing amongst each other, which I mean, you might need a government to run or maybe a protocol. And I think these kinds of things will be coming up that there will be massive cost savings, cash savings and abilities to move outside of the existing cash system into new forms of value that actually are backed by things that we care about instead of more war and extraction from overseas.

Lucas Tauil (45:23)

Jeff, you mentioned arbitrage earlier. Could you share with us what arbitrage means?

Jeff Emmett (45:30)

Yeah, loosely speaking, in its most traditional form, if you have an asset that's available on two different markets, maybe in two different cities at different prices, arbitrage is the money that can be made by buying it in the place where it's cheaper and selling it in the place where it's more expensive. So you're kind of equal liberating the prices by potentially taking some of that, that arbitrage profit off the table. And this is a way to market incentivize goods to move around from where they're valued to where they're not. The way that I use arbitrage sometimes is kind of funny. don't think it's traditionally used in that way, talking about mushrooms as arbitrageurs, where if they're after a forest fire and there's a ton of one type of resource, they will capitalize on that, bring it to where it is less abundant and trade it for the things that they need. I've had some people disagree that this is arbitrage. It may be considered something a little bit different, but I think there are parallels in sort of that. Like there's a, there's a natural emergent process there that equilibrates between where things are in abundance or where things are in scarcity. And we don't have to measure that in dollars of profit necessarily. I think there are many other ways that we can redistribute those flows and in a higher dimensional economic mesh. We could probably do that in a way that's much more sustainable than just dollars and profit.

Lucas Tauil (47:01)

Jeff, I would like to look into gradients in mutualism. How can we create economic incentives and gradients that encourage mutualism?

Jeff Emmett (47:16)

I think we have to be careful with incentives and where we implement them because every incentive creates kind of an equal and opposite disincentive. You know, if you create an incentive to pay people to clean up trash, well then there's an incentive to dump trash on the ground. So there's trash cleanup. So we have to be careful where we implement these incentives or whether we do and where we do, I think we need to match them to sort of the social gradients that are already there.

So, you know, this comes down to just good system design. know Bernard Letaire talked a lot about different community currencies and he always talks about connecting the thing that you have a lot of that maybe isn't high cost, which is often things like space, you know, or seats in an auditorium. You know, if you're going to put on a play anyway, a few extra people in seats doesn't increase your costs any further. So you actually have kind of an abundance of seats.

And then you need to find out what is the thing that your system is lacking or what do you want to encourage? Maybe that's for people to use more economically or environmentally friendly modes of transit. So then you could say, okay, well, let's connect those two things where we say if citizens ride their bikes instead of taking a car, then they can earn theater tickets at the opera. And then when they go to the opera, they can enjoy, and it doesn't actually cost the...the city anything, if the opera has extra seats and they're willing to offer those for people who are decarbonizing their commute, then this is a great way to connect something that's in abundant supply with something that is needed. And I think in mutualist groups, it's an opportunity for each group to determine what are these resources they have? What are the skills that they have in their community? What are the assets that are non-financial?

that can be utilized people's time, people's skills, people's connections. A lot of these things exist outside of the financial system. And I think we can use a lot of interesting ways of connecting those once we can track them and measure them. I'm not saying that they all need to be tokens necessarily, but that we can have representations of these other systems and connect them in ways that allow them to Yeah, bring about more of this stigma, jic connection that that happens through economics just on a much lower dimensional level.

Lucas Tauil (49:53)

Yeah, on the foundation of the design of governance systems, subsidiarity stands out to me. Subsidiarity is the understanding that decision-making is best held on the edges, close to where the challenges emerge. Jeff, how do you think subsidiarity principles guide us in designing systems that prioritize local problem-solving?

Jeff Emmett (50:22)

Yeah, think subsidiarity is really important, but also one thing that's never called out is supersediarity. And maybe that's because we have too much top-down decision-making in our systems today, but I think we actually need both. Supersediarity in that there are global pools of experts who know certain things may work better than other things. And that may differ depending on whether we're talking about nuclear reactors or governance, online governance systems. But there are pools of talent that have that information and should definitely be referred to regarding that information. However, we need subsidiarity in the contextual application of which of those fields needs to be applied here. So we need local decision-making with global expertise where the context can be fit to the local, but the pool of expertise or the pool of solutions comes from the global. So each community doesn't have to figure it all out by themselves. They can actually choose from a slate of the best options and then choose which one works for them. This kind of comes back to like Cosmo localism. It's like keep the what's heavy local and what's what's light global and ideas are light and the experts who know which ideas are better than which others. This is also something that can be shared easily. When it comes down to deploying those things, you know, we shouldn't allow experts from some place very far away to tell, you know, me and my community, how we, how we need to do things, which is often what happens in, you know, even like development aid projects. there's, there's sort of a, a dictation from, ⁓ the, experts or the elites and speaking broadly here, ⁓ to the people on the ground. so I think a mix of that subsidiarity allowing the local people to decide what works for them and super city airity having a global toolkit of solutions that could actually be deployed.

I think we kind of need both in the right balance.

Lucas Tauil (52:24)

boundaries. no, I like that. Jeff, in your book, you mention adaptogenic principles. What are adaptogenic principles?

Jeff Emmett (52:35)

some mushrooms are called adaptogens because they don't have a targeted effect on, ⁓ say your, physiology, like it might happen if you were taking a Tylenol or an aspirin, it, you know, releases the, the, pressure in your, ⁓ blood vessels and therefore relieves a headache. a lot of these gourmet and medicinal, medicinal mushrooms don't actually have a targeted effect. They just seem to make your immune system better tuned to doing whatever it needs to do, which is, you know, they find it, can affect, you know, fighting cancer. They, recommend it as an adjunct therapy because it basically just kind of tunes, optimizes, adapts your immune system to be able to more handily fight off whatever it needs to.

Lucas Tauil (53:21)

And Jeff, is there a parallel of adaptogenic principles into distributed ledger technologies?

Jeff Emmett (53:29)

I've been playing with this term. I don't know how it lands with you is, ⁓ psilocybinetics. ⁓ so psilocybin being the basically like the adaptogenic, the, the, neuro, ⁓ neurogenesis, you know, regrows your neurons. It teaches your body, ⁓ how to fight off pathogens and so on. ⁓ and cybernetics as the, the science of sort of like organizational design steering ⁓ coop from Kubernetes, the, the, Greek, ⁓ like to steer the ship, the ship of society, the ship of this corporation, the ship of a government, ⁓ any of these could be considered a cybernetics challenge. ⁓ so silo cybernetics is an idea to say, well, if these, adaptogenic mushrooms help our brains grow new neural pathways as individuals, maybe if we apply these Mycofi principles in organizations they can increase institutional neuroplasticity. They can allow for new ways to sense things, new ways to cohere around what's important and new ways to act by creating these sensing governance pathways and these acting funding pathways and allow them to proliferate in new organizational forms. So that's kind of one of the leading edge theories of, of myco-fi is that we can increase institutional neuroplasticity using solo cybernetics.

Lucas Tauil (54:59)

Jeff, another term that appears in the book that I really love is trophic levels. Could you explain what are trophic levels and how do they offer strategies for energy to move uphill?

Jeff Emmett (55:17)

Yeah. I mean, this is a, an interesting, ⁓ area of, know, how do we, the, second law of thermodynamics, you know, fighting, fighting entropy. ⁓ can we, ⁓ and it turns out, I mean, in the long run, no, can't, but in the short run, there are these interesting little like eddies of energy. And I think our, our whole existence is probably one of those. ⁓ but our existence is predicated on several other layers of these, these like energetic eddies. ⁓ and.

mushrooms are kind of a base layer of that because they are the bridge between death and life. know, when things die, they decay. Then they get turned back into useful resources that can, you know, say a plant can grow in that. And that might be the next trophic layer. An animal that eats the plant. That might be another trophic layer. Now we've got us who eats the animal. So we've got sort of this upcycling of energy that is kind of captured from the sun. You know, we've got

We don't live in a closed system. We live in a system that gets abundant energy from the sun. And thus we have this kind of like upcycling of energy through these various layers. So really interesting to consider how actually going back to, like you were saying, nested economies before I feel like these, this is sort of the same nesting of energy flows where if we have, you know, trophic energy levels in an ecosystem, we might have similar positive sum benefits in nested economies with the right kind of checks and balances to keep them in line with each other.

Lucas Tauil (56:53)

Jeff, how can decentralized finance create more resilient and stable economies, especially in bottom-up contexts?

Jeff Emmett (57:03)

Yeah, mean, DeFi on its own is kind of a scary place these days. But I think that the broader design space that it's it's gesturing to has has a lot to offer. You know, going beyond sort of the existing financial system, the way that we create relations between people. It's funny that for for, you know,

you and me to work together, we need to go and get someone else's money to trade between us, or if you wanted to pay me, it's not just something, we've been intermediated. We've always had this, and I mean, it was probably much more intangible. was a gift systems or barter systems even came from person to person, but now we're all intermediated by the present day financial system, which gives it immense amounts of power.

And I think that's how they are able to push the world in this direction, you know, at a, you know, through economic exploitation, through military force backed by that economic exploitation and vice versa. I think if we open up the ability for smaller groups to basically divest from that, to step away from that and start using their own value systems backed by the things that they produce, then we just start to siphon away.

the power of that system piece by piece, pocket by pocket, and allow them to exist in some post capitalist dimension where they're all interconnected in an actually much more powerful economic mesh. Because you can leave this system, but you can join all of the other systems as soon as we have the tools available to mesh them together properly, which is think bonding curves and a lot of these technologies have an important role to play there as well.

Lucas Tauil (58:58)

Yum.

Jeff Emmett (58:58)

HoloFuel

Reserve accounts, for example.

Lucas Tauil (59:01)

Jeff, what about offline transactions in distributed finance? How can they transform financial inclusion?

Jeff Emmett (59:11)

I think we absolutely need offline. We need to be thinking about, you know, redundancy if, if, you know, networks go down or power goes out, or there's, there's all sorts of things that we can't afford to lose. If you can't connect to the internet and you can't use your wallet, this is like, yeah, it's not, it's not a way that these systems are going to become useful in the, the real world. But I think we can, you know, with, especially with things like the agent centric ledger of a Holochain, can have, you know, you and I transacting in the deep woods. ⁓ our devices know our ledger account and we're not connecting, ⁓ until we, we go out and connect to the world again, want to interact with someone else. at which point our ledgers will be updated, ⁓ to the network as soon as you go online. So I think it would be very interesting to consider, ⁓ how, how these tools could be used, you know, without internet connection, without, ⁓grid connectivity even because I don't think we can necessarily rely on that in the future and these tools need to be robust through any kinds of infrastructure failures. yeah, lots of exciting stuff to come I think with how these technologies evolve.

Lucas Tauil (1:00:28)

Jeff, if you could design the ideal bottom-up economy, what features would it have to stabilize systems and create resilience?

Jeff Emmett (1:00:40)

I don't know if I have a good answer for that. The context is so key. This is what I've realized in all of the systems that I've had a hand in, in the design of. The context is so important. I don't think there is a formula for it, but I think there are principles that are better than others. And I think we often have to, you know, there's...

It's very difficult to first order say these kinds of things, but second order, you can abide by principles while staying flexible on how they're achieved. And I think maybe that's the difference between like strategy and tactics. You you can have a strategy or values of something, but then how you actually achieve that strategy or those values changes quite a bit depending on the context.

So I think there are broad principles and I think a lot of these principles are already out there, like Ostrom's principles. mean, Bernard Leterre has ample amounts of community currency patterns to learn from. Michelle Bowens has such a massive literature of the commons and peer-to-peer history that all of these are really important patterns. Donnella Meadows.

and her systems patterns. These are also really important. mean, Art Brock's work, Michael Zargam's work, there's a lot of great patterns and sort of, I think values, but as soon as we can't be too specific on, your voting system has to include this or this. Maybe you don't even have a voting system. Maybe you don't even have an economic value token. It changes so much. And I think this is part of the critique of the Web3 space is,

It often feels like they come in with, you know, here's the token. It's your solution. I mean, your token could do anything. So of course it's the solution, but then it's like, no, there's so much more that goes around that. Even the user experience, the social dynamics, there's it's not about a tool or about a solution. It's about, I think, sense and response around the right problems for the right group at the right time. So any way that we can get closer to that, I think there's there's so many

helpful principles out there. And there's so much data on what has worked and what hasn't in the crypto space so far. We're speed running every economic experiment and governance experiments since probably the dawn of memory. And it's all on chain. We can go and analyze that. That's what we do with some of our research groups and with the bonding curve research group. And we love digging into figuring out what's working and what isn't and where and why.

And then iterating that, you know, we have to understand, add that to our, class of technology that, okay, under these circumstances, this might happen. And now in the future, do we want to design against that or do we want more of that? So I think there's a lot of data out there to learn from and a lot more experiments to try.

Lucas Tauil (1:03:46)

It's a wealth of validated data that is extraordinary, right? And it really excites me how well positioned to play with validated data Holochain is. So as the ecosystem matures, this functionality will likely become more and more meaningful because there is this wealth of validated data we can play with.

Lucas Tauil (1:04:13)

Jeff, thank you so much. It was an honor to have you back and to talk to you. I can't wait for another one.

Jeff Emmett (1:04:24)

Likewise, yeah, great conversation. There's always more to explore. Thanks so much for having me.

Lucas Tauil (1:04:29)

For sure, for sure. Thank you so much.

Have a beautiful day, Jeff.

Jeff Emmett (1:04:35)

Thanks.

Narrator, Clara Chemin (1:04:37)

⁓ Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.

Samantha Slade, author of Going Horizontal and co-founder of Percolab, shares her journey from education and anthropology into pioneering participatory leadership and practical ways to work together.

Slade reflects on how early life experiences—from teaching in remote Canadian communities to witnessing a revolution in Central America—shaped her views on power, courage, and the need for authenticity in the workplace. Samantha discusses how horizontal practices can transform organizations, why listening is the foundation of collaboration, and how Indigenous traditions influence her approach to leadership and organizational design.

Together, we explore:

• Rethinking Hierarchy – Why organizations don’t need to be monarchies to be effective.
• The Power of Listening – How listening culture creates psychological safety and shared responsibility.
• Indigenous Wisdom – Lessons from Indigenous practices on stewardship, spirit, and complexity.
• Abundance Mindset – Power and knowledge as renewable and expansive resources.
• Care & Productivity – How relational well-being directly fuels organizational outcomes.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Feed

Themes

• Horizontal Leadership – Moving from command-and-control to collaborative structures.
• Courage & Authenticity – Bringing full humanity, including difficult emotions, into the workplace.
• Indigenous Practices – Integrating stewardship, reciprocity, and spirit into modern organizations.
• Listening as a Practice – Developing cultures of deep listening to build trust and effectiveness.
• Abundance & Power – Reframing power as limitless and collective rather than scarce.
• Care & Productivity – Understanding care not as a distraction but as the driver of engagement.

Timestamps

Beginnings & Inspirations

00:00 — Welcome & Introduction of Samantha Slade

00:39 — From education to questioning hierarchy

02:48 — Founding Percolab as an applied research lab

Early Life & Formative Experiences

05:45 — Teaching in a fly-in community in Northern Canada

07:56 — Witnessing revolution and resilience in Nicaragua

09:40 — Surviving a human trafficking attempt and finding courage

13:24 — Reconnecting authenticity and emotions in workspaces

Workplace Dynamics & Horizontal Practices

16:19 — Why workplaces are monarchies, not democracies

17:56 — Gallup research on global employee disengagement

19:09 — Small shifts that transform organizational culture

21:01 — Talking circles and conflict resolution in practice

Abundance, Reciprocity & Indigenous Wisdom

22:50 — Open-sourcing practices & shifting from scarcity to abundance

24:30 — Standing on the shoulders of cultural traditions

26:20 — Why Going Horizontal is an action, not a destination

29:10 — Scaling collaboration: from small groups to large organizations

Trust, Structure & Leadership

35:36 — Building conditions for trust in organizations

37:00 — Horizontal systems are structured, not structureless

39:56 — Key diagnostic: listening culture as a first step

42:28 — “Listen For” – a game to cultivate listening practices

Care, Power & Decolonization

43:46 — Why care and productivity belong together

47:32 — Navigating crises collectively, not alone

50:25 — Power as abundant rather than scarce

54:09 — Decolonizing organizational practices

59:18 — Stewardship and the “Keeper of Spirit” role

Success Stories & Closing Reflections

01:06:58 — Revitalizing Inuit language and agency through strategic planning

01:12:56 — Shifting from performative to well-being indicators

01:16:05 — Closing gratitude & reflections

References

📖 Going Horizontal: Creating a Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice at a Time – Samantha Slade

📚 Tyson Yunkaporta – Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

📚 David Snowden – Work on complexity and sense-making

📖 Wade Davis – The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

📚 Otto Scharmer – Theory U

Transcript

Lucas Tauil (00:02.044)

Today we welcome Samantha Slade, author of Going Horizontal, creating a non-hierarchical organization, one practice at a time. Samantha Slade is the co-founder of the Percolab, where she pioneers culture-driven practices and operational tools to grow participatory leadership. Sam, such an honor to have you here. Welcome.

Samantha Slade (00:28.066)

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

Lucas Tauil (00:31.325)

Could you start by sharing a bit about your journey and what first drew you into working with horizontal organizations?

Samantha Slade (00:39.98)

Hmm. Where to start? How far back should I go? So I mean, I can start with a professional worker, Samantha. My first career was in the realm of education and I was very successful in it and went up the ladder. And as I went up, I just kept feeling stranger and stranger inside my belly that something was amiss, that this wasn't how

the world was supposed to work. This wasn't how I was designed to function. And until after 16 years, I let go of it all and started Percolab as a conscious place to function as an applied research lab to lean into how might we want to be together in the work world. And so...

It really, this is a journey that comes from a life work journey of being tuned into the subtleties of how we organize and structure ourselves at work.

And that if we take it to the layer before, my background is in cultural anthropology. So I have also been on a life journey of really looking about the worldviews that underpin how we set ourselves up in the process and structures and practices we give each other are all coming from a certain belief system underneath. And I've spent a lot of my time sort of looking.

at different ways and belief systems that exist in the world and those that exist in our... it's like for some... I'll just call it this, like this... for some reason historically our world figured itself out to get organized the way it is and it's based on a paradigm of more one over the other in hierarchical...

Samantha Slade (02:48.331)

means which involves

people telling other people what to do versus everybody uplifting each other to be in their collective strengths. It's just all of that journey. So both the anthropological journey, which took me on personal life into many different places, and then the professional journey, which gave me the hands-on experience to eventually create Percolab Co-op as this applied research lab, which is now coming on 20 years.

Yeah, and every, every week, every day.

I continue to see that we are designed as human beings to function together in ways that are mutually caring, mutually respectful and honoring our strengths and gifts. And there are ways to function effectively, productively in that spirit. We've just been struggling to find examples, but we have them. We have the research, we have the examples. It's possible we can go there. So yeah, that's that's one.

way we can talk about work there's the other deeper story but we can get to that after but that's that's the first level in

Lucas Tauil (04:05.264)

Yeah, I love to hear that your background is education. It's always been a fascination of mine. When my first daughter was born, my wife and I were living in a tiny village in Brazil that didn't have proper schools. It had an elite school for the rich and the poor had a very precarious school. And we found that both were not suitable. We tried, but...

Samantha Slade (04:33.771)

Mmm.

Lucas Tauil (04:33.852)

our daughter that was super extrovert and happy all of the sudden became very contracted and fearful. So we got a bunch of parents together and we co-founded a communitarian school. And ever since I've been fascinated, my wife and I sailed a couple of years and home-schooled our children.

And in New Zealand, where we live today, I learned that the Maori people have this concept of the word that they use for education does not distinguish in between teacher and student. Learning or teaching is the same word. So there's this embedded concept of reciprocity in their native culture that I just find it...

Samantha Slade (05:19.597)

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Tauil (05:31.792)

beautiful, you know, because it's like there's no hierarchical structure in the process of learning together and it's like gosh it's such strong observation.

Samantha Slade (05:45.11)

And you know.

If I just like we back to my education experience. So during those 16 years, I was in all different places in education. But of course, like most people, I started out as a teacher and I was blessed because my very first job when I first came out of university was in the north of Canada. You had to fly. It's what we call a fly in community. There's no roads to it. So you fly in, you get dropped off the plane and you integrate into a community where there's in the place where I was, there was

classrooms and so I had the classroom where kids were age 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and I had all subjects with all those ages and it was my first year teaching.

I couldn't do anything other than self-manage, self-govern, self-directed, self-organized learning. It was like, just immersed me in that instantly. I was like, how do you do this? Other than giving everybody tools and structure and processes to be able to go, this is what I'm working on right now. This is how much I've practiced it. This is how I know I'm advancing and progressing. This is how I'm going to be celebrating it. This is how I'm going to ask for help.

and for coaching and doing all of that like inter-age all over. I loved it. It was a great creative complex constraint challenge for me that I probably cut my teeth in a lot of the things that I do today and like all you know much more serious spaces but those children were really my first teachers.

Lucas Tauil (07:26.268)

Yeah, the interaction in between children in different age groups is just fascinating. The school we had was also a 2-7 in the beginning. It was a kindergarten. And the interaction between the children is just so fascinating. But, how did your early experiences in Nicaragua shape your perspective on organizational structure?

Samantha Slade (07:30.103)

Hmm.

Samantha Slade (07:56.174)

So I was studying at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and in a political science course, you know, we were talking about revolution and reading books on it and doing all the theory on it. And it was just sitting with me that while we were in the midst of doing it, there was a revolution going on.

in Central America that was alive. And I was just like, oh, you know, reading about stuff and then being in it, that's two different things. And so I took a year off and I was like, I'm just going to pause the education and I'm going to go and experience what a revolution could be firsthand, which is, I don't know, it was there in me. And off I went down to Central America and had experience in a few countries. It was, you know, the 1980s, it was a very

time, but what I did get to see was how, you know, the government could create new systems for literacy and for organizing things that just seemed like wild and not possible. But yes, they were, they were happening right there. And then you could make new policies and roll them out. And the same time I was, to be fair, a young woman on my own traveling in a very, you know, complex places and

not in Nicaragua but in a neighboring country. had a difficult experience that has turned into a real gift for me but it was one day I got, when I was just trying to rent my room for hotel, I was caught in a human trafficking organized crime trap and

I was taken hostage and put on a market to be sold and people came in to try and put a price on me. There were negotiations and it was a whole thing. It was really like it showed me the underbelly of a world where we don't talk about these things happening that your life and freedom can be taken away from you in just a moment like that. And so I was locked in a room.

Samantha Slade (10:11.405)

I didn't see any way out but this young boy who was maybe 10 or 11, we're back to children, children as teachers, he was very aware it was happening. He was the muchacho who was supposed to do run all the errands and his job in the end was to, he had something to do, put in the room and then leave and he was supposed to lock the door but he looked at me, he looked at my backpack, he looked at the door handle and he looked back at me and I understood that he was intentionally not locking the

door and I had a one-minute window to get to freedom and which I managed to take and be here where I am today with you.

And in the end, he's become, I guess, my model when I think of leadership. I often come up with the word courage because that young lad, he mustered his courage and risked his own consequences, which I'll never know what they really were, to make sure that I had my freedom. So yeah, that's put fire in my belly for...

For a lot of the work we do, it took me a long time to make the link to it, but there's something about that. There's something about me using my freedom to do meaningful work. That's very, very clear. And the other is about what is the world we want to live in and what really is leadership. Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (11:43.44)

him hearing the story of violence in...

your liberty and body under risk is just like, know, there's so much there. Before we started recording, we were speaking about managing anger, and you're speaking of the fire in your belly, you know? There's this whole realm of deep emotions in threatening experiences that...

Samantha Slade (12:08.363)

Hmm.

Lucas Tauil (12:20.784)

that we go through in... that is usually kept away or washed, right, from the professional experiences, from the workspaces, like where we tend to leave things out the door. And there's a maiming, a curtailing when we do that, right? If I come to work,

Samantha Slade (12:26.654)

Mm-hmm.

Lucas Tauil (12:50.64)

but a huge part of myself is left out. Something is amiss, something can't fully create, there's a loss there. In hearing of your experience, I go like, yeah, very early on, you encountered this in a way that could be traumatic, that could have...

blocked you in fear, but it gave you fire in your belly. In a way a blessing from a scary situation.

Samantha Slade (13:24.493)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I did.

Samantha Slade (13:33.646)

And I like the way you link it back to authenticity at the workplace, like showing up real. And real doesn't mean just happy and smiling. Real means real with all the colors of real. mean, we talk about it.

I use a framework for six emotions that are basically when we look at the way we feel things, it's you're either joyful, you're either sad, you're angry, you're surprised, or you're disgusted. I'm missing one. No, anyways, it'll come.

Lucas Tauil (14:10.588)

Curious?

