Indy Johar on Civilizational Optionality: Preserving a Planet That Has Become Self-Aware
The Long Now Foundation
At a Long Now Talk at San Francisco's Cowell Theater, Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, argued that a long-term view matters more now, because the future is becoming "foreshortened," opaque and hard to imagine. His central question is what we are trying to preserve, and how. His answer is not the continuity of civilization as usually understood. He proposes the preservation and expansion of optionality, the range of futures still open to a planet he describes as having become self-aware. He then asks what forms of organizing, financing and deciding could keep those futures open when shocks compound and fates are coupled. He presented much of this as live work with partners, and he said openly that many of the questions still lack answers.
A Moment of "Systemic Degenerative Volatility"
Johar opened by describing the present as a period of "systemic degenerative volatility," and he named several drivers.
The first is climate breakdown, which he defined as the loss of the predictable weather patterns societies have relied on. He cited a projected warming range of 2.8 to 3.1 degrees. A 3-degree global average, he said, means about 5 degrees on land and about 8 degrees warmer in urban environments. He also said that between 1.7 and 1.9 degrees, the world will "almost certainly" lose one of its five major food baskets. He stressed that temperature is only a proxy for climate volatility in general.
The point he most wanted the audience to take away was about timing. Discussions tend to focus on end states, such as 3 degrees, or a London that swings between minus 20 and plus 40. In Johar's view, the more damaging period is the volatility between now and any new equilibrium. That transition produces "whiplash effects," including price shocks and inequality, and he considers it far more destabilizing. Society might or might not be able to cope with the end state, he said, but the volatility arrives first.
The second driver is ecological breakdown. He pointed to a UK government report released in the previous two weeks on the catastrophic effects of ecological breakdown and its relationship to the social contract. He argued that as ecological losses erode the social contract, most of society's assets and theories of value begin to erode too.
The third driver is the race around a new general-purpose technology that could establish "a hegemony of power for the next 50 years." He said this race over resources, compute and futures creates an unprecedented sense of existential competition, driven by the fear that if a runaway power structure does not arise in one place, it will arise somewhere else.
He tied these abstractions to everyday costs such as food and energy prices. Highly nutritious foods in the UK, he reported, rose 82% in two years. The combined picture, in his words, is an environment that is systemically fragile, volatile, fracturing into geopolitical competition, and "weaponizable."
Cascades and the Myth of the New Zealand Strategy
Johar argued that these risks become existential because they cascade. His example, as he recounted it, began with fires around Moscow in 2008 that led Russia to stop exporting fertilizers. Food prices spiked worldwide, riots broke out in 60 cities, and he said the Arab Spring was "almost certainly" catalyzed by those conditions. The chain ran from fires to fertilizer to the collapse of the social contract. As cascades grow larger, he said, we open pathways where the social contract cannot be stabilized, and systems that looked divisible turn out to be "planetarily coupled."
The typical response to this coupling is what he called "New Zealand strategies": the belief among some wealthy people that they could escape to a remote refuge. COVID showed how hard that is, he said. New Zealand lacked access to antibiotics, microchip production and PPE. He credited a pre-talk conversation with the moderator for the example of a toaster. No single country can make even a toaster on its own, let alone a microchip. Talk of forced decoupling from the planet is, in his word, "delusional." A rainforest cannot be decoupled either, because it shapes atmospheric rivers that operate across the planet.
How Precarity Shortens the Future
Johar then argued that volatility is making people more fragile, and that this fragility shrinks their ability to perceive the future. He framed this as a matter of material conditions, not intellect. "If I'm hungry today," climate breakdown in 30 years does not matter, because the immediate risk is starvation within days. He noted that average savings in the US are, he believed, less than a month and a half of income.
His conclusion was that "we have systematically economically foreshortened society's capacity to perceive the future." If people face different risks on different timescales, a society cannot build consensus or legitimacy around long-term frameworks. The ability of some people to think long-term, he suggested, is a privilege that is itself a product of this breakdown. He returned to this point near the end: without a shared perception of risk, a society's capacity to organize is fragmented.
Rethinking What We Preserve: A Critique of Long-Termism
Johar raised what he considered the most important question, what we are trying to preserve, and said he would be "a little bit difficult, but only as a friend" to his Long Now audience. The question of preservation, he argued, often reduces to preserving "the minimal viable continuity of civilization." He suggested that long-termism, read critically, aims at exactly this. That goal is not the same as preserving 8.5 billion people. He said such a concept carries an "instant discount" on human lives, has "horrific imaginary possibilities," and legitimizes thinking along those lines.
As an alternative, he drew on James Lovelock's last book, Novacene, whose first third he called extraordinary. In his reading of Lovelock, the Earth stored vast amounts of solar energy in hydrocarbons and released it to form a civilization of 8.5 billion people, one capable of human, machine and ecological activity. He showed the 1968 Apollo photograph of the whole Earth and called it "the moment where the planet became self-aware," when the planet could perceive itself. Echoing the toaster example, he said it took the entire capacity of that civilization for the planet to photograph itself.
What should be preserved, he argued, is this: a planet becoming self-aware, whose intelligence we are part of. He rejected the framing of ecology versus machines versus humans. "Machines are as natural as humans," he said, and all three are part of the planet's self-awareness. He suggested this may be very rare in the galaxy, let alone the universe. The objective he proposed is therefore to preserve and expand the optionality of that self-aware planet, not merely the continuity of civilization.
From Conservation to Regeneration and Transformation
Johar described the underlying problem this way. The economic model built over the industrial era generated enormous optionality by using stored energy, but it produced externalities that now feed back on themselves. Those externalities are forcing a "recoupling" of the planet, while information systems, monetary systems and compute are layered over it. He cited Benjamin Bratton as someone who explains this layering well.
