The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Foundational Challenge: Stewardship, Responsibility, and Designing a New System with Indy Johar

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

(Conversation recorded on October 3rd, 2024)    While humans, like all animals, are subject to certain fundamental realities, we also possess the unique ability to shape the world around us through physical infrastructure, laws and institutions, and our economic and social systems. And yet, it's important to remember that, as today's guest would say, what we design designs us back. In short, the systems and structures we build influence our cultures, values, and identities. Today, Nate is joined by architect and professor of planetary civics, Indy Johar, to explore the relationship between system design and human behavior - and what might be possible for transformational change. Along the way, they discuss the impact of sunk costs on our ability to change, the importance of new language to describe and respond to our human predicament, and envision future governance and economies that could enable the full spectrum of what it means to be human.  What sorts of unconventional ideas, like self-owning land and technology, could lead to economies that are capable of sustaining humans as well as foster a healthy planet? How do our current societies prevent us from embodying and living into our greatest gifts as human beings? Is it possible to intentionally redesign our systems at the physical, structural, and psychological levels in service of all the entangled life inhabiting the Earth?    About Indy Johar: Indy Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, as well as the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing), and Open Desk (open source furniture company). Indy is also a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, which is the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

I think people can perceive the violence in their economic realities. And I think this is where the thesis or peace actually invites a new psychological state, as well as, I think, language of freedom. And I think the freedom not just of economic choice, which I think is usually a freedom to escape the tyranny of the system, but a freedom to be radically human, which is to construct a system that ennobles us in a different way. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's.

On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by architect and mission steward of Dark Matter Labs, Indy Johar. India is also the co-founder of the architecture and urban practice, Architecture Zero Zero, a founding director of open system labs, and a non-executive

international director of the Blocks Hub, the Nordic Hub for Sustainable Urbanization. India is taught and lectured at various institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and the new school, and is currently a professor at our MIT University. Today, Indy and I have a very wide boundary conversation about how the structure and design of our physical systems in our culture shape our values and behaviors and how they in turn shape the system back. We also dive into some emergent projects and ideas, what he calls fissures, that may be key to leading us towards better human and planetary systems. perhaps this conversation can plant the seeds of change in viewers like yourself to create your own movements wherever you are towards more pro-social futures. This was a conversation that unexpectedly was both interesting and inspiring to me, and I hope it will be the same for you. Before we begin, if you enjoy this podcast, please share this episode or another episode you love.

someone you think would would benefit from it from or learn from it. Uh, without further ado, please welcome Indy Johar. Indy Johar, welcome to the program. Delighted to be here. It's a real pleasure. I met you, um, a year ago, two years ago in, in Austin at an emerged conference. Uh, and this is our, our first conversation, uh, since then and I'm, I'm really been looking forward to it.

So let me tee you up. You have a background in architecture, but your work today is really much broader than that and focuses on the social change informed by a wide view systems lens of all the converging global crises we face. Can you start off by describing your journey to the current work that you're doing now at Dark Matter Labs? I trained as an architect, and I remember the first most. sort of I wasn't a very good student being really honest and it was my third year where

my one of my professors said so in the what's the future of the city and it was such a one of those questions which became kind of almost haunted me to the rest of my life because in a sense it was a knowledge question that is operating at the intersection of so many issues and challenges and from there on in I ended up being you know really focused on how do we democratize the making of places? And by democracy, I don't mean the representation of power, but actually the means to construct society. And so I was part of building Zero Zero.

We built Wiki House, Open Source Housing, Open Desk, open source furniture company, all the way to being part of building the impact hub network, multiple impact hubs around the world, to building social investment structures. So we kind of experience the kind of tools of making. But what became very clear was that behind the things that we were trying to make, there were a bunch of strategic institutional logics which were limiting and controlling the nature of the world we were making. And I'll give you a sort of boring practical example, which is like, you know, everyone was talking about how do you build affordable housing? Well, yes, you could make the house by decentralizing the production of the house.

the value of a house is in land. And actually, where is the value in land when you start to really ask the question? The value of land is actually a function of the monopolistic access that land provides to critical common goods, i.e. labor markets, cultures, transportation systems, these sort of intangible assets, which are common goods typically, and the land provides that access. So the value of a house is not just the material construction of the house, it's the access it provides. And what you started to find was that actually we were privatizing these common goods in the form of property and the kind of boundary. And that really opened up the journey into dark matter labs where we could democratize the means of making.

But there was a much deeper structural question about actually what are the institutional infrastructures and what are they reinforcing in the constitutional power? And then when you start to look at theories of property and what they externalize, what they start to drive, and I think this links back into much more of the bigger questions that we're now all talking in the middle of is there is a property, theories of boundary in an entangle world, create the capacity and forcing functions to externalize and extract and thereby set up the precedence, I think, at the core structural level of the crisis that we're in, which is where we're externalizing and extracting at the point that we are not in stewardship of the generation or value that we're operating in. So in a way, my journey has been vertically through the system to that point and then coming back out into some of the kind of polycrisis issues that you and Daniel and various other people talk about. And how important is your training as an architect to apply to the metacrisis and the human predicament? Not necessarily uniquely so, but I think what architecture and design

do give you is two things. One is architecture. It's fundamentally about the fusion of knowledgees. It is an intersection of knowledge, it is not a singular practice itself. And secondly, it is a propositional discipline as opposed to an analytical discipline. And I think that's quite a different type of capability. To be able to propose into the world is not the same pathways to be able to analyze into the world. And I think that's, I think those two things. And then I think it does, I mean, architecture is philosophically and structurally rooted and has a journey of being rooted into different ways of our relationship to the planet. You know, whether it's theories of property or the theories of stewardship, a theories of our

relationship with the land. These are all rooted in some of the foundational, framework. So I think architecture as a discipline, certainly for me, has opened up many of these things. And then I would even argue the coding of capital is fundamentally rooted in theories of property. And the coding of capital, as people like Katrina Prestor, elegantly talk about, has been so fundamental in the abstraction and externalization that we're witnessing. So I think architecture has played a very dominant role in my understanding of the crisis. I actually have a ton of questions about what you just. just said and property and all the things. But one thing that I've noticed in your writings is you

often use the phrase, what we design designs us back. Can you unpack what that means? And then I have a lot of questions about it. Yeah, I mean, I think the phrase is largely a derivative of what people like Churchill said. We make the built environment and the world around us and the buildings around us and they make us. And I think that as a metaphor also expands beyond the built environment. It expands to theories of contract. It expands to theories of employment law. It expands to if we reduce ourselves to being contractual economically incentivized agents. It reduces us to only seeing ourselves as homo-economists. So I think this kind of, we have this reciprocal relationship with the world that we design and the nature of how we interpret and imagine ourselves.

