![](\"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/media/rich-editor/channels/vPv5VdjRnPt/image-87263a0560932a6dbbd05b4e3d4f1246.jpg\")
A podcast exploring MutualityA podcast exploring MutualityConversations towards a world that work for everyone
Entangled Futures is a podcast exploring the world of mutuality, produced by Lucas Tauil.
Engaging in conversation with the people shaping collective spaces, we aim to identify adjacent possibilities— new opportunities for collaboration and innovation—that nourish a planet where everyone can thrive.
This work is the result of the excellence and dedication of an amazing team: Ira Nezhynska led the design, Kika created the music, Clara Chemin was the narrator, Paul d'Aoust developed the website, Mamading Ceesay handled the infrastructure, Matthew Nichols took care of integration and Jonathan Patecki edited the animations.
Come together! Help us bring the next season to life. You can support the show with a credit card on our Patreon page, (https://patreon.com/EntangledFutures) or with crypto using the Ethereum wallet, ENS: entangledfutures.eth.
0x24055dB18b971f24C3BFAB623A24Ee6c2b04F921
The 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.
Lucas Tauil is a trained, and seasoned communicator focused on participative culture and collaboration. Connected to the world of sustainability and decentralised technology he has worked as a Journalist for two decades in mainstream media.
Working with the power of difference and collective intelligence on multiple stakeholders organisations since 2001, Lucas is part of Enspiral, a collective of people working on stuff that matters.
Together with his partner Sandra Chemin and eight other families, Lucas co-founded Quintal Magico, a communitarian Steiner school in Paraty, Brazil. The couple sailed for six years with their two daughters from England to New Zealand.
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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.
Listen to this episode:
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.
","content_text":"Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union and author of 'Mutualism:\nBuilding the New Economy from the Ground Up', shares her journey into mutualism.\n\nHorowitz is a former chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York\nand a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been covered by NPR,\nThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among other\noutlets. She describes herself as a lifelong mutualist and lives in Brooklyn,\nNew York.\n\nHorowitz emphasizes the need for reciprocal obligations and community building,\nsharing insights from her family history and the experiences in creating the\nFreelancers Union Insurance Company. The conversation explores how we can learn\nfrom the past to build effective organizations and outlines a vision for a\nmutualist ecosystem. \n\n\n\n\nWatch this episode on YouTube\n\n\n\n\nListen to this episode:\n\n\n\n\nApple Podcasts\n\nSpotify\n\nPocket Casts\n\nRSS Feed \n\n\n\n\nThemes:\n\n\n\n\nMutualism as a framework – Understanding its three principles and how they\ndiffer from socialism or capitalism.\n\n\n\n\nSafety nets and reciprocity – Why peer-to-peer systems of care provide\nresilience in uncertain times.\n\n\n\n\nHistorical lessons – From unions, Mondragon, and religious organizations to\nmodern co-ops and movements.\n\n\n\n\nPatient capital – Models for financing ecosystems without extractive pressures.\n\n\n\n\nThe role of government – Creating sandboxes, infrastructure, and scaling\nmutualist innovations.\n\n\n\n\nSelf-determination and community – Finding your group, nurturing trust, and\nbuilding resilience together.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTImestamps:\n\n\n\n\nOpening & Context\n\n00:00 — Sara on neighbors, connection, and joy in supporting others\n\n00:41 — Lucas introduces the Holochain Foundation sponsor\n\n01:58 — Introducing Sara Horowitz, Freelancers Union founder & author of\nMutualism\n\nSara’s Journey into Mutualism\n\n03:25 — Family roots in unions and cooperatives\n\n05:19 — Rethinking safety nets: beyond government and charity\n\n07:23 — What we’ve lost in the social fabric of business and community\n\nPrinciples & Practices of Mutualism\n\n09:22 — Defining mutualism: solidarity, economic mechanism, generational time\nhorizon\n\n11:38 — Political homelessness & decentralized strategies\n\n13:34 — Reciprocal obligations: indivisible reserves, Green Bay Packers, and\ncooperative models\n\nBuilding Safety Nets Today\n\n15:48 — Learning from past cooperative institutions\n\n17:48 — Babysitting co-ops and neighborhood organizing\n\n19:44 — From transactional to relational economies\n\n21:27 — The founding of Freelancers Union & portable benefits\n\nVision of Mutualist Ecosystems\n\n24:20 — Building networks and small beginnings\n\n26:16 — Practical examples: Molly Hempstreet & industrial cooperatives\n\n28:15 — Pillars of a mutualist ecosystem: organizations, government, training,\ncapital\n\n30:18 — Patient capital: seedling stage, fellowships, program-related\ninvestments\n\nRole of Government & Institutions\n\n35:03 — Sandboxes, safe spaces, and infrastructure\n\n36:54 — Religious organizations and mutualist hard-coding\n\n39:20 — Disaster recovery & the risks of outsourcing mutual aid\n\nScaling Mutualism\n\n41:32 — Scale as mycelial networks and feedback loops\n\n43:48 — Trust as the foundation of markets and democracy\n\nChallenges & Future Directions\n\n45:53 — Where to start: local communities, co-ops, book groups\n\n47:52 — Distinguishing mutualism from socialism and communism\n\n49:38 — Wealth concentration & collective survival\n\n51:26 — Unusual alliances: bridging divides through shared needs\n\n53:34 — Self-determination, faith, and forgiveness in hard times\n\nClosing\n\n54:59 — Beginners in mutualism: the courage to start\n\n55:46 — Farewell & invitation to join the Mutualist Society\n\n\n\n\nResources & References:\n\n📖 Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up – Sara Horowitz \n\n📜 The Rochdale Principles – Early cooperative movement guidelines \n\n📚 Mondragon Cooperative Model – Basque Country, Spain\n\n📚 United Mine Workers of America – Historical labor organizing\n\n\n\n\n📖 The 10 Laws of Trust: Building the Bonds That Make a Business Great\n\n📖 The End of History and the Last Man – Francis Fukuyama\n\n📚 Ashoka & Echoing Green – Fellowship programs for social entrepreneurs\n\n\n\n\nTranscript\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (00:00.088)\n\nYou better really be connected to your neighbors. You really have to start to\nknow the people around you and be connected to them in a peer-to-peer way\nbecause you don't know when you're going to need help. And it turns out\nsupporting other people is probably one of the best things you can do to give\nyour life joy.\n\n\n\n\nNarrator - Clara Chemin\n\nWelcome to Entangled Futures with Lucas Tauil, where we explore mutuality and\nconversations towards a world that works for everyone.