He said the task has three parts: preserve the "deep code" optionality, regenerate damaged environments, and transform them. His example was that, because of climate breakdown, nearly every ecological landscape will need to move roughly 100 miles north or south. Evolution cannot do this, because the changes outpace evolutionary capacity. He concluded that there is no longer a theory of simply conserving ecosystems. They will have to be actively regenerated, and the same is true in the Arctic and Antarctic. Letting go and assuming rewilding will solve the problem is not a viable path, in his view.
He applied this to foundational systems. On nutrition, he referred to a book on soil loss he assumed many in the audience had read, repeated the food-basket warning, and said we are "about 40 cycles of agriculture away" from significant soil damage. He also listed shelter, energy stability, water, bio-integrity and "cognitive security."
He spent the most time on shared decision-making capacity. A society that cannot perceive, sense, make sense and decide together cannot manage the risks it faces. "Democracy is not an overhead on the free market," he said. "It's the fundamental means to manage common fates." He clarified that he did not mean industrial or representative democracy, but "agentic liberty" and the ability to care and cooperate about common fates, which requires reimagined tools. Because damage is already locked in, he argued, the world will likely overshoot some limits and have to pull back over time. The question becomes how to regenerate common infrastructures fast enough to be resilient and antifragile under shock.
Coordination Technologies and Learning as a Way of Organizing
This demands a new class of technologies, Johar said, by which he meant socio-technical frameworks and social capacities, not mechanistic tools. The biggest problem he identified is many-to-many collaboration: coordinating large numbers of agents in complex situations.
If competition was the defining coordination technology of the past, he asked how we might "swarm innovation," supporting many agents working toward a shared goal such as cooling a city, with capital and value organized in new formats. He suggested machine learning may open a new mode of organizing in which learning itself becomes the means of coordination, because learning expands the surface area of our ability to operate in complexity. He called this a paradigm of organizing, not just of technology. "21st century organizing is going to be rooted in learning," he said, and the future CEO is a "chief learning officer." An organization's ability to learn at speed, he argued, will be its main source of utility.
Illustrating New Civilizational Options: Living Bridges and Terra Preta
Johar offered examples of what new "civilization options" might look like, calling them "a rhyme with the past." He showed a bridge in India grown from living tree roots, a biological infrastructure shaped by human intervention. He then noted that the Amazon was effectively a multispecies open garden, and that its fertility and hyper-biodiversity result from its having been gardened, which he connected to terra preta.
He asked the audience to imagine agroforestry futures in which precision micro-machines and autonomous machines help cultivate multispecies landscapes. Again, the point was not to separate ecological, human and machine futures, but to ask what options open up when they are combined. Densifying multispecies systems, he argued, strengthens soil. It also supports diverse business and value models, and provides a technological base for labor in a context where, in aging societies, human labor will increasingly not be available. He called this "an entirely novel landscape of possibility," with value not only in soil preservation and diversified nutrition and biodiversity, but also in the new technologies themselves.
Doubt, Partial Knowing, and Care
Johar then turned to how we conceive of machines, which he said is usually rooted in control and certainty. He offered his own reading of Descartes as "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am." He prefers the doubt, he explained, because no one, however brilliant, can know everything. That is informationally and computationally impossible, so the only truth anyone can genuinely hold is their partial knowing.
He described this as "a beautiful liberation." Because partiality is a truth, one must operate with doubt. Doubt then invites curiosity about someone else's partial knowing, and leads to a way of being rooted in "tentativeness, tenderness, and care" in a complex, relational world. This matters, he said, for reimagining what it means to be human and also for reimagining what machines could be. Used as a framework, it opens pathways not only to resilience but to antifragility and new civilizational capabilities, with doubt, tenderness and care serving as "epistemic behaviors" for operating in complexity. He added that current technology may for the first time let us operate within rich situational complexity instead of simplifying the world to fit ideas of certainty and linearity. He called this an extraordinary moment.
Optionality for Whom? Entanglement as Enlightened Self-Interest
Johar recounted what he called one of his most profound conversations of the past year. A person of significant wealth told him that, given current conditions, they expected to lose 90% of their wealth over the next 30 years. Johar described this person as hyper-rational and self-interested, not driven by morality. What mattered was the recognition that their wealth was entangled with the planet, and that recognition changed how they thought they had to act.
From this, Johar argued that expanding planetary optionality is not a moral choice but one of "enlightened self-interest," given the "terminal pathways we're on." There is no split between the few and the many, only a shared fate. The breakdown of the social contract, he said, is not a piece of paper blowing away. It means producing traumatized people with access to asymmetric, weaponizable technologies, including bioweapons, which he said have been largely democratized. The cost of large-scale harm has "collapsed into virtually zero," he argued, which forces coupling. CO2 acts as a "planetary coupling device," so cascades no longer stay local.
He applied this to the UK. Losing the Antarctic ice shelves would mean, by his figure, about 65 meters of sea-level rise, and "there is no meaningful UK" after that. So he was "not asking for moral universal ideas of justice," only for being smart. He went further and suggested that morality is itself a function of perceived separation from the planet. Wealth, he said, is a concentrated claim on the capacity for future-making, which is acceptable only if the entanglements are recognized. "There is no fortress pathway in a mutually assured destructive future." The goal must be to expand the option space, not merely preserve the current one, or the result will be a zero-sum, mutually destructive future. He defined optionality as the set of available futures in which we can respond to uncertainties and risks we cannot foresee.
Where to Act: Glaciers, Atmospheric Currents, and Hot Cities
On the question of where to act, Johar pointed to glaciers, likely to be largely lost in the Alps and parts of the Himalayas. The Himalayas, he said, support the hydrological cycle of about 3.5 billion people, including at least three nuclear powers. Again, the danger does not require the glaciers to disappear. It only requires volatility severe enough for violence to become the dominant way of resolving conflicts. He also cited UK modeling suggesting that if the AMOC ocean current is lost, most of the UK would become unfarmable because the hydrological cycle would weaken so much. He described this as the start of a new theory of atmospheric governance.