I think there's some beautiful examples of even if somebody studies economics, it reduces their comprehension and incentive of how they perceive humanity through a mechanical, very simplistic, economist model. It sort of changes their behavior. And there's a lot of research that's starting to point to, and this is something we often talk about now, where CEOs or orchestrators of large amounts of capital, in the accumulation of power,

they also thereby not only accumulate power, but an asymmetry to that world. And in the design of that asymmetry of that world, because the power accumulation is so large, you accumulate a tendency for psychopathic relationship to that world. And so I think this sort of nuance of we design the world and the world designs us is something that I think is quite powerful. And I think one of the big traps we're caught into is those recursive routes have become so large that we are trapped in those modalities. And I think it's all around us 400 years of, you know, organizing the world through dominion, through perspective, i.e. the kind of construction.

of distance and also the construction of asymmetry, classification theory, all the way through to thereby its manifestation in property, its dehumanization. All of the stuff is rooted in these concepts that we've then rooted and built our institutions, but also reinterpreted ourselves. And one of the classic examples I use now is in terms of genetic diversity, Africa, the continent, is more genetically diverse than the rest of the whole world. Yet in terms of racialization, we have racialized on the basis of power and distancing as a means to exert and dehumanize in a particular way. So I think what's fascinating to me is how these concepts have constructed the world

and thereby constructed our relationships and our perceptions of self. And there's this recursive loop, which I think is really charging. and this goes all the way around. And that's, I think, the kind of entangled trap went in the middle of. I think it goes way beyond 400 years ago. I think it goes back to the agricultural revolution. And when Cortez found South America,

there were already canals and temples and priests and hierarchy, and that was over a thousand years ago. So I think the 400 years ago is when we started, you know, true globalization and it eventually hit industrialization with the massive amount of energy surplus from carbon, and that turbocharge the dynamic that you're discussing. So I have a bunch of questions there, but before we go in any further,

I just want to ask you just a personal question with the context of what you just said, what does it mean to you to be human and how the way we design the world around us, how do you think that brings out the best and the worst of the qualities of being human alive today. This is, I think, the project in a way I would argue. This is the greatest project that I think is often under discussed in our age.

So I think what does it mean to be human now? I think this is the foundational challenge. I think we have rooted ourselves in a theory of humans as individual and as objecthoods. and and I think one of the key journeys that we're in the middle of is one to reimagine ourselves as not just beings becomings i.e. developmental. Two, imagine ourselves as multitudes, i.e. we, we are not a singular, but an emergent plural. And three, to actually reimagine ourselves as interbeings as beings in relationships. and dialogue with. So our lungs are an extension and in relationship with the trees.

And this to me, the science of this stuff is already there, as is the philosophy, and it's been there for subcarataki 50 years, subcarataki millennias. I think the project is that our institutional logics are so far, and our cultural norms are now so out of delta with, out of deviation in deviation with the science of this project, I think this is what the challenge that we're facing. And this is the project. So I would argue for me, that is the, that is probably at the kind of core base project of the transition that we're in the middle of. And, and I think is under discussed, underinvested and under deliberated. And I think there's something, this is how I would interpret it, and I think it's really vital part.

And we often talk about transition from a theory of objecthood or, you know, new products, new services, new supply chains. And we often talk about it from that level. And then if we're really smart, maybe we talk about institutions. But I think the deeper project is the revolution in how we imagine ourselves. And history would always say, I would argue that every, epochal period is actually equivalently a transformation of how we imagine ourselves as it is in a transformation of the world around us. I'm kind of glad that we didn't do a podcast right after I met you because if you had just said what you just said a year ago, I kind of might have scoffed or let it flow over my head, but now I feel it.

I feel the resonance of what you just said because I've matured. gone beyond my analysis of the situation more to the deeper level or I'm I'm still a kindergartner in those domains but I'm but I'm experiencing it so let me ask you this and by the way when you say the project you don't mean dark matter labs project you mean the project capital T capital P for humanity yes absolutely I think this is this is the project for all of humanity and and I think it's an extraordinary invitation, by the way. This is not a sort of, it's not a minor solve the problem project. It's a sort of, you know, I mean, I'm, I don't know if you've read James Lovelock's Nova Scene. The first third of it is extraordinary because I think he lays out the thesis of a planetary consciousness being born. And his narration of our history, I think is really beautiful because he narrates all the beautiful energy blindness that you talk about. But he narrates it in a a different way, which I think is really interesting, where he says the Earth has stored vast

amounts of solar energy, which is it's expended and to the maximum it can in giving birth to an 8.5 billion unit planetary consciousness to become self-aware. Yeah, that sounds a little more poetic than my language. No, no, no, but it's equivalents. I think this is two ways of describing a sort of moment that we're living in, I think, which I think is extraordinary. That way of narrating is also rooted in the same issue. It is rooted in the reimagination of ourselves and work our relationship to the planet at a fundamental level. So I know that you are aware of my work and have read it and seen videos and you probably follow the podcast. Here's kind of a burning question that I have after doing a review of your work and hearing you so far.

How much of our behavior is a problem? product of the sunk cost of our infrastructure and social structure to use Marvin Harris's terms. And part two question is if we were hypothetically able to freeze everyone in the world in stasis and redesign the infrastructure and our social structure, our laws, institutions, knowing what we know about system science and all the things that you and dark matter labs work on, how radically different would our housing, our streets, our laws be? In other words, there's such a sunk cost that comes with our at the margin decisions of what to do this month or this quarter.

And it's all based on the metabolism of what's been building and happening over prior decades or even centuries. And boy, we would like to do this, but we're stuck with what we already have. So we're just making decisions building on top of that giant disconnected, non-will well-being, non-ecologically tethered Rube Goldberg mousetrap. That was a mouthful. What do you think, Indy? No, I think you're right. And the word I suppose I'm looking for is not I think we're locked into path dependencies as opposed to just infrastructures. I think it's not even the fact that our existing infrastructure is locking us in. I think we're locked into replication of that infrastructure because the metametrics,

whether it's GDP and you've done brilliant critiques of that or our theory of, you know, I think the level of how we recognize our own agency and our own value the world is through accumulation and consumption. Those incentives are so deeply coded that we're locked into these systemic path dependencies. And I think those path dependencies for me are the things that are really manifestly trapping up. They're almost invisible infrastructures like vector infrastructures as opposed to static infrastructures. We often talk about the stasis infrastructures of dependency.

But I think we're locked into vector infrastructures that are locking us into these trajectories, which I haven't got language for late, if I'm really honest. So I understand and agree with you that there are multiple path dependencies of our culture, the metabolism of how our economy is going forward. Either theoretically or pragmatically, could you outline how we would get out of those path dependencies? Is it an individual change in consciousness? and then that scales with more than one individual and groups of individuals. Is it a top-down rule change?

Is it a crisis? And then we have to react and chart a new pathway with a new metabolism that's, you know, lower scale and more ecologically tethered. What are your thoughts on changing the path dependencies? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a really, I think there's multiple points on this. And what we're learning is that there are fissures which are opening up landscapes for new possibilities.

Now, I would argue places like Canada where indigenous worldviews and crown and common world views are colliding and opening up new landscapes. There is new possibilities emerging for ways to perceive and break the orthodox. of these vector path dependencies because they're inviting us to do that. You could argue, I would argue, that I think the African continent is going to give birth to new forms of monetary mechanisms as resource bank monies are going to be born in terms of liquidity crunches. I would argue that there are possibilities that are opened up in places like Stockholm to look at the intangible value of mental health as a strategic collective asset. So, what we're seeing is different landscapes are opening up different fissures into the future, which I think is really worth recognizing.

Second, I do think that we are, I think our capacity to change will be rooted in how crisis opens shifts and opens the Overton window for actually driven crisis-driven models of change. I think that will be another path dependency on that. And then I think there is another architecture, which is, I would argue there are locations in the world which require preemptive peace strikes because they're cascading planetary scale risks are so of an order of magnitude that they would drive planetary scale mutually assured destruction. Are you thinking about Brazil and the Amazon? Are you thinking about Russia and the war with NATO? I'm thinking about Brazil and the Amazon. I'm thinking about the Himalayas. I'm thinking about locations in the world,

which open up pathways of such superscale mass destruction, that preemptive peace becomes cognitively smart. And I use the word preemptive peace intentionally as a recognition of how we use military language to be able to pre-declare a new position. And I think the preemptive peace strikes are going to be critical assets. I think crisis will open up certain landscapes, preemptive peace in strategic localities, will open up new landscapes. I also think constraints are going to open up new landscapes.