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (00:41.4)\n\nThis episode is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is\ncreating technology that allows people to team up, share information, and solve\ntheir own problems without needing a middleman. Creating carriers that cannot be\ncaptured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and\nmutuality. I first came across the project in 2018, during my journey into\nparticipative culture with Enspiral. My good friend, Hailey Cooperider, pointed\nme to the green paper and I was blown away by the vision of a local first\ndecentralized internet. I worked for five years on the project and feel very\ngrateful for the support with the show. Enjoy it.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (01:58.744)\n\nToday we welcome Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancer’s Union and author of\nthe book Mutualism, Building the New Economy from the Ground Up. A breeze of\nfresh air in a time of suffocating narratives and wealth concentration policies.\nSara Horowitz's book and practice give new life to powerful ideas on collective\naction, self-determination, economic systems, and labor. Sara's new initiative\nis the mutualist society, a space for peer-to-peer cross-pollination on ideas on\nmutual aid, mutualism, and building from the ground up. I'm so stoked to have\nyou here, Sara. Thanks for joining.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nThank you so much. Really happy to be here. Thank you.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, could you share your journey into mutualism for us to get started?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nI'd love to. I really love hearing when people talk about their families or\ntheir backgrounds and it's usually the feeling of being really human. So I would\nsay the thing that really has surprised me about my mutualist journey is that it\nreally did start with my grandparents' generation. And my grandfather was a vice\npresident of a union called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. And\nthat union really was this\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (03:25.368)\n\ncompletely entrepreneurial endeavor. So mostly women workers paid their union\ndues. The union were active, incredible entrepreneurial capitalists except for\nthe working class and they built housing and insurance and all sorts of things\nthat workers needed that still exist today. I was raised to go to my grandma's\nhouse which was a union cooperative and\n\n\n\n\nI didn't think anything was special about it. It's just where we went for family\nget-togethers. And then my father was a union-side labor lawyer. And then I\nbecame a union organizer. And I'd say as I started to really build and think\nabout it, I never forgot the 1920s trade union movement and what they did and\nhow they had this vision of starting with one thing that workers needed.\n\n\n\n\nand just kept building and building and it was a viable economic strategy. And\nI'd say that was probably my real base frame that really has guided my life but\nI don't think I really thought about it until I started really building up the\nFreelancers Union.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, on your book, workers looking after themselves and building a safety net,\nhas central stage. How important is a safety net? Why is it so crucial?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYou know, there's really not just one safety net. I think we now think about a\ngovernment-provided safety net, and that feels like a safety net. But actually,\nwhat we really have to start realizing is that we build many safety nets, and\nthat we have to see that it's not all either government or charity or a market\nthat we buy, like an insurance.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (05:19.214)\n\npolicy, especially when we look at what's happening with climate change, you\nbetter really be connected to your neighbors. You really have to start to know\nthe people around you and be connected to them in a peer-to-peer way because you\ndon't know when you're going to need help. And it turns out supporting other\npeople is probably one of the best things you can do to give your life joy. And\nso, really we need to reconceptualize this framework. And I would say that is\nprobably the thing I realized from the Freelancers Union starting to build the\nMutualist Society is let's just get started with this peer-to-peer and let's\njust move fast to realizing that is going to be where we have to be right now.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, on your book, you mention a plaque in the Rochdale Pioneer Museum in\nEngland, the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement that puts it so\nnicely that the cooperative ideal is as old as human society. It is the idea of\nconflict and competition as a principle of economic progress that is new. This\nreally struck me reading the book in realizing how nourishing and regenerative\nit is to be in mutuality. And it seems we lost that, we forgot that on the\nsocial fabric.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYes. You know, if I were describing how much we've lost that in our\nconceptualization, the way we think of business is the cherry on the icing on\nthe cake. That we're just going to engage in these transactions and we're going\nto do really fast things, really easily. We're going to do one thing, it's going\nto be homogenous. We're going to take it to scale. Everything will have big box\nstore uniformity.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (07:23.414)\n\nand boy won't we get rich and have all the consumer items we could possibly\nneed. UNI would probably not even find that conceptualization to be attractive\non its face. But the truth is that that kind of economic activity doesn't happen\nunless human beings have a lot of trust in one another to be creating all sorts\nof exchanges. And because we haven't been doing that, we see that we're moving\ntoward this kind of growth that isn't actually helping people. It's not the kind\nof growth that makes people healthier, freer, richer. We're seeing\nconcentrations of capital. And that's why I think we actually really have to say\nthere's a way to build markets that are coherent, that actually sustain\ncommunities that aren't about rapacious capitalism, but we have to think about\nit mutualistically. It's neither the government in a centralized way, though\nthere's an important role of government to build mutualism, nor is it an\nunfettered free market, though markets are important. Mutualism isn't a\nthird-way argument. It's a different way of looking at the world.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, I've been in the space of collective decision-making and participative\nculture for two decades. Reading your book, I realized I'm actually a mutualist.\nNoticing the convergence the name carries in compressing mutual aid, care, and\ncollective organizing was thrilling and humbling. The book dramatically\nincreased my understanding of what mutualism is and how it spans both across the\npolitical divide and time, from modern cooperatives in the Basque Country to\nreligious communities in the early settlement of the United States. What is\nmutualism? And when did you realize you were a mutualist?