He cited Madrid, which he said faces temperatures of 47°C in midsummer, and insisted on the human stakes. A close friend of an acquaintance of his died after nights too hot to sleep: the man got into a car in the morning and fell asleep in it. Johar listed other effects of heat: rising domestic abuse, transformer failures that ripple through supply chains, road maintenance costs, and drops in IQ.
He argued that the most vulnerable places will often not be where solutions are pioneered. It is hard to do this work in the Himalayas, but it may be possible in the Alps, where the need is understood, political "thickness" exists, and there is enough talent density to build new institutional infrastructure. The first movers, in his view, will be places where "risk is legible, politics can hold and talent can orchestrate," and they will need to move quickly.
Beyond the Startup: New Organizational Forms for Multi-Actor Problems
On how to act, Johar said cooling Madrid is not a single-product problem but a multi-point intervention problem that needs a portfolio of innovations: different products, measurements, cooling methods and automation. Glacier stabilization is similar. Much of our theory of innovation is built around the startup, but cooling a city will cost billions and require coordinated interventions across many domains. The bottleneck, he said, is usually organizational. It involves pooling risk across thousands or tens of thousands of actors, allocating interventions by situation and location, and financing it all. He called this "a wrapper problem" that must be solved before the physical technologies can be organized.
He proposed a new word for the organizations he has in mind, which the recording renders as "executions." He contrasted them with closed, bounded institutions and with startups: new ways of organizing large, multi-actor problems without fixed boundaries. Their required capabilities include pooling liabilities across many agents and building "deep attractors" for the future. He raised a harder issue as well. When the effects of climate risk are properly priced, he said, most economic enterprises "don't make it through; they're nonviable," which means the politics of that reality must be deliberately designed. He described an "outcome accelerator" aimed at a goal such as cooling a city by 7.5 degrees, combining startups, policy, civic participation, new infrastructure and supply-chain innovation, with teams of entrepreneurs working together in new ways.
His provocation was that if the startup was the institution of change from 2001 onward, the 21st century may need a different organizational form. Capitalization, he said, becomes a question of roughly two billion to cool a city. He stressed that this was not hypothetical: most of these pathways are ones his organization is building with partners, and cooling Madrid and stabilizing Alpine water systems are real 21st-century problems.
The Value of Being Human and Decision-Making in Complexity
Johar said one question he had not addressed enough was the value of being human, which he believes is diminishing rapidly. Returns on labor have stagnated or declined relative to returns on assets. This devalues human beings and also makes it harder to finance education and health systems. As California transforms machine logics, he argued, equal or greater attention should go to the future value of being human, and to human-machine logics rooted in conversation, doubt and curiosity instead of certainty and opinion.
He listed other open questions. How do you finance bioregions, meaning large landscapes involving soil preservation, water regeneration, multispecies nutrition and biomaterials, micro-autonomous farming machines, and non-extractive provenance systems? How can societies decide together? Representative democracy, in his view, only works for a relatively simple or linear world. We are trying to apply "a 19th century theory of decisions" to a complex landscape, even though, he told the audience, "you've built the technology" to support something new. He suggested large-scale learning models could enable new forms of conversation, focused not on "valorization of opinion" but on society's capacity for complex discourse. He also asked what it would mean to create "fertile societies," meaning systemic fertility, not biological.
As a historical precedent for new governance, he cited the Danube, where conflict among 12 nations gave rise to the concept of international waters. He expects 21st-century forms of governing, organizing and capitalizing to emerge similarly from specific "sites of discovery."
The Scale of Value at Risk and the Questions Without Answers
Johar stressed how large the numbers are. For London residential property alone, he cited 3.8 million homes at an average price of £668,000, for a total value at risk of £2.52 trillion. That, not marginal gains in growth or jobs, is the economic background he said he works against.
He described the deepest revolution as a shift in organizational theory along two lines: from control and instruction, which treats humans as "poor machines," to learning as the foundation; and from bounded corporations to unbounded organizing. "It's not a dream; it's just the means of organizing," he said. He also asked how to "thicken" Markov blankets to buy time and capacity, what roles fiat money, stablecoins and "next economics" should play, and how conversation, which he believes has far more bandwidth than opinion, could be valued more highly.
He shared an anecdote on that point. He has often been told his language is too complicated, fine for Westminster but not for ordinary people. His experience was different: an 89-year-old man once told him he did not understand every word, but Johar had put words to what he was feeling. For Johar, the goal is the conversation, not the opinion, and machine-assisted tools could greatly expand the surface area of coordination.
He framed the long list of questions as an invitation. How to put mathematics behind cascade risk, pool liabilities, build outcome accelerators, write term sheets, and distribute value among many parties: "these are questions that we are dealing with and we don't yet have answers." He also mentioned an idea his team has explored, a "prophecy lab," which would ask whether deep attractors for a different future could be deliberately engineered, and what legitimacy such work would need. He closed by describing a fork between "mutually assured destruction and mutually assured thriving," quoted Jurassic Park's "life wants to live," and called for a long now for everyone, not a few.
Q&A: Nations as Knots in Global Flows
The moderator, whom Johar had referred to as Denise, returned to the toaster. Nations are reasserting borders and sovereignty, yet no single country can make even a seven-component toaster. How can a planetary perspective be asserted in this context?
Speaking from the UK perspective, Johar described the UK as "a knot in global flows," and said it would be a mistake to try to govern it by its boundary. The UK is existentially linked to the Antarctic and the Amazon. He proposed governance that is "situational and relational," in which the UK defines itself through relationships, for example with Kenyan soils and their long-term mutual development, instead of through extraction, which destabilizes both sides. He positioned this between two familiar options: a universal common good, which he said has been actively critiqued, and the bounded Westphalian state. His middle path is enlightened self-interest viewed through a systems lens, with mutual development as a way to stabilize one's own situation. He said he believes the science supports this.