And I think one of the things that I think the West has not been used to, and I use the West colloquially, and I hate it, but as a term, but let's use it as a soft language. I think we've not been used to operating how constraints shift the spaces of innovation. So as we see, you know, your work does this beautifully, is, you know, I think all of Europe can, if it was to recognize its carbon budgets, is only able to build 176,000 homes a year. Its current budget of homes construction is somewhere in the region of 1.5 million plus, and that's because actually if there was to follow the Paris Accord, it just doesn't have the carbon budgets of it. And those constraints are going to shift, I would argue, the spaces of

how we provide spatial justice, how we use material resources in radical new ways. So I think because strain-driven transformation is also another critical pathway as we are seeing these kind of fissure landscapes as well. On the response to crisis, is it like, no, no, no, no, crisis, oh, we respond, or is it, there's a crisis coming. Let's have some conversations locally and regionally about how to respond to the upcoming crises. And there's a preparation ahead of it, or do you mean just literally unexpected thing like happened last week in Asheville, North Carolina, where they got 30 inches of rain and now they're responding. Is it more of that sort of thing?

Well, what I'm sensing is more like as we got 30 inches of rain, we suddenly realize that insurance companies are backing off in vast parts. And that is the underlying actual crisis because suddenly what you see is the meta effects behind that and that changes the landscapes.

The crisis is not just the physical manifestation. when the underlying dark matter starts to shift and break. Can you explain what dark matter is? That's the name of your organization, but I'm not sure that I fully understand it, which means our listeners probably don't either. So we use dark matter as a term that behind the visible world, i.e. the visible crisis, the house is a set of institutional infrastructures, norms, and mechanisms that allow a certain reality to persist.

For example, in order to buy a house, if you want to get a mortgage, you need to have to have insurance. And if you don't have insurance, you can't actually get a mortgage. And so as you lose insurability in a kind of what I'd call in a scalar climate breakdown with some global weather volatility, we are losing insurability and thereby losing the access to capital markets, which is thereby going to drive a concentration of assets and a distribution of distressed assets. So inequality will scale.

So what I'm talking about is those institutional frames that sit underneath the house and its physical construction that actually create those reinforcing logics. So often in the crisis, there's what I would call the visible crisis and the real crisis. And then there is the crisis underneath that, which I think is where once you start to recognize that, you start to recognize the fundamental. I think it's a reality quakes where our reality starts to show. shudder at a much more structural level. And it's those sorts of crises that tend to shift the landscape quite fundamentally and create new politics. A non-sequitur, but I'm just curious.

What were you like in grade school and high school indie? We was just an average kid or were you thinking and talking like this back then? Look, my reality was I was into philosophy very early on and I was trying to see how to see the world and that's been a lot of my journey. But I think my real thing has been that the privilege I really had is to operate at the intersection of different worlds, whether it's building startups or whether it's building platforms or whether and physically making these types of institutions or whether it's being building capital structures, which has allowed me to understand and operate in the cross-seas languages. And that's the other challenge that I think we have. And I think people,

you know, many people in your podcast and other people have spoken about this. I think one of the big challenges that we have is these problems are intersectional. They operate across disciplines, yet actually most of us are so disciplinary focused that our ability to look at the intersections of the disciplines and where the opportunity spaces is really marginal. So I think there's a kind of new type of polymatic capability that's required to look at these problem spaces and to be able to go from the house and the water and the rainfall and the weather system to the insurance system to look at the political effects of that

and thereby look at what the over to windows are for transformation. I haven't voiced it as such, but that's exactly what I'm trying to do with the podcast and these conversations because it's not a single topic. It's how all the topics intersect, both the natural science and the human side of it. So thank you. Thank you for that. Not at all. And Nate, I just want to say, I think that is one of the exceptional contributions of this

podcast, you know, I listen to you and Ed Conway speak, for example, and the material, material limits and material possibilities on the system as he was placing it, but also the energy infrastructures and many, and obviously your conversation with Daniel and Daniel Schmectenberg. So I think what you're building is this intersectional worldview. And I think this is absolutely vital because I think if you only take a disciplinary worldview, you try to solve the world with the hammer because all you see is nails. And that's because that's all you can see. And I think this is a really key contribution.

Before I move on, I mean, we could just spend the rest of our time talking about what you've just shared so far. But could you define what you mean specifically by preemptive piece? And are you working on that with Dark Matter Labs? Like, is that something you're trying to influence? Yeah. And, I mean, from our perspective, there are locations in the world which have pathways to catastrophic planetary scale risks. And it does not take a genius to recognize that those risks require new forms of discoveries of peace. And I think the word peace is underrated because I would argue that on one landscape, you could argue that we've been in systemic.

war at our ecological substrate. And that war is through extraction and externalization. And those micro-accretions of war are now accumulating to the point of self-termination. And the war is not just kinetic, it's at every scale. And actually for us to discover a new piece, which I think is actually, and I think the violence has also felt at the human bodily level. I don't know, increasingly when I'm speaking both publicly, I think people can perceive the violence in their economic realities. And I use this word softly, but I think people in the what I call networked enslavement that I think people feel in their theory of labor, reducing people to units of labor, reducing people to being, how do you weaponize them into the economy, how do you, and the words often use

our incentivize, or all this sort of language that we've used, which actually returns us into commodities of agents into a macroeconomy. So I think this violence is felt at every level. And I think this is where the thesis of peace actually invites a new psychological state that I think people can perceive as a new politics, as a language of a new politics spell words that allow us to, as well as, I think, language of freedom. And I think the freedom not just to be,

what I would say, freedom of economic choice, which I think is usually a freedom to escape, the tyranny of the system, but a freedom to be radically human, which is to construct a system that ennobles us in a different way. So I think you're, I mean, I would argue that this peace, this freedom to be radically human, and that the preemptive aspect is recognizing the locations where these situations do exist right now and are predictable and our security services are able to perceive them. And the construction of this piece is not just a member state issue or between, states. It's a sort of what I would call a multi-agent issue because I no longer think that states are the

only agents of power in the system. And so our ability to construct peace is also a different form of negotiation in that landscape and to construct the conditions for peace is different as well. And that goes back into, I think, other forms of theory of where sovereignty is not no longer through the theory of state. I think we are seeing an explosion of sovereignties. And in that explosion of sovereignties. We have to construct a different theory of negotiation and peace construction in that reality as well. I know I've gone into a whole tirade of stuff there, but I think these are the logic flows. And yes, and we're looking at these issues. First of all, what you just said maps a lot to what I referred to as the economic superorganism, which doesn't treat us or

care about us as individuals. There's a downward causation that it only values our contribution to the global amassing of surplus, which of course itself is not shared equally and doesn't use the right prices, both on scarcity and ecological impact. But what did you mean about the sovereignty and change from the nation states able to solve this to something beyond the part of the state? Where would the sovereignty go, if not by the state? I think this is, so there's two, two points I want to come into on this, Nate. I think one is the economic superorganism, which I think you elegantly describe, is also now self-terminating.