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (09:22.23)\n\nThat's a great question. And I think the easiest way to understand mutualism is\nto really focus on the three principles because it lets you decide what you\nthink is mutualist and what is important to you. But it really is a frame of\nunderstanding. So number one, there has to be a group, a solidaristic group. Are\nyou in it? Is it a group of workers who are organizing a factory? Is it a\ncooperative of people who are purchasing together, but you know who's in and who\nisn't in. Is it your faith community? And that is a boundary community based on\nsolidarity. The second, which is often forgotten, it has to have an economic\nmechanism. But an economic mechanism can be dues, it can be services, it can be\nalternative currency.\n\n\n\n\nIt can be anything that enables people to have an exchange, barter, but you must\nhave something of value that you're exchanging because it's not charity, it's\npeer to peer. And whatever value you generate has to go back to that community.\nThis isn't like an impact investment where the revenues leave the community and\ngo elsewhere. They must go back. So I think a really great example is a strike\nfund in a union. Your dues go to that strike fund. You don't know if you're\ngoing to be the workers who are going to get to use that or not. But you do that\nbecause you're paying it forward. And the third is that time horizon that is\nrecognizing you got here because other people helped you. You are asked to make\na contribution and that has to go to future generations. And we could talk about\nthis many models, economic models do that. And that generational exchange is\nwhat makes those communities that have the flattest distribution of income\nsustainable. And I think that's very interesting. But those are the three\nprinciples. It's kind of a funny thing, but I think I always thought like this.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (11:38.19)\n\nBut it's really in the last 15 years that I realized how politically homeless\nI've become because the left really focuses on centralized government and\nanything that's good must come from government. And the right thinks everything\nmust be an unfettered market. And I don't think that anymore. I believe in\ngovernment. I believe we need a really decentralized strategy. I think human\nbeings are pretty smart about what they need and we should be thinking about how\nto make things decentralized so communities have a larger say. But I don't think\nit's just a feel-good thing. I think it's like tough economics, like revenues\nhave to exceed expenses and people have to be grown-ups and we have to give them\nreason to be grown-ups but like let's get back to that, you know.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nAs I hear you, one of the phrases of your book come back to me. I'm sorry if I'm\nbeing too much of a fan. I really love the book. So you speak of building\ninstitutions that are supported on the binding energy of reciprocal obligations.\nAnd this was like, my God, of course.\n\n\n\n\nHow does reciprocal obligations work as the mortar of this structure?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nWell, you know, it's reciprocality and it's also over generation. So I want to\ngive you an example. If you look at the cooperative movements around Quebec, the\nBasque region of Spain, and northern Italy, they all have these models. And the\ncapital system is called indivisible reserves. And so it is an acknowledgment of\nthe current generation that has to pay 3 % of revenues to a central fund.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (13:34.594)\n\nAnd that central fund is used to be affordable and good capital for the next\ngeneration of cooperatives that have a business model and want to be born. So\nthey don't have to go out to the free market where they would never be able to\nbe sustainable because they'd have to either pay back too much or the equity\namount wouldn't work. But the reason that people give that is because the\ncooperatives that they're working at at this moment got their capital from the\npast generation. you don't know maybe people from the past and maybe you won't\nknow people from the future, but the economic model is actually doing that work\nand each generation is sustaining it. Another interesting story, the Green Bay\nPackers are a big football team in America. And like a lot of soccer teams\nacross the world, which are owned by fans, America actually had that model too\nin football. And so fans used to own it. But in the 1920s, the American Football\nLeague was formed. And it said, yeah, no, that's over. Only one rich guy is\ngoing to own football now, maybe a handful, but no more than a handful. But here\nwere the Green Bay Packers. And they said, we want to be grandfathered in. So\nthey said, OK, you're the only ones. So Green Bay Packers, a big football team\nin America, is owned by its fans, and the fans have funded new stadiums. They\npay the salaries of the players and staff. And so the message of all of this is\nthese are models that work, right? We just have to set up these markets so that\nthey encourage it and sustain it over time. And that's what I think people\nforget because they think the market works like a hurricane in a weather system.\nIt doesn't.\n\n\n\n\nMarkets are created by human beings. We decide. Powerful people make decisions\nabout how they'll be maintained. That's the work for now, is to get the vision\nto explain that we can build something different.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (15:48.59)\n\nI really want to get into patient capital with you in models that point us into\nthat direction, but I feel we better build a bit more of a foundation before we\nget into the... So, Sara, in the first part of your book, you share how your\nfamily story is one and the same as the story of how workers organized to create\ntheir safety nets in the United States.\n\n\n\n\nWhat can we learn from the past to build our own safety nets?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nWell, you know, in the book I talk about, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, New\nYork, my parents were in a babysitting cooperative. And again, what I think is\nreally important is people form these not because they wanted to be able to tell\npeople they were in babysitting co-ops, but because they wanted to go out and\nthey couldn't afford to pay people to take care of their kids. So they literally\nused like a monopoly money. The families got together. I remember my mother kept\nthe monopoly money in like a legal white envelope in the chest of drawers in our\nhallway. And when the envelope was empty, she would call around to see if\nanybody needed babysitting, which other people did too. But what happened as a\nresult was, I guess the good news for them is they got to go out. the parents\nand the children, all the parents had babysat for all these different children.\nSo everybody in the neighborhood really knew each other because there was this\nincredible cross-pollination of everybody getting some time together. And that's\nwhat I think is so important here, is we can start to realize that we think\nwe're doing something economic, but actually what we're doing is we're ordering\nsociety. I think a lot about\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (17:48.14)\n\nthe problems facing a lot of developing countries in particular of obesity and\ndiabetes. And it strikes me how we don't have a coherent policy for community\ngardens and training people to do basic visiting of one another. And you could\nimagine how you could set these institutions up. No one's going to get rich from\ndoing them, but you don't need that.