Q&A: Negotiating Between Human and Biospheric Optionality
The moderator noted that human civilization's growth has come at the expense of the biosphere's optionality through lost biodiversity, and asked how to negotiate between optionality for humans, the biosphere and now agentic systems.
Johar called it perhaps the most complex question available. He reframed it by saying about one billion people live at multiples of planetary capacity, while about 7.5 billion live within planetary boundaries. Returning to terra preta, he argued that industrial logics are efficient for capital but "systemically deeply unproductive over time." Multispecies gardening, combined with new technologies and a changing role for labor, could provide more diversity and nutrition at a scale never achieved before. So the solution is not just negotiating lifestyles but reimagining foundational goods from the root.
He expressed "deep hope" in moving beyond the industrial logic of simplification, citing James Scott's Seeing Like a State. He believes embracing complexity and situational variety is now technologically and bureaucratically possible, pointing to Summer of Protocols and other work, and to smart contracts as enabling "a contingent landscape, a parametric landscape of organizing." One example was material stewardship. Owning a timber house, he argued, really means holding an obligation to steward that timber, and the liability for its stored carbon, for 500 years. Current ownership includes the right to abuse and burn, and there are no institutions for "material stewardship chains." He believes such mechanisms could unlock unprecedented optionality at multiple layers.
Q&A: Being "Better Capitalists"
Asked to repeat a provocation from the previous evening about everyone being "bad capitalists," Johar said there is a once-in-generations arbitrage between what markets price and where value and risk actually lie, and the two are "totally out of whack." The science provides the numbers, but people are locked into outdated paradigms that cannot price them. Five years or so earlier, he said, he might have argued "let's be better people." Now he does not think inner development is needed. The scale of the losses makes a different theory of value evident. He urged being sharp capitalists: understand the risk, think intergenerationally, allocate and move.
Asked what capital allocators should do, given institutional constraints, he offered several points. Institutional capital is bound to an old worldview at many layers, so family offices have a unique ability to take a different risk profile. Every capital holder should "build a fucking worldview." He said he has not seen even the best funds systematically examine their risk profile and the impact of their allocations. Risk models should focus on volatility, specifically how fast systems cascade into exposed total value at risk, rather than end states. Continuity value, meaning stable water, energy and nutrition supply, will command high premiums. He mentioned his team's work on "security and stability economics."
The moderator distinguished risk management of one's own portfolio from proactive investment in mitigation and resilience. Johar replied that no portfolio can keep up with financializing risk at the scale it is growing outside, so an inward strategy is "a demise strategy." Value will come from a "risk-on" stance toward external risk, finding leverage points. He noted that venture capital is fundamentally risk-on and said this is its moment, pointing to derivative technologies, stability as "a delta function," and his belief that stability is underpriced as volatility rises.
Q&A: Where Optionality Pays, and Whether Doubt Is Foundational
An audience member named Joseph asked for examples where optionality has a first-order positive effect on innovation, economics or governance. Johar pointed to the bioregionalism movement. Restoring agroforestry landscapes, water infrastructure and soil density addresses threats to nutrition and bio-integrity. On top of those "longitudinal assets," he said, a full stack of value emerges: biomaterials, the nutrition economy, fire risk management, provenance and standards technologies, and derivative technologies. Together these provide resilience, continuity and antifragility.
The moderator raised a possible paradox. Johar celebrates new capacity to manage complex systems, yet asks us to embrace doubt. Is doubt foundational to intelligence? "Yes," he said. If one cannot know everything, the only awareness one can hold is partial knowing. Curiosity about others then stops being a pleasant trait and becomes the only way to expand one's knowing, and tentativeness and tenderness become ways of being. He referred to self-learning machines that dynamically reorganize to find ways of walking. Doubt, he said, does not rule out action or knowing more. It roots action in hypothesis, inquiry and question-oriented organizing.
The moderator suggested this personal stance could be built into organizations as continuously learning entities. Johar agreed and added that the "object form" becomes the conversation. If both parties know partially, the conversation is what matters, and "intelligence is not my position or your position," but a meta-property of the evolving conversational field. He contrasted this with an anthropocentric, internalized view of intelligence, and called conversation "the unit product."
Q&A: Eschatology, Faith, and the Future of Being Human
A question credited to Ashoka noted that planetary coordination happens amid largely monotheistic eschatologies centered on end times and salvation, whose political power may grow as breakdown increases. How could a planetary perspective build broad constituencies?
Johar drew on his Sikh faith, in which, he explained, God is not a thing out there. Everything is God, a non-divisible worldview. He cited Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand, which he described as exploring different theories of masculinity, partnership societies, and non-monotheistic societies with different relationships to land. He suggested we are on a course of a new form of evolution. Seeing the blue marble photograph as a planet perceiving itself, he said, changes our relationship to ourselves and our sense of separation from the planet.
He argued that the most radical question is not the future of AI but the future of being human. Every revolution, he said, has reinvented what it means to be human, and this is "the underdeveloped thesis." He urged San Francisco and California to hold that question alongside their machine-learning work, and said conversations with neuroscientists suggest a completely different path. Between the image of the planet perceiving itself and an expanded idea of being human, he thinks something may break us free of historical lock-ins.
Closing: A Fork, Not a Choice
The moderator quoted Stewart Brand, "None of us can save the world, but we can all set in motion a self-saving world," and asked what the audience should take away. Johar said we face "a fork, not a choice," and the real question is whether we want to live. Once mutually assured thriving is seen as the only viable pathway, he argued, the available options and ways of seeing the world change radically.