So it's terminating itself and it's terminating us in symbiotic relationship. And I think it is also a result and function of being an extractive optimising system. And I think it's also no longer just a moral issue. I think that extractive system can no longer efficulously operate in complexity and in a new human machine economy. As our machine economy and our human economy is evolving, which I think is symbiotically evolving in this phase, I think we're starting to have to look at the agentification of the world, not just the agentification of the world through Ellen Malmes and sort of generative AI, but the reagentification

of the world through whether it's self-sufficiency. or in New Zealand mountains being recognized as having their own agency or river systems of forest. So we're seeing the reagentification of the world to deal with complexity and entanglements. And this is a new theory, I would argue, of organizing in complexity as we've now got the computational capacity and the bureaucratic capacity to operate and recognize no longer in dominion in control, but in relationship to agentification. So this worldview that's made available to us is a function of a new bureaucratic capability that we've unleashed. And I think that allows us to operationalize complexity in a way that our old bureaucratic systems could not. And I think we were going to

self-terminate. That also means that our theory of governance can no longer be rooted in control, but has to be rooted in what I would say is ennobling and learning infrastructures. So as opposed to control theory, the role of governance is an emergent function of building the learning capacity of an agified worldview that tips our theory of operating in the superorganism no longer becomes a superorganism of extraction and optimizing, but becomes an ennobling organism at the back end. And I think that flip is, I think, available because our bureaucratic frameworks have shifted and our capabilities and technology have shifted in one way. Now, this I know is a very hopeful and a hyper, maybe over hopeful position, but I think it's cognitively

available to us. And it aligns with, I think, psychological needs, but also new bureaucratic capabilities. So this is our first real conversation. So I want to make sure that I understand some of your vocabulary. You mentioned agentified world, world of agency. Can you briefly describe what you mean by an agentified world? So on the technology level, it would be how we can actually distribute the ability to make situational actions and decisions that can be autonomous and distributed. And they can be contingent and learning orientated.

So now that is not just a function of computational power. It's also a sort of how we're starting to look at nature rights and nature sovereignty. It's also looking at new types of organising theory, which is rooted in shifting from control orientation to learning orientation systems. So we're seeing this agentification. In a kind of semi-poetic when I apologize for using this language, it's kind of operating out of seeing the world through the our economic sees the world through a world of dead things. and dominion. I think this allows us to see the world through living things, or living is a bit too emotional, but agentified operational to be enlivened in the world. And I think that paradigm, and we often talk about this as life ennobling economics, an economic theory that is rooted in

ennobling life, and the life is not just human life, but human, non-human computational living systems, which I think is the paradigmatic leap that we have to make to operate in complete. So instead of just the economic superorganism and the humans riding high on that structure, having agency, an agentic view of life is we all have agency, including the river and the trees and the mountains and the biosphere. And the technological infrastructures as well. So this is why it builds a different frame. I like it. And then you've used a word three or four times entangled, an entanglement. Is that an important word?

It is because I think if we only exist as the idea of objects in ennoblement, I think the objecthood is insufficient. It's, you know, where we talked about it's not just beings, but becomings, but interbecomings. I know this is a series of language, beings, becomings to interbecomings, which recognizes that actually, you know, you and I are in relationship, our lungs are extensions in relationship with trees. because they provide the oxygen for our lungs. We're in a symbiotic relationship with ecological systems. And I think unless we can conceive and operate in that entanglement

and conceive ourselves in that entanglement, and that entanglement requires us to operate in a theory of care. This is, I think, the real leap is that you have to operate in a theory of, we have agency and we recognize our agency is our theory of freedom. and then we have to recognize we operate in an entanglement and thereby we operate in a theory of care and being in relationship too. And that is a different type of beingness in the world

or relating to the world. And I think this is the nuance that I think we're moving into where we move away from power over to being in care with. That's a different type of metabolism of being. I love that. I thought we were going to talk about housing, but I kind of like this direction better.

You're in England and I'm in Minnesota, so we don't technically have an energetic field between us right now, though you might educate me on that. But in talking with you, Indy, my nervous system is calmed. And I feel in relationship, I'm following, I'm with you in this conversation, what's up with that? Is that part of the intent? Even though we're an ocean apart connected via technology transmitting up at 20,000 miles in the sky and back down.

I think the reality is, I would argue we're in a community of fate together, Nate. Our fates are so systemically entangled and non-divisible that I think that's one dimension of it. I think there is a dimension that you and I and our existence is entangled with the Amazon. and other critical organisms that our fates are non-divisible in our substrates. And then I think there is the fact that your and I knowledge bases and our so-called intelligences are entangled in bodies of work that we have both read and conceived and worked with and iterated off and admired. So there's, you know, we stand on the shoulders of similar giants.

And I think the third dimension, which I think is also, or fourth dimension, which I think is equally important, is that I do think that there is a lot of really interesting work about at what level the universe in our brains, and there is kind of conjecture about, you know, the thought being a quantum process, and what level of that operates in a different dimension

that you and I yet cannot possibly put words to, and I'm sure a brilliant scientist could give us, there are documents and papers out there to start to talk about that. So I think there's multiple dimensions of this. And this to me is the kind of paradigmatic moment where I think theory of separation and competition as a means of evolution are now reaching the point that actually our entanglements and our mutual assured pathways

are so deeply entangled that we have to find a new pathway for development, which isn't through competition. And I think this is, you know, some would argue, this is the Fermi paradox moment, I would argue anyway, that unless a civilization can transcend competitive evolution and to find a different pathway, which recognizes an entangled co-evolutionary landscapes,

I think it tends to fall and die because it actually goes into competition to the point with mutually assault destruction pathways are so dominant. And I think this is the moment of, a developmental quantum leap is required from us as a species. I agree with you. And yet it's going to happen at the same inflection point where society as a whole relative

to our recent past moves from an abundance to a scarcity mindset. When as individuals we are called to move from a scarcity to an abundance mindset, You just mentioned yourself that there's only technically, given our footprint, room for 100, some thousand. I forgot your numbers, 100,000 extra houses in Europe per year, yet they're building a million. So we're going to have to have that switch towards collaboration and interdependence at the same time. We're getting cultural signals of scarcity and competition. Yes? I think this is exactly it.

And this is the kind of flip moment. that I think if there's a politics to be constructed, there will be this moment that there will be greater efficacy in a new political arrangement, which actually transcend us for this moment. Or, and I think this is a fork moment, and I don't think this is a gradient, or we reach a moment where, and I, you know, mutually assured destruction becomes the inevitable path because the othering, because this is the other key moment. As those abundances turn into scarcity, scarcities then drive us to enter otherings. and otherings are separational frameworks. And the more we try to do that, we will set the pathway to a type of war and destruction and conflict. And, you know, maybe some of it will be kinetic, some of it will be resource-orientated, so we'll reach that path. But I think this is visible to us now.

And I think the choices are, is there, and this is why I talked about these key political languages of a great peace, the freedom to be radically human. are there new offerings that create these radical new abundances that outstrip the material abundances to which we've currently orientated our theories of value and wealth? How would you define if you had to give an elevator pitch to someone that you met or someone that's listening to this show? What does it mean to you to have the freedom to be radically human? What does that mean? I'll give an example.

which is, I don't know what your experience of COVID was, but I can imagine many people's experience of COVID. There was a moment in COVID where the streets were quiet, where you were with your kids or families, and the rational, homo-economist rational of incentives, structures, languages started to erode. And there were glimpses made available to a different life and a different thesis of what it meant to be a person.

And I think that was a sort of a glimpse, a fracture, into a much bigger idea that I think we are trapped into, like, I would argue, our homo-economist reductive narrative. And I think there are many spiritual movements that talk about this stuff in many formats. But I would argue that we are starting to see fractures in those realities. And I think, you know, you could argue there are many, many of these intentional communities that are starting to explore where we recognize that we do not just operate in the orchestration

of financial capital and not just in the theory of contract and asymmetric power, but in relationships of care. So I think we've all started to experience this in moments. And I think there's also, I think what is perhaps more easily experienced is how entrapped people feel. When we mutually recognize how entrapped we are, I think there's a sort of space of what does a real freedom to manifest our completeness of being. And to be not, to be freedom to be in care, to freedom to be in care is a different type of freedom to have freedom to consume. And to be in care, you have to, you know, when you look off when you're with your kids or with your close family members or somebody else, care is not a transaction.