\n\n\n\n\nYou just need revenues to exceed expenses. So why not create a generation that\nstarts to create these kinds of organizations and institutions? I have a lot\nmore faith that that's going to work than some public service announcement on\nyour radio station about being lonely. If I hear one more stupid lonely story,\nit's really got to be that you find a way. I think a lot about mayors.\n\n\n\n\nI don't get why mayors don't, they have staff, why don't they mutual-ously map\ntheir faith, their cooperatives, their credit unions, all of them together,\ninvite them to a meal and say like, what should we be doing together? And we\nhave this space, use the space, you have ideas, here's the mutual-ist space and\nstart telling me what we should be doing and helping to set up what's called\nlike a sandbox for new ideas.\n\n\n\n\nAnd let's see if we can, if it's a housing thing, get some of the housing budget\nto support that innovation. Like, this is not hard. It's that we have to see it\nand have the will and be open to experimentation. And then people have to not be\npissed off when experiments don't work. And that is on us to change ourselves\nand stop being critiquers and chiefs.\n\n\n\n\nand start moving into being builders and cutting each other a little bit more\nslack.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (19:44.61)\n\nI notice a huge transactional vein in modern life and the relational is getting\nweaker and weaker. Most of us don't realize why are we feeling dread or why we\nare unhealthy. The transactional is limited, right? It's arithmetic. Relational\nis exponential. Relationships create life, right? You get kids. Transactions\ndon't do that. Sara, you have yourself built a successful modern mutualist\norganization with the Freelances Union. What problem did you choose to solve and\nwhy was that choice important?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYou know, I love that question because now, in retrospect, when I say, well,\nfreelancers needed health insurance, it's kind of like, duh. But I think what\nwas really important was I didn't go into organizing freelancers with that\nthought. First, I was a union-side labor lawyer that was misclassified as an\nindependent contractor. And I was like, that is really messed up. We should be\nable to unionize. But freelancers are independent contractors and therefore\nwe're not and can't form unions in the traditional industrial sense. So I\nstarted talking to freelancers anywhere I could and wanted to hear what was\ngoing on. And that's an emergent process which is 100 % mutualistic, right? You\ndon't go in because some management consultant that you've paid an enormous\namount does the interviews. No, you go and talk to...\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (21:27.33)\n\npeople and find out what is going on. So it turned out that it was insurance and\nat first I was like, my God, this is a disaster. Like who cares about insurance?\nBut it turned out that that was the string that really showed how in the US, the\nNew Deal, big social policy was unraveling for huge parts of the population. And\nso I literally just started to learn insurance. And that enabled us to keep\nworking at different levels. So first we got the crappiest thing that we could\nget, but it was an improvement over nothing. And then we evolving. And then\nreally it was having imagination to design a system that hadn't existed before.\nWe created the first portable benefits network actually. And to people who know\nabout crypto, I will just say that in 2008, we launched our insurance company,\nand freelancers would have to verify that they were real freelancers. And I kid\nyou not, they would have to download a form called the proof of work form to\nverify their work, that they went from job to job and project to project. And\nthat is what mutualism is, is that we started in the traditional business way.\nWe had to succeed at incremental levels until we could take off with a different\nvision. And I think that was probably one of the most important lessons. And you\nand I have discussed this. think that when you were referencing this\ntransactional way, I think we get ourselves into another trap, which is really\nat this moment in time, we think anything we build must have funding, it must be\nbig, it must have impact.\n\n\n\n\nWe must start at a level of just sheer force. And I don't know anybody who's\nbuilt anything like that. When you start, you start small. My new tagline is you\nhave to have the courage to be small. And value what you're doing and build from\nthere and build your networks and build your ecosystem. Mondragon started that\nway, Emilia-Romagna, the labor movement.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (23:49.41)\n\nThe labor movement in America was started when the United Mine Workers of\nAmerica’s President got into a car and drove to the mines and said, President\nRoosevelt wants you to form a union. Nobody knew what it was. They made it up.\nPeople can't imagine that. 13 million people are in unions in America and much\nmore in many other places. Everybody has an origin story, always.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (24:20.526)\n\nSara, having had created a union-owned business with $100 million a year in\nrevenues leaves no doubt on your capacity for ambitious undertakings. You\ninspired me with your bold vision of a full-fledged mutualist ecosystem,\nespecially on how practical and down-to-earth are your suggestions on how we get\nthere.\n\n\n\n\nCould you share your vision in what are the structures we need to get there?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYes. Well, I think the first thing, it starts with a solid, heuristic community.\nIt doesn't have to be in one place. It can be virtual. But you have to start\nwith your solid, heuristic group. And if it doesn't exist, you make it up. I was\njust talking with somebody who's a veteran cooperative builder. And we were\ntalking about how the first step often for funding is to have a house party and\nask people to contribute and then ask those people to be the first people in\nyour network to start something on Kickstarter. And it's not that you have to do\nthose two things, but actually realize that's OK if that's where you're\nstarting. And then look around you for the other mutualists and go and talk to\npeople and start to see what do they need, what do they want to do. And maybe\nthey have a room. Maybe they have some resources. I don't mean resources like\nnecessarily money. I mean, maybe they have a list. Maybe they can introduce you\nas somebody who's doing a project and help you brainstorm. Just start\nimmediately network weaving. And then when you have something, another pattern\nthat I've really seen, and I did this at the Freelancers Union, you build your\ngroup and then you keep building the next entities that you need. So we didn't\nstart with insurance company.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (26:16.312)\n\njust sold it in the beginning. But then we started our own technology company.