Samantha Slade (14:15.317)

the interesting one is that we, all of those are healthy and natural. fearful. Isn't that fear and anger right up there in disgust? Like those are three of the six, emotion categories and we don't really talk about them very much or even get,

I don't want to say trained, but get initiated in to have healthy expressions of them. I know for myself, like this is an interesting one, you use this one, repression of anger is like a classic. And so this story was repressed for many years. And as I was coming into shifting the ways we do workplaces to show up fully as ourselves and being in our strengths and our authenticity and all of that, this story came back to the surface.

had repressed it until I was wow in my 40s before I shared it out. Yeah, late 40s even I think. Yeah and that's true so much. So I mean often when people think that

they can be authentic at the workplace. It's because they have affinities, friendship affinities with the people they work, but workplace isn't always about being with your friends. So how do you be with people who are different with you in a place where you have things to get done, deliverables to do, stuff to happen, decisions to make?

when people are completely different than you and this will cause well we could talk about emotions we can talk about tensions we can talk all the way up to conflict and the way we currently manage it in our mainstream systems is I'm going to go talk to my supervisor who will manage it for me like

Samantha Slade (16:19.573)

What is that other than as entire society getting better at this and being able to manage our difficult moments together respectfully, but not just like, I'll figure it out in our workplaces we have structures and processes and protocols for things. can have structures, processes and protocols for this too. In fact, we do, and there are tons. You know what I mean?

Lucas Tauil (16:46.35)

Yeah, we are going through for political movement. Let me do that again. Yeah, we're going through for political moment where we feel democracy under threat, right? There's extreme right movements emerging throughout the planet. And we are all speaking up about it and people are taking to the streets.

But I find it fascinating that the workplace is not democratic at all. The workplace is an old-school monarchy, right? Like, whoever owns it sets the rules and the systems and the processes. And people who are trying something different are actually finding that it works better, that you have better results. I think I remember you mentioning the

the Gallup researchers on work engagement and it's just like scary, right? Could you remind me of that?

Samantha Slade (17:56.568)

Catastrophic. the numbers, they're just so catastrophic. I've even put them aside because I can only imagine them in some places getting worse. But the level of disengagement of employees is beyond what anybody can think. I'd have to stop and go back and get the numbers. They're in the book. But you remember?

Lucas Tauil (18:17.274)

I do remember, I think that if you compare the number of workers with an eight-seat rowing boat, two people are rowing forward, so they are engaged. Two people are rowing backwards, so they are intentionally disengaged. And four people are flapping their oars.

Samantha Slade (18:41.685)

I love the boating metaphor, so the boat's not going anywhere. It's a very good metaphor to put in it. Yeah, and yet we continue with it. We continue building the boats. We continue trying to make them move like that, which is the whole system goes until at one point we just stop and take a breath and say, do I like, how am I contributing to this? Do I want to continue contributing to this?

Lucas Tauil (18:45.18)

Exactly.

Samantha Slade (19:09.645)

What could I do? I mean, there's a whole bunch of people who just go, I don't want to be in the workplace because they intuitively sense some of the dysfunctionality. That is a problem in and of itself and probably adds to, you know.

the anxiety of youth amongst all the other issues going on in the world, right? Is finding their place where they feel valued and well-being in a workplace is not as easy as they would like it to be. And so they just, some people just disengage. And it is possible. this is, mean, I think this is why I decided to write a book. It's the reason why I decided.

to engage fully in the workplace as a place of change and a leverage for co-creating the futures we dream of.

because it's actually easier than you think in a workplace. mean, yeah, you got to pull up your sleeves, but the pathways are known. It's not, you like you can work from a fractal way of functioning, change your meeting culture, and you change the way you're showing up together. There's like so many low risk places where you can, you can transform the way we're doing things based on other assumptions and other belief systems around

you know, human beings, art could be together. And what that does is it creates everybody feels more valued, more acknowledged, more recognized, more seen, more able to contribute in their ideas, their strengths. It's like it creates flow. It doesn't mean it's squeaky clean and everybody's all happy and da da da da. And that's we get back to the emotion piece. There's like there's still the tricky emotions that you have to navigate. At one point you have to deal with that.

Samantha Slade (21:01.941)

It's why I say, I've come to say over the years that for any endeavor to really succeed in transforming the way we do things together, going back to the practice of talking circles is necessary because that's what it's like a tool we can lean on.

that can take us through those real crunchy difficult moments where you're like, I could never be here. I have to go join another team. I have to leave this place. If you actually have in your body and your reflexes and in your know how some protocols and practices of being together that can take you through, then you can lean on them and they will carry you through.

Lucas Tauil (21:58.139)

Sam, we worked together a couple of years ago and I remember how all your materials at the Percolab are open source. So the practices are there. Anyone can come and learn from them and use them. There is a background of abundance in it, right? Hey, here's all the work I created.

Samantha Slade (22:03.467)

Yes.

Lucas Tauil (22:27.836)

you can use in reciprocity. There's a huge shift when we do that, right? There's a trust that this will work. How was the experience of shifting from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance?

Samantha Slade (22:50.903)

Hmm. So what I want to say first off is it's not me or Percolab or a team that's been developing any of the practices that we're developing. We are standing on the shoulders of many there and I'm going to get back to you. You're going to hear me come back to the cultural anthropologist a lot.

peoples across our planet have been practicing social practices of togetherness for time immemorial, right? And have figured out good ways to...

And I say ways because we do need rituals and structures and processes that help us be our better selves, that help us be better listeners, that help us deal with difficult moments and situations. So the practices that we actually, I would say, we like fine tune and get to the baseline.

essential of step one, two, three, four with a couple of principles and that you can just put in a single page and that can travel well and stick well and be picked up by people very easy and accessible.

they're not coming from me directly, they're coming through me from all of this what's behind me and I'm just putting my little or we are just putting our little contribution into them to reconnect the modern work world to these practices and that's why I can't I mean

Samantha Slade (24:30.645)

When I first put the book going horizontal out, I had some people give me pushback because they were like, but Samantha, I thought you always said these practices don't belong to anybody. They belong to the world. And I'm like, yes, absolutely. And I just wrote a book with a publisher and an editor. this has a price on it and it will be distributed in bookstores and around the world and translated and whatnot. And those two things can coexist. And yeah.

Lucas Tauil (24:56.444)

I've been living in New Zealand for 12 years and I'm totally fascinated by the Maori local culture and they have this concept of Manakitanga where you come to my home and I'm gonna host you like a queen because you deserve it. But when you leave my home you're going to brag to the forewings that I'm the best host ever. So there's this

acknowledgement of reciprocity, acknowledgement of lineage that is embedded in the protocols of the culture.

Samantha Slade (25:25.984)

Mm-hmm.

Yes, yes.

Lucas Tauil (25:34.983)

time-tested practices are really important, And as you say, they exist in the modern present time. They float with our needs for livelihood and encounter in workplaces. So it's the...

Samantha Slade (25:57.794)

They flow together, yeah.

Lucas Tauil (26:00.57)

the experience of being adults in a real world that makes it more important. You were speaking of your book, Going Horizontal, and there's a particular choice in that name, right?

Samantha Slade (26:20.109)

100%. So the title for me had to be a verb because it's an action, not an arrival. It's a doing. It's like the spirit of, I am...

I'm in my awareness and my consciousness that we are at a period of time in the world where I have within me from the mainstream dominant world, the outside system, very, a lot of hierarchical elements that are inside me and

I have also all of these kind of circular collective caring interconnected relational reciprocity shared responsibility and I'm standing between them.

I am, you are, we all are, most of us are, right? And we're navigating between that with one foot in this way that we've been conditioned and one foot that speaks maybe more to our values. And yeah, and any day we're trying to just work with

that reality. So it's a going. It's, you know, we're in it. So I want us to be kind with ourselves on that journey, right? It's not like, I failed or I got there and people said to me, Samantha, we would like to do something, but you know, we're not going to go all the way. I'm like, just be in the awareness of what we've inherited from the dominant systems that are around us of what's considered normal. And what for you

Samantha Slade (27:57.596)

makes more sense based on your values and and the shifts going on in our world. Just be just be aware of that and more conscious of it and be in the going and getting better and the practice and that's enough. And the horizontal was there because it doesn't it like sometimes people confuse horizontal with flat. Horizontal is basically a provocation to say you know it doesn't have to be as hierarchical as

people are assuming it needs to be. And so look at that.

question it, think about it, play with it, right? And so also the going horizontal is of course a provocation that my editor loved in herself, but in the work I've been doing with a lot of different Indigenous communities, because we don't have one here in Canada, we have lots of First Nation and Inuit communities, it's very natural to put a verb instead of a noun because the action is there's an acceptance.

there and an invitation.

Lucas Tauil (29:04.38)

Yeah, I love the idea of movement, of something in progress rather than something frozen. Yeah, that's super powerful.

Samantha Slade (29:10.217)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (29:16.504)

Sam, there's a lot of theories and discussions of why we chose hierarchical structures in the past, the idea that scale requires hierarchical processes. We have very good examples of non-hierarchical structures, right? On a jazz band.

No one is leading, no one is telling you how to play, where to go, right? On an improv theatre play, it is the flow, it's the playfulness of the actors that drives the possibilities. And we have this figured out for small groups. It is on the bigger groups that we struggle. How does...

going horizontal happens when you are in the bigger groups. How does collective intelligence finds safe spaces and healthy interactions in bigger groups?

Samantha Slade (30:36.213)

It's interesting, there's so many assumptions in your question, right? Because, and people say this to me all the time, they're like, we're a big organization, we can't go horizontal. And I mean, to be fair, I've worked up from the federal government to wherever, we're a group of people in a team trying to work together in a way that feels both,

can feed both our well-being, our feeling of belonging, and all the stuff that means that I'm going to be engaged and motivated and show up in my best self and all the productivity things. So doing that can happen at any scale and we have examples of businesses that do it, but I feel that if you come from hierarchy, you're always seeing like a head director at the top. that's like you think as you go up, you can't. It's almost like a

hierarchically biased question. You see what I'm saying? Because if you look at nature, it's self-organizing. There isn't a director.

Lucas Tauil (31:35.962)

you.

Samantha Slade (31:46.035)

The world works like this.

And somehow we've gotten lulled into thinking if that there isn't a boss on the top, how would people know what to do? How does the tree know where to grow? How does the bee know where to buzz? I mean, we, this is the way we're designed, right? And so,

There is also, so this is the, that's the one thing that I'm saying, there's a little bit of a bias in it. And the other is that there are so many forms and shapes and possibilities of how we can do things within that other worldview, within all that other worldview that integrates.

the subtleties of showing up fully and giving space for this and that and making decisions together and inviting everybody. When you assume, if you come from hierarchical bias, you'll go, well, we can't do collective decision making. I would love to invite everybody, but then it would be a disaster. We don't have time for it. And I'm like, right, because from your hierarchical space, you have not yet watched

like a hierarchically directed decisions with lots of people that are efficient, of course, because that's where you've been. But if you go into a place that's working with a more horizontal or whatever you want to call it, collaborative, healthy collaborative spirit, and doing that well in an egalitarian and holistic way, then people could be inviting everybody and they know what the minimum diversity is and people know that

Samantha Slade (33:33.632)

that, what are the criteria for making that decision? I don't need to be involved. And that whole thing is managing itself out with way more wisdom, way more wisdom than what the hierarchical bias could even imagine. And it's one of the difficulties with this. And this is why I feel like it's hard to imagine something that you haven't experienced. And here at Percolab, we open our team meetings for guests, like every week, three spots.

And we've been doing this for, I don't know, eight, 10 years. I'm not quite sure. It's just like for us, it's normal. And we open it to people, sure, some people who are interested in being interns or joining the team, but we open it to researchers or organizations that are on their own journey. And they just want to come and have an immersive experience of like, is it really possible? How does that look and feel? And...

to get it out of a book and a cognitive place and put it into your body space and watch people actually who have who think and feel that this is normal because they've been living with it for years and watch it function as a well-oiled system and witness its productivity and witness its care. It's yeah, I feel it's one of the really important things we do is keeping that door open for our team meetings.

Lucas Tauil (34:54.938)

Yeah, there's something you describe adult-to-adult relationships, relationships of trust and integrity. There's something tremendous that happens when you encounter lack of trust. If from the get-go there's no trust, there's no incentive to be an adult, right? If someone is treating you like a child,

Samantha Slade (35:02.113)

Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (35:20.998)

This creates dysfunctional relationships. It invites people to play childishly and to respond as adults in relationships and in integrity. You're about to say?

Samantha Slade (35:30.188)

Yes.

Samantha Slade (35:36.654)

Absolutely. Yeah, I was gonna say it takes two forms that does because it depends where your experience is. You might have experienced it as people stopping you from doing things or telling you to do things like micromanaging you or the other form is the very, you know, I'll do it for you form because I'm gonna save you from it. And they're both equally dysfunctional, but one might feel caring or think it's caring.

but it's still not allowing another person to be in their full agency, strength, discovery, expertise of themselves. And yeah, so I'm fully with you. Trust, how do we create, it's not even, we create conditions for trust to grow and be cultivated. And it's really the conditions for that.

Lucas Tauil (36:36.826)

And it's not free for all, right? It's within the context or the container of agreements that we make together. It's not that you do whatever you want. We'll hold agreements together and we'll review them. There's a container for it. It's not free for all.

Samantha Slade (37:00.297)

So the assumption that working in more egalitarian, collaborative, horizontal ways is is structureless. We know that this is

in the it makes no sense right it's it's a myth and a misperception and in my experience of course it's a different structure but because you've never seen it or witnessed it you you you can't imagine it and that structure is so well thought out i i think of it as like banks of a river so that the water flows

And if you don't have banks on a river, just like, huh, it becomes very marshy. But if you have that sweet spot structure, that water is flowing. And when I think of the structures of horizontal systems, the water's flowing. Just before I came into this call here, we were running.

workshop with it was a launch of a training and collaborative leadership in a corporate context and it's so interesting because it was so structured on like we knew we were going to be going into breakouts and not going into great breakouts we knew that we were going to be putting things in the chat so that everybody could be seeing like all of those details but what was really interesting was that at no point we were presenting to the group we were like

This is the purpose and you're going to have time.

Samantha Slade (38:37.099)

You go and figure it out and you're going to be with a couple of people and you figure it out. And if you come back, you have some clarifying questions. We're here for you. But that's how the trust was created at the very beginning. Instead of doing, I'm going to speak to you because I'm the expert and I know, and you're going to quietly listen. So straight away flipping that around and creating trust by like, here's what's going on. Here's a two page document. You guys go figure it out together, figure out what you love in it.

figure out what makes you uncomfortable, figure out the questions that are still alive in you, see if you can answer them together and if you can't, we'll come back and we'll listen in. Now...

That doesn't sound complicated at all, but it took a structure. The structure was we are going to have 15 minutes and we're going to explain that. We're going to do breakout groups, dah, dah, dah, dah. It's a different structure than me, which I almost think is a non-structure standing there explaining it to you while everybody passively listens. And if we think that's structured, I don't know. That's our default structure that we go to, right?

Lucas Tauil (39:44.452)

Yeah, Sam, what are the key factors for successfully transitioning organizations to horizontal structures?

Samantha Slade (39:56.076)

Well, I can tell you what I listen in for first when I'm almost doing like my quiet little diagnostic on the side is the quality of the listening culture. That's the first element because there's so much...

inefficiencies in system set up while people are cutting each other off and explaining and justifying and trying to commiserate or argue against or debate like all of that is just like so much noise on a surface that you can't go to the deep level of of what I talked about those emotions that could be more complicated and they almost saves us from it right so

for a shift into functioning together, taking responsibility for shared purpose. Yes, we need to have the shared purpose and we need to be aligned on it. So that's something having the practice of surfacing purpose and aligning with it and having a basic listening culture so that you could put something in the center.

and each person could speak without being interrupted and could be witnessed. I'm almost coming back to the talking circle bit, right? And it's not just about I'm listening to you to judge you or to get my words ready to tell you what I think to prepare my counter argument. It's like, are we able to stop and see this other human being?

and receive their perspective and their experience and their words they choose to have and their ideas and their thoughts. It's very simple, but

Samantha Slade (41:43.338)

We don't get taught that necessarily in school and we don't get brought into that necessarily in the workplace and systemically we're exhausting ourselves and unable to actually start being in our healthy collaboration until we begin listening together. That's why we developed a game Listen For because after years of seeing it it's like my

We need some tools to help us get to that place of listening to each other. That's the baseline for it. It's, it's, I mean, be you horizontal or hierarchical, if you've got good listening, you're going to be doing better work.

Lucas Tauil (42:23.292)

where people can experience the game.

Samantha Slade (42:28.476)

It's offered online in both the America's time zone and the Pacific time zone, Asia Pacific time zone. I don't know, like I'm not sure I'm not the one takes care of it, but once or twice, once a month or once every couple of months. And you can get the game. exists in a couple of languages and you can just get it online at percolab.com.

Yeah, it's just a really simple card game that helps people share stories in a way that creates psychological safety and then to be listened to with a little protocol around that and some really lovely cards that shift your listening bias to a specific listening lens. There's really simple research and science around this and

it works and the game fast tracks it so very fast you can have a quality listening experience and receive stories of what's going on every day in a workplace and actually learn from your everyday in a workplace together.

Lucas Tauil (43:38.94)

How do you observe the relationship between productivity and care?

Samantha Slade (43:46.51)

So we're back to the I feel that the mainstream world puts those in opposition as separate things. It's like, I'm going to stop the productivity and have a little well-being moment. You know, we think that care is counter to productivity. I feel a lot of people make that assumption. I know spaces that do. And we haven't quite figured out.

how to just do work in a way that is caring and the more it's caring it is actually more productive. But and I'm just going to loop it back to the because there's so many things we could say about this but to loop it back to the first level of caring you could have is to be listened to to be acknowledged to be seen to be heard and

There are so many spaces that are well intended and would like to have the voice of everybody. Wouldn't that be great? But because you're just letting everything pop around and we haven't developed this capacity of witnessing each other without reacting or speaking up. Yeah. So once you do that good listening, you're also doing good caring and you're getting,

wiser perspective on all that's going on. You're seeing each other and so you can actually start getting more systemic understanding of things so you can the the the caring way can lead you to the wiser way of doing things as well. Yeah, it's a real unraveling to do that and I'm back to it's hard to understand it without living the experiences of it. But mostly everybody you know,

And this is the cultural anthropologist. We do all of this. Everybody knows what caring feels like in our lives. And then somehow we get confused in the workspace. It's like this productivity assumption means, that would be great, but we just don't have time.

Lucas Tauil (45:55.838)

Sam, how does the idea of adult to adult interactions shifts the culture within an organization?

Samantha Slade (46:07.543)

So tell me what specifically you're thinking around about.

Lucas Tauil (46:15.664)

So when we get rid of maternal or...

Lucas Tauil (46:25.468)

Let me get back to this. So when we think of paternalistic or maternal lenses in relationships or childish behaviors, there's no clarity of limits or agreements.

not good. Let's just get rid of that one. think we covered it before in a

Samantha Slade (46:56.651)

Hmm, okay. Let's go.

Lucas Tauil (47:05.392)

Let me bring you another one.

Samantha Slade (47:08.031)

Alrighty, I'm ready.

Lucas Tauil (47:11.62)

Sam, how can horizontal organizations handle crisis situations in... sorry, I'll try again. Sam, how can horizontal organizations handle crisis situations as effectively as traditional ones?

Samantha Slade (47:32.952)

So.

I just want to unpack. It's like we're dealing with horizontal organizations as being one thing when there are a multiplicity of things. We're just, we're teams and organizations, departments and units that are functioning together with a more conscious way of doing healthy collaboration in more egalitarian ways and more holistic ways. Okay. So if I look at it like that and I go, how do we deal with

crisis. Anything that we're doing is we want people to be in their most capable to see an issue going on and to take responsibility and initiative. That's what everybody wants. So see what's going on, take responsibility and initiative. And if you can take that responsibility and initiative, not just from a

self-interest but from the collective purpose interest. This is what we cultivate in places of healthy collaboration is getting discernment between my what's good for me and what's good for the the organization or the team or the project and that tension point and navigating it. This is you can start to get a lot of discernment around that. So in a time of crisis you can be together in it.

That's mostly what I'm trying to say instead of alone. I just think back of when we went through COVID and if you want to talk about crisis, it just comes into my body as a business of we had 100 % of our contracts cancelled within, I don't know, a two week time period. And I was like, oh, if I was a traditional boss, I would have all of that on my shoulders.

Samantha Slade (49:34.594)

But thank goodness, I have sold the business to the team and we are now a worker run cooperative and everybody is in this and a shared responsibility place and we put it in the center and together we held it. And I was, I just remember thinking about it that, I can live any crisis with collective wisdom, with collective capacity, with collective care.

and thank goodness for that.

Lucas Tauil (50:11.174)

Sam something that really caught my attention in your book is when you mention power as abundant rather than scarce. How does this perspective shift leadership practices?

Samantha Slade (50:18.445)

Mm-hmm.

Samantha Slade (50:25.261)

So, I mean, I love talking and thinking about power because we've gotten so many assumptions that have come down. I would give them the lineage of colonialism down today. We think about power in specific ways and it's the assumptions that are the way we do decision making and work with power dynamics in organizations. And so,

If we don't think of it, if I ask you the question, when you think of power, do you think of it as something that's like a pie and that's something we could divvy up and there's pieces of the pie. So if I get a bigger piece, you have a smaller piece. If you get a bigger piece, I have a smaller piece. so I feel restricted around power.

Whereas about, if I think about everyone's in their power and you're in your power and I'm in your power and this person's in their power and that person's in their power, then that means we will all be able to do amazing things. But to be able to be everyone in their power, you have to break through your actual inner understanding of what

power is for you and that is not always known to oneself. So I often ask people like what is power for you and it's like a question of him like but there are those that way of thinking about power and I feel that even just like naming that out loud it helps people to to like kind of see it for themselves and unravel it and then straight away you're like

Maybe I was feeling a little bit competitive around power in spaces where I didn't need to be, because what we really want is we don't want everybody to start functioning like all employees and nobody's being directors. We want everybody to be functioning as if they were taking care of the business and the organization. Right? That's what we're trying. That, takes people a while to figure that out.

Lucas Tauil (52:34.076)

Power is much more like love, right? You don't love one child less because you had a second child. It's not divisible.

Samantha Slade (52:37.889)

Yeah.

Samantha Slade (52:49.005)

Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (52:50.468)

Sam, how do horizontal organizations address inherent power dynamics and invisible hierarchies?

Samantha Slade (53:02.497)

So you're talking about power dynamics that exists beyond positions within an organization, right? So, and let's just say, you know, I'm not saying that positions are bad and that having hierarchies is bad in an organization. Some ways depends on whatever's going on. I mean, you can go and...

look at them. There very many examples. Frederick Lelouz does a great job of explaining this. Let's cut that and go at it again.

Lucas Tauil (53:39.461)

Yeah, I actually, this was here by mistake. This was a code question. And I don't know how it ended up in my teleprompter. And after I finished, I saw the C for code and go like, this shouldn't be here. So we can just skip it. Sam, what practices have you found most effective?

Samantha Slade (53:43.661)

Okay.

Samantha Slade (53:49.365)

Okay.

Samantha Slade (53:54.88)

okay, we're done. that's great.

Lucas Tauil (54:06.542)

for decolonizing organizational structures.

Samantha Slade (54:09.389)

the big word. Tending towards decolonizing. I mean, as soon as we begin working with power, more consciously and collectively and care and relationships and reciprocity, we are tending towards decolonizing in a way because colonization just, you know,

has left a legacy of I barge in, I decide for you, I don't listen to you, I dominate, I take from, I extract. Like it's just all of it, right? And it's in us. It's in all of us. And so the unraveling of it slowly, right? And moments where we see, we just see things. So

I can talk about when I come to talk about listening, having the inclusion of everyone and you can start to see and hear and value perspectives that are not your own is part of my decolonizing journey.

Because that's the whole thing is the just thinking my way is the right way is what we're trying to break through, right? There are ways. There are ways. Do I have curiosity for these other ways of thinking, being and doing, right? And so.

Yeah, there's no, I don't want to give like, there's no recipe and I will not give the recipe 123 of decolonizing, right? They're like, I think everybody if you if you become intentional on that as a journey, it will find its way to unravel itself in you. So that listening to the perspectives is one and I like it makes me

Samantha Slade (56:20.075)

to span my hands out. But then if I went to the other one, this other direction is we already mentioned it a little bit of lineage. understanding where things are coming from. And from anybody who's spent some time with Indigenous people, at one point, they're going to talk to you about the elders, the ancestors, they're going to start they go down because the stories come. And they come up and there's an

honor and respecting and that so you're walking in a more respectful way with all that is and has been before you. So you come into that humility, right? And that's a practice, but

You know, there's an organization we've been working with right now and they wanted to put humility into their strategic plan part and they were challenged on it of like, hmm, do we really want to need to be humble? Aren't we supposed to be taking our place in the world? And it's it's it's such an these are some interesting things to be journey and just having the conversations around them is so beautiful.

Samantha Slade (57:39.586)

Yeah, there's so much work I'm doing right now in this space. I don't know what to say that respectfully honors it other than.

The number one thing I have is like, had at one point in a Percolab retreat, we gave ourselves a, we always have a talking circle on something, but one that really stayed with me as part of our process was how is my practice of allyship going? And we put that in the center of a talking circle at our team retreat. And...

I loved it because we had a new person from the team who just immigrated from France. was like ally, like never like allyship with First Nations and Inuit and Indigenous peoples was like...

a concept she had never heard of. It was completely off her radar and she really checked in like that. But as we went around, she could see that, she had just immigrated to a place that had a history that was off her radar. So like she was starting to see that and naming it as a practice is

Yeah, how do we be in all the work that we do with more consciousness and awareness of all that has been before us? Yeah, it's part of the work we need to do in the world today.

Lucas Tauil (59:05.082)

Stim, could you speak about how insights from indigenous organizational practices have influenced your work?