He told the audience they were in a place of extraordinary opportunity, and that capabilities built there will be essential building blocks. But he fears we remain "trapped into the institutional forms of the 19th century" despite having the capacity to organize very differently. His closing provocation: if San Francisco and California were the birthplace of the startup as a way of organizing value around 2001, what is the form of organizing value in 2026? "I don't think it's a startup."
Hi everyone. It is wonderful to be with you. I'm so excited to be hosting Indy for his talk tonight. Indy is a true provocateur of better institutional and infrastructural futures. Indy is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and it's described as a living lab for building options for the next economies. So we're thrilled to have Indy joining us tonight for his talk but also as a new member of our recently launched advisory body called the Council at Long Now. So we will Yes. And we have I think a few council members here as well tonight. So, thank you for being here and we're thrilled to have his genius in forming the future of Long Now as an institution. So, you're in for a treat tonight.
Good evening. It's an absolute honor to be here and to be sitting in front of so many of you is an absolute honor. So, one of the reasons I'm delighted and honored to be here is that I think this is an important moment to talk about what is a long now view in a world which is increasingly becoming foreshortened and our futures become increasingly opaque and unforeseen and unimaginable. I think how we talk about a long now becomes actually increasingly critical.
I would like to put forth to you that I think we're living in a moment of systemic degenerative volatility. Now, this volatility is rooted in multiple factors and I'm going to name some drivers. One of them inevitably right now is that we're heading in many ways towards climate breakdown which is the breakdown of predictable weather patterns to which we've been used to. And that landscape is between 2.8 to 3.1 degrees is likely the projected scenario of the world that we're living in. What does 3 degrees global average mean? It means 5 degrees on land, it means 8 degrees warmer in your urban environments. But when you put those numbers into factor that between 1.7 to 1.9°, we will almost certainly lose one of the major food baskets of the world. There are five major food baskets. And remember, I'm using temperature as just a proxy. It's actually climate volatility in every sense.
The one thing I'm going to put into your minds is that we often talk about these end states. People talk about three degrees, people talk about minus 20 plus 40, but actually the more damaging issue is the volatility that happens between now and the end point. So it's not the new stabilization positions, it's the volatility that happens. Why is that volatility important? Because that volatility has whiplash effects in terms of actually whether it's price inequality all sorts of effects that is the period that is actually far more destabilizing. The end goal we might be able to deal with or may not be able to deal with volatility period happens first.
Second ecological breakdown. The UK government just released in the last two weeks one of the most interesting reports out there looking at the catastrophic effects with ecological breakdown its relationship to social contract. I think what we need to keep an eye on is the relationship of those ecological effects to social contract loss. And as you lose that, you start to lose pretty much most of our assets and theories of value in society in multiple ways.
Third, we're also living in a moment of an idea of a new form of general purpose technology which can create a hegemony of power for the next 50 years, which is creating a form of race of resources and compute and futures that is also creating a sense of existential competition to the point that we've never never had before because of the fear it generates of a runaway power structure and a hegemony that if it's not here, it's somewhere else.
And this means in real people's lives, not just the kind of conceptual problems, but the practical problems of food prices, energy prices. Highly nutritious foods in the UK have gone up 82% in the last two years. So we're seeing a systematic inequality start to drive into the environment. So as we look forward into this, what you start to see is an environment that's becoming systemically fragile, volatile, fracturing into its geopolitical competition, and also weaponizable.
We're living in a moment when these risks are actually cascading into becoming existential because they're falling into cascades. One of the major cascades, if you remember 2008, some of you will remember this, 2008, there were fires around Moscow, which meant that Russia stopped the export of fertilizers. As a result, what you saw were food prices around the world go through the roof. And those food prices meant there were riots in 60 cities. And the Arab Spring was almost certainly catalyzed by those situations. So you get a relationship between fires, fertilizer all the way through social contract.
And when you start to look at those cascades in more and more significant terms, you start to open yourself up to these pathways where we cannot stabilize the social contract. What looked like divisible environments start to become planetarily coupled.
And in that moment, we reach for what I would call New Zealand strategies. And you know there were moments when people with significant wealth thought that you could hide in New Zealand but it very quickly becomes very apparent that it's very difficult. New Zealand didn't have access to antibiotics didn't have access to microchip production didn't have access to PPE. So what you found in COVID was that actually to live outside the planetary context becomes increasingly difficult. Denise was in pre-con conversations was pointing out the difficulty of even making a toaster, right? Forget a microchip, a toaster.
So, we live in this kind of delusional conversation about forced decoupling and our capacity to decouple from the planet. And whether I talk about the toaster or even a rainforest, you can't decouple a rainforest from the planet because the rainforest is fundamentally charging and transforming the atmospheric rivers that are operating across the planet. And that opens up a question about what is our strategy of operating in a planetary context.
But as we start to see this volatility, we're also seeing people becoming increasingly fragile, increasingly vulnerable in ways and the future is becoming foreshortened. The capacity to perceive into the future is becoming increasingly difficult. And that is not just a function of intellectual capacity or anything like that. You know, if I'm hungry today, climate change and breakdown does not matter tomorrow or in 30 years time because I'm hungry today.
So if you want to fracture a society's capacity to be able to perceive the future in a shared social contract, what you have to do is create differential risks. My risk today is hunger today. Well, I don't give a [ __ ] about climate breakdown because I'm going to be dead in seven days if I don't have food. If I have only a monthly paycheck, what's the average savings? I think in the US it's less than a month and a half, I think. So that means that we have systematically economically foreshortened society's capacity to perceive the future and that's making our capacity to imagine a long future systemically fragile and we cannot create consensus or legitimacy around those frameworks. So in partial ways we feel privileged but the privilege is a function of this breakdown.
And this opens up for me one of the most important questions. What are we trying to preserve? Here I'm going to be a little bit difficult but only as a friend.