\nThen we started a medical practice. And I've seen Molly Hempstreet in North\nCarolina in Industrial Threads, who started out with two employees and a sewing\nmachine. And now in North Carolina, they've created a whole hub of cooperatives\nthat's connected and have been able to really galvanize a lot of economic\ndevelopment funding 64 million into their small area in North Carolina. So what\nI think is happening is there's a layer that we don't have which is the\nconnecting of those new future-facing organizations because they're building\nthis in an environment that is so uphill. But I think we still have to start and\nthen we have to start bringing in the different elected officials and other\nleaders and other communities to make it so that we're not just building an\nisolation. And that really is the difference. So for instance, going back to the\ncommunity gardens of growing vegetables, we're having a big crisis in the price\nof eggs right now in America. You know, I'm from Brooklyn, you know, I don't\nhave chickens.\n\n\n\n\nBut I bet you other people around Brooklyn have chickens. But forget about us in\nan urban area. You could start to talk to said mayor, or there's a lot of land.\nStart growing vegetables and start having people come together. And then enjoy\neach other's company. Then have it become a farmer's market, because there's a\nwhole regional group of farmers around you. Start to find out what those issues\nare. This is just an organic way of doing it.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (28:15.47)\n\nSo when I hear of the building of a mutualistic ecosystem, I see a couple of\npillars, the locally grounded mutualist organizations that need to be seeded and\nincentivized. A layer of government, as you put it on the book, that needs to\nnourish and enable that thing to grow. You also mentioned the training of the\nnext generation of mutualists and capital. So we have those foundational points\nthat need to grow together, right? You can't build one only without the others.\nShall we go through, Fadim, you spoke of structures of patient capital in\nMondragon, in the Basque Country, in Emilia Romano, in Italy, and in Canada. How\ndo we shift the system to enable patient capital?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYes. Well, I think that if a Silicon Valley, Josillionaire said, here, I'm\ncreating this giant fund, I would say that will be the worst thing that could\nhappen. Because it would, again, create this kind of uniformity. Down the road,\ngiant capital could be very helpful, but you'd be plugging it into a system.\nWhat would undoubtedly be catalytic is if it either came from donors or\nfoundations or mayors or regional capital in tandem, creating funds that create\nfellowships. When people in the local community have an idea, they get plugged\nin. There are these fellowships that exist everywhere in the world that Ashoka\nis a nonprofit organization started with social entrepreneurs and they have many\nthousands across the world, Echoing Green and Schwab.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (30:18.83)\n\nWe know how to do this. So the first is a call out to the people who have an\nidea. And the second is that you give them a small amount of capital to get them\nstarted. And then the third is that you watch and see how the field gets grown.\nAnd at each step, it's a vertical of funding and you're watching where that is.\nEventually, you're looking for bigger money. So let's say you're funding an\necosystem. But let's plant these seeds and let the seedlings grow. Let's not\nstart, you know, with the forest that has been around for 30 and 50 years. No,\nwe're at seedling time and that's okay. And people have to get over their own\nego that it has to be something big and fancy, you know, like enough already.\nAnd then you can start to see that. what the message is not, let's just get a\nbunch of rich people to collect their money, right?\n\n\n\n\nLike, yeah, okay, that's great if people want to do that. But it's actually the\ncall out to the people who are starting and supporting them. I'll give you\nanother example. I think there's a group that does this already in the far\nprofit sector and it's called Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. So Y Combinator,\nthis is exactly what they do. They get a bunch of the founders who they think\nare great. They put them in a cohort each year. They train them, so that they\nlearn what every early stage group needs. And so by the time they come out of a\ntwo-year program, all the big Silicon Valley funds want to invest because who\ndoesn't want a group of people that were picked that are acculturated to what's\nabout to happen, have a network that's interconnected so people can help each\nother, the other founders.\n\n\n\n\nWe and they then have a vertical. So here you, they have figured this out from\nthe early stage all the way to maturity. They have a capital market. We here\nback in mutualism, they'll have this vertical that has about a million holes in\nit. And so that's why we have to start and just keep getting those holes patched\nand the energy.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (32:41.29)\n\nwe'll start to make it happen because people will be able to start articulating\nwhat they need next. But it won't happen if we don't start with these cohorts\nsaying, I'm a mutualist, this is how my community is. This is what we're doing\nin mutual aid. This is what we're doing to build a cooperative or a faith\ncommunity or a new kind of school. And then the capital can hear them because\nthey have a track record. But we just have to be ready, and there are, to give\nyou another example, foundations actually have these tools in the United States\nand they're called program related investments that allow foundations to give\nlike one in two percent loans, which you cannot get in the traditional market.\nAnd it comes out of their charitable pot. Like they don't even lose money if the\nloan isn't repaid. But they've stopped investing and worse, they no longer have\nstaff who even know how to do it. Less than 2 % even do it now. So they actually\nhave the right tool, but it's because we've let this sector go. And I think it's\na sector that is from generation to generation. We have to understand that we\nstopped passing to this younger generation. They need to get the baton back in\ntheir hand, and that's our job.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, what about the role of the government in this vision of a strong\nmutualistic system? The New Deal gave scale to the mutualist innovations created\nby the union movement in the United States. In Spain, Mondragon's exceptional\nresults in the Basque Country has the support of the government. What can we\nlearn from past successes of the government giving scale to mutualist\ninnovations?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nI think the first lesson is to not think that the story started with the\ngovernment supporting them. The story started with the social movements and\nsocial organizations that told government what they needed to grow. And they had\ngrown to such sufficient heft that the government, of course, would do it. So if\nyou talk to the people of Madrigón, they will tell you that when Madrigón\nstarted, it was with Padre Arizmendi, and it was in a fascist.