It's not an economic relationship. It is a mutual developmental relationship in its best form. And you are both developing that relationship. So I think we've seen glimpses of this. And I think this is also critical as machine computational capabilities. mean that the human contribution to the economy as a bad robot is no longer sufficient as a contribution to the theory of value. So I think we're also being displaced and move forward. And I think there's a new invitation for a new human machine economy that will invite us

to expand our theory of being human and thereby embodied theories of intelligence, multi-capital forms of value, situational intelligences are ways of being in different formats. So I think we've glimpsed it. And I think I I also try not to over describe it because I think it needs to be discovered and not colonized from an old worldview. Because I think I am merely on this side of the bridge describing what's on the other side of the bridge. But I can tell you there's something interesting there, but I can't yet. I'm not it. So there is a positive feedback happening in this conversation because now I have more questions than I did a few minutes ago.

So what do you mean by a human machine economy? So I think we've always had some form of relationship with some form of toolification. And you could argue that a human tool economy created asymmetric capabilities. Okay. So it could have been a hammer made with a stone or a spear was a human machine in a primitive sense. Exactly. And we've been scaling up this new human machine economy in four, of evolution, and every one of those have displaced and mutually developed the human construction. So the Industrial Revolution, for example, was made possible in the UK because the UK had already done educational reforms and a greater distribution of wealth than Holland had or Netherlands had, which meant that educational reforms

combined with the distribution of wealth created the capacity and the abundance of coal and other things, created the capacity for a form of feedback of innovation, of human resource, and foundational natural capabilities to be able to do that. I think we're in another one of these moments where I think machine capabilities are going to co-evolve, and we are in a moment to co-evolve as we start to drive automation generative AI and all these sort of things are inviting a new form of embodied, a more embodied intelligence, which I think machines are multi-forms of intelligence that I think machines are not yet able to provide. So I assume you watched a few months ago.

I did an episode with Daniel Schmachtenberger on AI and the environment, and that under our current use of AI, it is downstream from the economic superorganism. And so it's going to make everything conceptually more efficient, better at extracting, better at everything. And that additional productivity will act like a large. larger siphon of the natural world. What is your view on AI, generative AI? Could we rein it in to have a net positive towards this emergence that you're talking about, or is it fraught with peril? There's two fundamental challenges, I would argue, that our current generative AI structures

are being built into 19th century organisms. Well, it's like the, it's like the metabolism and the sunk costs that we talked about. about. We've got this wonderful technology, but we have all this built infrastructure that we're just, you know, putting it on top of as a patch. Yes? Exactly. So we're building into the 19th century idea or the 17th century idea of the corporation as a theory of value when actually, you know, generative AI is an emergent societal product. It's a function of emergent societal capability. So that's one dimension. And I think the problem is that those institutions, frames are rooted in theories of control and optimization of assets as opposed to optimization

of outcomes. So there's logic problems that we've got in the institutional problems, which is driving our technology to base, to root itself in theory of control, manipulation, and bias. And often I think we conflate the problem of technology with the problem with institutions. one dimension. And I think it's, I find it helpful to break the two apart because I think it allows us maybe to fix the right problem. And thereby, I also believe if you fix the institutional problem, I think we might be designing different forms of technologies and their different manifestation cycles as well. Second, I think the, the problem I think we also have is how we're building, as I understand it, the waiting systems and how we're coding the information into these recursive

systems and learning systems is rooted in a particular worldview. It's rooted in particular biases of intelligences and thereby we're losing the plurality of what I'd call complex embodied knowledges and accelerating dominant singular perspectives. And I think this is at a system level a systemic loss because the accelerated power of that framework becomes so advanced and so combative it will overrun other forms of imported intelligence and be able to articulate that. And I think that requires a systemic recognition of value destruction and what value is at risk and where value is being created. So AI in that sense is accelerating the Walmartization of our culture.

Precisely. But I want to engage with it because I also think it offers a pathway, like I was originally saying, of reagentifying the world. And it allows us to take our current dead views of the world and start to operate in a new form of agency into it. Now, that is also available as a result of it. But this requires us to operate and recognize a whole, I mean, all the work that's happening around frames of, of frame setting between generative intelligence is situational. There's a lot of stuff happening

that I think is really interesting and I think could be a transformative moment to create a new form of ennobling infrastructures, not control infrastructures and age identification infrastructures. However, I think we must recognize these codings of risks that we're coding into our current manifestations of those technologies. I'm following you here, Indy,

and I'm seeing where you're, going or where we would all like to go. What role is education have in this? Because, you know, we're talking, most people watching this show are 40s, 50s, 60s, and they're understanding what the risks are and the pathways. But what about 12, 15, 18, 22-year-olds? What is their role in this different future that is emergent and, respects the global

commons and is not so extractive and all the things you've been talking about. Don't we need to inculcate a different lens through the education system for young people? Or what are your thoughts on that? Completely. I mean,

I think the biggest regret that I have is right now, if you look at the transition conversations we're all part of, everyone is focusing on you know, material energy decarbonisation, what I would call mitigation strategies to preserve the current, as you would call it, the economic superorganism.

But actually, none of them are dealing with the profound developmental conversations that are rooted in how we incentivize, how we grow, how we nurture, actually the next generation. And my risk is that we're still we're building the same context for them to repeat the same behaviors that we manifest. And worse still, I think we are not able to break. I mean, let's put it this way. You could make an argument that we are a function of our traumas. And many of us have been victims of a field of trauma construction,

which is then weaponizes us to operate in a problem. a very particular way. And I worry that we are intergenerationally handing over these traumas to a next generation rather than actually making a firewall, a firebreak between our generation and the next to allow for a conscious beyond trauma transition, which I think is vital because otherwise we will implicate and pass through the violence that we've been operating with because I think we are functions of that violence rooted in us and at every level incentive systems competition theory, everything else. So we're a function of our trauma and our infrastructure together.

And the infrastructure provides the frameworks of trauma and thereby also those have become the residual roots of how our behaviors manifest into the future. And I think the risk is that we are not able to create a firebreak between the traumas that we carry and we hand them over to the next generation who thereby then are finding it massively more difficult in terms of escaping the economic superorganism or transforming it or recoding it. Okay, let me repackage this in the way that is my language and my work and then you can reply. So there's two general timelines ahead. We have to live differently in the not too distant future and that's going to be different infrastructure,

different rules, different institutions, and different attitudes and values. But between here and there, there's a miracle that happens in the middle, which is the bend, not break all the different transitional things to hold society together, to not have war, to not have the Amazon turn into a Savannah and have runaway warming and all the things. So there's two components, two timelines and also two components. One is our infrastructure and the housing and the energy flows and the taxes and the incentives. And the two is the is the values and the consciousness and where people come from from their heart. And so what you're saying is if we don't have that second thing in transit changing, that the first thing isn't really going to be solved.

So we have to do both of those things at both of those timelines. What are your thoughts? Precisely. And I would argue that whether you look at the industrial revolution or other forms of revolutions that civilizations have gone through, it is usually a symbiotic function between our new technological capabilities and our reimaginations of what it means to be human, our educational capabilities to be reductive. And I think it is the same sort of symbiotic transformation that we're in the middle of. And I think we're going to have to do those two in symbiosis. Okay.

So that brings me to this question. Earlier in this conversation and often in your work, you use the phrase, what we designed designs us back. But what we designed or what was designed by emergence and time and energy surplus and, you know, dominion extractive hierarchies. exist now and we're building on top of that. And so it's hard to design something for the future without this momentum already playing out. So are there ways to, like you said earlier, COVID, we had a glimpse of what it meant to be something different, what it meant to be, you know, the freedom to be radically human. Are there little test pilots, or, you know, trial periods,

can we do this now in small groups or communities or something larger, that we design something in a VR of trial sense so that we, that opens our heart and opens our imagination and creates an Overton window for us to be better able to face these things when they really happen? Absolutely. I mean, you know, we're working for example, you know, Jane Engel is working in Canada.