Samantha Slade (59:18.899)

It's really interesting because, yeah, Indigenous practices, Indigenous organizational practices, it's quite... There's one Indigenous organization that I worked with and, you know, we do what we do often when we're restructuring based on this other paradigm, which is, how do we do our roles? So they were an organization that said, we want to restructure based...

on who we are as First Nation peoples and not based on corporate structures. And so how do we organize in roles different than job descriptions and all that? And so...

We're in there and we're spending some time and we're, we're, we're, we've just like let go of job descriptions and the idea of roles and that you steward a role. And this role of stewardship is so natural for indigenous peoples. They understand that like intuitively. And we were going through and I was just holding process for it and they were coming up with their roles. And it's so interesting because the first two roles that they identified,

documented as far as responsibilities and accountabilities and all the things that you do in a properly structured organization were financial caretaker and keeper of spirit. And this for me was like a moment I really stopped and I was like of course financial caretaker because every organization has one and of course you're going to have that role is going to be structured but keeper of spirit really

Yeah, it made me stop in my tracks to say. And they did that so naturally and with such shared alignment that of course we need to tend just to the spirit.

Samantha Slade (01:01:14.613)

Yeah, and so we're at a different level of listening. that's talking about listening, not just like listening to you from your perspective, but listening to the in-between and listening to the beyond and listening to the other than humans. And it's that deeper wisdom and listening. so for them, their role was somebody who would just bring in little rituals into their day to day that would keep them connected to

the spirit of life. Because, so yeah, I just, I just want to name that because we don't even that's so off our radar, right? That an organization could be doing something like that and doing that in like a really professional structure. Let's get organized and roles and accountabilities process. And that just comes up in an indigenous organization says a lot.

Lucas Tauil (01:02:09.55)

Yeah, I recently joined a training on integral practices and it's been the first time I feel I embodied the U on Theory U. So this letting go, connecting to Source and then letting come to prototype. But it was a rational thing to me before during this retreat I joined in Australia.

I think I embodied the connecting to source, the listening to spirit you're talking about, letting go and going like, hey, what is here? What wants to emerge? For then, letting it come in, thinking of together prototyping. And it's been life-changing as an embodied experience rather than just one in the mind.

I think that Otto Scharmer drank from a huge number of indigenous...

practices in even religious cosmologies to summarize theory. And I'm going, yeah, of course. How can you do it if you're not silencing enough to listen to what is existing in here? What's the source? What's the spirit?

Samantha Slade (01:03:44.682)

I, you know, in the world today, one of the things when you look at the way we understand the world, the mainstream.

world we've all been trained, myself included, to think of the world from like I'm going to analyze it and use my expertise to figure it out and just need more data and more information and to dig in. It comes from a very linear understanding of the world and it's totally appropriate for many things if you want to build an airplane, all that stuff, And...

There's all the other stuff and I mean, go read the works of David Snowden and others on the complexity theory about, you know, it's not about doing all that analysis or something else to do to be with and you're in a, for me and in my work, it's...

when we're really dealing with complex issues that we're in today in our work world, to being able to stop and have that more intuitive sensing and trying things out and listening between the lines. That for us as a non-Indigenously trained person and with work experience like that felt really

not how I'm supposed to do things, right? And yet it is the way, I'll go back, cultural anthropology and the Indigenous communities I'm with, they know that sense is there. There's the being with complexity is, I think, that's the skill set of those...

Samantha Slade (01:05:31.224)

people, organizations and spaces that are still kind of in their connection to the world that we're in. If you still have that connection, you're still can be in that feeling. And so you can work with complexity because you understand the interconnection and the interdependencies that are going on at so many levels beyond just what we're seeing.

And that is what the work world is facing today. And there are, you know, methods to do that. But there are also peoples who've got that deeper know how have been doing it. that's, yeah, one of the things working. Tyson Yonkapura, he talks about you can read in some of his work, the the how indigenous thinking and complexity really go together.

Lucas Tauil (01:06:18.14)

Yeah, I'm fascinated by his invitation to look into stories and identify right story and wrong story, story that's out of context and doesn't belong to that place or people. It's been super inspiring. Sam, can you share a success story that particularly stands out to you from your work with the Percolab?

Samantha Slade (01:06:25.175)

Yes.

Samantha Slade (01:06:37.581)

Mm.

Samantha Slade (01:06:49.609)

Any success story. Wow.

Lucas Tauil (01:06:51.238)

any.

Samantha Slade (01:06:58.047)

So I know what I consider successful today, but it's very particular to the work I'm doing. So if I get back to everyone in their power, that's really your power, your agency, your awareness, your consciousness, all of that. So the work I'm in.

I'm working with an Inuit school board right now, Kadavik Ilisarni Lidenik. Took me one year to be able to pronounce that. Proud of myself. And as we do the work for the past year, we're doing strategic planning. Everybody knows strategic planning. Everybody does strategic planning. And for me,

The indicator of accomplishment that I've been having in this over the past year is witnessing a community who at the beginning didn't really say anything about their language.

being honored and respected and then beginning to speak it more themselves and then actually like go, hey Sam, if you're working with us, Kedeviki lissardilirnik, should be able to say it. And I was like, yes, I should. so that revitalization of language and revitalization of their own voice,

leadership, agency, creativity, contribution to the world gets stronger as we do the work. And so, yeah, at the end, we're landing a strategic plan that not only, you know,

Samantha Slade (01:08:59.819)

The content feels completely aligned. The form feels aligned. But the process, the journey along the way is already creating the impact of, you know, it's involved a thousand people, but some of those people are really leaning in.

and through the processes of doing, working in this way of being more egalitarian and more holistic and more inclusive and thinking about power differently, people are showing up and are being in their own power in their own own ineptitude voice. Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (01:09:40.591)

Yeah, I remember reading the work of a fellow Canadian of yours, Wade Davis on Wayfinders, where he says that each language is a way to understanding what it is to be human. And that of the 3,000 languages spoken on the planet nowadays, half are not being taught to children. So being actively engaged with a culture.

Samantha Slade (01:09:47.373)

Mm.

Samantha Slade (01:09:56.998)

yes.

Lucas Tauil (01:10:10.328)

in its renaissance, it being taught to children and staying alive and having a diverse way of understanding what it is to be human. It's just brilliant, brilliant.

Sam, I think...

Samantha Slade (01:10:26.913)

Yeah, so that's success. That's success. Indicators of success is, sorry, we're have to cut that. Because I got new phone, somehow it's back pinging on my computer. You heard that? You did, okay, yeah, I don't know how, because that's, I don't know if my new phone has messed me up somehow. But.

Lucas Tauil (01:10:43.132)

I did. I did.

Samantha Slade (01:10:52.333)

We're gonna breathe. wanna say one of the other big success factors that I'm seeing today is when we do work, everybody wants indicators, right? How do we measure success? How do we do evaluation? And the systems around there are also an expression.

of a way of thinking and perceiving the world. And so I've been on part of our research lab inquiry is, what, like, how do we flip these? How do we upside down? How do we engage or decolonize or rethink this whole world of measurement indicators? And I think for a while I was like, you know, you go through the phases, I'm just angry with them. I'm not going to do them.

But I know that it's not about turning away. It's about really leaning in and being with it is how we've transmuted things. so the other day we had a woman from an Indigenous organization, Mekana, here in Montreal with a public health physician in a conversation around

evaluation indicators and he talked about how you could actually have well-being indicators and there's like some frameworks around them and ways of looking at well-being from accomplishment and positive emotion and relationships and engagement and these things and was talking about how we could just shift it and he's like a researcher in public health physician and this woman was like yeah well that's just

that sounds like you're doing things the Indigenous way with putting wellbeing at the center and doing it. So in some of the projects we're doing right now, we're transforming with actual partners who are in like their beautiful courage.

Samantha Slade (01:12:56.127)

without really knowing how that will be deployed in full-on strategic plans, but doing a strategic plan with wellbeing indicators embedded in its rollout. That for me is huge work. It doesn't, there's not like a recipe for doing it, but an agreement of adopting a framework and working on it for the next five years as it gets rolled out. That's a different project that we're doing. It's great.

Lucas Tauil (01:13:21.466)

Sim, would it be correct to say that you're moving from transactional indicators to relational indicators?

Samantha Slade (01:13:33.078)

I haven't thought about it. we're actually, this is really work in my belly. You can feel this one, right? It's quite alive.

Well, well-being indicators are definitely relational and relationships is one of the key whole elements in there. And the way we do conventional

evaluation indicators. I mean maybe you could call it transactional but I guess I was thinking of it more as linear, cognitive, those are the words that were really coming to me more.

Lucas Tauil (01:14:17.948)

Gotcha.

Samantha Slade (01:14:21.719)

performative.

Lucas Tauil (01:14:25.648)

I see, see.

Samantha Slade (01:14:27.575)

They're not going into the depth underneath. Like it's what's on the surface and what you see. So that's what you're focusing on because it looks good. That's the performative part. But well-being indicators really go into say, this is, we're really looking at the impact that matters.

Lucas Tauil (01:14:47.034)

Yeah, I think I connect transactional with linear and relational with exponential. relationships can literally reproduce, right? Like we can fall in love and have children. Transactions are always linear. They don't have this exponential capacity. I think this was the...

Samantha Slade (01:14:51.916)

Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Samantha Slade (01:15:05.186)

Right.

Samantha Slade (01:15:16.326)

yeah.

Lucas Tauil (01:15:16.535)

point I was coming from.

Samantha Slade (01:15:18.955)

I guess because I'm working in thinking about new economics as well. you know, transactions are part of how we negotiate and are together. And they can be extremely relational and build out well-being or can be the opposite. They can be extractive and yeah.

Lucas Tauil (01:15:40.462)

I love the invitation that even transactions can be held in kindness and love.

Samantha Slade (01:15:46.293)

Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Tauil (01:15:50.82)

Sam, this has been tremendous. think we have a beautiful interview to share. I really appreciate your time and your wisdom. It's always a gift to be with you.

Samantha Slade (01:16:05.837)

It's really sweet. I love the fact that you are taking on this initiative, this endeavor to bring stories into the world and to weave that with your work. I love it. Thank you so much.

Lucas Tauil (01:16:19.292)

Thank you so much, Sim. I hope we can host you again in a while and hear more how your work is progressing and what the new learnings and experiences are in there. Thank you very much.

Samantha Slade (01:16:35.063)

Thank you, Lucas

Lucas Tauil (01:16:38.961)

Goodbye.

Samantha Slade (01:16:41.784)

Goodbye.

In this episode, Lynn Foster—champion of open-source software and co-author of the Value Flows vocabulary—shares her journey from corporate software development to creating commons-based economic infrastructures. She explains how Value Flows provides a shared language for representing economic activity, enabling projects and organizations to coordinate without relying on siloed systems. At the heart of this work is REA accounting (Resources, Events, Agents), an elegant model that traces real-world flows of resources and interactions across networks.

Foster explains how Value Flows and REA accounting enable interoperability across distributed systems and why ontologies, that is shared vocabularies are critical for both people and software to communicate effectively. She also reflects on the real-world impact of projects such as cooperative supply chains and regenerative networks.

Lynn Foster explores:

• Code vs. Community – How open-source software becomes powerful when a community organizes around it.
• From ERP to REA – Why flow-based accounting creates clarity across networks and ecosystems.
• Networks of Networks – The potential of Value Flows and Holochain integration to connect grassroots initiatives.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Listen to this episode:

Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Pocket Casts • RSS Feed

Themes:

• Open Source as Commons – How shared vocabularies and cooperative communities make technology durable.
• Ontologies & Interoperability – Why common data meanings allow software ecosystems to plug and play.
• Flow-Based Accounting (REA/Value Flows) – Moving beyond double-entry into transparent, cross-network flows.
• Distributed Architectures – What makes Holochain different and better suited for decentralized collaboration.
• Regenerative Supply Chains – Lessons from the Carbon Farm Network and other next-economy experiments.
• Contribution Economies – Models that reward contributions fairly and support resilience.

Timestamps:

Origins & Foundations

• 00:00 — Opening reflections on open source as a growing seed
• 01:53 — Lynn’s background and introduction to Value Flows & hREA
• 03:07 — Leaving corporate software to build economic commons
• 04:35 — First “aha moment” in open source: a stranger contributes a logo
• 05:08 — The difference between open source code and open source community

Value Flows & Ontologies

• 06:20 — The Open App Ecosystem: modular tools like Lego blocks
• 06:52 — Why vocabularies are needed for interoperability
• 07:40 — APIs vs. shared vocabularies: simplifying collaboration
• 08:17 — Ten years of Value Flows: what has evolved

Patterns & Flows

• 08:40 — Conway’s Law: communication shapes technology
• 10:30 — Supply chains and the shift from “best company” to “best supply chain”
• 11:16 — Trust and transparency across enterprises
• 12:20 — Expanding the surface of cooperation rather than competing

REA & Network Resource Planning

• 13:50 — REA explained: Resources, Events, Agents
• 15:35 — Three layers: policy, planning, and observation
• 16:55 — Directed graphs: tracing resource provenance and flows
• 18:10 — From ERP’s silos to NRP’s networks
• 19:30 — Working with Sensorica on open hardware and contribution accounting

Ontologies in Practice

• 21:09 — What ontologies are and why they matter
• 22:53 — Shared meaning for humans and software alike
• 24:28 — Configurability and taxonomies: flexibility without lock-in
• 26:54 — Digital Product Passports in the EU as a use case

Distributed Systems & Carbon Farm Network

• 27:58 — What makes Holochain unique: no central servers
• 29:35 — Using Value Flows to connect Holochain networks
• 31:30 — hREA as a generic backend for many user experiences
• 31:55 — Case study: the Carbon Farm Network in New York
• 33:21 — Supporting sustainability and local supply chains
• 34:46 — Challenges: funding cuts, infrastructure closures, systemic inequality
• 36:30 — Possibilities for cooperative ownership of spinning mills

Broader Applications & Future Directions

• 38:45 — Offers/Needs apps, mutual credit, barter, and gift economies
• 40:58 — Contribution economies and benefit distribution algorithms
• 42:10 — EU projects: Reflow, Fab City, and The Weathermakers
• 43:50 — Expanding agents/resources to rivers, forests, carbon, nitrogen
• 45:46 — Regional planning and resilience after crises
• 47:28 — Building relationships now for resilience in uncertain futures
• 49:41 — Small pieces of the puzzle: upward spirals of collaboration
• 51:00 — Closing reflections on the importance of collective effort

References:

REA Accounting Model – Bill McCarthy

Value Flows Vocabulary – Co-created by Lynn Foster, Bob Haugen, and collaborators

Digital Product Passports (EU Initiative) – Ongoing regulatory framework

Sensorica – Open value network experiments in contribution accounting

Transcript

Lynn Foster (00:00.076)

I think open source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the beast, so to speak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It takes us beyond the competitiveness of our current system.

Narrator - Clara Chemin

Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and conversations towards a world that works for everyone.

Lucas Tauil (00:35.97)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018, during my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (01:52.888)

Today we welcome Lynn Foster, a champion of open source software and co-author of the Value Flows vocabulary. The Value Flows vocabulary is designed to represent economic activities, particularly within distributed fractal networks involving diverse agents, such as individuals, organizations, and ecological entities. The purpose of Value Flows is to enable

interoperability across various software projects serving as a shared vocabulary. Lynn Foster is also a driving force at HREA, an implementation of the Value Flows specification. HREA enables a transparent and trusted account of resources and information flows between decentralized and independent agents across and within ecosystems. Welcome Lynn, such a pleasure to have you here.

Lynn Foster

My pleasure, Lucas.

Lucas Tauil

Lynn, for us to break the ice, could you share the origins of your journey in Open Source software?

Lynn Foster (03:07.182)

So I worked in corporate America in software development for most of my kind of day job career. A little teeny bit of which was open source, but even that was usually kind of open source washing, you know. But when I retired and joined my partner Bob Haugen to work on economic open source software, we knew we wanted to help build a commons of shared code, to get beyond the corporate scene that's doing so much harm to the earth, to the people, and especially to support people doing economic experiments on the ground. But actually in those days when we were coding, not a lot of people came around to help. And we weren't really focused on building open source communities at that point. But I want to mention a kind of a little tidbit of a small incident that was kind of my first aha moment about open source, which is maybe three weeks into the Value Flows project. Somebody, I don't know, put out some kind of a call and all of a sudden this graphics designer showed up, made us a logo, you know. Nobody knew this person, Julio. And that was just cool, that was really cool, was people just want to contribute to what they believe in and contribute what they can. I think open source is one of these seeds that's kind of growing within the beast, so to speak, where it organically appears and it wants to be born. It takes us beyond the competitiveness of our current system.

Lucas Tauil

Lynn, I noticed you differentiating between open source software building and building open source community. Could you expand on that?

Lynn Foster (05:08.312)

Well, open source software is software that lives in the commons and people can use it. They can fork it, they can change it, whatever. An open source community needs to develop around open source software. And we had that in Value Flows. There were a lot of people working on it, people coming in and out, people that cared deeply about it. There was a lot of give and take between people. And that was a completely different experience than me and Bob sitting there coding together, you know, which was also pretty great, but the community is important.

Lucas Tauil

And Lyn, how did the Value Flows initiative start? What was the initial drive?

Lynn Foster

Yeah, so Value Flows got going around 2015 and for a year before that, there was a bunch of software developers kind of all over the world who were starting to be interested in making software that wasn't just your kind of big walled silo centralized kinds of things. And there was a lot of ferment going on and people were talking to each other about how to move forward on making better open source software. One thing that evolved was called the Open App Ecosystem, and I think that was named by somebody in Inspiral out in your part of the world, which is basically building apps or components that could be built into suites that people working on the ground can use and that could communicate with each other and be building blocks like Legos or something. And one thing that became

Lynn Foster (06:51.598)

is that if we had these smaller pieces of software, we were going to need vocabularies and protocols, or vocabularies could be called ontologies to enable that communication. So that way, like developers could program in whatever language they liked, you know, they could create very specific things for user groups, et cetera, and it would be much easier to get the software to interoperate.

Otherwise, things are geometric. everybody has a different API and you have 600 APIs, it's impractical to connect that way. But if you can say, OK, everybody's using this protocol or this ontology or whatever, then it's really easy. You create that, and then you can suddenly plug into lots of places.

Lucas Tauil

I see, I see. And how did the open app ecosystem evolve?

Lynn Foster

So it was all this discussion and ferment that was going on then. And then what happened is that as people talked about vocabularies and ontologies, Value Flows came out of that. We were interested in economic vocabularies. A lot of other people were too. so Value Flows was born. And a whole bunch of people just went off to work on it.

Lucas Tauil

2015. So this is 10 years on the ground.

Lynn Foster (08:17.742)

Yes, it is. I hate to say, but yes, it is.

Lucas Tauil

It's beautiful. Lynn, you have been in the world of distributed software and gossip protocols for over a decade, What patterns have you noticed, and where do you most see potential opportunities?

Lynn Foster

Let's see, have you heard of Conway's Law, Lucas? You probably have, and it has sort of a lot of permutations. But the one I'm thinking about is roughly that organizational communication structures tend to mirror the technology that's being created by that organization or for that organization without kind of taking a position on what causes what, you know? So these days with… You can kind of see it evolving, the gig economy, so-called sharing economy, growth of complex supply chains, that kind of thing. We seem to be moving towards more networked, more distributed organizations. And that finds reflection in software architectures. So there are more distributed software architectures and decentralized architectures appearing. And I think that those kinds of architectures will

Lynn Foster (09:37.282)

best support the kind of networked economic organizations we expect to see more of in the future.

Lucas Tauil

Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, my career as a journalist in technology started in the late 90s where ERP software were picking up in, there was all the year 2000 bug fear. The foundation of ERP software is proprietary, right? And centralized. How is this an obstacle? For supply chain integration, for example.

Lynn Foster

So yes, I remember that period pretty well, actually. Supply chains are by definition more, they're not enterprise, right? There are many enterprises involved in a supply chain or whatever form of organization you'd like to plug in there. It's all the same. So being able to use open software and in some cases even open data, all of which can be seen by people all along the supply chain, makes it easier. People who work in supply chains tend to work across companies directly with their counterpart. And they're just thinking about making things work. They're not thinking about proprietary this, centralized that, right? So having software that can...

Lynn Foster (11:16.576)

interoperator is the same software, whichever, which is still a lofty goal, but sort of automatically supports more informed coordination. And it also means that there has to be a level of trust involved, you know? And I've heard people say that at some point around that time, it became apparent to a lot of people that the best company didn't win anymore. It was the best supply chain that wins. I'm not interested in winning, but anyway, within that context that made sense. So even within the capitalist world that consciousness was developing.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, it's this shift of take mine into grow ours, right?

Lynn Foster

Mm-hmm. Yes. And it works better. Shockingly.

Lucas Tauil

It does, it does. I love this concept of increasing surface area rather than fighting for the resources on this single surface. So when we start looking at like, well, yeah, this surface is taken, but can we have other surfaces where we don't have to compete and we expand what's possible?

Lucas Tauil (12:43.608)

This is a huge orientation on the thinking around Holochain and what inspired Art and Eric. And it really speaks to me.

Lynn Foster

I totally agree with you and also think that what you're talking about there with the surface area is so much more productive than competition. It's huge.

Lucas Tauil

It is, yeah. And it speaks of fractality, doesn't it? There's this shape that emerges that is organic and somehow mimics what we see ecosystems creating in the natural world. It resonates with what I feel we should be focusing on. And I think it is, right? It's the space we are playing in. Yes. And Lynn, In that regard, what is REA accounting, this space that hREA comes from?

Lynn Foster

So REA is an ontology which developed initially in academia and was started by a guy named Bill McCarthy at Michigan State University in the US probably in 1980-ish. And there's now kind of a global academic community that revolves around that that's active. REA stands for Resources, Events, Agents. And it was...

Lynn Foster (14:17.034)

Actually, during that period, was coming to the forefront of computers and especially database design that enabled this to happen. Accounting for a few centuries had been double entry accounting, and McCarthy was able to take that and distill it into a very simple, elegant model based on real economic events that happened in the real world.

And you can take that kind of data and use it to generate your standard accounting reports, for example, if that's the way you want to look at your economic activity and that's not a problem. And that's again because of computers, you know, that you can slice and dice and aggregate data how you want. My partner Bob Haugen found REA in the 90s actually when he was looking for a model for a new kind of ERP system. And he needed ERP to go across enterprises. So he contacted McCarthy and kind of said, do you see what I see? This model can work across enterprises. It doesn't have to care. And McCarthy said, I see it. So they worked together for some years actually and expanded REA into this more like independent view, or sometimes it's called the helicopter view, which can easily work across enterprises.

And that made it really useful for accounting in networks. And there's now lots of experimentation going on in that area, kind of thinking beyond the capitalist enterprise. And Value Flows, which we mentioned earlier, uses REA. That's the base of its model. Adds a few things.

Lynn Foster (16:25.966)

to make the resource flows a little easier. There's a few things around the edges that kind of go a little bit beyond standard accounting. So it expands the scope a little bit, but its core base and heart is REA. So network resource planning, or kind of called NRP, was what Sensorica ended up calling some software that Bob and I developed in collaboration with them, maybe to 2015-ish, so was pre-Value Flows, but it was definitely REA. Bob and I had, mostly Bob at that point, I was still doing too much day job work, had been experimenting continuously with REA, and when he retired, he had created several systems around us. There were about four food networks and a timber network. then along came Sensorica, and they were interested in a lot more functionality. I mean, it was basically more or less an ERP system. I'm going to back up just a little bit for you. ERP was created out of initially MRP, material requirements planning, which was a production planning and inventory system way back when. I ran into it in the early 80s. It had already been around a decade, but that was a flow-oriented system. ERP took MRP and tacked on the rest of the software needed for enterprise financial and economic work. That's like accounts payable and receivable, those kinds of things.

And those things, I don't know, I could say that they were designed more to impede flows than enhance flows. So we had conflict between flow-oriented software and non-flow-oriented software. And also the whole thing got kind of bigger and more tacked together and more expensive and harder to work with, et cetera. But it ended up being software that was

Lynn Foster (18:49.792)

meant to cover an enterprise's needs, basically. Now, enter NRP, right? NRP takes everything back to flows because REA does that. That's how it works. It flows all the way down. So we started working with Sensorica in maybe 2012. Maybe I said that. Sensorica was in Montreal. They have a lab there. But they also worked globally through the magic of the internet with organizing what they call an open value network. And that's a flat organization that kind of organized itself into what they called peer production projects. And they were doing research and development, R &D, and eventually some manufacture of open source hardware, particularly sensors, thus then Sensorica.

And the open source piece was very important to them. And I think that that's the open source hardware world in general is really super important to where we need to go in this world. Because we still need a certain amount of stuff. anyway, that project was interesting because we were developing software while they were developing their organization and their systems. And so it was very fluid and sometimes a little crazy, but it really showed me the value of working agilely and interactively with user groups on the ground. I think you don't need to do that if there's a very mature, stable system that's already been programmed three times before or something. But for anything that's this kind of experimental, it really has to be, it's a give and take, a collaboration between the developers and the people trying to make things work on the ground. that was kind of interesting and fun. And we called the software working prototype and that's what it all was. We threw away a lot of software in the process and that was fine.

Lucas Tauil (21:09.102)

Lynn, how would you explain the importance of ontologies to a beginner?

Lynn Foster

Well, ontologies give people a defined language to use when they're talking about things and concepts in a domain so people can understand each other better. And ontologies also define the relationships between these things and concepts. Sometimes we kind of tend to use vocabulary and ontology interchangeably, and there's a lot of overlap and kind of looseness in how people use the words, but one thing ontologies definitely have is these relationships. So besides communications between people, there's communication between software, and that's where it becomes really important that software, people and the software know what is the same thing as something else, right?