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (35:03.156)\n\nmoment and they started very small and very locally with having nothing to do\nwith the government. And then they built and it took many decades before they\nthen had a conversation with government about what they needed and what they\nneeded to be separate. So I think that's number one. Number two, if somebody\nwere an elected official or somebody who had some power in an area said, like,\nwhat should we be doing? You should be creating sandboxes. You should be\ncreating a safe place for a group to just get started. They can't follow every\nregulation that's already out there. They can't do it the way the existing\norganizations are doing it. So you have to create some kind of zone as long as\nthey're showing that they're mutualistic. So in other words, you don't want to\nhave people who are coming in and just trying to make a quick buck get away from\nsome regulation. But you do have to create that safe space. And then I think\nthird, we should be looking at that government has things. It has buildings. It\nhas infrastructure. It has real estate. It has land. And that should be for the\nmutualists to be able to come in and use, to be like Y Combinator and have a\ncohort. So every city should have a cohort of this could be started in high\nschools, could be started as trades, this could be started in college. If you\nwant it to happen, just ask people what they want changed in their area. What\ndoes the area need? What do they want to grow?\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, what can other mutualist organizations learn from how religious\norganizations carve the niche in the tax code that enabled them to look after\ntheir communities with hospitals, schools and orphanages?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (36:54.7)\n\nYeah, well, you know, what's interesting is if you look at, let's say the\nCatholic Church, so many religions are very old. They were providing, before\nthere was a tax code written for their own communities. And so they had the\nability to be at the table to say, we need an exemption. But, you know, I'm,\nJewish. And one of the things that I'm always impressed about with Judaism is\nwe're kind of hard coded to organize, right? So we have to get started something\nthat's called the Minyan, used to mean 10 men, but 10 people, 10 Jews have to be\nthere in order to have decision making. And then we had to have a place to bury\nour dead, and we had to have ritual slaughter for animals. So you get it, it's\nlike, here's the group and here's your first two activities. So we kind of\ntaught people how to organize. The Catholic Church started taking care of\npeople. The Muslim tradition has a tradition of tithing.\n\n\n\n\nThese actually make complete sense that they have this ability to understand\nthat there will be new generations. They have to learn how they're going to\norganize for the future. And then they institutionalize so that they could\nsurvive and get a space that's carved out. So you don't have a government\nreligion. That's the same with the trade union movement in America's New Deal.\nThe government made it illegal for companies to have unions and for government\nto have unions. Only unions can be unions and that's the danger right now and I\nthis is again the left and the right keep getting into the mutualist lane so you\nhave these for-profits that are like B Corps and impact and they use these words\nthat are like magnificent and you would think by their words that they will\ntransform things but they've just completely confused us to seeing that we don't\nhave a mutualist sector of the three principles of the solidaristic group, the\neconomic mechanism and the long-term time horizon. It's wonderful when\nbusinesses want to be wonderful, but that's different. And it's the same for\ngovernment. We often think, so-and-so is doing something wonderful. That group\nis so wonderful, government should do it in their place, because then we can\ngive it to everybody. No, that's what kills it. I'll just give you another\nexample.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (39:20.884)\n\nYou see this all the time with the disaster recovery around climate change right\nnow. Everywhere in the world, when something terrible happens, human beings\nimmediately, in a kind of Jungian wired way, start to help each other. They have\nto. People need medicine, they need food, they are ill, and if everybody was\njust sitting there just doing their own thing, everybody would suffer and die.\nSo people get together and immediately have this organization. The first thing\nin the United States that we do after people have built this incredible mutual\naid apparatus using technology and setting up networks and phone chains and\neverything is FEMA comes along, which is our disaster government program, and\nsays, that's great. What you've done is wonderful. All you people are wonderful.\nGo you. They then take it over and make it a government job and then they\noutsource it to the for-profit sector to do all the tasks that have been done.\nSo why is that bad? Because if we had the patience to start to create the\ntechnology that was open source, we could say, okay, the first thing we're going\nto do is show you how to start to plug in to the same pattern of the people who\nhad three disasters before you. You're going to need this, you're going to need\nthat, you're going to need a team leader.\n\n\n\n\nAnd then what if after this was a great way for the community to get organized,\nthat whole infrastructure got codified. And we said, now we can do the next\nthing. What else does the community need after the crisis? And then it's a way\nto govern ourselves because we've now shown how we're actually structured. But\nwhen you come in and you get us into this homogenous, big capital, big way,\nuniformity, then now people are lonely, they're alienated, they're isolated, and\nthat's not where we want to be.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (41:32.032)\n\nAnd you're not replenishing and nourishing the nascent mutualist experiment, I\nsee. Sara, how is scale in mutualist ecosystems different from scale in\ncapitalist economies?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nSo I think there really is scale. It's not like that this is going to just be\nsome little quaint and cute thing. that the problems of the world are really\ncomplicated. know, logistics are global in many ways. But what it does is it\nsays that this sector doesn't replace government. This sector doesn't replace\nmarkets or for-profit businesses. It stands connected to them, and makes it so\nthat there's a place that helps to have human beings be able to flourish. So the\nscale of a mutual sector starts where people are incredibly connected in their\nlocal community or in their solidaristic group. So you could imagine that it's\nlike mycelial networks. It's ways that people start to see that by being\nconnected, they'll do better. I'll give you an example. If one small community\nis buying something that the community needs, if it connects with 100\ncommunities and has 10 times the people, they're able to get more at a lower\nrate. Or, give an example of another mutualist organization, First Book. First\nBook is an organization, a nonprofit, that 50 % of their revenues come from a\nmarketplace they own, where they get books to kids who need them. So very early\non, they were getting whatever the publishers were giving them. But once they\ncould connect all these kids together, they started saying back to the\npublishers, you need to get books that look like the kids who are reading, that\nare reflecting the issues that are going on in their lives. So that's what\nmutualism does. It actually is a feedback loop.