I was just with her two weeks ago. Exactly. And so she's, you know, she's working with Pam and the Friendship Center looking at how do you make land self-sovereign, which is about, and this is because it rhymes with indigenous ways of being, but it also builds this kind of conversation of the reagentification of the world. So we're seeing at the kind of nexus point between indigenous world views and common low worldviews, these new possibilities emerge, we're seeing like every city, Most cities in the world have declared that they need new forms of tree canopies and ecological infrastructures as a key resilience strategy.

So they know that there's a theory of value in the tree canopies, even though the current accounting systems can't price them. So the perception of value and the political recognition of value is now acting as a forcing function to transform the theory of accounting and the theory of attribution. But it also recognizes that trees planted by communities of a 90% chance of. survival versus tree planted by municipalities because the relationships of value of care is so significant. So we're seeing this, whether we talk about the collective intelligence of a city being recognized as a strategic asset as an emergent asset, non-divisible emergent asset,

which has strategic outcomes is being recognized and thought through. We know our material economics and, you know, our theory of material as a theory of ownership is perhaps insufficient as a means to govern materials, whether we need to now talk about being custodian relationships to material economies, holding the incumbency of full life relationships to the stewardship of there. There's brilliant explorations we're in the middle of of looking at how to look at electric batteries with new forms of,

like I say, stewardship and custodian relationships as opposed to ownership relationships and waste relationships. I don't understand that. What do you mean by that? A custodial relationship for electric batteries? So, for example, it is not that I own it. I have a duty of responsibility to use it and care for it so it can be handed over in a relationship of care to be managed and recycled. It is not a product of ownership and disposal.

And I think there are fundamental, you know, there's a beautiful Taiwanese phrase which are calling my Fang, sort of, there's a, There's a house in Taiwan and the indigenous people of Taiwan sort of say they ask the river permission to borrow the stones and they promise to give the stone back to the river. Now, in that thesis, they have borrowed the stones from nature. They are looking to be custodians of it and they recognize their responsibility to return it. And if they don't, if they don't fulfill their responsibility, nature will take it back in the form of a hurricane. Precisely. But also socially we construct these rules, right? We construct the social arrangements around them. What I'm finding interesting is we now have the bureaucratic frameworks to construct these new material economies. These don't just have to be what I would call soft cultural relationships. We can construct institutional arrangements around this, these sorts of ways are working. So I would argue that these are manifesting now in many, many dimensions. And we were talking about resource-back currencies. I I'm pretty convinced in the African continent we're going to see a whole birth of resource-back currencies as people look to Africa for a resource, but actually the liquidity can be rooted into future ecological minerals and how they can create a new form of circularity around how their mineral resources are there. We're going to see innovation.

And I think we're going to see this in all these dimensions around the world. So I don't sit there with a sort of, I sit there with these fissures being opened up as we were discussing earlier. Okay, let me ask you a very difficult question, and you have as long as you like to answer it. So we have roughly a 19 terawatt metabolism right now. The 8 billion humans use effectively 190 billion 100 watt light bulbs are turned on 24-7. You and I would generally agree this is unsustainable. And in the not too distant future, we're going to have a smaller scale of, of energy and material throughput on average on the planet.

So knowing all that you know and your work on architecture and the metacrisis and everything, if we were able to hypothetically freeze everything now and therefore the built infrastructure is not necessarily causing an additional metabolic building on top of it, given everything you know, how would you restructure society in the housing, infrastructure, economic loss sort of things to be better aligned with a lower throughput future in the next 50 to 100 years? Wow. Okay.

Bring out your paintbrush, Indy. Okay. I'll sort of engage it. And I think I want to, my first thing would be food systems, actually. I think it's super clear that our food systems are going to be one of the first things to go into crisis, both as a result of climate breakdown and other forms of fragilities that are systemically emerging. So I think the transformation of our food system, which I think predominantly, I would argue, is going to have to move towards plant-based food diets as a function of reducing,

our energy input and making sure, I think you referred to it elegantly as kind of where, I think our food system is net endothermic, i.e. we consume some more energy the energy it provides. A lot more. A lot more. And I think we're going to, moving towards a plant-based food diet, I think we're going to have to move towards a combination of shifting our food systems to being rooted in rewilded multi-species farming, which I think thereby sustains the soil at a higher level, but also increases the nutrition density of our food systems, where that will support a new form of precision farming, probably relatively local to reduce logistics and transportation burdens on our energy systems. That will almost certainly be combined, I think, unfortunately,

with some form of control food environments as a resilience buffer in those situations. and some form of that system. So we'll live in this hybridities. I think that will be one of the first transition pathways. I think in terms of transportation, my argument is that the electric bike is actually the future of transportation. It is per mile.

I think we spoke about this. It is the most effective. It preserves pretty much all of our economic geographies. And per unit mile is probably the most efficient. I think if you were to take a more radical future, I would say autonomous three-wheelers would be the kind of game changer in terms of actually the second order framework. So I think the shifting of our transportation systems would be the second move I would really focus on. Third move would be actually looking into

our provision of how we do spatial justice in terms of actually the level of... Spatial justice? Yes. So the equitable distribution of the space is in the environments of our city. There are many, many homes right now, certainly in Europe that are lying empty, that are preserved as assets, financial assets with actually zero utility because of the net depreciation

that they're accumulating on the basis of stability value as opposed to utility value. I think we are going to have to resolve that as a recognising there is a net societal cost of actually preserving it as a non-use, non-utilized asset, and I think we're going to have to open that up and use incentive and also other forms of function to be able to equity share space. I think that's going to have to be, so I think there's a whole dimension about what level of construction. We're then going to

have to rebuild our biomaterial economy. So I would pretty much talk about in the UK, for example, has not one structural timber managed forest, and we're going to have to rebuild our biomaterial economy both to act as forest carbon pumps and carbon sinks, but also with our nutrition cycle to rebuild our construction capabilities over a 20 to 30 year cycle, and that will be also about restabilizing our soil systems. And then I think there's a sort of, those are the kind of macro fields that I think the energy infrastructure, I would just recommend everyone, just listen to you. I think you've described it so well. I think the problem. I don't know the solution. Well, I mean, so I think demand management as well as supply side, my big worry is that everyone often talks about the invention of supply.

And I think actually demand reconstruction is going to be a critical part. Our material economy I already spoke about, that we're going to have to make it fabulously more circular. And the problem with circular materials is not the physical reality. It's our institutional reality, i.e. material passports and our capability to ensure these products. So it's the institutional frameworks for circularity. And who owns the end of life liabilities? How do you construct those chains of liabilities and the incentive systems? So, for example, a building doesn't account for the materials on the balance sheet of a building.

So it's actually we can have to recode how we account for the material costs and the embodied energies and other frameworks into those things. And that will change the near-jural material economy. We won't be doing new build. If we're doing new build, it will almost certainly be roof extensions. we will almost be certainly looking at biomaterial basis and textile construction as a means to actually be able to construct new forms of envelope frameworks. I think we'll be looking at new forms of intangible assets. That will be the places of strategic growth, mental health of a city,

the decision-making capacity of a city, the collective intelligence of a city. I think this will be the spaces of new forms of abundance. I think we'll rebuild the balance sheet of a city rooted in ecological infrastructure of a city is a key part of its productivity cycle. If I'm being really far off, I would start to imagine almost new economies of, sort of, we talk about self-sovereign homes or sort of this sort of new form of property tenure, which allows for the efficacy of these environments without becoming rent-seeking systems. I think then we also go, you know, slightly further off into that future,

that we can start to imagine not only intangible how societies make decisions and the capacities of societies to make decisions in complex volatile situations will be a strategic asset. So I think we'll change our theory where value and balance sheet and risk is understood in fundamental ways. So I think one of the weird moments is that we will change a lot, but I'm not sure the city will change as visibly

as we've kind of imagined in all of our beautiful 2050, 2060 sci-fi films. I think what we're going to change is all sorts of invisible logics of our city and where our theory of values. values is occurring from. So you've thought about this before. Well, it was not just once. So let me ask you this.