So software can count on knowing the meaning of what's coming in and what they're sending out. Another implication of all of that is that when software needs to talk to other software, then ontologies, along with technical protocols, make it so that new software can just plug into software ecosystems. You know, they don't have to look and see, oh my gosh, there's 20 different ways I have to talk to these 20 different pieces of software, you know. If everybody's using Value Flows or whatever, because they're working in the same domain, it's easy. It's so much easier.

Lucas Tauil (22:53.364)

Lynn, what are the key innovations in the REA vocabulary?

Lynn Foster

Well, mostly I would say that it reflects what really happens in the economic world. And that makes it really a lot simpler than thinking about things like debits and credits, which are a little bit of a more analytical view of things and limited. And especially that's true across networks, because actually my debit is probably your credit or whatever. If you're just looking at reality, none of that matters. So it's also a very clean, configurable model. So different kinds of organizations can define the specifics of their economic activity as data. The ontology won't limit that. And that's where things called taxonomies come in. It's like people do have to agree that, I'm calling this particular kind of whatever x and you should call it X2 so that we can communicate, but that's all configurable in REA. So it can support any domains. And also speaking of simplicity, it has this resource event agents, right? And we have processes in there too and agreements, but that small, simple pattern happens across.

Lynn Foster (24:28.43)

So the one we've been talking about mostly, and it has the R, the E, and the A, is the what really happened layer. We call it observation. I think McCarthy calls it accountability. And before that, there are two layers. One is called scheduling or planning. It has the same basic pattern. So it calls the flow there as a commitment instead of an economic event. But it works the same way, and the layer above that is, we call it the knowledge layer. I think McCarthy might call it the policy layer, and it is where all that configuration happens, as well as recipes, which give you a pretty well-defined pattern of what used to be the bill of materials, plus routing information, plus whatever, all into one place so you can create your plans easily without redoing the same thing over and over when you have repeatable processes. Anyway, those three layers are basically the same model, right, which also makes it simple. Another innovation is the flows, right? This is a data model that makes it so your recorded economic data can be assembled into flows based on resources flowing like an output from a process creates a resource that some or all of that resource might be consumed in another process, et cetera. And you can, if you have open data, you can see that as far back as it goes, right, as far back as it's recorded. So it creates these flows in sort of a form that technical people sometimes call a directed graph. It supports all this network of flows. And that makes things like tracking back what happened to a resource or where all it came from or what were the implications of how it was produced much easier. And this also includes in REA both production and exchange types of flows. And those things can connect. If you produce something and the next thing you do is sell it to somebody, then that all works.

Lynn Foster (26:54.318)

It's a really nice model, actually. It's perfect for actually something the EU is trying to do now, which is called digital product passports, where I can't remember what year it's supposed to be implemented. It keeps getting moved out, but basically products coming into the EU will be required at some point to have that digital product passport associated with them, and you should be able to scan your QR code on a product and know exactly how it was created, what's happened to it since, for anything coming into that area.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, that's fascinating in terms of allowing people to make informed choices on what they consume and what they are economically supporting, right?

Lynn Foster

Yes.

Lucas Tauil

Fingers crossed it will come soon. Lynn, what about the hollow chain architecture? What is different about it?

Lynn Foster (27:58.549)

Yes. Okay, I'm going to give you a simple version because I'm not a deep expert in Holochain. But the key thing, and we might have said this before, is that it is actually distributed. That is, a network's data is held on everybody's individual computers, right? There's no central server, which takes a little bit of getting used to. This kind of fits back into our Conway's law discussion.

Lynn Foster (28:39.006)

So it supports networks because it is a network. And it handles all that distribution so that if somebody's offline, you aren't missing any data. It manages sharding that out into the Holochain world using Holochain magic and a distributed hash table. It also has, because of that architecture, has an emphasis on privacy and security and all of those kinds of things. I don't think it will ever be a tool for surveillance capitalism, which is a nice thing.

Lucas Tauil

Lynn, what possibilities emerge from integrating Holochain and Value Flows in REA architectures?

Lynn Foster (29:35.746)

Yeah, we're trying to do that now in several projects, which is pretty fun, but the coolest possibility to me is that Value Flows and REA provide a way to connect Holochain networks to each other. So now we're adding networks of networks. And it can be networks that were formed and coordinated by people from the grassroots for their own benefit, you know. And then before you know it, you have a whole economic ecosystem going, say for a community, say for a bio region. So that's the kind of promise I feel with this kind of integration, which I think is very cool and we need it. think, so I mean, and we could expand that. If Holochain had kind of a set of ontologies that were used in that way, you could...internet work in whatever way you needed to. 

We're doing the economic work, but there's other stuff. There's social networking, there's governance, all kinds of things. So a lot of work to be done there, but that's what I think is an amazing possibility. Another thing maybe to mention here is that we can start thinking more about how to simplify software development, making it more modular, working towards that concept of the open app ecosystem that we talked about a little bit. For example, HREA is created in that vein where it's REA-based backend. It's very generic and can be used by any developer who wants to

Lynn Foster (31:30.702)

Create user interface software on top of that, which is by its nature kind of much more specific and will support all kinds of different user experiences and use cases. There is a lot of work we got to do to get to this goal, but I see the possibilities.

Lucas Tauil (31:55.316)

Lynn, could you share the story of the carbon farm network?

Lynn Foster

The Carbon Farm Network is actually one of the projects that we're working on right now using Holochain and Value Flows. And it's built as a user interface on top of HREA, making use of that generic open source software that's sitting there for everybody. But the real story about the Carbon Farm Network, of course, is on the ground as usual.

They are a textile network in the Hudson Valley region of New York that focuses on sustainable creation of knitted clothing, basically. They are organized as a cooperative of the designers, and the designers together manage that whole supply chain. The network also includes the farmers and the mills in between where the fiber coming off the farms. This is Alpaca and Sheep Farms gets processed and made into yarn and knitted. They're a supply chain network, they like to call themselves, as opposed to just a supply chain.

Lucas Tauil

Lynn, what problems are being solved by the Carbon Farm Network software?

Lynn Foster (33:21.01)

Well, one thing is definitely sustainability. They think they see that as very important to them. That's the term carbon farming, right? So carbon farm network. So they support implementation of agricultural practices that tend to reduce carbon, sequester carbon, et cetera. And that also relates to them focusing on trying to be as local or regional as possible, which is sometimes difficult in this world and educating people about that. So another thing just to say about them is that they're in between what you think about as artisanal kind of, know, people making things by hand and mass industrial production, you know, they're like, they're in between that kind of a batch manufacturing thing, but there's, so for example, there's nobody with knitting needles, there's knitting machines, right?

But it's all local, smaller, and community-based, but also real.

Lucas Tauil

Nice, Lynn, what are the main challenges ahead of the carbon farm network software development?

Lynn Foster

They are many.

Lynn Foster (34:46.328)

So, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is funding, which is often the case with these grassroots efforts that aren't starting with capital in hand. And they have been doing a lot of work with the small farmers, right, on this carbon farming practice. A lot of that's funded by the USDA, but that just got yanked in our current political climate. So they're really scrambling there.

The software effort has received funding both from carbon farm networks contacts in the textile world and from several key people in the Holochain ecosystem, which is super helpful. And then the carbon farm network itself, the designers pitch into some of their income to the regenerative work with the farmers that they are doing and some of the infrastructure work.

But I think unfortunately in this world we're not at a place where new local sustainable economic activity itself can fully fund these kind of extra efforts that are needed, especially at the startup for for things that are trying to support a better climate and natural ecosystems and need new kinds of infrastructure that'll support these kinds of networks into the future. More generally, they have the ongoing kinds of challenges that are often felt by groups trying to implement this kind of local sustainable production of lasting quality in the world that we live in, right? Monopoly capitalism, that's moved production to areas of cheap labor, exploits the environment and privatizes the profits while socializing the costs and this all this makes artificially cheap prices possible and that's a problem in in this time of ever-rising inequality so there's this giant systemic problem that happens for all all of these like next economy

Lynn Foster (37:12.436)

experiments and they are definitely feeling that themselves. Just in the last few weeks they learned, this is just an example, right? They learned that their spinning mill is shutting down and now they're really scrambling to find something not too far away that can spin yarn. know, it's just part of this level of deindustrialization that's happened and somehow this spinning mill survived the worst of it and then I think COVID did them in. But anyway, they're closing, which made all of us sort of immediately think, is there some way that somebody or co-op or anything, people can get together and take advantage of that equipment and plants sitting there to start something new, you know, a new spinning mill there with all that existing equipment. But it's hard to scramble into that easily and quickly, you know, but maybe, fingers crossed, it will happen and hopefully we'll be catching up soon and hear about the development there. Lynn, I'm looking forward to more. Lynn, are there other Value Flows use cases you would like to share?

Lucas Tauil

That would be good.

Lynn Foster (38:45.526)

Yeah, sure, because it's such a flexible and lovely model. And I can say that because it stands on the shoulders of many, but there are lots of possibilities. A couple other apps that are in process now using HREA, one is an offers needs application being created for internal use in the Holochain ecosystem. So developers and projects and people who can offer other kinds of support can all find each other, and there are a bunch of other offers, needs, efforts in progress elsewhere. All kinds of exchange can be supported, know, conventional sales and e-commerce and purchases with money, whatever, mutual credit, gift economy, barter, whatever people can imagine.

If Value Flows doesn't support it, we'll make it support it, right? If it's something that people are using to try to make this a better situation. Another in progress application is a rewrite of the old sensorica software. So that's like the next generation NRP, right?

And it's probably about the same scope, but I'm sure they've learned a lot over the years and we can make lots of improvements. And another thing I could mention there is that Sensorica has innovated with something we could call a contribution economy. And I see that actually a fair amount now. A lot of groups are very interested in this concept where they distribute the income that comes in according to the contributions that were made to create the resources that brought that income in, right, when it was sold or delivered to somebody. AstonSorica has what they call a benefit distribution algorithm or redistribution. I've seen it both ways, which is democratically decided. And they use that to, the software actually uses that to calculate how much all the contributors get from that income.

Lynn Foster (40:57.566)

And it can be pretty involved or not that involved. But that's a lot of people are interested in that. A couple other applications that I think Deserva mentioned are apps that were completed in the EU. One is called Reflow. It's circular economies and they had like six pilot municipalities. So it was circular economy software within a city. And a more recent one is called Fab City. And that supports fab labs with individual or collaborative design and then the distributed manufacturing of fabricated items that were designed by whoever, because the designs are available and are open. There's also a Netherlands-based organization while we're in Europe here, called the Weathermakers that is working on software to help them design and manage rather large projects, earth moving projects often, that are to restore water cycles. And it's worth kind of emphasizing that Value Flows and REA, and we've actually had fairly recent discussions on this have expanded the concepts, both of resources and agents, to make climate modeling and climate accounting a real thing, also to account for externalities, to account for carbon and nitrogen and whatever you need, right? And we think that's kind of important for a whole set of future projects. Like when you have an agent, an agent can be a person or an organization, but we want to say that an agent can also be a river or a forest, you know, and that resources are taken out of that forest and resources are put into that forest. Maybe they're helpful and maybe they aren't. But anyway, if you can track all those flows, you can get a lot closer to helping

Lynn Foster (43:23.598)

the climate out a little bit, we definitely need. We've also worked locally with the high school FabLab network and there's a mutual aid network with us we've been working with for several years. I want to say it's not all about manufacturing, like services are equally well supported. When we were actually creating Value Flows, we talked quite a bit with translators who make, to translate, right? And the finished document is the resource that's created. So yeah, it's worth thinking about broadly. And also things like saving pools or other financial kinds of applications, you know. It can be about anything of value to people that they want to track in some way. Yeah.

Let me give you one more, too, because this one's sort of important. And we did a couple projects around this, but it is important, I think, to understand that Value Flows in REA can represent any kind of aggregated data. It can be more than operational software.

We did a couple projects around this. One was in Nova Scotia, mostly around planning around food, and then one specifically around fish, and then one with our nearby mutual aid network, where they're trying to connect up people and organizations within the community. And this kind of software gets you to where you can plan, for one thing, but also you can discover where there are gaps and where a new organization might fill in a gap. Or you can discover where one organization produces something that another organization uses, but they don't know about each other yet. So it's all about using the same model and similar tools for regions or communities. So that I can get pretty excited about.

Lynn Foster (45:46.08)

Actually, we were just talking with some people from Asheville and there's a whole effort there where they are thinking this is an area that was devastated by a hurricane a few months ago and they're still rebuilding from that. But there's a whole group that's really interested in using that as an opportunity even to think about, how would they restructure their economy in that region and just reconfigure things?

So that's, I think, important.

Lucas Tauil

I love the talk you're taking of looking into challenges as opportunities. We're going through an extremely challenging political moment in the world. And I'm really interested in what are the opportunities, because like there's no point in us only loathing it, right? It's like, can be done? What are the possibilities that open up? How can we encounter it?

in strength rather than as victims. And I'm really interested in why is work like value flow so relevant to this?

Lynn Foster

Yeah, you talked about the challenges and indeed they are many, right? I think anything where we can get prepared now and start to create relationships among ourselves, in this case we're talking about economic activity and economic relationships, but in any area really of human interaction, right? You know, if we can start working towards something

Lynn Foster (47:28.59)

that we know will work better than what we've got, maybe we'll have it when we need it. mean, I don't know, you know, it's, I mean, Value Flows and this kind of work we're doing with these projects is, it's, you know, we always say it's a small piece of a very large puzzle and that's really true. There's so much that's needed. But, you know, the open source piece is important, and we're gonna need that open knowledge to easily bring ourselves together, you know, up to where we need to be. And hopefully we'll still have internet. If we don't, we'll work with it, but you know. But we kind of ended up with our little piece of the puzzle just because we happen to have those skills and experience, you know. There are so many pieces that need to be plugged into that that it's sort of mind-boggling. I think if we can get our collaboration hats on and not be too competitive about any of this, we can maybe make something happen in time. We'll see.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, I'm in love with small bits, you know. I think that in the beginning of my adult life, I had this expectation of scale, that things had to be big, they had to be impactful. And recently I heard from Paul Krafel that really at scale things are usually downward spirals because you're seeing them erode really quick. When you're building, you're building a small bit of the puzzle, you're laying bricks. You can imagine the cathedral or the beautiful bridge you're building, but it's not quick. Scale comes with the encounter of many small bits coming together. It's not immediate and as visible as downward spirals. And this was a beautiful...

Lucas Tauil (49:40.984)

framing for me, you know, just like, yeah, it's a right to be doing this small bit of work here that's very meaningful and local, because it will connect to other ones and together they will create an upward spiral. And yeah, this has been inspiring me a lot. And when I hear of your experience in the years you've dedicated to this, it goes like, yeah, there it is again, you know, that's the pattern that works and that makes sense.

Lynn Foster

Yeah, well said. You have your puzzle piece too, right Lucas?

Lucas Tauil

Lynn, it's been a huge pleasure to have you here today and hear of your story and all the beautiful work you and Bob have been doing together. I really appreciate your time and really looking forward to meeting you again shortly and hearing of the development of both Value Flows and HREA and where carbon farm networks are going with the software you're creating. Loads of gratitude.

Lynn Foster

And likewise, Lucas, this is important work you're doing here. And believe me, I wouldn't get up and talk about it without you initiating and doing what needs to be done to get to what people are doing out there. So that's a good thing. Thank you.

Lucas Tauil (51:12.75)

Thank you so much, Lynn. Have a beautiful day.

Lynn Foster (51:19.79)

And you too.

Narrator - Clara Chemin

Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.

Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union and author of 'Mutualism: Building the New Economy from the Ground Up', shares her journey into mutualism.

Horowitz is a former chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been covered by NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. She describes herself as a lifelong mutualist and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Horowitz emphasizes the need for reciprocal obligations and community building, sharing insights from her family history and the experiences in creating the Freelancers Union Insurance Company. The conversation explores how we can learn from the past to build effective organizations and outlines a vision for a mutualist ecosystem. 

Watch this episode on YouTube

Listen to this episode:

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Themes:

Mutualism as a framework – Understanding its three principles and how they differ from socialism or capitalism.

Safety nets and reciprocity – Why peer-to-peer systems of care provide resilience in uncertain times.

Historical lessons – From unions, Mondragon, and religious organizations to modern co-ops and movements.

Patient capital – Models for financing ecosystems without extractive pressures.

The role of government – Creating sandboxes, infrastructure, and scaling mutualist innovations.

Self-determination and community – Finding your group, nurturing trust, and building resilience together.

TImestamps:

Opening & Context

00:00 — Sara on neighbors, connection, and joy in supporting others

00:41 — Lucas introduces the Holochain Foundation sponsor

01:58 — Introducing Sara Horowitz, Freelancers Union founder & author of Mutualism

Sara’s Journey into Mutualism

03:25 — Family roots in unions and cooperatives

05:19 — Rethinking safety nets: beyond government and charity

07:23 — What we’ve lost in the social fabric of business and community

Principles & Practices of Mutualism

09:22 — Defining mutualism: solidarity, economic mechanism, generational time horizon

11:38 — Political homelessness & decentralized strategies

13:34 — Reciprocal obligations: indivisible reserves, Green Bay Packers, and cooperative models

Building Safety Nets Today

15:48 — Learning from past cooperative institutions

17:48 — Babysitting co-ops and neighborhood organizing

19:44 — From transactional to relational economies

21:27 — The founding of Freelancers Union & portable benefits

Vision of Mutualist Ecosystems

24:20 — Building networks and small beginnings

26:16 — Practical examples: Molly Hempstreet & industrial cooperatives

28:15 — Pillars of a mutualist ecosystem: organizations, government, training, capital

30:18 — Patient capital: seedling stage, fellowships, program-related investments

Role of Government & Institutions

35:03 — Sandboxes, safe spaces, and infrastructure

36:54 — Religious organizations and mutualist hard-coding

39:20 — Disaster recovery & the risks of outsourcing mutual aid

Scaling Mutualism

41:32 — Scale as mycelial networks and feedback loops

43:48 — Trust as the foundation of markets and democracy

Challenges & Future Directions

45:53 — Where to start: local communities, co-ops, book groups

47:52 — Distinguishing mutualism from socialism and communism

49:38 — Wealth concentration & collective survival

51:26 — Unusual alliances: bridging divides through shared needs

53:34 — Self-determination, faith, and forgiveness in hard times

Closing

54:59 — Beginners in mutualism: the courage to start

55:46 — Farewell & invitation to join the Mutualist Society

Resources & References:

📖 Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up – Sara Horowitz  

📜 The Rochdale Principles – Early cooperative movement guidelines  

📚 Mondragon Cooperative Model – Basque Country, Spain

📚 United Mine Workers of America – Historical labor organizing

📖 The 10 Laws of Trust: Building the Bonds That Make a Business Great

📖 The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama

📚 Ashoka & Echoing Green – Fellowship programs for social entrepreneurs

Transcript

Sara Horowitz (00:00.088)

You better really be connected to your neighbors. You really have to start to know the people around you and be connected to them in a peer-to-peer way because you don't know when you're going to need help. And it turns out supporting other people is probably one of the best things you can do to give your life joy.

Narrator - Clara Chemin

Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and conversations towards a world that works for everyone.

Lucas Tauil (00:41.4)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information, and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018, during my journey into participative culture with Enspiral. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (01:58.744)

Today we welcome Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancer’s Union and author of the book Mutualism, Building the New Economy from the Ground Up. A breeze of fresh air in a time of suffocating narratives and wealth concentration policies. Sara Horowitz's book and practice give new life to powerful ideas on collective action, self-determination, economic systems, and labor. Sara's new initiative is the mutualist society, a space for peer-to-peer cross-pollination on ideas on mutual aid, mutualism, and building from the ground up. I'm so stoked to have you here, Sara. Thanks for joining.

Sara Horowitz

Thank you so much. Really happy to be here. Thank you.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, could you share your journey into mutualism for us to get started?

Sara Horowitz

I'd love to. I really love hearing when people talk about their families or their backgrounds and it's usually the feeling of being really human. So I would say the thing that really has surprised me about my mutualist journey is that it really did start with my grandparents' generation. And my grandfather was a vice president of a union called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. And that union really was this

Sara Horowitz (03:25.368)

completely entrepreneurial endeavor. So mostly women workers paid their union dues. The union were active, incredible entrepreneurial capitalists except for the working class and they built housing and insurance and all sorts of things that workers needed that still exist today. I was raised to go to my grandma's house which was a union cooperative and

I didn't think anything was special about it. It's just where we went for family get-togethers. And then my father was a union-side labor lawyer. And then I became a union organizer. And I'd say as I started to really build and think about it, I never forgot the 1920s trade union movement and what they did and how they had this vision of starting with one thing that workers needed.

and just kept building and building and it was a viable economic strategy. And I'd say that was probably my real base frame that really has guided my life but I don't think I really thought about it until I started really building up the Freelancers Union.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, on your book, workers looking after themselves and building a safety net, has central stage. How important is a safety net? Why is it so crucial?

Sara Horowitz

You know, there's really not just one safety net. I think we now think about a government-provided safety net, and that feels like a safety net. But actually, what we really have to start realizing is that we build many safety nets, and that we have to see that it's not all either government or charity or a market that we buy, like an insurance.

Sara Horowitz (05:19.214)

policy, especially when we look at what's happening with climate change, you better really be connected to your neighbors. You really have to start to know the people around you and be connected to them in a peer-to-peer way because you don't know when you're going to need help. And it turns out supporting other people is probably one of the best things you can do to give your life joy. And so, really we need to reconceptualize this framework. And I would say that is probably the thing I realized from the Freelancers Union starting to build the Mutualist Society is let's just get started with this peer-to-peer and let's just move fast to realizing that is going to be where we have to be right now.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, on your book, you mention a plaque in the Rochdale Pioneer Museum in England, the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement that puts it so nicely that the cooperative ideal is as old as human society. It is the idea of conflict and competition as a principle of economic progress that is new. This really struck me reading the book in realizing how nourishing and regenerative it is to be in mutuality. And it seems we lost that, we forgot that on the social fabric.

Sara Horowitz

Yes. You know, if I were describing how much we've lost that in our conceptualization, the way we think of business is the cherry on the icing on the cake. That we're just going to engage in these transactions and we're going to do really fast things, really easily. We're going to do one thing, it's going to be homogenous. We're going to take it to scale. Everything will have big box store uniformity.

Sara Horowitz (07:23.414)

and boy won't we get rich and have all the consumer items we could possibly need. UNI would probably not even find that conceptualization to be attractive on its face. But the truth is that that kind of economic activity doesn't happen unless human beings have a lot of trust in one another to be creating all sorts of exchanges. And because we haven't been doing that, we see that we're moving toward this kind of growth that isn't actually helping people. It's not the kind of growth that makes people healthier, freer, richer. We're seeing concentrations of capital. And that's why I think we actually really have to say there's a way to build markets that are coherent, that actually sustain communities that aren't about rapacious capitalism, but we have to think about it mutualistically. It's neither the government in a centralized way, though there's an important role of government to build mutualism, nor is it an unfettered free market, though markets are important. Mutualism isn't a third-way argument. It's a different way of looking at the world.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, I've been in the space of collective decision-making and participative culture for two decades. Reading your book, I realized I'm actually a mutualist. Noticing the convergence the name carries in compressing mutual aid, care, and collective organizing was thrilling and humbling. The book dramatically increased my understanding of what mutualism is and how it spans both across the political divide and time, from modern cooperatives in the Basque Country to religious communities in the early settlement of the United States. What is mutualism? And when did you realize you were a mutualist?

Sara Horowitz (09:22.23)

That's a great question. And I think the easiest way to understand mutualism is to really focus on the three principles because it lets you decide what you think is mutualist and what is important to you. But it really is a frame of understanding. So number one, there has to be a group, a solidaristic group. Are you in it? Is it a group of workers who are organizing a factory? Is it a cooperative of people who are purchasing together, but you know who's in and who isn't in. Is it your faith community? And that is a boundary community based on solidarity. The second, which is often forgotten, it has to have an economic mechanism. But an economic mechanism can be dues, it can be services, it can be alternative currency.

It can be anything that enables people to have an exchange, barter, but you must have something of value that you're exchanging because it's not charity, it's peer to peer. And whatever value you generate has to go back to that community. This isn't like an impact investment where the revenues leave the community and go elsewhere. They must go back. So I think a really great example is a strike fund in a union. Your dues go to that strike fund. You don't know if you're going to be the workers who are going to get to use that or not. But you do that because you're paying it forward. And the third is that time horizon that is recognizing you got here because other people helped you. You are asked to make a contribution and that has to go to future generations. And we could talk about this many models, economic models do that. And that generational exchange is what makes those communities that have the flattest distribution of income sustainable. And I think that's very interesting. But those are the three principles. It's kind of a funny thing, but I think I always thought like this.

Sara Horowitz (11:38.19)

But it's really in the last 15 years that I realized how politically homeless I've become because the left really focuses on centralized government and anything that's good must come from government. And the right thinks everything must be an unfettered market. And I don't think that anymore. I believe in government. I believe we need a really decentralized strategy. I think human beings are pretty smart about what they need and we should be thinking about how to make things decentralized so communities have a larger say. But I don't think it's just a feel-good thing. I think it's like tough economics, like revenues have to exceed expenses and people have to be grown-ups and we have to give them reason to be grown-ups but like let's get back to that, you know.