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (43:48.526)\n\nPeople often read Fukuyama's book, which is The End of History, but they don't\nread this other book that I had to get used on eBay, which is called Trust. So\nhere, this pretty conservative guy at Stanford who's known for many neoliberal\npolicies realized that you don't have any successful market if you don't have\npeople who trust one another. And trust happens in a sophisticated way through\nmutualist organization. That's why there's a crisis of democracy, because we\ndon't have associations, we don't have organizations, we haven't learned how to\nbe with people we don't like. Like, we're human. If we all need something, we're\nnot gonna like each other sometimes. Often. If you have people you love, you\nargue with them.\n\n\n\n\nWhat it does is it teaches people civic skills, not just setting an agenda, not\njust running a meeting, but like, can't stand that person. Well, we better\nfigure out, like, it doesn't mean we're going to like each other, but we've got\nto get along enough to get this bigger thing done. And I think that anybody\nwho's experienced that in life knows that's the true fulfillment, right, of that\nperson I couldn't stand, I got something done, we had to work it out together.\nThat's what mutualism does every day.\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nYeah, on your book you carefully warn romantics that the mutualist period in the\nearly 20th century was no utopia. Members had to work out their issues among\nthemselves, and for a long time they did. In the process they became skilled and\nrobust citizens. Where can people who want to help find out more on how to flex\nour mutualist muscles go?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (45:53.218)\n\nYeah, well, first of all, you can come to the mutualistsociety.net and we have\npeer-to-peer classes on mutualism 101, mutualist tech infrastructure, mutualist\nprocess. And so that's the beginning of cross pollination, but you don't need\nus. You could go in your local community and just start by going to your faith\ncommunity or a faith community that you're interested in or going to your local\nfood cooperative and joining it, or starting a book group, or starting something\nthat enables you to be with people that you all decide. What it isn't is going\non social media and liking somebody. Like, turn off the computer and just meet\nwith people, or use technology so that you're creating a group. So just a little\nsimple thing, you can say you want to get together and talk about something\nthat's happening in your local community, whatever the issue is, then you can\nstart to use social media and say, this is where we're meeting. But when people\ncome to that meeting, do not use social media. Use a Google Doc and just keep\ntrack. And get off these group platforms because they're not building\nsolidarity, they're just keeping everybody as individuals and they're the ones\nwho are making the money. And then you'll go from there. And then you'll tell me\nwhat you're using and we'll have a bigger conversation and we'll start to maybe\nuse Holochain. And start to really think about, like, how do we have something\nthat actually works?\n\n\n\n\nThe problem is not that it doesn't exist. It's that we don't know how to use\nthis in a coherent way. But not to worry, we'll start.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (47:52.076)\n\nSara, you mentioned you heard this question many times. Here it goes again. Is\nmutualism just another word for communism or socialism?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYou know, I think we're so fearful that it takes over logic. Communism and\nsocialism are centralized systems. There's an uniformity and an expectation that\ngovernment decides everything. Mutualism is the antidote to that. It says that\nindividuals need to come together and not lose their individuality, actually.\n\n\n\n\nYou never are told if you're in a group where somebody tells you what we think\nlike run Because what you have to be is persuaded. It has to make sense. It\ncan't fail the common sense test Do you need to join a food co-op because food\nprices are less expensive? Do you need a community garden because there's a way\nto have fresh vegetables? Do you need this thing because?\n\n\n\n\nThere's, you will only do better if the group does better. If that math doesn't\nwork, it's not mutualist. So this isn't brainwashing. Don't check your brain at\nthe, you know, mutualist door. You should be thinking and critical, but you\nshould be a builder and you should be forgiving and loving. That's really what\nthis is about, is forgiving and loving, because this is a hard time. We're gonna\nmake a ton of mistakes.\n\n\n\n\nWe are going to have to leave our ego, and we all have big egos, that's the\nnature of being human, but we have to check ourselves because we have to be\nfiguring things out. This isn't a time of pat answers, it's a time of good\nquestions.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (49:38.254)\n\nYeah, unusual times call for unusual alliances, right? Today the richest 1 %\nhave more wealth than the bottom 95 % of the world population put together.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nYou know, the thing that I find alarming is that not even 1%, the 1 % of the 1 %\nare planning their exit from planet Earth. You know, they're either buying land\nor they're planning to go to another planet. Meanwhile, they're giving us nice\nlong lectures from both the left and the right about how we're supposed to lead\nour lives and telling us, you know, don't think too much. You just do what what\nwe say. But meanwhile the rest of us have to come up with ways to flourish and\nto survive. And that has to be a more collective response. And that's just the\ntruth. Because we're not going anywhere to Mars and we're not buying\nmunicipalities and islands. We're not talking about longevity. We're actually\nmeanwhile down here in the real world talking about affordable eggs.\n\n\n\n\nSo let's be clear about who we're listening to. And that's why I think loving\nand forgiving is actually the antidote because that will guide you for the\nthings that are productive. And I can assure you that you will be connected to\npeople you don't agree with and you are surprised by. That's how you know it's a\nsuccess.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, what are the unusual alliances you see ripe for us to explore in these\ngloomy times?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (51:26.52)\n\nWell, know, kind of feel like we, this does feel like gloomy times, but so many\ntimes have felt like gloomy times, you know? And I think it's really important\nto remember that, you know, our parents and their parents and their parents,\nlike every generation had horrors and scary things that they were confronted by.