Often the question of preservation is a very reductive conversation about the what we're trying to preserve which is the minimal viable continuity of civilization. Right? Long-termism. The thesis of long-termism, you could argue if you was difficult, is about preserving the minimal viability of continuity of civilization. That is not preserving 8.5 billion people. There is an instant discount in that concept which I think has not only horrific imaginary possibilities to it, but also legitimizes a pathway to think that way.
I want to offer you a different idea and it builds on a different way of looking at the continuity of civilization. James Lovelock's last book on Novacene I think is a beautiful book. The first third of it is extraordinary and the way he narrates our moment I think sets us up for a different idea of continuity. He would argue that the earth stored vast amounts of solar energy in hydrocarbons and it released that energy in the formation of an 8.5 billion civilization. A civilization that was able to effectively not only talk about human machine and ecological civilization and that was the release of energy but the beautiful thing about that 8.5 billion civilization, this picture is from the 1968 Apollo picture, that was the moment where the planet became self-aware. The planet was able to perceive itself. The planet had stored enough solar energy, released that to create an 8.5 billion civilization. Remember my thing about the toaster? We'd created that much capacity for the planet to take a picture of itself.
That is what had been born. And so I would argue the thing that we have to preserve is something far more precious than our idea of the civilization. But actually this idea of a planet that is becoming self-aware to which we are party of that intelligence. This is not a theory of ecology versus machine systems versus human systems. It's saying that is a system. Machines are as natural as humans as our ecological systems. They are part of the planet becoming self-aware.
So this is the object form I'm going to put forward to you. That is the thing to preserve. And it could be argued that might be very, very, very rare in this galaxy, let alone the universe. A planet that has become self-aware. And preserving and expanding that optionality is our objective form. Not the continuity of civilization, but this other thesis.
And in order to do this, the challenge becomes how do we preserve and expand this optionality? It's worth recognizing what our challenge is. We built an economic model and a social economic model that generated vast amounts of optionality. Energy was used in this moment. It's creating externalities and those externalities are feedbacking on itself. So the externalities are now forcing a recoupling of the planet as well as layering an information structure on the planet as well as a monetary system on the planet. All these things and our self-awareness, ability to sense itself. All these compute capabilities are layering over the planet. Benjamin Bratton does a beautiful job of explaining this stuff. What we have to do, and I think this is where the kind of things become really interesting. We have to somehow preserve the optionality, the deep code optionality. We've got to regenerate those environments and we've got to transform them.
Let me give you an example. Pretty much as a result of climate breakdown, every ecological landscape will need to move a 100 miles north or 100 miles south. And unfortunately, evolution won't do it for us because the speed of those transformations outstrips evolutionary capacity to make those transformations. So, we're already in an environment that there is no theory of conserving our ecological systems. We are now in a relationship that we are going to have to regenerate them. Same is true for the Antarctic. Same is true for the Arctic. We are in a situation there is no pathway for us to let go and assume rewilding will sort the problem out. That means we are now in a moment that every option has to be about actually yes preserving the resilience, regenerating it and also using it as a transformation of where the optionality lies of the future.
And I think here when you start to look at the fundamentals, you start to see actually the preservation of optionality is going to require us to reimagine our nutrition supply. You all probably have read Professor Jim Blendell's book on soil. We've lost that arable land around the planet. I've already talked to you about the 1.7 to 1.9 degrees loss of major food baskets. We're about 40 cycles of agriculture away to losing significant soil damage. We are in a systemically problematized environment with regards to our nutrition landscapes. Shelter, energy stability, shared decision-making capacity to name such a such a thing.
I'll focus a little bit on shared decision-making capacity. If a society cannot actually perceive, sense, sense make and make decisions together, it cannot preserve or manage the risk to which it's facing. So our capacity to make decisions together is a fundamental asset. Right? Democracy is not an overhead on the free market. It's the fundamental means to manage common fates. And I don't mean industrial democracy. I don't mean representative democracy. I mean the idea of actually agentic liberty and to be able to care and cooperate with regards to our common fates. So the tools and mechanisms have to be reimagined.
What I'm talking about is soil, energy, water, nutrition, biointegrity, cognitive security. We're talking about foundations. If a society cannot perceive itself, manage itself, actually it isn't cognitively secure in itself. So what are the deep codes of those frameworks?
And as I said, conservation is no longer enough. It is no longer sufficient for us to be able to say we bounded a piece of land and it will sort itself out because of the ecological environments environmental damage that we've already done and the climate breakdown that's already baked in. Right? We will almost certainly at best overshoot some of the limits and pull back over time. And that opens us up to how do we regenerate these common infrastructures around the world fast enough to become both resilient antifragile into that future under under shock.
And what this opens up is a demand for a new class of technologies. I don't mean mechanistic technologies. I mean social technical frameworks and capacities in society. One of the biggest problems that it flows up is how do you drive many to many collaboration and coordination. So the coordination technologies of being able to organize multiple agents into complexity I think is one of the biggest fundamental challenges that we face and that challenge is also opened up paradoxically by a capacity that we've also been building.
So if the defining coordination technology was competition as a means of coordination I think one of the things that we have to unleash is how do we swarm innovation? How do we support multiple agents working towards shared goals of say cooling a city in a way that allows for capital and value to be organized in different formats? You could argue that machine learning capabilities are going to open up a new way for us to organize. Placing learning as a means of coordination in a complex environment. Learning opens up and expands the surface area of our ability to operate in complexity. And this is not just a paradigm of technology. It's a paradigm of the future of organizing. I would argue 21st century organizing is going to be rooted in learning. Future of the CEO is not chief executive officer. It's chief learning officer. Being able to patent the capacity of learning at speed of an organism is going to be its number one framework of utility. And in that framework, I think what we have to open up and build is a new class of civilization options.