Lucas Tauil

As I hear you, one of the phrases of your book come back to me. I'm sorry if I'm being too much of a fan. I really love the book. So you speak of building institutions that are supported on the binding energy of reciprocal obligations. And this was like, my God, of course.

How does reciprocal obligations work as the mortar of this structure?

Sara Horowitz

Well, you know, it's reciprocality and it's also over generation. So I want to give you an example. If you look at the cooperative movements around Quebec, the Basque region of Spain, and northern Italy, they all have these models. And the capital system is called indivisible reserves. And so it is an acknowledgment of the current generation that has to pay 3 % of revenues to a central fund.

Sara Horowitz (13:34.594)

And that central fund is used to be affordable and good capital for the next generation of cooperatives that have a business model and want to be born. So they don't have to go out to the free market where they would never be able to be sustainable because they'd have to either pay back too much or the equity amount wouldn't work. But the reason that people give that is because the cooperatives that they're working at at this moment got their capital from the past generation. you don't know maybe people from the past and maybe you won't know people from the future, but the economic model is actually doing that work and each generation is sustaining it. Another interesting story, the Green Bay Packers are a big football team in America. And like a lot of soccer teams across the world, which are owned by fans, America actually had that model too in football. And so fans used to own it. But in the 1920s, the American Football League was formed. And it said, yeah, no, that's over. Only one rich guy is going to own football now, maybe a handful, but no more than a handful. But here were the Green Bay Packers. And they said, we want to be grandfathered in. So they said, OK, you're the only ones. So Green Bay Packers, a big football team in America, is owned by its fans, and the fans have funded new stadiums. They pay the salaries of the players and staff. And so the message of all of this is these are models that work, right? We just have to set up these markets so that they encourage it and sustain it over time. And that's what I think people forget because they think the market works like a hurricane in a weather system. It doesn't.

Markets are created by human beings. We decide. Powerful people make decisions about how they'll be maintained. That's the work for now, is to get the vision to explain that we can build something different.

Lucas Tauil (15:48.59)

I really want to get into patient capital with you in models that point us into that direction, but I feel we better build a bit more of a foundation before we get into the... So, Sara, in the first part of your book, you share how your family story is one and the same as the story of how workers organized to create their safety nets in the United States.

What can we learn from the past to build our own safety nets?

Sara Horowitz

Well, you know, in the book I talk about, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, my parents were in a babysitting cooperative. And again, what I think is really important is people form these not because they wanted to be able to tell people they were in babysitting co-ops, but because they wanted to go out and they couldn't afford to pay people to take care of their kids. So they literally used like a monopoly money. The families got together. I remember my mother kept the monopoly money in like a legal white envelope in the chest of drawers in our hallway. And when the envelope was empty, she would call around to see if anybody needed babysitting, which other people did too. But what happened as a result was, I guess the good news for them is they got to go out. the parents and the children, all the parents had babysat for all these different children. So everybody in the neighborhood really knew each other because there was this incredible cross-pollination of everybody getting some time together. And that's what I think is so important here, is we can start to realize that we think we're doing something economic, but actually what we're doing is we're ordering society. I think a lot about

Sara Horowitz (17:48.14)

the problems facing a lot of developing countries in particular of obesity and diabetes. And it strikes me how we don't have a coherent policy for community gardens and training people to do basic visiting of one another. And you could imagine how you could set these institutions up. No one's going to get rich from doing them, but you don't need that.

You just need revenues to exceed expenses. So why not create a generation that starts to create these kinds of organizations and institutions? I have a lot more faith that that's going to work than some public service announcement on your radio station about being lonely. If I hear one more stupid lonely story, it's really got to be that you find a way. I think a lot about mayors.

I don't get why mayors don't, they have staff, why don't they mutual-ously map their faith, their cooperatives, their credit unions, all of them together, invite them to a meal and say like, what should we be doing together? And we have this space, use the space, you have ideas, here's the mutual-ist space and start telling me what we should be doing and helping to set up what's called like a sandbox for new ideas.

And let's see if we can, if it's a housing thing, get some of the housing budget to support that innovation. Like, this is not hard. It's that we have to see it and have the will and be open to experimentation. And then people have to not be pissed off when experiments don't work. And that is on us to change ourselves and stop being critiquers and chiefs.

and start moving into being builders and cutting each other a little bit more slack.

Lucas Tauil (19:44.61)

I notice a huge transactional vein in modern life and the relational is getting weaker and weaker. Most of us don't realize why are we feeling dread or why we are unhealthy. The transactional is limited, right? It's arithmetic. Relational is exponential. Relationships create life, right? You get kids. Transactions don't do that. Sara, you have yourself built a successful modern mutualist organization with the Freelances Union. What problem did you choose to solve and why was that choice important?

Sara Horowitz

You know, I love that question because now, in retrospect, when I say, well, freelancers needed health insurance, it's kind of like, duh. But I think what was really important was I didn't go into organizing freelancers with that thought. First, I was a union-side labor lawyer that was misclassified as an independent contractor. And I was like, that is really messed up. We should be able to unionize. But freelancers are independent contractors and therefore we're not and can't form unions in the traditional industrial sense. So I started talking to freelancers anywhere I could and wanted to hear what was going on. And that's an emergent process which is 100 % mutualistic, right? You don't go in because some management consultant that you've paid an enormous amount does the interviews. No, you go and talk to...

Sara Horowitz (21:27.33)

people and find out what is going on. So it turned out that it was insurance and at first I was like, my God, this is a disaster. Like who cares about insurance? But it turned out that that was the string that really showed how in the US, the New Deal, big social policy was unraveling for huge parts of the population. And so I literally just started to learn insurance. And that enabled us to keep working at different levels. So first we got the crappiest thing that we could get, but it was an improvement over nothing. And then we evolving. And then really it was having imagination to design a system that hadn't existed before. We created the first portable benefits network actually. And to people who know about crypto, I will just say that in 2008, we launched our insurance company, and freelancers would have to verify that they were real freelancers. And I kid you not, they would have to download a form called the proof of work form to verify their work, that they went from job to job and project to project. And that is what mutualism is, is that we started in the traditional business way. We had to succeed at incremental levels until we could take off with a different vision. And I think that was probably one of the most important lessons. And you and I have discussed this. think that when you were referencing this transactional way, I think we get ourselves into another trap, which is really at this moment in time, we think anything we build must have funding, it must be big, it must have impact.

We must start at a level of just sheer force. And I don't know anybody who's built anything like that. When you start, you start small. My new tagline is you have to have the courage to be small. And value what you're doing and build from there and build your networks and build your ecosystem. Mondragon started that way, Emilia-Romagna, the labor movement.

Sara Horowitz (23:49.41)

The labor movement in America was started when the United Mine Workers of America’s President got into a car and drove to the mines and said, President Roosevelt wants you to form a union. Nobody knew what it was. They made it up. People can't imagine that. 13 million people are in unions in America and much more in many other places. Everybody has an origin story, always.

Lucas Tauil (24:20.526)

Sara, having had created a union-owned business with $100 million a year in revenues leaves no doubt on your capacity for ambitious undertakings. You inspired me with your bold vision of a full-fledged mutualist ecosystem, especially on how practical and down-to-earth are your suggestions on how we get there.

Could you share your vision in what are the structures we need to get there?

Sara Horowitz

Yes. Well, I think the first thing, it starts with a solid, heuristic community. It doesn't have to be in one place. It can be virtual. But you have to start with your solid, heuristic group. And if it doesn't exist, you make it up. I was just talking with somebody who's a veteran cooperative builder. And we were talking about how the first step often for funding is to have a house party and ask people to contribute and then ask those people to be the first people in your network to start something on Kickstarter. And it's not that you have to do those two things, but actually realize that's OK if that's where you're starting. And then look around you for the other mutualists and go and talk to people and start to see what do they need, what do they want to do. And maybe they have a room. Maybe they have some resources. I don't mean resources like necessarily money. I mean, maybe they have a list. Maybe they can introduce you as somebody who's doing a project and help you brainstorm. Just start immediately network weaving. And then when you have something, another pattern that I've really seen, and I did this at the Freelancers Union, you build your group and then you keep building the next entities that you need. So we didn't start with insurance company.

Sara Horowitz (26:16.312)

just sold it in the beginning. But then we started our own technology company. Then we started a medical practice. And I've seen Molly Hempstreet in North Carolina in Industrial Threads, who started out with two employees and a sewing machine. And now in North Carolina, they've created a whole hub of cooperatives that's connected and have been able to really galvanize a lot of economic development funding 64 million into their small area in North Carolina. So what I think is happening is there's a layer that we don't have which is the connecting of those new future-facing organizations because they're building this in an environment that is so uphill. But I think we still have to start and then we have to start bringing in the different elected officials and other leaders and other communities to make it so that we're not just building an isolation. And that really is the difference. So for instance, going back to the community gardens of growing vegetables, we're having a big crisis in the price of eggs right now in America. You know, I'm from Brooklyn, you know, I don't have chickens.

But I bet you other people around Brooklyn have chickens. But forget about us in an urban area. You could start to talk to said mayor, or there's a lot of land. Start growing vegetables and start having people come together. And then enjoy each other's company. Then have it become a farmer's market, because there's a whole regional group of farmers around you. Start to find out what those issues are. This is just an organic way of doing it.

Lucas Tauil (28:15.47)

So when I hear of the building of a mutualistic ecosystem, I see a couple of pillars, the locally grounded mutualist organizations that need to be seeded and incentivized. A layer of government, as you put it on the book, that needs to nourish and enable that thing to grow. You also mentioned the training of the next generation of mutualists and capital. So we have those foundational points that need to grow together, right? You can't build one only without the others. Shall we go through, Fadim, you spoke of structures of patient capital in Mondragon, in the Basque Country, in Emilia Romano, in Italy, and in Canada. How do we shift the system to enable patient capital?

Sara Horowitz

Yes. Well, I think that if a Silicon Valley, Josillionaire said, here, I'm creating this giant fund, I would say that will be the worst thing that could happen. Because it would, again, create this kind of uniformity. Down the road, giant capital could be very helpful, but you'd be plugging it into a system. What would undoubtedly be catalytic is if it either came from donors or foundations or mayors or regional capital in tandem, creating funds that create fellowships. When people in the local community have an idea, they get plugged in. There are these fellowships that exist everywhere in the world that Ashoka is a nonprofit organization started with social entrepreneurs and they have many thousands across the world, Echoing Green and Schwab.

Sara Horowitz (30:18.83)

We know how to do this. So the first is a call out to the people who have an idea. And the second is that you give them a small amount of capital to get them started. And then the third is that you watch and see how the field gets grown. And at each step, it's a vertical of funding and you're watching where that is. Eventually, you're looking for bigger money. So let's say you're funding an ecosystem. But let's plant these seeds and let the seedlings grow. Let's not start, you know, with the forest that has been around for 30 and 50 years. No, we're at seedling time and that's okay. And people have to get over their own ego that it has to be something big and fancy, you know, like enough already. And then you can start to see that. what the message is not, let's just get a bunch of rich people to collect their money, right?

Like, yeah, okay, that's great if people want to do that. But it's actually the call out to the people who are starting and supporting them. I'll give you another example. I think there's a group that does this already in the far profit sector and it's called Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. So Y Combinator, this is exactly what they do. They get a bunch of the founders who they think are great. They put them in a cohort each year. They train them, so that they learn what every early stage group needs. And so by the time they come out of a two-year program, all the big Silicon Valley funds want to invest because who doesn't want a group of people that were picked that are acculturated to what's about to happen, have a network that's interconnected so people can help each other, the other founders.

We and they then have a vertical. So here you, they have figured this out from the early stage all the way to maturity. They have a capital market. We here back in mutualism, they'll have this vertical that has about a million holes in it. And so that's why we have to start and just keep getting those holes patched and the energy.

Sara Horowitz (32:41.29)

we'll start to make it happen because people will be able to start articulating what they need next. But it won't happen if we don't start with these cohorts saying, I'm a mutualist, this is how my community is. This is what we're doing in mutual aid. This is what we're doing to build a cooperative or a faith community or a new kind of school. And then the capital can hear them because they have a track record. But we just have to be ready, and there are, to give you another example, foundations actually have these tools in the United States and they're called program related investments that allow foundations to give like one in two percent loans, which you cannot get in the traditional market. And it comes out of their charitable pot. Like they don't even lose money if the loan isn't repaid. But they've stopped investing and worse, they no longer have staff who even know how to do it. Less than 2 % even do it now. So they actually have the right tool, but it's because we've let this sector go. And I think it's a sector that is from generation to generation. We have to understand that we stopped passing to this younger generation. They need to get the baton back in their hand, and that's our job.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, what about the role of the government in this vision of a strong mutualistic system? The New Deal gave scale to the mutualist innovations created by the union movement in the United States. In Spain, Mondragon's exceptional results in the Basque Country has the support of the government. What can we learn from past successes of the government giving scale to mutualist innovations?

Sara Horowitz

I think the first lesson is to not think that the story started with the government supporting them. The story started with the social movements and social organizations that told government what they needed to grow. And they had grown to such sufficient heft that the government, of course, would do it. So if you talk to the people of Madrigón, they will tell you that when Madrigón started, it was with Padre Arizmendi, and it was in a fascist.

Sara Horowitz (35:03.156)

moment and they started very small and very locally with having nothing to do with the government. And then they built and it took many decades before they then had a conversation with government about what they needed and what they needed to be separate. So I think that's number one. Number two, if somebody were an elected official or somebody who had some power in an area said, like, what should we be doing? You should be creating sandboxes. You should be creating a safe place for a group to just get started. They can't follow every regulation that's already out there. They can't do it the way the existing organizations are doing it. So you have to create some kind of zone as long as they're showing that they're mutualistic. So in other words, you don't want to have people who are coming in and just trying to make a quick buck get away from some regulation. But you do have to create that safe space. And then I think third, we should be looking at that government has things. It has buildings. It has infrastructure. It has real estate. It has land. And that should be for the mutualists to be able to come in and use, to be like Y Combinator and have a cohort. So every city should have a cohort of this could be started in high schools, could be started as trades, this could be started in college. If you want it to happen, just ask people what they want changed in their area. What does the area need? What do they want to grow?

Lucas Tauil

Sara, what can other mutualist organizations learn from how religious organizations carve the niche in the tax code that enabled them to look after their communities with hospitals, schools and orphanages?

Sara Horowitz (36:54.7)

Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting is if you look at, let's say the Catholic Church, so many religions are very old. They were providing, before there was a tax code written for their own communities. And so they had the ability to be at the table to say, we need an exemption. But, you know, I'm, Jewish. And one of the things that I'm always impressed about with Judaism is we're kind of hard coded to organize, right? So we have to get started something that's called the Minyan, used to mean 10 men, but 10 people, 10 Jews have to be there in order to have decision making. And then we had to have a place to bury our dead, and we had to have ritual slaughter for animals. So you get it, it's like, here's the group and here's your first two activities. So we kind of taught people how to organize. The Catholic Church started taking care of people. The Muslim tradition has a tradition of tithing.

These actually make complete sense that they have this ability to understand that there will be new generations. They have to learn how they're going to organize for the future. And then they institutionalize so that they could survive and get a space that's carved out. So you don't have a government religion. That's the same with the trade union movement in America's New Deal. The government made it illegal for companies to have unions and for government to have unions. Only unions can be unions and that's the danger right now and I this is again the left and the right keep getting into the mutualist lane so you have these for-profits that are like B Corps and impact and they use these words that are like magnificent and you would think by their words that they will transform things but they've just completely confused us to seeing that we don't have a mutualist sector of the three principles of the solidaristic group, the economic mechanism and the long-term time horizon. It's wonderful when businesses want to be wonderful, but that's different. And it's the same for government. We often think, so-and-so is doing something wonderful. That group is so wonderful, government should do it in their place, because then we can give it to everybody. No, that's what kills it. I'll just give you another example.

Sara Horowitz (39:20.884)

You see this all the time with the disaster recovery around climate change right now. Everywhere in the world, when something terrible happens, human beings immediately, in a kind of Jungian wired way, start to help each other. They have to. People need medicine, they need food, they are ill, and if everybody was just sitting there just doing their own thing, everybody would suffer and die. So people get together and immediately have this organization. The first thing in the United States that we do after people have built this incredible mutual aid apparatus using technology and setting up networks and phone chains and everything is FEMA comes along, which is our disaster government program, and says, that's great. What you've done is wonderful. All you people are wonderful. Go you. They then take it over and make it a government job and then they outsource it to the for-profit sector to do all the tasks that have been done. So why is that bad? Because if we had the patience to start to create the technology that was open source, we could say, okay, the first thing we're going to do is show you how to start to plug in to the same pattern of the people who had three disasters before you. You're going to need this, you're going to need that, you're going to need a team leader.

And then what if after this was a great way for the community to get organized, that whole infrastructure got codified. And we said, now we can do the next thing. What else does the community need after the crisis? And then it's a way to govern ourselves because we've now shown how we're actually structured. But when you come in and you get us into this homogenous, big capital, big way, uniformity, then now people are lonely, they're alienated, they're isolated, and that's not where we want to be.

Lucas Tauil (41:32.032)

And you're not replenishing and nourishing the nascent mutualist experiment, I see. Sara, how is scale in mutualist ecosystems different from scale in capitalist economies?

Sara Horowitz

So I think there really is scale. It's not like that this is going to just be some little quaint and cute thing. that the problems of the world are really complicated. know, logistics are global in many ways. But what it does is it says that this sector doesn't replace government. This sector doesn't replace markets or for-profit businesses. It stands connected to them, and makes it so that there's a place that helps to have human beings be able to flourish. So the scale of a mutual sector starts where people are incredibly connected in their local community or in their solidaristic group. So you could imagine that it's like mycelial networks. It's ways that people start to see that by being connected, they'll do better. I'll give you an example. If one small community is buying something that the community needs, if it connects with 100 communities and has 10 times the people, they're able to get more at a lower rate. Or, give an example of another mutualist organization, First Book. First Book is an organization, a nonprofit, that 50 % of their revenues come from a marketplace they own, where they get books to kids who need them. So very early on, they were getting whatever the publishers were giving them. But once they could connect all these kids together, they started saying back to the publishers, you need to get books that look like the kids who are reading, that are reflecting the issues that are going on in their lives. So that's what mutualism does. It actually is a feedback loop.

Sara Horowitz (43:48.526)

People often read Fukuyama's book, which is The End of History, but they don't read this other book that I had to get used on eBay, which is called Trust. So here, this pretty conservative guy at Stanford who's known for many neoliberal policies realized that you don't have any successful market if you don't have people who trust one another. And trust happens in a sophisticated way through mutualist organization. That's why there's a crisis of democracy, because we don't have associations, we don't have organizations, we haven't learned how to be with people we don't like. Like, we're human. If we all need something, we're not gonna like each other sometimes. Often. If you have people you love, you argue with them.

What it does is it teaches people civic skills, not just setting an agenda, not just running a meeting, but like, can't stand that person. Well, we better figure out, like, it doesn't mean we're going to like each other, but we've got to get along enough to get this bigger thing done. And I think that anybody who's experienced that in life knows that's the true fulfillment, right, of that person I couldn't stand, I got something done, we had to work it out together. That's what mutualism does every day.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, on your book you carefully warn romantics that the mutualist period in the early 20th century was no utopia. Members had to work out their issues among themselves, and for a long time they did. In the process they became skilled and robust citizens. Where can people who want to help find out more on how to flex our mutualist muscles go?

Sara Horowitz (45:53.218)

Yeah, well, first of all, you can come to the mutualistsociety.net and we have peer-to-peer classes on mutualism 101, mutualist tech infrastructure, mutualist process. And so that's the beginning of cross pollination, but you don't need us. You could go in your local community and just start by going to your faith community or a faith community that you're interested in or going to your local food cooperative and joining it, or starting a book group, or starting something that enables you to be with people that you all decide. What it isn't is going on social media and liking somebody. Like, turn off the computer and just meet with people, or use technology so that you're creating a group. So just a little simple thing, you can say you want to get together and talk about something that's happening in your local community, whatever the issue is, then you can start to use social media and say, this is where we're meeting. But when people come to that meeting, do not use social media. Use a Google Doc and just keep track. And get off these group platforms because they're not building solidarity, they're just keeping everybody as individuals and they're the ones who are making the money. And then you'll go from there. And then you'll tell me what you're using and we'll have a bigger conversation and we'll start to maybe use Holochain. And start to really think about, like, how do we have something that actually works?

The problem is not that it doesn't exist. It's that we don't know how to use this in a coherent way. But not to worry, we'll start.

Lucas Tauil (47:52.076)

Sara, you mentioned you heard this question many times. Here it goes again. Is mutualism just another word for communism or socialism?

Sara Horowitz

You know, I think we're so fearful that it takes over logic. Communism and socialism are centralized systems. There's an uniformity and an expectation that government decides everything. Mutualism is the antidote to that. It says that individuals need to come together and not lose their individuality, actually.

You never are told if you're in a group where somebody tells you what we think like run Because what you have to be is persuaded. It has to make sense. It can't fail the common sense test Do you need to join a food co-op because food prices are less expensive? Do you need a community garden because there's a way to have fresh vegetables? Do you need this thing because?

There's, you will only do better if the group does better. If that math doesn't work, it's not mutualist. So this isn't brainwashing. Don't check your brain at the, you know, mutualist door. You should be thinking and critical, but you should be a builder and you should be forgiving and loving. That's really what this is about, is forgiving and loving, because this is a hard time. We're gonna make a ton of mistakes.

We are going to have to leave our ego, and we all have big egos, that's the nature of being human, but we have to check ourselves because we have to be figuring things out. This isn't a time of pat answers, it's a time of good questions.

Lucas Tauil (49:38.254)

Yeah, unusual times call for unusual alliances, right? Today the richest 1 % have more wealth than the bottom 95 % of the world population put together.

Sara Horowitz

You know, the thing that I find alarming is that not even 1%, the 1 % of the 1 % are planning their exit from planet Earth. You know, they're either buying land or they're planning to go to another planet. Meanwhile, they're giving us nice long lectures from both the left and the right about how we're supposed to lead our lives and telling us, you know, don't think too much. You just do what what we say. But meanwhile the rest of us have to come up with ways to flourish and to survive. And that has to be a more collective response. And that's just the truth. Because we're not going anywhere to Mars and we're not buying municipalities and islands. We're not talking about longevity. We're actually meanwhile down here in the real world talking about affordable eggs.

So let's be clear about who we're listening to. And that's why I think loving and forgiving is actually the antidote because that will guide you for the things that are productive. And I can assure you that you will be connected to people you don't agree with and you are surprised by. That's how you know it's a success.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, what are the unusual alliances you see ripe for us to explore in these gloomy times?

Sara Horowitz (51:26.52)

Well, know, kind of feel like we, this does feel like gloomy times, but so many times have felt like gloomy times, you know? And I think it's really important to remember that, you know, our parents and their parents and their parents, like every generation had horrors and scary things that they were confronted by. But I would say, like, really starting to realize that people that are not in the super, super, who are super, super wealthy or super, super poor actually have a lot in common, especially people who work, you know? And that, I think, has been the big travesty that workers have been separated a lot by the policies of the left and the right. And I think that it is realizing that we have to figure out how to send our kids to schools, and not schools that teach them to work in factories, but to let them be little human beings that are curious and imaginative. We need to have food that we enjoy that's good for us. You know, I think those are the kinds of things that we have to be thinking about and the things that we think are the hot button issues. Like, uh-uh. So, like, let's have a little space for who we want to spend time with and be, again, forgiven.

Lucas Tauil

Sara, self-determination appears to be central in people solving their own problems. What have you learned on how to keep your self-determination alive during the storms in your journey?

Sara Horowitz

Well, you know, I think that self-determination, to me, is really finding your group, right? So it's actually not an individualistic thing. So not to say it's an individual orientation, but finding your people. So when I wrote The Mutualist, Building the Next Echonomy from the Ground Up,

Sara Horowitz (53:34.964)

I felt like the first thing I had to do was to try to gather mutualists because we were all over the place. To start to have a place where we don't have to go to everybody else's conversation, but we could just have that conversation, but be heterodox. So there's no one way to be. There's like, people can disagree and they should disagree, but we should have an orientation around this. And then for me personally, you know, it's a question of faith. And I, I really believe in that, and I really believe in connecting to something greater than yourself and realizing you're here but a moment in time and people came before you and people will come after you. You don't have to succeed at the task at hand, but you may not desist from, from, as I would say, trying your best. So get off the scale and all these things and bigness and impressiveness and just do what you can do and be okay with that. Forgive yourself.

Love yourself. There's a lot to do. Like, just stop listening to the media that make money if you come to them and click. We're all addicted to it, and we all know we are listening too much. Turn it off and just start to find your people.

Lucas Tauil (54:59.64)

Yeah, extremely inspired. I'll see you in the mutualist society.

Sara Horowitz

Listen, let's begin. That's the phase right now. We are all beginners. And that's like the most exciting time, right?

Lucas Tauil

Sara, that's been an exceptional experience. I really appreciate your time and the inspiration you bring. I'm looking forward to more conversations in the future. hope we can sit together again and see how the progress of the society is going in hearing more from you.

Sara Horowitz

And thank you so much, really. It's been a great delight.

Lucas Tauil

Thank you so much.

Sara Horowitz (55:46.531)

Take care.

Narrator - Clara Chemin

Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality, towards a world that works for all.