\nBut I would say, like, really starting to realize that people that are not in\nthe super, super, who are super, super wealthy or super, super poor actually\nhave a lot in common, especially people who work, you know? And that, I think,\nhas been the big travesty that workers have been separated a lot by the policies\nof the left and the right. And I think that it is realizing that we have to\nfigure out how to send our kids to schools, and not schools that teach them to\nwork in factories, but to let them be little human beings that are curious and\nimaginative. We need to have food that we enjoy that's good for us. You know, I\nthink those are the kinds of things that we have to be thinking about and the\nthings that we think are the hot button issues. Like, uh-uh. So, like, let's\nhave a little space for who we want to spend time with and be, again, forgiven.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, self-determination appears to be central in people solving their own\nproblems. What have you learned on how to keep your self-determination alive\nduring the storms in your journey?\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nWell, you know, I think that self-determination, to me, is really finding your\ngroup, right? So it's actually not an individualistic thing. So not to say it's\nan individual orientation, but finding your people. So when I wrote The\nMutualist, Building the Next Echonomy from the Ground Up,\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (53:34.964)\n\nI felt like the first thing I had to do was to try to gather mutualists because\nwe were all over the place. To start to have a place where we don't have to go\nto everybody else's conversation, but we could just have that conversation, but\nbe heterodox. So there's no one way to be. There's like, people can disagree and\nthey should disagree, but we should have an orientation around this. And then\nfor me personally, you know, it's a question of faith. And I, I really believe\nin that, and I really believe in connecting to something greater than yourself\nand realizing you're here but a moment in time and people came before you and\npeople will come after you. You don't have to succeed at the task at hand, but\nyou may not desist from, from, as I would say, trying your best. So get off the\nscale and all these things and bigness and impressiveness and just do what you\ncan do and be okay with that. Forgive yourself.\n\n\n\n\nLove yourself. There's a lot to do. Like, just stop listening to the media that\nmake money if you come to them and click. We're all addicted to it, and we all\nknow we are listening too much. Turn it off and just start to find your people.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil (54:59.64)\n\nYeah, extremely inspired. I'll see you in the mutualist society.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nListen, let's begin. That's the phase right now. We are all beginners. And\nthat's like the most exciting time, right?\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nSara, that's been an exceptional experience. I really appreciate your time and\nthe inspiration you bring. I'm looking forward to more conversations in the\nfuture. hope we can sit together again and see how the progress of the society\nis going in hearing more from you.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz\n\nAnd thank you so much, really. It's been a great delight.\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil\n\nThank you so much.\n\n\n\n\nSara Horowitz (55:46.531)\n\nTake care.\n\n\n\n\nNarrator - Clara Chemin\n\nThanks for joining us at Entangled Futures. Subscribe to our channel for more\nconversations on mutuality, towards a world that works for all.","image":"https://media-cdn.entangledfutures.fm/podcast-entangledfutures-fm/production/images/item-93ec4f770bb971640ad7da30af9b56c1.png","date_published":"2025-08-28T13:41:01.746Z","_microfeed":{"is_audio":true,"is_document":false,"is_external_url":false,"is_video":false,"is_image":false,"web_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/reciprocal-obligations-the-heart-of-mutualism-w2lBTsPVWLE/","json_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/w2lBTsPVWLE/json/","rss_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/i/w2lBTsPVWLE/rss/","guid":"w2lBTsPVWLE","status":"published","duration_hhmmss":"00:56:06","itunes:episodeType":"full","itunes:season":1,"itunes:episode":3,"date_published_short":"Thu Aug 28 2025","date_published_ms":1756388461746}}],"_microfeed":{"microfeed_version":"0.1.5","base_url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev","categories":[{"name":"Technology"},{"name":"Society & Culture"},{"name":"News","categories":[{"name":"Tech News"}]}],"subscribe_methods":[{"name":"RSS","type":"rss","url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/rss/","image":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/assets/brands/subscribe/rss.png","enabled":true,"editable":false,"id":"nUhl7Fa-Cl0"},{"name":"JSON","type":"json","url":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/json/","image":"https://podcast-entangledfutures-fm.pages.dev/assets/brands/subscribe/json.png","enabled":true,"editable":false,"id":"VyIkGrRjybr"}],"description_text":"[HTTPS://MEDIA-CDN.ENTANGLEDFUTURES.FM/PODCAST-ENTANGLEDFUTURES-FM/PRODUCTION/MEDIA/RICH-EDITOR/CHANNELS/VPV5VDJRNPT/IMAGE-87263A0560932A6DBBD05B4E3D4F1246.JPG]A\nPODCAST EXPLORING MUTUALITY\n\n\n\n\nConversations towards a world that work for everyone\n\n\n\n\n\n\nABOUT US\n\n\n\n\nEntangled Futures is a podcast exploring the world of mutuality, produced by\nLucas Tauil.\n\nEngaging in conversation with the people shaping collective spaces, we aim to\nidentify adjacent possibilities— new opportunities for collaboration and\ninnovation—that nourish a planet where everyone can thrive.\n\nThis work is the result of the excellence and dedication of an amazing team: Ira\nNezhynska led the design, Kika created the music, Clara Chemin was the narrator,\nPaul d'Aoust developed the website, Mamading Ceesay handled the infrastructure,\nMatthew Nichols took care of integration and Jonathan Patecki edited the\nanimations.\n\n\n\n\n\nSUPPORT US\n\n\n\n\nCome together! Help us bring the next season to life. You can support the show\nwith a credit card on our Patreon page, (https://patreon.com/EntangledFutures)\nor with crypto using the Ethereum wallet, ENS: entangledfutures.eth.\n\n\n\n\n0x24055dB18b971f24C3BFAB623A24Ee6c2b04F921\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSPONSORED BY\n\n\n\n\nThe show is brought to you by the Holochain Foundation. Holochain is creating\ntechnology that helps people team up, share information, and solve their own\nproblems together—without needing a middle-man. Creating carriers that cannot be\ncaptured, Holochain enables privacy and holds space for innovation and\nmutuality.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHOST\n\n\n\n\nLucas Tauil is a trained, and seasoned communicator focused on participative\nculture and collaboration. Connected to the world of sustainability and\ndecentralised technology he has worked as a Journalist for two decades in\nmainstream media. \n\nWorking with the power of difference and collective intelligence on multiple\nstakeholders organisations since 2001, Lucas is part of Enspiral, a collective\nof people working on stuff that matters. \n\nTogether with his partner Sandra Chemin and eight other families, Lucas\nco-founded Quintal Magico, a communitarian Steiner school in Paraty, Brazil. The\ncouple sailed for six years with their two daughters from England to New\nZealand.","itunes:title":"Entangled Futures","copyright":"©2025 Lucas Tauil","itunes:type":"episodic","itunes:email":"lucas@entangledfutures.fm","items_sort_order":"newest_first"}}