And I want to illustrate what that could look like. And it's a kind of a rhyme with the past. This is a bridge system that's been grown out of roots in India. And it's been built out of the root infrastructure, living roots, out of tree infrastructure, biological infrastructure, human intervened and grown. Imagine this world view for a terror worldview. Many of you will know the Amazon itself was effectively a multispecies open garden landscape. Its fertility is a function. Its hyper biodiversity is a function of it being a gardened environment. Now imagine what happens when we talk about building agroforestry futures with precision micro machine autonomous machines acting as key parts of cultivating a multispecies future. So this is not about divisibility of an ecological human and a machine future. It's about how do these futures come together and what options do they open up? How do we actually densify the multispecies future is critical for actually improving and preserving soil strength and so capabilities. The multispecies capability actually provides multiple business
models, value models and contributions by a diversity as well as the technological infrastructure that's required in a diminishing, transforming labor environment where the labor provision is not certainly going to be provided by human capacities over time in an aging demographic in many parts of the world. So what is the option that it opens up?
And what I'd like to say is that this is an entirely novel landscape of possibility, and it opens up spaces of value not just in the preservation of soil, not just in the diversification of nutrition and eco-biodiversity, but also in new technologies and the capacity of those new technologies. So one of the conversations that we've been part of is saying our theory of how we think about machines is often rooted in control and certainty systems, how we conceptually perceive them. Whereas if you were to look back at someone like Descartes and read Descartes properly, I think one of the most beautiful things he says is I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.
And why I prefer the doubt is that if you are all incredibly bright people, at the same time none of us can know everything. It's informationally impossible, computationally impossible. So the only truth that you can genuinely hold is your partial knowing. It's a foundational truth. You only know partially of the world. And in that is a beautiful liberation, because you must operate with a sense of doubt because your partiality of knowing is a truth. And in that doubt is an invitation of curiosity of somebody else's partial knowing. And in that doubt is a way of being which is rooted in tentativeness, tenderness, and care as a way of being in a complex relatable world.
Why that's important is not just for the reimagination of what it means to be human. It's also important for a reimagination of what we think machines are, what machines could be in a complex, entangled world. If we use that framework to think about the world, we open up not just kind of options which are about resilience, but actually resilience, antifragility, and pathways of new civilization capabilities rooted in doubt, rooted in tenderness and care as epistemic behaviors of being in complexity.
The problem space is that the problem space of operating in rich situational complexity, and actually I would argue the technological infrastructure that we're building is allowing us to operate in, learning into that situational complexity, which was a unique moment. We lived through the idea of certainty, linearity, having to simplify the world around us. Actually we can operate in that complexity. That is an extraordinary moment, and this then opens up, I think, a series of interesting questions about optionality for who?
One of the most profound conversations I had over the last year was somebody of significant wealth basically saying, over the next 30 years, given the context that we're in, I expect to lose 90% of my wealth. This was a very hyperrational, non, like, morally rooted gentleman. It was a very self-interested perspective, but it recognized something really important. His wealth was fundamentally entangled to the planet. So that recognition of seeing his wealth coupled to the planet started to change his theory of how actually he had to operate in recognition of that entanglement. Expanding and preserving the optionality of the planet doesn't become a moral choice. It becomes an enlightened self-interest choice of recognizing the terminal pathways we're on.
And so at this moment in time, there isn't a divisibility problem between some and the many. Actually, we start to recognize our shared fate. And we recognize the cascading failures. We recognize that actually the destruction of the social contract isn't just a piece of paper being blown apart. It's effectively about the number of sociopaths and psychopaths we create, that we traumatize into the world, with access to asymmetric weaponizable technologies which we've largely democratized, with bioweapons and other landscapes.
We are indivisibly linked. Our fates have become systematically coupled. The quicker we realize that, with either the maths or the enlightenment perspective, it doesn't really matter now. Those two things are so co-joining, and the cost of large-scale harm has collapsed into virtually zero, and that is forcing a coupling, and the cascades don't stay local anymore in any format, because CO2 is effectively a planetary coupling device. Our fates here become entangled with everyone else's fates. The United Kingdom fundamentally is indivisibly entangled to the fate of the Antarctic. If we lose the Antarctic ice shelves, we talk about a 65 m rise in water levels. There is no meaningful UK.
So I'm not asking for moral universal ideas of justice. I'm asking for just being smart. I'm not looking for any morality here. I think morality is a function of divisibility, separation from the planet. I'm just asking you to be self-aware and enlightened self-interest, to recognize our systemic entanglements and operate in a radically new way to avoid this.
And I think optionality for everyone is because optionality breakdown is going to affect us all. We won't have a New Zealand pathway. Loads of evidence to say why that New Zealand pathway has not worked, will not work in these futures. And in this context, I think wealth and strength, as it's now often been talked about, is concentrated claim on the capacity of future making, and that's fine only in recognition of those entanglements, because they're indivisibly available. And this creates a different form of relationship of how we operate in the world, and this requires us to start to think about these foundational economies and reimagining every one of those foundational economies that I spoke about under those cascade conditions.
Again, repeating, there is no fortress pathway in a mutually assured destructive future. So our capacity to expand the option space, and it's not just the preservation of the current option space, to expand the option space, otherwise we end up with a zero-sum game future which actually will be mutually destructive, becomes really critical. I would say in that context, optionality is the choice of available futures to us where we have the capacity to operate and react to uncertainty and risks in a way that we cannot perceive, and expanding that becomes a critical need.
So the question then becomes, where do we act? Right now we're looking to lose likely most glaciers, certainly in the Alps and many parts of the Himalayas. The Himalayas is responsible for the hydrological cycle of about 3.5 billion people, with at least three nuclear powers. Remember, you don't have to wait for the end goal of losing glaciers. You have to wait for the volatility effects to be significant enough for violence to become the dominant way of resolving those conflicts.