Jean-François Noubel, visionary thinker and researcher in the field of collective intelligence, explains that for collective intelligence to truly scale, we must both see and be seen. Like in a jazz band, where every player senses the whole to improvise in harmony, societies also need a reciprocal view of the whole—only on a much larger scale.

Known for his work on how humanity can evolve beyond ego-centered systems, Jean-François explores how narratives, language, and invisible architectures shape the way we organize ourselves, and how emerging technologies can help us transcend the limitations of pyramidal power structures.

In this conversation, he shares stories and insights that reveal how myths, grammar, and currencies act as the social DNA of our systems—and why re-designing them may be essential for humanity’s next evolutionary step.

Watch this episode on YouTube

Listen to this episode:

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Themes:

The Power of Stories and Myths – How narratives guide consciousness and collective action.

Paradigms and Unstated Assumptions – The invisible beliefs that shape our systems and behaviors.

Language as Invisible Architecture – How grammar and words embed domination and possibility.

The Middleman and Pyramidal Systems – Why concentration of power creates fragility.

Distributed Technologies – Designing resilient, living systems for the future.

Timestamps

Opening & Framing

00:00 — Collective intelligence in small groups vs pyramidal systems

01:43 — Sponsor: Holochain Foundation & Lucas’ personal journey

02:59 — Introducing Jean-François Noubel & his vision

Stories & Narratives

04:53 — Why stories and myths are the strongest forces in human evolution

07:16 — Narratives as holograms of culture and consciousness

08:12 — Paradigms and Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points”

Paradigms & Assumptions

09:58 — Hidden cultural assumptions: gender, slavery, eating animals

12:18 — Invisible architectures: language, currency, time, and codes

14:38 — Challenging assumptions: veganism, language, and thingification

Language & Grammar

16:56 — Patriarchy embedded in grammar

18:46 — Removing the verb to be and reducing “social violence”

21:11 — Language as domination vs language as responsibility

22:17 — Causality vs synchronicity: why our languages limit perception

Technology & Evolution

24:04 — Written language and centralization of power

26:17 — From oral to pyramidal systems: writing as keystone technology

28:43 — Scarcity currencies and concentration of power

32:23 — The role of the middleman (agents, rules, data)

34:44 — Why bureaucracies grow and become self-serving

Disintermediation

36:36 — Concentration of money and power: systemic feedback loops

38:33 — Limits of the middleman and blockchain’s shortcomings

40:16 — Distributed living systems and decision-making

43:31 — Pyramidal bottlenecks vs distributed resilience

45:07 — Humanity’s evolutionary need for distributed intelligence

47:32 — New grammars for synchronicity and emergence

Currencies & Agreements

49:29 — Meta-grammar for agreements

51:22 — Designing currencies as living stories

52:59 — How the Holochain story has evolved over the years

AI & Holopticism

55:20 — Artificial intelligence as augmented collective intelligence

57:20 — Wrapping up: Holopticism as sensing the whole together

Closing

58:10 — Outro & invitation to subscribe

Resources and References

📖 A Brief History of Everything – Ken Wilber

📜 Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System – Donella Meadows

📜 Towards a Commons Culture – Paul Krafel

🏆 Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize work on Design Principles for the Commons

Transcript

Jean-François Noubel (00:00.322)

From a collective intelligence perspective, the best setting as human beings, we do play sports in small teams. The jazz bands, we start as a small group and the family. So we have a cognitive system optimized for small groups. But it has limitations. When you want to do big things, it can't work. You need to unite more people. So we shifted to pyramidal collective intelligence.

It has centralized power, chain of command, labor division, and a scarce currency. Because the scarcity of currency will create the concentration of power. One of the properties that we like in small groups, we call it holopticism. A holos, a hole, and opticism, see the hole. And so I know what I can do in my sports team or in my jazz band because

I have a representation of the whole. I know what the whole does, so I know what actions I can do in the whole. Every time you have a pyramidal structure, you let a minority of people to deal with something so big, they can't embrace the complexity. If you don't give them augmented holopticism, which distributed systems will need to provide, then they can't work. You hit

the glass wall.

Lucas Tauil (01:43.48)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.

During my journey into participative culture with Unsparil, my good friend Hailey Cooperider pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (02:59.79)

Today we welcome Jean-Francois Nouvelle, a visionary thinker, speaker and pioneer in the realm of collective intelligence. Jean-Francois has dedicated his research to understanding how humans can evolve from ego-centered systems to new forms of collaboration that honor our interconnectedness. With a background in computer science, linguistics and philosophy,

Jean-Francois has worked at the cutting edge of technology and humanity. He explores how we can transcend the limitations of current societal structures, embracing what he calls the next species of humanity. From his deep insights into money and currency systems to his practical experiments in living systems, Jean-Francois invites us to reimagine how we live, work,

and create together. So get ready to expand your perspective and dive into a fascinating conversation about the future of collective intelligence, the role of inner transformation in the art of designing systems that truly work for all. Welcome, Jean-Francois. It's an honor to have you with us.

Nice to meet you, Lucas. Thank you so much for having me here.

Lucas Tauil

I'm stoked to dive into this conversation. I would like to start with narratives. The materialists say we are made of atoms. I prefer to believe we are made of stories, relationships to place, life and people. You also seem fascinated by narratives. What is the story we need to reveal about the stories we are telling ourselves?

Jean-François Noubel (04:53.592)

Well, first, I don't see a bigger driving force than stories. And I'd rather even say myth, not as a mythology like old stories, but myth as those kind of stories that invite us to a greater journey and to overcome our limitations and to do something so, so big and so cool and so impossible that we want to do it. You know, like really going to the moon, going to space, and building, you know, the best journey, the best experience we can build for ourselves. That means dreaming something that does not exist. So not just storytelling. Now, we do exist as storytellers. We've existed as this forever since we speak together. 50,000 years ago, you had human beings around the fire sharing stories. So we do exist as storytellers, as storytelling beings. Yeah, no bigger force than this. Now we have different levels of stories. Those stories we say every day, what did you do today? And that will reflect how you see the world, you see yourself, your value system. Every story that we share reflects that. We're like a hologram of a greater thing and the hologram of yourself, but also a hologram of the society and the stories you believe in that you belong to. And you have also other stories that have the mythological aspect of that. When they share something about an epic adventure, you know, let's do something epic together like:

Take a boat and go over the globe together, you know, explore new frontiers of science, make the most beautiful movie ever. You know, something so incredible that it brings, you know, tears in your eyes when you speak about it. And it also unites people around this because whatever you do, you know, let's talk about space exploration. You have people who do coding, you have people who do accounting, you have people who train as astronauts. You have all sorts of people that if you ask them, what they do, their story will say something greater, will connect their being into something greater with a sense of belonging and participating to something greater. So here we talk about the myth. And of course you cannot separate the everyday stories and the myth. They have some kind of entanglement. But understanding how this works, I think, give us very powerful insights about

Jean-François Noubel (07:16.566)

social dynamics and also maybe understanding where the world wants to go, where consciousness wants to go.

Lucas Tauil

This gets me to Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything. We understand evolution where survival of the fittest work. Yeah, that explains how legs evolved. But it doesn't explain how you evolved from an arm to wings. You need a hundred plus consecutive mutations for an arm to become a wing. And you need two individuals to have viable offspring. how this happens. And I'm with you. I feel this space of wonder is more likely to have answers than the subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

Lucas Tauil (08:12.79)

Jean-Francois, in your research you mention unstated assumptions that are deeply ingrained in our culture. In Paul Krafel’s recent article, Towards a Common Culture, introduced me to the work of systems thinker, Donela Meadows. In her article, Leverage Points, she points to the most impactful ways to shift systems. And one of the leverage points are paradigms.

She describes paradigms as the shared ideas in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions. In her words, unstated because, unnecessary to state, everyone already knows them. Money measures something real and has real meaning. Therefore, people who are paid less are literally worthless. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to become...

converted to human purpose. And there it goes, you know, one can own land. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our culture, all of which have then founded other cultures. So, if paradigms are the sources of systems, from them, shared social agreements, system flows, feedback, stocks, everything

about systems is based on them. And her insight is so powerful because these shared beliefs are where real power lies when changing systems. What assumptions are we taking for granted? And what might be possible if we change them?

Jean-François Noubel (09:58.518)

What a topic, what a big topic. We have so many assumptions and many of them rooted in stories we share. So for instance, we've shared stories that women don't have the same level of intelligence than men for thousands of years. And today, a majority of people consider that slaughtering animals represents a very natural order, just like people of color in slavery belong to the natural order. I think the next generations will talk about civilizations today with some kind of like, wow, they ate animals. But I think we need even to go further in the very deep structures of language. Whatever language you speak has some forms of consciousness rooted in them, you know, with layers and layers of thousands of years of different forms of supremacy. And so the supremacy consciousness that we can see everywhere, whether you call it racism, sexism, homophobia, religious orthodoxy, all these things, you can also find them in the very roots of the grammars that we speak today. That's why I think we can't invent brand new languages out of sort of the blue like this, but we can hack. We can hack our stories and build new stories, but we can also hack our languages. I can help you share some examples that I've done for myself, because I...

Before talking on a general theoretical level, I like to try things on myself first to see how they work. I try to work on new stories and see how they make me regress or evolve. And also I try to change things in my language structures and my social codes and, you know, every possible aspect where I can see where my consciousness goes. And by the way, I think maybe the underlying thing when we talk about evolution, you know, when I say the word evolution, most people will see biological evolution, you know, how we move from dinosaurs to today's forms of life. But I think we need to talk about the evolution of consciousness, which includes a biological evolution, which includes the materialistic way to look at reality, but not only. And so back to living systems and human living systems with storytelling. Yes, we have the storytellings, but we have also invisible architectures like the currency system that we use.

Jean-François Noubel (12:18.796)

The way you design a currency system, can see that social DNA, that means the social body that will emerge from that will depend, will change based on how you play with those currency systems. The way we articulate grammars in the way we speak or write will also completely shift the kind of consciousness that we have. And of course the biological aspect of it as well, you know, I can put chemicals in your body or I can change your DNA and that can also, because of design, create new kinds of society and new kinds of human beings or post human beings as well. So maybe we want to talk about all these things under the umbrella of design and what I'll call invisible architectures because we don't see them physically, know, currency design, you don't see it. Language structures, you don't see them. You can observe them, but you don't see them like seeing a bird or a tree outside your window. Social codes, you don't see them. The deep structures of narratives and stories that we share, you don't see them. The way we experience time, you don't see it, but we could also shift the way we experience time. So you see all these things, I put them under the umbrella of invisible architectures and how do we become architects for emergence. And we could cover any of these topics, of course, if you're interested in them, through practical examples, theoretical examples as well.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, I'm particularly interested in the unstated assumptions in how they create those systems you're describing. On a fundamental level, there is this body of old ways of doing things that we don't even question or are aware of. It is in the realm of shadow.

Jean-François Noubel

Well, so assumptions we can take plenty of them and I gave two examples. As a vegan person, I've really challenged that assumption that we need to take the life of other animals. Well, probably not a long time ago when you lived in a tribe but with eight billion people on this planet interconnected and having the capacity to grow food other than animals, why would we keep hurting sentient beings, ruin the planet and create all these toxic effects that we have on the planet?

Jean-François Noubel (14:38.008)

Here we have one assumption, but who really works on this assumption? A tiny minority of people. Most people will try to capture carbon without challenging the root hidden assumptions that we need to eat animals. And so we could challenge so many assumptions. However, I also feel quite interested in seeing what we have rooted in the very grammars that we use.

So let me take a few examples to see the depth of what we need to address. For instance, when I pronounce the word resource, when I declare something a resource, I've put that word on that something. Then I've shifted my relationship to that something in declaring that a resource. So I can say human resources. I can talk about the things out there in the world as resources. So you can't see it as just a word. It declares something.

It changes the rules of relationships and the behaviors that we have with that something or that being. Same thing with what we call thingification. When I say the word meat, well, then I have thingified being. When I say meat, I transform into a thing and into a resource. I kind of kill the whole array of dimensionalities of that being, you know, that being had a life, had a personality, had a story, had siblings, friends, issues, you know, a whole sense of self, and then the persons also who raised that being and who killed that being also have their own story. So you have a whole web of experiences, human and non-human experiences, that you just kill right now by declaring meat. You've thingified. So you have something rooted in language.

Thingification. Okay? We have these processes rooted in language of domination that we use all the time. Also in many languages and that includes of course your native language and that we have in so many Latin languages that we speak. We don't have a neutral person. We don't have the it. So the masculine becomes the norm and the feminine the exception. And that has also impact on your brain. So if you want a patriarchal

Jean-François Noubel (16:56.674)

world, patriarchy has created those kind of grammars that kind of self-justifies the domination from the masculine side over the feminine. And we can go even further. I've changed something quite important in my language, in both English and French, suppressed a word I don't know if you've noticed, but I've really taken a word away from my language. Have you noticed that?

Not not yet,

Well, usually people don't notice that. I don't use the verb to be. And I haven't used it since we began our conversation. Every time I say, and I will use it on purpose, I say, you know, this person is like this. The Americans, the women, the Europeans are this or not this. Then, or reality is like this. The is-ness of things. I impose.

Some kind of absolute truth and absolute reality that has nothing to do with your perception or mine. It just is like this. So let me take an example. When I say, Ken is shy. You don't have a choice. He is shy, forever. It has nothing to do with you or me. It has an is-ness of it in the absolute reality. So I create a kind of

relationship with reality with the Isness that has nothing to do with the observer. Now if you hear me say, I met Kevin yesterday, I found him shy. Or if you hear me say, begin my sentences with, I believe, I think that, I have the feeling that, all these things starting with I as the observer or as the creator of my own experience, then I don't apply this social violence onto you because I just tell you,

Jean-François Noubel (18:46.57)

I see the world from this window, from my emotions, from my storytelling, from my way of thinking, from where I observe things. And you may see that from a different perspective. So you see, moving from things are this way, where I impose a social violence all the time on you, and also I create a narrative on myself where I don't even see myself as the creator of my experience.

But moving from that to saying, I think that, I believe tha.t I have the opinion that, I have the experience that. Then I create a narrative for myself first where I grow and become more of an adult who takes responsibility for how I see the world, how I experience the world and offer that to you. And you may have a different way to observe the world as well. And we don't need to fight. We may want to add our perspectives are

So you see, removing the verb to be has helped me to shift, I think, to greater embrace of reality with less violence in my everyday language. And now seeing the world from that perspective, when I see people say to be all the time, most sentences have the word to be in them. Things are all the time or are not. Well, I see the everyday violence and domination at play.

It might look okay for a casual conversation. Let's say we go to the movie together and you say, this movie was great. And I say, ah, this movie was awful. We won't kill each other. We may argue a little bit. Right? And let's go have a beer. But look at the conflicts in the world. The things that are good and are not good, that are right and are wrong, that are true and are not true. The isness of things leads to most conflicts that you'll see in your everyday life, but also in the big, you know, conflicts in the world. So not only I believe we need to evolve our storytellings, we also need to go to a deep scrutiny of our grammars, because a grammar can also embed lots of domination, alienation, supremacy that we can observe in our everyday language.

Jean-François Noubel (21:11.82)

And I don't pretend that I've removed all those things from my language because I still need to use those things every day. But what can I do today to redesign those architectures in my social codes, in my language, in the way I use technology, and the way I use currencies, and all those things? And then we have great leverages that we can use.

Lucas Tauil

So in the work narratives doing cultures, there's an underlying layer where grammar is playing in narratives.

Jean-François Noubel

Yes, absolutely.

Lucas Tauil

And how do grandmas and narratives work in cultures? So what is it that they build?

Jean-François Noubel

Well, I don't know all the languages, if I think of the languages that I know, they talk about causal reality. So you have a subject, a verb, and a target. Like the dog sees the cat, the dog runs after the cat, the cat climbs in the tree. So we have a very causal language.

Jean-François Noubel (22:17.774)

which we can modulate of course with you know slow, slowly, fast, with joy, with all these things but mostly we have things that talk about causal events a cause and an effect and does reality always work with causes and effects?

I don't think so. think causal effects do happen in reality, but reality probably has much more than just causal things. But our languages cannot address that part of reality that we can experience in our consciousness, in our intimate life. For instance, you know, the doing the experience of synchronicities where that event A and that event B, they have a meaning to you as the observer, as you experiencing those events.

And they have a special meaning, special storytelling, but none of these events exist as the cause of the other. Like you think, you know, of this friend, you haven't met this friend for the past 20 years, and then suddenly you bump into that person in the street, or that person gives you a call. And one minute earlier you thought about this person, and you haven't met that person for such a long time, then you have a synchronicity. Now you cannot say, you're thinking, provoked the call. But in our language, we cannot express synchronicities other than in a causal way. So, at least not just a philosophical question, because when we think about systems, have emergence. Like new properties emerge from a system, and causality cannot explain them. The grammars that we use cannot reflect this new level of consciousness that we may have inside ourselves. It cannot bring that to a social reality that we can share.

So maybe we also need to evolve those grammars as well.

Lucas Tauil (24:04.174)

It's very interesting because for a very long time grammars existed in the realm of spoken languages, right? We have seen the emergence of the Greek alphabet and technologies around language have hugely transformed how we experience the planet, right? Once written language was around, huge geopolitical transformations emerged from that. It created

huge centralization. The Catholic Church emerges on the back of the written language, right? The evolution of the Greek alphabet, hordes of monks copying the Bible and spreading it around the planet. That is the book where people learn how to read and write. But this same centralization increased literacy and people started reading other things and questioning.

So the very centralization carries its mirror image, right? Its decentralization. And then there's the printing press and huge concentration of power from telling stories with the printing press. Stories are cheap, many people are reading, people start having opinions, and again, it carries its own decentralization. And we go on, like the Telegraph.

the internet and now we are in this space of distributed technology, right? We encounter this way of getting together, connecting our computers and doing things. What is the story rooted in this distributed technology? What is hidden in there?

Jean-François Noubel

Well, you can see in the examples that you gave, you know, the writing where you just had an elite that could read and write and had also access to the means, the technology. Not everyone had access to paper and not everyone had access to the tool that you use to put a sign on the support. So we always have the same pattern where few innovate and because they know they have the control, not necessarily with bad intention. I don't know. I don't have the answer about the everyone-ness.

Jean-François Noubel (26:17.944)

However, we can clearly see an evolution from centralized to distributed. From a collective intelligence perspective, we started in what we call original collective intelligence. That means the small group, the tribe, human beings. do play sports in small teams, jazz bands, a startup. We started as a small group and a family. So we have a biology and a cognitive system optimized for small groups. But of course it has limitations. And one of the big properties that we like so much in small groups, we call it whole-opticism. A whole is a whole and opticism see the whole. And so I know what I can do in my sports team or in my jazz band because I have a representation of the whole. I know what the whole does so I can know what actions I can do in the whole. And we can come back to this notion later, but

Remember original collective intelligence. That has limitations because when you want to do big things, it can't work. You need to unite more people. And so we had that evolution and we shifted to pyramidal collective intelligence, which still prevails today. You have to think of, you know, moving from nomadic tribes to people who stayed at the same place, sedentary lifestyle, agriculture.

An explosion of complexity, explosion of birth rate increases, you need to specialize, have more specialized jobs, you need to administrate bigger territories. All world traditions cannot cope with this level of complexity. And then you have this miraculous technology, the kind of internet of the time, called the writing. That comes because now you can transport information through space and time. which you cannot really do that much with an oral tradition. So that really brought the keystone technology for pyramidal structures to emerge. And we still live by those standards today. It has centralized power, it has chain of command, labor division, and one very important, harder to understand, a scarce currency. Because the scarcity of currency will create the

Jean-François Noubel (28:43.544)

concentration of power. If you want concentration of power, make a scarce currency. It will mutually reinforce itself.

Lucas Tauil

JF, I remember reading that written language emerges from accounting, and that accounting emerges from agriculture preservation of grain, so that it is in coaches where grain became feasible, that the staple that you can stalk and survive droughts and sieges where mathematics and accounting emerges in the language. And with it,a scarcity currency, is this a correct connection of the two things?

Jean-François Noubel

Yes, very likely written language came from accounting. You need to represent big quantities, you need to memorize data, you need to write in stone, if I may say so, a contract, an agreement, because verbal agreement doesn't bring a memory. So you can create an independent support on which you can see, well, I owe you this amount of work or cattle. So yes, very likely it began with this.

And so writing currencies and writing abstract language that led to philosophy and poetry, all the abstract language, they probably have the same origin, the same root, and then they took their own course and specialization. And then it led to specialized forms of language. Engineering language, have medical language, and accounting means that some people needed to specialize into this, just like we have quoters today. The quoters of the time, they knew how to read and...

Jean-François Noubel (30:24.462)

how to read and write and how to deal with those complex grammars because it complexifies very, very quickly, you know? How do you define time? You know, do I owe you something next week in 10 years? How do you describe those items of the I owe you or you owe me things? How do you create abstractions about agreements that we have to rule the city together, you know, on the territory together? How do you define the laws that we agree on and then how do you write those stories also because then you have to have to write stories just for the sake of remembering things or creating a legal system you know like you have a legal system and then you didn't play by the rules then you have a story to share and to write to write down and all those things so it very quickly complexifies and with lots and lots of abstractions and things that don't have a physical existence per se they have an existence in our mind in the way we tell a story. Like if I say, you know, you owe me 10 hours of work, it doesn't have a physical existence.

And there's something really interesting in this scarcity rooted story, right? Everything is intermediated. Everything has to go through this central power. And we're finally getting to technological possibilities where we can have this intermediation. What emerges from this intermediation?

But maybe first, before we go into this intermediation, maybe we need to understand a little more about intermediation because it really brings something so important here. And that we call the middleman. The middleman has the role of guaranteeing always, all the time, three things. And it doesn't matter which period of time you look at it, 10,000 years ago or today.

Jean-François Noubel (32:23.01)

You'll see those three things happening all the time. You have players or identities. So did person A have a contract with person B or does person A owe that amount of livestock or work to person B? So you need, have technically what we call players or agents. I prefer the word agent, kind of more neutral. The middleman takes care of agents, the identity of agents. So whether we do banking, carpooling, chess contests, you have players, have agents interacting with one another and you need to know which agent did what to with that other agent. Second, we play games, we play rules. So do we play chess? Do we play elections? Do we play money transfer? Do we play carpooling? Do we play medical advice or medical acts? You play games.

Different games with different rules. The middleman also needs to guarantee that you play by the game. Like, you know, did you do the right medical act in the whole medical world? Did you play the right chess move if we play chess? Did you rent an apartment to me or a car? All those things. So did we play by the rules? And third thing, the data. We update data all the time.

What amount of money do you have on your bank account? Which ride did you give me on this carpooling system? The middleman guarantees those records of agents, rules and data in a good space that you will play by the rules, right agents and yet that you have a right data updated over time. Whatever you want to do, know, rule a country or play a contest or do banking or do Airbnb.

You need the middleman. We never knew how to do differently than that, but it has some consequences. Number one, you as a middleman, if you want to do your job in a good way, you need always more and more information and control. You have this kind of natural drive. I need more data because I want to do my job well. I need more people. I need more control. It can grow and grow and grow and create what we call bureaucracies or those kind of big

Jean-François Noubel (34:44.449)

cancer, you know, when it becomes so big that it has, it lives just for itself. Now it becomes its own self-interest. And just because of a natural drive, let's even forget about, you know, people who want to make personal profit of that. Just if they want to do a job in the right way, they will take this direction.

Lucas Tauil

It's a beautiful acknowledgement that all power becomes self-serving. Even if it starts really well intended with a revolution chopping the heads of the nobility, it becomes self-serving. It's the nature of it, right?

Jean-François Noubel

Exactly. And if you look at all the bureaucracies in the world, you can see that kind of story. Now they become self-serving and they need to justify their work. But, of course, it also gives you lot of power. I mean, that makes it so hard to resist because it will give you advantages. And of course, as an elected person, you want to vote the laws that will serve you better than other people that you don't even know.

So the middle man has a very strong efficiency but a very poor resilience. Good efficiency, poor resilience. Because if you attack it, if you intoxicate it, if you corrupt it, if you hack it, then the whole system will collapse. And when you look at history, you know how the whole course of humankind changed brutally because of a tiny thing on the head, you know? Think of a chump assassination attempt.

It didn't work by one tiny little move of the shooter that could have changed the course of the world. And you have this concentration of power, see? So much connected to a tiny variation, further effect at this moment. And we could say the same thing for the assassination of Kennedy.

Lucas Tauil (36:36.174)

What would have happened had Kennedy not died, right? Exactly. And you can see. have never had autocracies in South America, in Egypt, Somalia. He would probably have held his opposition to autocratic capitalism regimes, right? That became the norm after he died.

Jean-François Noubel (36:58.306)

Exactly.

Same thing with the First World War. Also, every time you look at history, you can see the link between the feather effect and the concentration of power. So the middleman existed because of evolutionary advantages. It allowed to do big things with big numbers of people in a pyramidal way. But now we hit the limits of that. We've never seen so much concentration of power that has nothing to do with democracy.

Lucas Tauil

We've never seen such a concentration of money because it goes along together. Concentration of money creates concentration of power that creates concentration of money that creates concentration of power and so on.