Many people blame capitalism as the root of a lot of the issues you're describing. I actually don't because I think it precedes capitalism, the dynamic of the superorganism. But do you see a similar issue? Do you see it that way? And what would you say to people that are suggesting that communism or socialism are the solutions to what we face. So I think the problem space, as I think you rightly allude to,

is the individual and the collective is the same problem. Actually, you're just looking at a different scale. So the individual and the collective, I am also a collective in one view. And then the collective, I think the problem is whenever you root something and understand something through the theory of boundary and other ink, And this is why I think the problem of individualism and collectivism are actually, they're all the same paradigms.

And I think what we have to move from is individual and collectivism as solution spaces to new relationalities. And as soon as you do that, your theory of value goes from not the interest of the collective or the interests of the individual to actually an unbounded theory of organizing. And I think the paradigm leap that this is why, and the same. as, you know, me being slightly controversial. I often get, you know, I go into rooms and people say co-operatives are the future. And I was like, no, co-optives were a brilliant answer to a 19th century problem. But they're not the future because co-opatives still create the boundary of the other. And when they transact with the other, they still operate through externalization and transactions.

Which is why I think one of the things that we have to do is operate in find a new operating, modality to operate in entanglement in unbounded organisms. And I think money systems actually are a theory of operating in unbounded organisms. Money is a kind of organism which actually allows us to operate. Now, I think there's fundamental problems in how we've coded our money systems and designed our money systems because of an inflationary cycle in there and the money production cycles in there. But there are hints as to these complex unbounded organism capacities that exist in that system. So I would root the problem in the individual and the collective are both parts of the same paradigm, and they are both rooted in the theory of othering. So if we move away from othering towards more of a collective in the spirit of all the things you've discussed, isn't there, doesn't that then create a free rider problem where those of dark triad personality type that don't subscribe?

to the ecological entangled worldview that you're espousing can then take even more advantage of the people that are adhering to these principles. What are your thoughts on that? Yes. I mean, I think this is a really important issue. Now, maybe the way of sort of resolve this in my head is not sufficient. I just want to say this straightforwardly. I think the way I've resolve this is the free rider problem is a problem, as I often perceive it and experience it, of a 2% problem. And the problem, I think, is we turn the 2% problem into the 98% problem. And I think when you take a net system view on it, I think the losses attributable by treating

the 98% as vulnerable to the free rider problem are far greater. than what the free riders are consuming in the system. So I think it's where we're trying to solve the problem. I think this is where I think we end up using control as a means for 100% of systems when actually the value unleashed by 98% of people being able to behave differently might be far in excess is my experience of the 2%. So to parse that using different language, love is potentially stronger than fear? Love when it becomes generative and you noble it, I think it can scale.

And I think we've designed our institutional economy. Every employment contract is rooted in a theory of fare. It's rooted in the theory of the free rider. And thereby we diminish all of us in those relationships. And we invite the lowest common relationships that are possible on the system, as opposed to the extraordinary contributions that we can all bring. And I suppose that's maybe where my sort of personal level of hope is and my belief is rooted. And I'll use the word belief.

I think if we were to look at the extraordinaryness of every one of us, our evolutionary journeys or whatever, 13.8 billion years of evolutionary journeys. And actually the extraordinary comitory intelligence and capacity that we have, and yet we resort ourselves. We construct economies of reducing humans to holding doors open. I think there's something kind of lost in our theory of the potentiality and the greatness and the extraordinaryness of being human. And I suppose there's a little bit of belief I have in what would it be to really unlock

the extraordinaryness of being human? So let me ask you this. I'm privileged hosting this podcast to share space with bright pro-future humans like yourself. And there's a lot of them. You mentioned Daniel Schmachtenberger. You know, there's dozens of way smarter people than I am on this program. But you all have slightly different ideas. What would happen if you all, a couple hundred of you, thinking around the metacrisis,

in this way got into a room, does the same sort of human dynamic happen where, well, I want to promote my idea because dark matter labs needs its funding to do this and to pay the employees, or is there potentially an emergence that looks at the collective and is more generative and more to the 98% you were just talking about? I mean, just hypothetically, what are your thoughts on that sort of dynamic? My intuition more and more is that the people that are really looking at this issue and crisis are recognizing the nil value point in the future unless we are able to move ourselves outside it. So any form of theoretical accumulation feels like somebody hasn't understood the problem.

I agree with that. And let me just flip the question on you. I've actually, I think that's going to start happen with philanthropists and people that have accumulated wealth. They need to apply that wealth and their skills and their knowledge and their networks towards this issue. Otherwise, we all self-terminate and what good is wealth then anyways? I do feel that that is like rapidly changing the perception of our situation. Absolutely. And if you're what I'd call a real world.

wealth holder, i.e. you hold land. You are starting to perceive these risks, and societal risks are now scaling in a way that is outstripping any of your theory to be able to manage them at the local level. So, and so to managing your wealth requires you to be able to allocate to the management of societal risks, which is kind of a societal risk hedge fund. It needs to become critical and a critical investment point. So what I'm seeing is, and I, what I love about pretty much everyone you bring on the podcast is I think across the dimensions of time and across the possibilities of space, pretty much everything is relevant. And I think we often pass everything down to actually trying to agree a moment. But I think pretty much everything on certain horizons is a vital part of that

narrative in that journey that we're on. And I think most of the people that you bring on, as I also see, they recognize this point that you and I just discussed. There is no wealth at the other end of this cycle if we don't make it, don't make it through. So any theory of accumulation is a false, false theory of wealth. You know, it's possible that I'm subconsciously self-selecting guests that already believe that. It is, but I think it's also just a case. Unfortunately, I think the science is pretty much, anyone who's watching the science. in any format or the numbers. You know, this is, okay, so let's just dev.

I think there is a body of people, unfortunately, you could argue there is a body of people that believe that there is some pathway through this crisis, through a throttling of the human race. There is a body of people. And I think that meme has become a means for the wealthy to insulate themselves psychologically. a brilliant delusion and delisle mechanism to theoretically try to insulate themselves from this crisis. Yet, and you know, Nate, you've done this, Daniel does this beautifully as well, and many others do this. If you understand the dynamics of violence that are available to us, and actually, whether it's, you know, forget the kind of primary tools of violence, but the production of antibiotics, like the production of silicon chips.

If we unleash that scale of violence, there is no pathway for the few to survive because we will rip the base cords at such a fundamental level. And the unleash it, when you combine that with bioweapons and other things, there's no pathway. And I think there's some memes that we have to destroy because they're becoming delusional vessels which are actually not allowing people to just perceive what's necessary. And I think that's the other part of the story that I think is really critical. And I'm not, you know, Daniel does obviously these game scenarios, which I think are really important. But I think we need to start to recognize these systemic entanglements and this kind of, this fork that we're facing, not a gradient.

How do we destroy a meme? Because isn't that like, don't think about an elephant, you automatically do? How would you destroy? a meme. I think the way you can undermine a mean is to make it as sort of, I think these are sort of crutches, certainly this particular one is a crutch that allows you to perceive individual survival. That doesn't allow

you to engage the entanglement. And I've personally been in Rooms where I've said, look, I know you've been told this by environmentalists. The earth carrying capacity is a billion people. so we're going to get down to a billion people. And I'm like, there was no scenario that I'm aware of that allows us to smoothly get down to a throttling. I think once we unleash those traumas at every level, this is a runaway problem. Because remember, our war machine is not even accounted in our carbon function.