Jean-François Noubel

Absolutely, kind of positive feedback loop. So I don't even need to talk about it from a moral perspective, but from a system design's perspective, it has reached its limits. Thank you. Bye bye. Let's now move to the next step. Now we know how to put the middleman into the whole system. So the whole system becomes its own middleman. And Holochain, the big story about Holochain, it did that. And it began with the blockchain saying, we could do with some accounting, with tokens in a very limited way, energy consuming way. It worked a little bit like the first plane of the Wright brothers. You know, it showed we can take off. Okay. Now, do you want to put your ass in that kind of plane and out it? I do not want to put my ass in the blockchain technology as big as it may become. don't, it doesn't do what we need to do today. It doesn't.

Jean-François Noubel (38:33.048)

fulfill the whole requirements of living systems, of distributed living systems that we need today. Holochain does that. So from a bigger perspective, you see, it resolves this limitation of the middleman because the whole system now can become the middleman, or part of it. It doesn't say that it has necessarily become that all the time. Sometimes we need a middleman. I don't say we don't need middlemans anymore. But we need to know the limitations of that. And we need to know that now we have a choice.

Lucas Tauil

So how is Holochain able to deliver disintermediation? What is it that it does that delivers disintermediation?

Jean-François Noubel

Yes, it takes away the middle man. I would say everyone can become an intermediate. I'd rather put it this way, it really distributes in the system the intermediation and does not concentrate that in the hands of the few. So that makes the system much more resilient, of course, without taking the efficiency of that. Now, I would like to invite you to make this hard exercise to think like what if our species now becomes able to build distributed organizations that means that we can build societies and collectives that don't have a concentration of power in them. That means, and I mean not just how language works, know, like languages they evolve in a distributed way already. They don't have, they have very little intermediation.

But what if we could do that for everyday decisions? Like what happens in your body. You don't need to think about what your thyroid does. You don't need to...

Jean-François Noubel (40:16.936)

understand what your bladder does or your liver do. You have so many automated flows. I see that in the future where lots of things will self-regulate in a distributed way. Now for building organizations, whether you want to create a new technology or to organize your territory, then we need to make decisions together and think, explore those possibilities where you know that everyone can participate.

and it doesn't need a centralized power. What does that mean? We have so much not seen that. It seems so abstract. You know, when I give talks, people keep asking me, yes, but who will decide? Well, maybe decisions will emerge without us even knowing who decided. You know, they just emerged. Histories emerged.

Lucas Tauil

There are design patterns for that, like Eleanor Ostrom won a Nobel of Economics identifying the design patterns for managing the commons, for deciding together. Who's in the membrane, what are the agreements, how often you take the agreements, how is the punishment, how it increases. So it's not that there isn't knowledge around this. We not only have the technological bits and bobs, but we have the social understanding as well, right?

Jean-François Noubel

Yes, absolutely. So you see, we talked about language and notice how we shift from a very mechanical language that we had so far in the past into a more biological language. You know, we talk about living systems, we talk about language, we talk about social DNA. Those organizations have much more aliveness than the kind of mechanical command and control.

You need a mechanical dialectics when you do pyramidal things because chains of command need to work in a very mechanical way. Otherwise, how could they work? They also need to have domesticated people because chains of command work with predictable people. Whatever you think, whatever emotions you have, whatever your personal story, up to certain degree, of course, but this next Monday at eight, you will...

go to your work. And you have a long training to separate your inner being, which you hardly know, with your outer doing, for which you have such a long training. went through long years of studies to learn how to do things and to annihilate your inner self. Everyone needs to learn the same stories, to repeat them in the same way, and don't go too far in challenging those stories because you'll have trouble.

And I may come back to that later, by the way, of the importance of that challenging the mainstream stories. But you see, the pyramidal collective intelligence world in which we still live today is still highly dominant, but hitting the limits, the hard limits everywhere, everywhere. Every time you have a pyramidal structure, you let a minority of people to deal with something so big that they can't embrace the complexity.

Jean-François Noubel (43:31.072)

No fucking way they can do that. By design. Even if you have, you know, well-trained people, good intention, not corrupted, not interested in big money and all those things.

Lucas Tauil

It's a matter of surface area, right?

Jean-François Noubel

Absolutely, very poor surface area. So they will always become the bottleneck for a system that needs to make decisions everywhere. If you don't recruit all the agents in the decision-making process, in the action-making process, if you don't give them augmented holopticism, which distributed systems will need to provide, then, you know, they can't work. They just hit the wall now.

Hence why we have an evolutionary need, not just a political philosophy here, but life needs to evolve this way. Our species needs to evolve this way, otherwise it can't make it. No more than all world tribal traditions could make it to face the complexity of the world that grew up in front of them, that they had created themselves.

And now they needed, you know, another technology and another paradigm. And you can't ask that dude in the tribal world who grew up in oral traditions to understand what the writing and centralization of power would do and create civilizations. No way that person could anticipate the shift of reality that would happen in the next hundreds of years because the person didn't even have the grammars.

Jean-François Noubel (45:07.31)

to talk about this reality. And today we face the very same limitation, like we've always evolved in the pyramidal world with the grammars of domination that you need in the pyramidal world. But now we need to make it a distributed world, but we don't have even the grammars for the everyday language and sharing their reality. So I feel myself exactly like the tribal man or woman starting to see, well, something bigger may emerge.

And the writing does that thing, but I can't really see because I don't have the grammars to talk about it, to represent, to have a social representation, to have story sharing about this. So now we face this exact same challenge, but we have to do it in a matter of years, maybe a couple of generations, no more. So what a challenge. We need distributed technology because now...

You can become yourself, I can become myself, everyone can become themselves as a unique agent, as a combination of so many unique things. You told me before in our previous conversations how much you love sailing and you've done journalism and so many other things and you've raised children in a specific way, you've created a school. All of us, have this kind of unique patchwork of so many things that we do. How do you want this to fit in the pyramidal structure?

And how do you want to build a society with so much unique profiles if you want to create that in a different way than pyramidal? We need to deal with complexity and we need to deal with emergence. That means we need to deal with living systems. And those technologies, those infrastructures, they just arrived. They just began. Now we can allow ourselves to think of new social organisms.

And that means the story-tellings will look very, very different. The same kind of difference between the narratives of a tribal person versus a civilization person. But also the grammars that we use, the grammars that we use for language, the grammars that we use for accounting. So you see language speaks about causal things like in chains of command. But now, what if we need now to become more aware socially of synchronicities?

Jean-François Noubel (47:32.098)

What if we need to become socially aware of emergence that we can't explain through causal language? How do we build those grammars in our everyday language? So those things will certainly emerge. But you see, we have some creativity ahead of us. And I don't think many people understand the magnitude of that evolution just happening. And so back to...

You see, holochain and the, and the disintermediation, as we see the greater story than just yet another technology, I see this, these new level of meta writing and meta storytelling, something that goes way beyond what we've already seen and that will transform us internally as well. Our psyche will completely transform in those new realities. Our languages will completely transform into these new realities.

Currencies also will transform. We cannot see currency as just tokens of debt that we exchange anymore. They'll become a language of flow, a language of currents, a language of non-linear thinking, of complex thinking, of complex realities, just about to happen.

Lucas Tauil

So, Jean-François, do I understand correctly that you see Holochain as a way to tell stories about the stories? It is a space to create agreements about agreements.

Jean-François Noubel

Exactly, a meta grammar that allows you to compose new grammars. What kind of agreements do you need to do carpooling? What kind of agreements do you need to deal with clean water? What kind of agreements do we need to build education at a local space, in local environment or a global one? What kind of language do we need for global things at the earth level which we need? We can't just

Jean-François Noubel (49:29.666)

go back to local communities. hear so many people say, hey, let's go back to local communities. Yes and no. I mean, yes, OK, local and global.

Lucas Tauil

So in this new story that contains stories, in this new rule set framework, what do you see Holochain doing? So it opens this possibility of telling many stories, of having many roles. What emerges from this?

Jean-François Noubel

Well, currencies, currencies themselves. So currencies as a new language of wealth and new language of flows. Money, as we know, creates a one dimensional language for trading movable wealth. So you can see currencies today as kind of living stories. They catalyze new stories. They seed new stories. They seed new ways to look at the world, some kind of

grammars for new stories to emerge. Holochain can do that. And hopefully other technologies, of course, we have to see just like the birth of writing, new technologies will arise here and there and hopefully will create an ecosystem so that distributed living systems can emerge.

Lucas Tauil

So there's a space of having visibility to flows and how they connect to the agreements of specific communities. There's another layer related to mutual currencies where the currencies can represent real things rather than a scarcity fiat currency. I'm particularly interested in representing

Lucas Tauil (51:22.22)

real wealth. So your capacity to write a film or a book and how can we generate within our communities credit on a way that is mutual but not sucked by intermediators. How we can create our wealth based on the very existence of the things we create.

Jean-François Noubel

Well, one of the important things here, let's not go into a one-fits- all system. Hence why Holochain doesn't mean one system, but a Lego that we give to people so they can compose their rules. Because what kind of tax system will they do? Do we take a 10 % for every transaction as a VAT? So the design of a tax system, how do we mutualize the wealth that we see?

So we just apply, we formalize in a new grammar things that already exist and that should reflect and put in dynamic motion our value system and the way we see the world. Hence why we can see currencies as dynamic stories. It has a story in it.

Lucas Tauil

JF, I'm hearing you're telling the story of Holochain and you've been telling the story of Holochain for at least six years, if not more. How did this story evolve?

Jean-François Noubel (52:59.298)

You know what? I don't think it has evolved that much. Maybe I have a more refined way to say it today, but 10 years ago, I would probably have told you something quite similar. The things that emerge, that evolve, goes more into deepening it than taking a different course. Maybe where I would add something, think artificial intelligence will play a huge role.

in this and we may not have enough awareness of that in the Holochain ecosystem and again because I see most people sometimes rejecting technology because they're confused with how we use the technology so I see lots of people and are scared about artificial intelligence or like many other things but I rather ask them whose hand holds the hammer? Whose hand holds the tool?

As a more powerful question than the technology itself. Imagine that, you know, what artificial intelligence, which to me looks more like collective intelligence, you know, what it can do to gather billions and billions of data in a distributed system and give you augmented holopticism. Like, what kind of angle and state of the system do you need to see?

From what you do as a doctor, as a parent, as a citizen, as a journalist, as an old person, maybe who will die soon, and whatever. You need different angles. You don't need the whole thing. You need an angle. So just like on the sports field, you see the game, have holopticism. You got trained by this. You got trained to read what happens on the sports field.

And maybe as a spectator, you don't play, but you so much love this dynamic relationship between the player and the whole. And you have this fascination of this. OK, so it gives us pleasure to experience holopticism because it gives you the range of possibilities because you get informed about the whole and not in a chain of command way, but because you have the sense of the whole. And artificial intelligence can do that.

Jean-François Noubel (55:20.948)

It can get all this data and gather it and also turn it into a storytelling for you. Not just analysis, but it can tell you today, well, you know, we need more care for the elderly because it knows you can do that. And because it knows you loves how to do this and it can give you some possibilities of things that you can do that you like in accordance to your profile in the system. And by the way, it knows a lot about your profile because you've created so much semiotic traces here and there that it can also build a sense of you and The sense of you doesn't mean something bad per se. I feel terrified if it goes in the hands of centralized powers, yes But if it gets anonymized if it goes if you have access to that information for yourself You decide who you share it with and what for I feel totally okay with this because we already do that

So where I would see myself evolve in the past years goes into the artificial intelligence, which to me seems more like some form of collective intelligence, which also embraces the biases, of course, and the intoxications that it can have as well. So we need to work on those questions. But I see the combination of Holochain and distributed systems technologies with artificial intelligence as the next leverage for a

Huge, huge evolution there.

Lucas Tauil

Jean-François, it's so inspiring to hear you speaking of Holopticism as this sensing of each other, you know? I feel like there's a tango playing and we're dancing and I think I got it. And this is our intention to create a space where we can see each other and where we can create together in flow, in joy, rather than in dread in this upward spiral. I love how you brought it and wrapped it on

Lucas Tauil (57:20.634)

a way where I feel super comfortable to speak about it. I couldn't articulate it in a way that I felt generative initially. And it feels like the perfect place for us to wrap it. I think we have a very well-constructed first step into this space. Very, very thankful for your time and your brilliance. The glint in your eyes is just huge inspiration.

Thank you very much.

Jean-François Noubel

Thank you so much.

Clara Chemin - Narrator(58:10.638)

Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.

Paul Krafel, author of Shifting, Nature's Way of Change, teaches about a dimension of possibilities for life, a space of positive and negative feedback loops. A naturalist, educator and charter school founder, Paul Krafel explains how this dimension of possibilities for life can help us navigate dread and avoid time lag traps. His decades of careful observation reveal deep natural patterns that can help us navigate the fog of present times.

The Interview was inspired by Krafel’s article Toward a Commons culture. 

Watch this episode on YouTube

Listen to this episode:

Apple Podcasts

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Themes:

Rain Walks & Upward Spirals: Paul’s practice of small landscape interventions to slow water runoff and regenerate land.

The Commons Culture: How natural systems, from soil formation to beaver dams, create shared abundance.

Thermodynamics & Life: Understanding how energy and flow shape ecosystems and human societies.

Decentralization & Resilience: Why smaller, self-organized systems often outperform large, centralized ones.

Hope as a Strategy: The psychological and systemic shifts needed to counter societal dread and build a future of shared possibility.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Opening & Welcome

• 00:33 — Sponsor & Host’s Backstory

• 01:49 — Introducing Paul Krafel & The Vision of the Commons

• 03:09 — The Raindrop Metaphor

• 05:00 — Rain Walks & Shifting Mindsets

• 11:06 — Life Lessons from Rain Walks

• 14:54 — Work as Joy & The Second Law of Thermodynamics

• 18:14 — Defining the Commons

• 21:10 — Feedback Spirals vs. Feedback Loops

• 24:37 — Four Strategies to Increase Life’s Possibilities — Part 1

• 33:24 — Four Strategies — Part 2

• 37:16 — Work, Play & Commons Culture

• 41:37 — Hope vs. Dread & Shifting Orientation

• 47:02 — Decentralization & Local Empowerment

• 51:09 — Time Lags in Systems Change

• 55:28 — Design Patterns for Managing the Commons

• 57:28 — Consequences Awareness & Education

• 59:05 — The Staten Island Ferry Metaphor & Enoughness

• 01:00:51 – Closing

Resources & References:

📖 Shifting: Nature’s Way of Change – Paul Krafel:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2876220-shifting

📜 Toward a Commons Culture – Paul Krafel’s essay on shifting systemic patterns:

https://roamingupward.net/toward-a-commons-culture/#Toward-a-Commons-culture

📚 Elinor Ostrom – Nobel Prize-winning economist on commons governance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

Transcript  

Paul Krafel (00:00.088)

For me, the commons is anything that did not exist before life appeared that has now an existence partly through the efforts of life and that helped make more possibilities for life.

Narrator - Clara Chemin

Welcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and conversations towards a world that works for everyone.

Lucas Tauil (00:33.602)

This episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that allows people to team up, share information and solve their own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality. I first came across the project in 2018.

during my journey into participative culture with Unsparil. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed me to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first decentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very grateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.

Lucas Tauil (01:49.4)

Today we welcome Paul Krafel, a naturalist, educator, and charter school founder. Krafel is the author of Shifting, Nature's Way of Change. His decades of careful observation reveal deep natural patterns that can help us navigate the fog of present times. Paul Krafel teaches about a dimension of possibilities for life, a space of positive and negative feedback loops that either increase or deplete life's potential. Acknowledging this dimension and being intentional about it can help us navigate complexity and foster a commons culture, a collective ethic that might turn the tide and heal the pervasive dread and lack of hope we experience in the face of systemic challenges. Welcome, Paul.

I'm honored to have you with us.

Paul Krafel

I'm looking forward to this. Thank you for inviting me.

Lucas Tauil

Such a treat to have you here. Paul, if you had to choose one image that best expresses your vision of a common sculpture, what would it be?

Paul Krafel (03:09.6)

It would be the moment that raindrops touch the ground. There's two paths open to that raindrop. One is to soak into the soil, later be pulled up through the roots and contribute to photosynthesis that would create more leaf surface area to absorb more of the sun's energy. And also some of that water would be transpired back into the sky.

fall again as rain or settle each night as dew, increasing the amount of water that's available for life. And when the plant eventually dies, it rots into the soil and enriches the soil and makes up a soil that can absorb more rain in the future. That's one path. And the other path is to let the water run off. And as it runs off, it converges with other rain drops and it gradually

assumes more erosive power to wash away soil and the opposite happens as the soil gets washed away it can absorb even less water and it just spirals down. Those two routes are open. One creates what I call an upward spiral, the other one creates what I call a downward spiral and

My hobby is to go out and try to shift downward spirals to upward spirals, get started with rain walks, going out and playing with the water. And it's generalized in attitude toward life, trying to see wherever I can, just making little nudges to help things accumulate possibilities.

Paul, I read your recent essay towards the commons culture and loved it. What drove you to write it?

Paul Krafel (05:00.778)

A couple of years ago, I was starting to feel a certain dread about where we were heading. And normally I'm very optimistic. And so this was definitely a change in direction that I was not quite sure what to do with because the things that filled me with dread were external to me and that I didn't have much control over. And then at a certain point, I remembered one of the lessons I learned from all my rain walks, which was

offer a new path to the water before trying to oppose the way it's currently flowing. And so I started thinking about that in terms of my culture. And I go, okay, and just changing, not knowing exactly what that meant, but just changing my thinking from opposing the current one to offer a new path. After a month or so, I realized my thoughts were changing.

and my spirit was recovering as I was contemplating that question about what is the new path that I would offer that led me to write the essay.

Lucas Tauil 

I'm experiencing something very similar since I first read your essay a couple of weeks back. It's been extremely inspiring. Like, it touched me very deeply and I'm very grateful for it. Hey! Paul, you described your rainwalks. Could you go deeper into them? How did they come up? What is the game, the play in them?

Paul Krafel

Well, let me just start off with my first strain walk. I used to work for the National Park Service and at one time I was stationed in this eroding sandstone Canyon in the Southwest. And I just loved that Canyon. It was so such a beautiful Canyon, except for a Arroyo that was gashed through that the bottom soil of it. It was a site of a cliff dwelling and geologically

Paul Krafel (07:06.766)

And archeologically, there was evidence that at a certain time, the canyon had no arroyo and was full of aspen trees. And then the people came in, built the cliff dwelling, and about 15 years later, an arroyo had cut down and they had to leave. And after they left, the arroyo filled in again. And then the 1930s, Navajo brought in sheep and the arroyo's back.

It gave me this image that the canyon can fill in with sand and create an area that can hold all the rain that pours into the canyon or it can erode away. And so it was just this model of a place that can rise into a very beautiful setting or just diminish down to this slow flow of water oozing out of the life system. And so I wanted to somehow see if I could change that.

And I tried a lot of things that I'd read about, like check dams and all like that, and none of them worked. And I built a couple of real tiny check dams, just with two by fours, and a little tiny gully coming in through the side. And a rainstorm came and it washed all the check dams away, but for once. And one was just situated on a place where

the water got split and flowed around the check dam in two directions. And at that split, the energy of the water just changed dramatically. Sand was just dropping out like crazy. And in fact, I had to keep shoveling the sand out, otherwise it'd plug up again. And it showed me, whoa, if I split the water, let's try that. So I started.

As the water that was going off to either side, I would use a little mattock to make a V in the ground and split the water and it would slow down more. And I ended up just making these little V's all the way across the terrace there. And I was able to do it. I was able to hold the water on and it was just so much fun. And then there was a series of three or four massive storms. Most of them, I got

Paul Krafel (09:32.492)

I got a lot of experience there in a few days. It was life changing. It definitely recharged my batteries. just being out of this canyon with lightning all around and big waterfalls pouring off the canyon walls and I'm out there with my little mattock. It was fun. was deeper than fun. mean, it was intense. And that got me hooked. And I've been doing rain walks ever since I go out.

And all my life since then, I've always had a place nearby where I can go out into a sort of public land or absentee landlord land and play with the rain. And that's nourished lots and lots of things.

Lucas Tauil

So, do I understand correctly that what you're doing is going upstream in diverting water there so that it can soak in, right?

Paul Krafel

Right, that they use the old permaculture mantra, spread it out, slow it down, soak it in. And I found that the key first step is spreading it out, not trying to slow it down, but spread it out. And spreading it out just naturally slows it down, and then that gives more time and more surface area for it to soak in.

Lucas Tauil

So what I'm hearing in your story is that across the years, your rain walks gradually enlightened you into different aspects of life. Could you expand on that?

Paul Krafel (11:06.21)

Yeah, it's been 40 years of Rainwalks. It led, for example, my wife, Alicia, and I, wanted to start a charter school and we ran into so much opposition. After two years, we're just kind of going, is this worth trying to keep working on? And one of the lessons from Rainwalks is don't underestimate your power because the work grows on itself. All these little splits you make in the water.

You come back a couple of weeks later and it's put water into a whole new area where you can do even more work. And so you never underestimate what is possible and start where you are and don't block your efforts with your current understanding. So we go, we're not going to let them stop us. We'll just start the school. starting the school meant Alicia teaching six kids around the dining room table for free, but

Gradually she picked up some more kids, had 11 kids, got TV coverage, and the school district could see the possibility and chartered chrysalis. So that's one example, but the more important example is just going back to what I said earlier, just looking for all these opportunities where you can help possibilities soak into the soil instead of running off. And part of that is

being open to accepting the power that comes to us to let it soak in and not let it run off in assumptions of what I can't do or what I need, what I'm supposed to do and all like that and just find one's own path.

I've been a water guy since I was four or five. when I thought about what I'm just going to do with my life, I never would have thought of water. But when I watch what I'm doing, it's water. So that's part of my manifest destiny, I guess.

Lucas Tauil (13:15.362)

Yeah, I love how your life is about the encounter of water with soil. My life is water in the ocean. I'm a long distance sailor in a surfer. And it is dynamic, just nourishes me on a way that is impossible to explain. I feel so nourished by your experience with water. It's just like, my God, this is like such a blessing.

Paul Krafel

And one of the implications of that is I cannot go to everybody and say, hey, go out and split water. That's not the path for everybody. It's in the end part of, know, when we start talking about, how do we save the world? A big part of that's going to be empowering each person, helping each person find their own path. And then what grows from each person enriching their own power will seep through the whole system and fills around.

I spend a lot of time at Chrysalis just nourishing the kids' energy.

Lucas Tauil

It's so lovely to hear you sharing this. It reminds me of one of my mentors, body worker called Monica Caspari. She taught me to savor the word rather than trying to save it. And it was in that cherishment that I could do the work. And I feel that your essay gives me a framing for this when the play is not an obligation. It's just...

what I do to be in my full space of joy.

Paul Krafel (14:54.136)

Yeah, sometimes on my rain walks, feel like I'm the shoemaker in the L's. These guys just come along at nighttime and when nobody's around in the pounding rain, I make my little shoes. I make my little plays and people later might come along and go, there's a lot of flowers growing here where there used to not be flowers, but that's just my little gift, my hobby, my fun, my sabre.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, this space where the work is our nature, it's an amazing insight to me.

Paul, in your observation of natural patterns, the second law of thermodynamics takes central stage. Could you remind us of what the second law of thermodynamics says?

Paul Krafel

Let me start with a simpler example. A lot of times, if the energy of a classroom is getting off a little, what I like to do is I break in some building blocks, like five or six of them, and I ask for a volunteer to build a tower with the blocks. And we time it, and it takes them about a minute to build the tower. Then I ask for another volunteer and ask them to knock it down. It takes about a half a second.

And I tell the kids, it's easier to destroy than it is to build up. It's a fundamental pattern of the universe and that it's not impossible to build up, but it takes longer and it takes work. And if we just kind of live our life mindlessly, kind of just whatever, you're going to kind of knock things down. But if we all as a group,

Paul Krafel (16:42.702)

work at trying to build up, we can build something really beautiful. so that's sort of a metaphor for the second law. That energy tends to flow in such a direction that the amount of usable energy within it diminishes. doesn't, energy doesn't get destroyed, but it just gets less usable.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, how does the second law of thermodynamics relate to the seeding of a commons culture?

For me, it is the direction by which you navigate your life. I've come to call it the fifth dimension when I'm out on my rain walks. think of, is the area spiraling up or spiraling down? That's a measure of the second law. Is it increasing possibilities? Is the energy of the sun able to come into this area and help lift it up? Or is it eroding away? That's the focus of everything.

It's, you know, in teaching, I watch the kids' eyes. Do the kids understand? there the mission of Chrysalis is encouraging the light within each student to shine brighter? And I really love that mission statement. It arose spontaneously 90 years after we started the school. just go, this is what we're navigating by. We're navigating, are the kids' light eyes shining?

and that is a better way to navigate them by test scores.

Lucas Tauil (18:14.766)

Paul, would you share your definition of the commons?

Yeah, for me the commons is anything that did not exist before life appeared that has now an existence partly through the efforts of life and that helped make more possibilities for life. A classic example is atmospheric oxygen. There is a time atmospheric oxygen

was not there and it started off with algae in the ocean gradually producing this oxygen that was able to decrease the amount of radiation hitting the earth. And as the earth changed from an anaerobic place to an aerobic place, oxygen is so reactive, it is such a high energy fuel that it just made possible all sorts of things that were never possible when oxygen did not exist as a free

molecule in the atmosphere. And now it's 21 % oxygen, it's created and maintained by photosynthesis of all the plants around.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, the fundamental pattern in the commons, as you point out, is of solar energy energizing dancing flows, energizing life to evolve ways to uplift the atoms into more complex forms that create new potentials. Bacteria help bring us into existence. What possibilities will we bring into existence?

Paul Krafel (19:50.264)

isn't that a juicy question? That is, I would imagine that question would be central in a commons culture. And there's two levels to it. There's a level of playing with the molecules, gardening, trying to increase the nutrition within the soil and keep going for biodiversity. That's sort of the physical work of it, but also creating a song that makes you're

the heart sing or something like that, or just doing a dance that uplifts. That is also part of the comments. It wasn't possible before life. It helps create more possibilities. mean, a lot of times I've been moved by a song or a performance that just makes me more hopeful and more determined to be more aware of what a tremendous miracle we live within.

and grateful for wanting to be a better part of it.

That's all to come.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, feedback loops are central to the path towards a commons culture. I notice you keep calling feedback loops as feedback spirals. Why is that?

Paul Krafel (21:10.654)

That's thanks to my eighth graders. I was trying to teach systems thinking to my eighth grade kids and I was trying to explain feedback loops to them because it's such an important part of any system and they couldn't get it and I Explained it two or three times until I finally had enough realization to go Okay, what is it? They're not understanding rather than be just trying to tell them

And so I was asking, what's... And they were saying, it's not a loop, it doesn't come back to the same place it started at. If you think of feedback as a succession of cause and effect that loops back on itself so that the cause creates effects that eventually become the cause that has the effect of changing the initial cause, that by the time that cause and effect sequence loops back,

you're in a different place. It's not a loop. And that's what was holding them up. And I go, you're right. It's a spiral. It's something that changes through time. It progresses. And so they taught me that it's feedback spirals. And I like it a lot better.

I agree. It makes more sense and it's more tangible, isn't it?

And then when you tie that in with what I was calling the fifth dimension of thermodynamics, there's feedback spirals that can spiral upwards. And that's the example I was talking about with the rain soaking in. It can go up or there's the other path where it spirals down. And so I have upward spirals and downward spirals.

Lucas Tauil (23:06.36)

So what you call the fifth dimension is this space populated by spirals, right? That can be either going up or going down. And there's an invitation there for us to navigate choosing generative spirals. How do we shift a downward spiral into an upward spiral?

Paul Krafel

Good question. One of the lessons I've learned from Rainwalks is to move away from the question of how do I shift it from a downward to an upward as

all the spirals I see as rates of flow. And if I can change the flow rates so that the balance between what's going down and what's going up changes, that's the level to look at. It's not the level of does it go up or down, but is it going down slower? Going down slower is.

positive change. It doesn't show positive in the way they think is an up or down, it's still down, but it's less down. And then when you get into the fact that these spirals are all interacting with one another, if you can create a change here, it starts to propagate out.

Lucas Tauil

So it's not about blocking this or that pattern, but creating experiments upstream to be observed.

Paul Krafel (24:37.282)

Yep. And then getting back to that whole idea of offer a new path before opposing the old, that the opposing the old is definitely a, I'm going to have to, whereas offering a new path, there's this tremendous possibilities all around us. And some of them, all they do is nourish your own spirit, but that's important for the work that's going to change the world. need this.

be able to see the opportunity within all the flows and to see that we can dance with it and we can help it change.

The flow in our spirit is fundamental, The difference in efficiency and creativity I have when I feel in flow, it's just, there's no reason to work out the flow. It's like, how do we maximize for flow, right?

Mm-hmm. And that's why I was saying that navigating our school by encouraging the eyes to shine on our students is more powerful than focusing on test scores. Because just more learning is happening. It's happening at a deeper level. And it might not translate into a test score right away, but eventually they're going to come to expect things to.

to make sense and to be able to understand them. If they don't understand them, they're gonna be pushing for, okay, where is the sense in this? And exploring the edge and tying things together. just, it leads to a much more living knowledge. One that you can navigate a life by rather than just having this thing filed away and needs to be known for a test.

Lucas Tauil (26:29.966)

Education is one of my passions as well. My wife and I were part of a small group that created a community school in Brazil 18 years ago. And the school today has 150 students and it's something that the community took on and is living and thriving with us being on the other side of the world. And it's like one of the most important things I did in my life. And it took..four years, it's not something huge, right? And if I compare my experience as a journalist, I've been a journalist for 30 years and I haven't written anything as meaningful as doing that school for those four years. So, yeah.

Paul Krafel

Part of it too is you don't know how far that effect's gonna go, you know? Those kids will probably raise their kids differently because of what you did. And they will all go out into the world and touch it in different ways.

Lucas Taul

So in your essay, you point to four strategies nature and life use to increase possibilities within the constraints of the second law. Shall we explore them? So why don't we start with the one we already spoke of, slowing down and backing up?

Okay.

Paul Krafel (27:56.802)

With the second law, it's impossible for things to flow up unless there's another source of energy. But backing up is allowed. I play with that a lot on the rain walks. Backing up moves the water higher without any violation of the second law, because it's just flowing down. It hits a place where it stops the stores to accumulate, and it has to back up. And it can back up into a place that it could normally not reach if I

move a few rocks around. So backing up is a really honorable strategy, central to a whole lot of feedback spirals.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, in the case of beaver, as it creates the little dams on streams, it increases the perimeter of the little ponds they create, right? So this increases the number of plants they like growing up, and it creates space for insects and amphibians, and this brings in predators, so the whole ecosystem grows around this.

but it also makes life more palatable for beavers. So, more beavers in this upward spiral. Is this an appropriate description of the slowing down and backing up strategy that beavers are doing?

Paul Krafel

Yes. And the fact that the slowing down and backing up feeds into something that's different, but there's all the sunlight coming in, then can do things that it couldn't have done otherwise. So it sets the stage, the backing up sets the stage for that. And another related example is just soil. Soil is part of the commons because it did not exist before life came along. There was broken rocks slowly creeping down slope.

Paul Krafel (29:47.698)

Soil as to get bacteria and algae starting to create surface films on the particles that join it together into a more cohesive mass that does not move as quickly, does not dry out as fast and other life can start colonizing that. The roots help hold everything together, binding it in, attracting insects and birds to it, know, get droppings and dead bodies all mixing in and this is backing up but then attracting more to it.

The commons is all around us, all around us.

Lucas Tauil (30:24.878)

Paul, as you were describing soil, it made me think of the second strategy that is increasing surface area. So the strategies usually aren't siloed, right? They are intermingled, they happen together. Could we go into the increase of surface area as a strategy to increase the possibilities for life?

Paul Krafel

That sort of comes from two places. One is a whole lot of processes in physics are proportional to surface area. And so when you change the amount of surface area that's there, flow rates and all can change. Like for example, just the flow of heat from a warm body, the more surface area you have, the cooler you're going to be. So that's where we put on jackets and insulation to prevent that. Like leaf surface area, the more leaves you have, the more sunlight can be absorbed. Like our teeth, the whole job of teeth is to increase the surface area of the food we stick in our mouth, chew it up. And so there's a huge surface area for all the enzymes to start working on that food. The whole idea of succession, you you have like after a glacier comes out, you start with lichen and gradually you get a, you get forests there. That's a creation of surfaces that then allow urges to find nesting places and insects to get behind bark and a whole duff layer that you can have all these decomposing invertebrates down and working on the surface areas, almost like a way of measuring how much life you've got. But then you come along and you pave it over for a parking lot. That's a fundamental change to that place.

Lucas Tauil

I remember reading your description that surface area transcends competition, because if we have only one surface, that's all there is. So all life there is competing for the resources. But the moment you start increasing surface, there's potential for diversity, for specialization, for doing things differently and not having to compete for that same surface, for that same availability of resources. And I find it inspiring.

Paul Krafel (32:37.48)

when that hit me I was going, whoa, I never thought about that because when I was learning about plant succession it was presented as competition for sunlight. You have the low plants and then taller plants come and shade them out and gradually you get a forest. But at a certain point I go, no, it's not so much a competition for sunlight as a cooperative creation of surface area because surface area baffles the wind.

It's one these abstract concepts that when you change it into the reality around one, one starts understanding how profound the commons has changed the world we live within and how indebted we are to all the lives that have preceded us.

Lucas Tauil (33:24.942)

So on on the strategies shall we move into caring and pushing up?

Paul Krafel

That has to be salmon. mean, salmon are such a perfect example of... The second law would say that nutrients cannot flow from the ocean up into the headwaters, the energy of the sun and the... have been fed upon all the smaller fish in the ocean, these big 30, 40 pound salmon, use their energy to swim upstream, bringing...that 30 or 40 pound body full of nitrogen and fertility from the sea spawning and then they die and they start floating downstream and everybody's feeding on them, ravens and seagulls and bears. It's all being defecated out in the woodlands and it's just this massive annual flow of fertilizer into the headwaters.

And then you get into these feedback spirals where that fertilizer helps the plants grow taller, creating more shade over the stream, which helps more surface area over the stream, which cools the stream, which allows more oxygen to dissolve into water because colder water can hold more dissolved oxygen. And so that when the salmon eggs hatch, they're hatching into a well oxygenated environment for them to

be able to grow well and then use the current to ride back to the sea. And earthworms are doing the same thing after they're burrowing through, wedging the soil upward, just kind of keeping it aerated. We had an atmospheric river come upon us. had seven inches of rain in about three days. And that rain just kind of pushes all the autumnal fallen leaves down.

Paul Krafel (35:25.286)

And then the next first day of good weather, I go out and there's all these birds out there just scratching in the leaves and just kind of fluffing it back up again. They're looking for little critters to eat, but they're doing the work of, well, for food type attitude. just out there just scratching away, fluffing it all back up again. it's such a marvel.

Such a delight.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah. And the last strategy is recycling, right? What would you like to use as an example?

Paul Krafel

Rain, the water cycle. That was another profound moment for me when I was back in the canyons trying to figure out what to do. Somehow I went into the books and I found that on average 11 inches of rain comes from the ocean. On average 27 inches of rain falls on the land.

At other 16 inches is the water from the ocean being recycled over and over again. That rain that soaks into the ground, it gets pulled up by the plants and somehow it gets transpired back into the air. And that moisture is going to fall again and again, settles as dew, falls as snow. And so a world that gets enough water from the ocean to barely grow desert grasslands.

Paul Krafel (36:58.52)

thanks to this spiral with life can sustain for us now. And again, it's seeing the world in terms of flow, seeing these molecules streaming and just playing with the swirling dance.

Lucas Tauil (37:16.504)

Well, the creation of the commons requires work, as you're saying. This is a fundamental implication of the second law, as it limits the direction in which things can flow spontaneously. But it does not require that absolutely everything is always moving down. Things can move up if energy from elsewhere can be used to do the work of lifting it. Work is the key thing, right? Salmon, do it, beavers do it, even plants do it. Let's do it!

Seriously, how can we do it faster than the erosion of the commons we witness?

Paul Krafel

Well, one way is to reduce the erosion so you don't have to work as fast.

Lucas Tauil

So playing with the rates.

Paul Krafel

Playing with rates, shifting rates, just being aware of, okay, is this rate something that's building up? Let's increase it. Is this something that's going down? Let's see if we can give it a new path that offers more possibilities. And the work, in terms of like a commons culture, we tend to have this image of work as a job or an eight to five, but.

Paul Krafel (38:33.73)

What we're talking about work is like plants and all. It's a 24-7 thing that's always there, always available. so expanding our sense of work to the act of being alive, I think, is an important part of the answer to your question.

And I imagine that a lifestyle or an awareness where being alive is slowing down rates of erosion in backing up or increasing surface area or recycling, like water coming to the headwaters or someone bringing its gift of life into the top of the hills. How do we break free of the concept of work as dreadful? As something you do to earn a living and remove duty and bring play back into the fold?

Paul Krafel (39:40.244)

I don't know if I have an answer to that, but it's definitely an important step in moving toward a more common culture. My wife who's a teacher says the most important work that kids do is play. When we take kids out on a camping trip and they're free to be in the forest, they start building stuff. It's just part of being alive. And the thing to do is to nourish the sense of direction.

so that that is part of your framework for choosing how you're going to spend your energy.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, your essay points out that many of the seemingly intractable problems we face are due to system patterns that generate consequences in roundabout feedback ways that we don't recognize or understand. What behaviors are holding us on this path?

Paul Krafel

One of the biggest patterns that are holding us on this path is that in the last several thousand years, there's a human created direction by which we often navigate our lives, which is, to put it simplistically, the direction is to have more wealth than others, that you're trying to accumulate more possibilities than those around you.

as opposed to as a group trying to create more possibilities within this entire system. And that focus on the self in comparison to others, I think, is a big impediment. historically, we're full of examples of people plundering the commons in order to get more wealth for themselves and to be able to

Paul Krafel (41:37.888)

change that orientation to realizing that if one works to nourish the entire commons, there'd be more possibilities for all of us. Part of that gets back to the dread I was feeling. A lot of people have reported feeling dread and how much better life would be if you felt hope. And the fact that a sense of dread was growing is feedback.

for what the long-term consequences of our current path is. And so in terms of offering a new path, hope, where does hope come from? And hope comes from living within a world where more is becoming possible. So the implication of that I realize is that the dread comes from feeling like you're living in a world where less is becoming possible. That the life of your kids will have as many possibilities as your life and that

It's a glum road up ahead. And to be able to see it as hope, if we can navigate that road, I mean, you just imagine, wow, if we're around for 100,000 years, then we get our act together. It's really a neat experience. so, anyway.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, I love how you picture it in an upward spiral. What I notice is that the dread can easily catch you in a downward spiral where you don't feel you're building “Ours”, that you're focused on getting mine, you know, on concentrating. And then you don't feel belonging, you're lonely, the dread increases. It's like...

the runoff cutting through the gully and cutting through the very water reservoir, right? It can really kill hope. And this shifting to when you're growing “Ours”, when you're building the commons, there's a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than you and bigger than our species. It's not just us, it's this whole commons, this whole wonderful planet.

Paul Krafel (43:49.614)

There's a feeling of enoughness, that life needs efficient. And that's the scary thing about the other path is that if things start running down around you, the solution that seems to be the obvious one is I need to get more stuff for me. I need to save myself. And so I will take wherever I can find the opportunity to be a survivor. I'll stop there.

that where does money originate from? What does it become? Where is it going to? And I turn back to that whole idea of the water cycles, rain being recycled and expanding the amount of rain on the earth from 11 inches on average to 27 inches on average. That wisdom is to recycle the money as it flows. It's not

robbing Peter to pay Paul. It's taking money, spreading it. That the convergence is the problem. When you get money too concentrated, you lose touch with what the dollar can actually create.

I was reading an op-ed by Nicholas Christoph in the Times about these nonprofits and the third world transforming people's lives with operations that cost a couple hundred dollars. Then you look at the Met Gala Ball with vessels that are tens of thousands of dollars and it's just best if they figure out a way to recycle back up to the headwater that still flows down, but there will still be wealthy people.

They will be living in a world that has more wealth within it all around, more hope all around.

Lucas Tauil (45:36.494)

Paul, you've dedicated your life to education. Can we tip the scales, preparing the next generation with enhanced awareness?

Paul Krafel

Well, I think tip the scales is the wrong image because it implies that either or, you tipped it or you didn't tip it. And when you're concentrating on flows, it's a gradient. It's that decreasing the rate of decrease is just as valuable as changing something from down to up. It all is moving in this direction upward. And so tipping the scales

I don't want to use that idea, but the very concept of education is definitely part of the commons. Life creates opportunities to help the next generation learn how to live better. The earthworms churning up the soil is helping their kids live a better life. So education's all around us. I'll keep doing the work and it's my working assumption, but it's the...

To give you specifics on how we're going to do that, I'm a little more humble.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, what role does decentralization play in shifting down spirals into upward spirals?

Paul Krafel (47:02.538)

And again, I come back to the water cycle. Founts come over the land and the water starts to converge into raindrops and then into little trickles and into creeks and into rivers. Life has learned to recycle it and to take it back up. And it's, I love the image of water being absorbed and turned into molecules of water vapor again. But it's the rate at how much of the water that's converging gets recycled back to fall again. That's what you want to increase. And that idea of decentralization, you sent me an article that led me to a political scientist named Ostrom. And he was studying small police departments. And she found that the smaller police departments, had less budget, they had less staff. But in terms of their effectiveness, they were rated much higher by the people in the community, despite the less money. And she was associating that with the fact that the police and the people are co-creating a resource that the people feel more a part of that police department, more likely to call them if in need. Buying of the smaller community allows the police to be much more effective. That's an example of decentralization.

Instead of trying to centralize it all into one entity, you wanted to fuse it. And creating Chrysalis, we wanted to have a school where the teachers felt that they had the freedom and the power to respond to whatever's happening in that classroom. That second with those particular kids and not having to be constrained by some legislator who has some idea that 30 minutes a day, you're going to need to do this, that, that.

At Chrysalis one time, migration of hundreds of sand-tailed cranes came flying over this school, which is, sand-tailed cranes are like the most wild primal call in the world. We all ran out and listened to the sand-tailed cranes flying overhead. That is decentralization.

Lucas Tauil (49:19.118)

There's no lesson that can give you that experience, right? Like nothing is that special.

Paul Krafel

And it's also a question of what's in a lesson? It's not social studies, it's not English, it's not math, it's not science. What it is is a taste of what life is really like here. There are birds that fly overhead that you never knew about. They're making this raucous primal call and then if you learn about them they fly way up into the Arctic and nest out there. Sand dune cranes are fantastic.

Lucas Tauil

I had an experience similar to that with my children in the Galapagos Islands. There was this huge bunch of blue-footed boobies attacking a school of fish and it looked like a war scene, you know? But the most inspiring thing, like they jumping into the water and fish jumping everywhere.

and around the school of fish there were dolphins and sea wolves. It was like that encounter with aliveness that it's so rare our urban experiences, right? It was like, gosh, I'll never forget that scene.

Paul Krafel

This is at the heart of the mechanism of what I consider a downward spiral in our culture is all that has receded so far away that most people are not aware of that vitality that is within the commons. it becomes that our life becomes more and more dominated by the things of our own culture. So we lose this sense that the world can provide direction and learning and inspiration.

Lucas Tauil (51:09.998)

Paul, taking a tack here, in your essay you argue that long time lags and slow oscillating feedback spirals create one of the greatest challenges our evolved intelligence faces. What are time lags?

Paul Krafel

Timelags are when you get into feedback spirals, they're this succession of cause and effect, going around, spiraling around, and that a lot of times, certain actions create a short-term reward, which can lead you to seek that more and more. The bad stuff doesn't happen for 20 or 30 years.

And that gap between your immediate sensation and the eventual results are very hard to navigate. All you're feeling is the good stuff. And an example is the building up of military empires that you start off and you go, this is great. We just loot the place, we just conquered and we take all the people and make them slaves, so that we don't have to work anymore. This is a fantastic win. You can use the bringing up of labor since you got all the slaves to do it. You can produce more food and you can produce a bigger population so you have more soldiers and you can go out and conquer the next place. And wow, another bonus comes in. And history is full of these empires that for a hundred years expand, but then they overextend and they've gotten everybody around them kind of.

These guys are dangerous. Your enemies start making alliances. Plus a lot of the ruling classes turn decadent and corrupt from all the wealth that's flowing to them. And eventually the thing falls apart. An example I like to think about sometimes. 1941 must have been a great year to be a Nazi in Germany. Because man, see, we really are the master race.

Paul Krafel (53:26.158)

in France in a few weeks. We are the master race, living around the world's ours. This is just fantastic. Compare that with what happened three years later. And it's just, that's a very short time lag, but most of the really hard time lags are the ones that are happened over hundreds of years.

One of the main time lags is soil erosion. Agriculture strips the forest and if you don't tend the soil, the soil gradually diminishes and the place that was once a land of milk and honey becomes a land of thorns. An example right around me here is groundwater. You pump the water out of the aquifers and you can irrigate the trees. It's a great cash crop and the area is economically prosperous thanks to that.

But you keep, so you use some of the profits to drill more wells and get more water to plant more nut trees. But there comes a time when the aquifer starts to diminish, groundwater starts dropping. The first people to suffer from that are all the households that have shallow wells and don't have the money to dig deep wells. And the orchardists, they have the profit from the nut trees so they can keep digging wells, but the keeps dropping and gradually the area is going to go bust.

or learn how to manage it. But again, that's a question of, you put your own benefit above the benefit to the greater whole or not? That's a great riddle there.

Lucas Tauil

Yeah, you mentioned the tragedy of the commons. I'm a big fan of Eleanor Ostrom that you just mentioned. And she was engrossed by Harding's reading of the tragedy of the commons because it wasn't based in any observation or data. It was just an opinion that this is how it happens. So she dedicated all of her life to studying the management of the commons in

Lucas Tauil (55:28.588)

And at first there was no visible pattern. And it was when she retreated into silence that she realized the design patterns that work. Eight simple design patterns that she goes like, this is how the commons are properly managed and how this becomes viable. And Eleanor was granted the Nobel of economics, not being an economist.

She was actually the only female to ever be granted the Nobel of Economics.

Paul Krafel

Well, you just introduced her to me, so I'm just starting to learn about her. I mean, there are tragedies of the commons, like passenger pigeons and fisheries that have been overfished, but like you say, she was studying systems where somehow the people involved were able to come up, negotiate, strategize, and come up with a way to manage the commons.

Which reminds me of one little story that's kind of an aside, but I remember reading about some kid who grew up in the rice terraces areas of the world, where you have your terraces up on the hillsides growing rice, and he and his little friend, they discovered that if you dig a little trench in the wall between one terrace and the next, would flow out and you could play in the water and all like that. And they're doing that.

And this man comes running out. He says, no, you don't do that. These walls have been developed over hundreds of years, and they're just the right height. And if you dig that down, you're going to lower the water level in that patty, and that patty will produce less rice. And somebody in the village might die this winter because of that. You do not touch these walls.

Lucas Tauil (57:28.056)

an impressive awareness of consequences, right?

Paul Krafel

and an impressive awareness of regulating the commons to educating, tipping the balance for educating kids. Even if you got that lesson, somebody might die, be your grandmother because you just, whoa, just, let's get serious here.

Lucas Tauil

Paul, the money game focuses on convergence rather than slowing down and soaking in. It creates a direction by which most of us guide our life's work towards obtaining more wealth than others. Most of the official power within our culture is given to those who earn more. This makes it important to signal your position on this gradient of wealth.

the clothes you wear, the car you drive, and where you live. It looks like a long time lag trap, doesn't it? Could you share how observing the Staten Island ferry docking gave you insight into time lags, like this one?

Paul Krafel

Yeah, so I was in college, I went to New York City and I fell in love with the Staten Island ferry. It was almost a free ride back and forth, past the Statue of Liberty and out onto the water. And one of the things I loved every time is when we came in to dock at the terminal, the engines turn off and you're coasting, then at a certain point they turn the other engines in the other direction on and there's just this big surge of water from the

Paul Krafel (59:05.634)

propellers for the terminal dock and they had it down so well. I the boat slows down in order to get to the dock. You can't stop, you can't go in reverse, but if you can slow down the forward momentum so it stops, just barely hit the dock. It's just masterful and I just loved watching that over and over again how perfectly they timed.

The lesson I got from that is in order to reach your goal, you have to turn away from your goal at a certain point. of the troubles with wanting more wealth than others is it's not a goal, it's just a direction. And so there's no practice in turning away from that goal. I read about a survey where they were surveying wealthy people and asking how much money do you need? And about everybody they talked to said about

twice as much as I have now. So if you're a millionaire, you needed two million, and if you were a hundred millionaire, you needed 200 million. So I mean, there's no end. just, somehow, if I had twice as much money as I had now, it'd be enough. That's I get there and then need it again. So that idea of what's enough, and we were talking about the sufficiency, the enoughness of the work of.

nourishing the commons and being alive on this planet. Did I answer the question? 

It might be better to stop today and continue this because the forces are conspiring against me.

Lucas Tauil

You did.

Lucas Tauil (01:00:51.182)

It's totally fine, Paul. Thank you very much. It was really, really nice to get this started. I'm looking forward to the second one. Have a good night. Thank you so much.

Paul Krafel

Thank you. This has been wonderful. I appreciate it. All right, both. You're welcome. Cheers. Bye bye.

Narrator - Clara Chemin (01:01:16.942)

Thanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more conversations on mutuality. Towards a world that works for all.

Welcome to Entangled Futures, where we explore emergent mutuality. In our first three episodes we will weave conversations with the Naturalist, Paul Krafel, the collective intelligence researcher, Jean-François Noubel and the founder of the Freelancer’s Union, Sarah Horowitz. They will help us set the foundations for the Entangled Futures journey into emergent mutuality.

This show is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating technology that helps people team up, share information, and solve their own problems together—without needing a middle-man. Creating carriers that cannot be captured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and mutuality.

On the first episode Paul Krafel will walk us through a dimension of possibilities for life, a space of positive and negative feedback loops that can help us navigate dread and avoid time lag traps.

Jean-François Noubel, the guest of our second episode, will speak of his research on the power of having a vision of the whole in small teams and help us imagine this power augmented through tech so that we can better organise and reinvent collective Intelligence at scale beyond hierarchical structures. Imagine whole orchestra’s playing like a jazz band 

On the third episode, Sara Horowitz will share how Mutualism cedes decision-making authority to the communities it serves by giving them economic power. Sara Horowitz’s book reminds us that mutualism is an old idea: "We can look to one another to solve the most intractable problems we encounter in our lives. The instinct to help our neighbours in times of crisis is so natural to us that when we are given the tools to do so we know exactly what to do".

Welcome aboard! It’s great to have you along for the journey.

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