And so once we unleash this, there's no pathway. And I think once you allow people to see the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. delusionary kind of conceit in that framework. I think it's unsustainable. The mean erodes itself. And I think this was, and this happened to me standing in a lunch queue where we were standing together in a lunch queue having this conversation. Do you mean? Like so, and it was really interesting for the other person, I remember this conversation, the other person just said, oh, that's interesting. That changes my world. And it was literally like this. And I don't think, it's not that people are possessing these beings. They don't,

But they need something to deflate them because they've become frameworks of problems. And that's one of them. And there's a lot of them. I agree. And I think the way to dispel them is like this. You just have conversations and it just shifts your consciousness about certain themes. There's so many of these memes. And you just mentioned one.

And I think just having these conversations. is enough to dispel in people's minds or at least have an Overton window of changing how we think about these things. I know my own view on what we face has both crystallized and softened over the last five years as I have talks with people like you and in others. So, Indy, what can the people watching this do to kind of, be part of the scout team that is espousing these values? What are some practical suggestions for people to bring values of responsibility and stewardship and some of the things that Dark Matter Labs is trying to work on? What advice do you have for people?

I think listen to all your back catalog. I think genuinely, I think one of the most extraordinary contributions we made is actually, you know, listening to the journey that you've been recording over the last years, I think it's really important. So I think exposing ourselves to these narratives and these conversations is vital. I also think we have to start to, I think one of the most transitional journeys is recognizing our interdependency. And I think one of the big challenges is the forcing functions to create the other are so large and systemic that they become easy devices of organizing, political organizing,

but they're systemically not appropriate to deal with the nature of the crisis and transitions we face. And third, I would say, is I really do think it's worth keeping, bearing in mind the extraordinary moment and capacity we have, the potentiality we have to pivot to make this transition. maybe that this throttle is the only way we'll make this, this, this pivot moment will only be made available to us as we imagine and operate into this energy throttle and this material throttle that allows us to actually reconcile and build a new capacity, which may open up a whole new forms of abundance. So I think we have to, and I think I have historically never not been a fan of since the last few years the word hope. But I don't know.

mean hope in a kind of hopium sort of sense has been used by people. But I mean, I think, recognizing the extraordinary potentiality of being human and actually liberating ourselves from the doctrines that have limited our own capacities and the kind of superorganism, as you rightly say, which has diminished our own capacities and diminished our own capacities to see our own extraordinarily, both individually but also in entanglements. and at a plenary scale. And that requires us to become quite different in both our dialogue and our relationship each other.

And I think words, my final point would be, let us become more conscious about the languages we use, because the languages we use shape the nature of the relationships we form and how we construct the world around us. And I think there's something really potent in the nature of the language and the nature of our use of language. And I think final point I would just say is that there's been. beautiful writings which talk about how English is largely an object-oriented language. And whereas actually many indigenous languages are verb-orientated,

so they construct a different form of being and becoming in the world. And I think the more conscious we are about these tools and devices that we have to narrate the world and orchestrate and see the world, and the more intentional we become about that, it opens up a landscape of possibility that I think has been largely ignored. And I think this is where I have radical hope. To expand that landscape of possibility, I understood and agreed with all the words you just said. And then we hang up and I go do my job and my, well, this actually is my job. But I go doing the other things on my list.

And it's hard to do as an individual. So how critical is it for people to connect and become entangled and have relationships to, breathe life into this new way of thinking. How critical is it to have a group of friends or fellow travelers in this space? Look, I think this space is rooted in constructing new alliances, but also is rooted in everything around us. You know, the employment contract that we sign, that we write, that is rooted in a theory of the, I would say,

the kind of economic superorganism. It's rooted in a theory of control. So every one of these intentionalities and choices, what biases we default to is a choice that we have and we have a choice to change that. I also think that this is why, you know, whether when I talk about the reanimism of the world, that's an alliance of how we operate in both in our theory of human contribution to our theory of value, but also non-human contribution, sort of nature and other systems, but also technological contribution. I think there is a new alliance to be made between the technologists and the ecologists and the kind of labor and beyond labor theorists who want to emancipate us from theories and constraints of labor. And I think we have to actively construct these new landscapes of possibilities and these new politics has to be constructed because I think there is a new alliance across us all those frameworks. And not to live in the landscape of othering. I think, you know, I think you often point this out.

we are all a function of the hydrocarbon economy, and we're all living this life as a function of the hydrocarbon economy. And there is no other in that story. And that, I think, requires us to have a different type of political theory in a theory of transition. Almost all. I learned yesterday there are still many undiscovered, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Yeah, but I get your point. So what advice do you have, Indy, for young humans, who are maybe follow this podcast and suddenly learning about the depth and breadth of the challenges of the human and end biosphere predicament?

What advice would you give to them? My genuine advice would be this is also bloody extraordinary. I think if we leap this, we leap the Furby paradox into a new paradigm. And I think this is probably one of the most important and interesting periods of human civilization. And I think there's something extraordinary on the other side of this. And to fall in love with that extraordinaryness is as important as to recognize the fear of the predicament where we stand in. And I think we have to live in those two tensions really comfortably. But I think the fall in love is also really important with the potentiality of what exists in front of us.

What do you care most about in the world, Indy? What I care about most is living with this belief of how extraordinary we can all be. I, and I don't mean that as a sort of, there's something quite beautiful to live in the world through that lens, as opposed to live with another world. And through my life, there was a very good friend of mine, Paul Cardinal, and I remember something was going on. And, and I was like, but you don't understand, this guy is amazing. and he is extraordinary in terms of how he cares and manifests in the world. And I remember I was whatever 12, 13 saying this. And it came out of my mouth, but it was so beautiful for me to look back at it because

that was the thing that I found amazing is that there is extraordinary in the world and to be able to live in that possibility I think is really vital. You follow the podcast so you know this question is coming. If you could wave a magic wand, Indy Johar, with no personal recourse to your reputation or status, what is one thing you would do to put human and our planetary futures on a better path? I think I would move us to a verbing language. I don't know what it looked like. I don't know how we talk.

But if English could become a verbing language and would root it in verb orientation, I think we would, and how that would impact culture. how that would impact everything else, how we've conceived it. I think there's something really potent in that. Well, because that loops back to the infrastructure of the past, because we have an infrastructure both in the buildings and the economic institutions, but we have an infrastructure in our language. And that also recursively flips back on who we are or who we perceive that we are.

You've given me an idea for an upcoming. frankly. I'll try to just speak in verbs. I really appreciate it. This has been a hell of a first conversation. I can already assure you that I would like to have you as a repeat guest because I didn't even get to a lot of the questions that we had prepared. If you were to come back, what is one topic that you are passionate about that you know or believe is relevant to the great simplification that you would be willing to take a deep dive on.

I think it will be the next economy of land. I think this is probably the base root level transformation that we're in the middle of, and it requires us to reimagine all sorts of logics of ownership, logists of accounting, logic of being relationship, logics of custodianship, all sorts of things. And I think there's going to be rooted in a new thesis and economy of land. Let's do it. Indy Johar, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you and all the people at Dark Matter Labs for your work.

Where can people find out more about what you're working on? We publish openly all the time on provocations at Dark Matter Labs. And, Nate, I just want to thank you for everything that you're doing in bringing so many amazing people into relationship and to dialogue and to building these conversations into that framework. And I really appreciate it. Exchalcier, onwards, my friend, to be continued. Take care. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your

favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann and Lizzie Siriani.