Atmospheric governance, more and more, it's very clearly recognizable, certainly from the UK models. If we lose the AMOC current, our capacity, most of the UK will become unfarmable, because actually the hydrological cycle will weaken so significantly. We are at the beginning of a new theory of how we govern into these environments. How you deal with cities like Madrid, which are looking at 47° temperature in the middle of summer.
When we talk about these temperatures, I just want to humanize all these conversations. And some of this stuff has already happened. In fact, it happened to a friend of mine, Yos Banderman. His close friend passed away. He effectively hadn't slept. It was too hot at night. He got into a car in the morning and fell asleep in the car in Madrid. Or whether it's domestic abuse that increases as a result of these temperature cascades, or whether it's actually transformers that break down, which means the continuities, whiplash effect in supply chains, or whether it's the maintenance costs of roads and everything else, or whether it's the IQ drops that happen as a result of the heat effects.
At the same time, what we recognize is many of these environments won't be the first movers. The hard constraint is it's very difficult to do this sort of work in the Himalayas. You may need to do it in the Alps, where the need can be understood and the political thickness exists to be able to build the new institutional infrastructures and the talent density to be able to do what's required. So geographies where risk is legible, politics can hold, and talent can orchestrate, these are the locations where these futures can be built, and they will need to be built at speed. And this opens up the how question.
Cooling Madrid is not a single product problem. Cooling Madrid is a multi-point intervention problem. A portfolio of interventions is required and to be innovated to deal with the cooling effect. A lot of our theory of innovation has been rooted in the theory of the startup. The challenge that we face is we're going to have to cool cities, which is going to cost billions, and it's going to require multiple interventions at different landscapes, different products, different ways of measuring, different ways of actually cooling those, different ways of automating those environments, a whole plethora of activities. Not just for that; for glacier stabilization, it's not a single product problem. And the bottleneck is typically organizational.
So to cool Madrid isn't just about cooling Madrid. It's about actually pooling risks across multiple actors, thousand actors, 10,000 actors. How do you pool that risk that allows for multiple interventions to be allocated situationally and spatially to be able to manage that risk in a spatial sense? How do you finance that? There's a wrapper problem which is fundamental to be able to organize the technologies, the physical technologies and beyond, to manage this reality.
Here I'm going to put forward a word: executions. Not closed, bounded institutions, not startups. New ways of organizing that allow us to be able to manage these large-scale multi-actor problem spaces without boundaries. These are rooted in new types of capabilities, like how do you pool liabilities across mass multi-agent actors? How do you construct deeper tractors for the future, recognizing and comprehending the risk, especially when the risk sometimes makes you unviable? So one of the biggest challenges that we face, and I'm sure Denise and I will talk about this, fundamentally, when you start to price some of the effects of this stuff, most of our economic enterprises don't make it through. They're nonviable.
How do you construct the politics? How do you engineer the politics for these realities? How do you build an outcome accelerator which is rooted in hitting a 7.5 degree goal of cooling a city, recognizing the innovations are yes startup, yes policy, yes civic participation, yes new forms of infrastructure, yes new forms of supply chain innovation, which have to be coordinated to orchestrate for that goal? This requires a team of entrepreneurs working together in a different way.
So one of my provocations for us here is that maybe the kind of institution of change which was, in 2001 onwards, the startup, maybe this institution of driving change in the 21st century will have to be a new means of organizing, rooted in a different theory. How do you capitalize this? This is not a capitalization problem of like, it's a capitalization problem of two billion to cool a city. And how do we build these forms?
Everything I'm saying here isn't hypothetical analysis. Most of what I'm saying are actually pathways that we are in the process of building with our partners and in our relationships. How do you cool Madrid, in many ways, is a real problem not just for Madrid, for many cities. How do you stabilize the Alps and regenerate the hydrological systems is a real problem for the 21st century.
I think one thing I've not mentioned well enough in this conversation has been, I think one of the fundamental questions I'm holding is what's the value of being human? And I think if we cannot transform our theory of the value of being human, the value of being human is diminishing, diminishing rapidly. Return on labor has been actually stagnant, if not declining, relative to return on assets. In that reality, what we're seeing is not just a devaluation of being human, but the inability to be able to finance the education and health infrastructures relative to that diminishing value of being human. So as we transform our machine logics, which, you know, California is the center of, we need to pay equal and maybe even greater attention to what is the future value of being human, and how do we build a new theory of human-machine logics rooted not in certainty and opinion, but in conversation, in doubt, in curiosity. What is a new logic of organizing in that reality?
How do you finance bioregions, and not just bioregions in terms of actually one project, I mean large-scale landscapes, in terms of actually soil preservation, water rejuvenation, multispecies nutrition landscapes, biomaterial landscapes, all the way through to micro autonomous machines and farming infrastructure, to new provenance mechanisms which actually are not extractive but actually systemically generative?
How do we build the capacity for societies to be able to decide together? Representative democracy, whilst great, only works with the idea of a relatively simple world or a linear world. Our ability to be able to organize in complexity is failing because we are still trying to live in a 19th century theory of decisions in a surface landscape that doesn't work. And you've built the technology to be able to already house it. I think some of the large-scale learning models are opening up a new human-machine landscape to be able to organize new ways of conversation, new conversational theory, which isn't rooted in valorization of opinion but the capacities for societies to have complex discourses. What does it mean to create fertile societies? And I don't mean biological fertility. I mean societies to be able to hold fertility at a systematic level.
So as I close this talk and I come close to it, what I want to say is, for me, these are not theoretical conversations. These are the landscapes where I think fundamental decisions and questions will be made about how we see the 21st century. I remember many years ago there were often these conversations about what does global governance look like, and the thing that gave me the greatest sort of imagination of the future was looking back at the river Danube. The river Danube in Europe was where international waters was born, at the conflict between 12 different nations. They gave birth to the idea of international waters.
I think in the landscape that we're talking about, in these futures that we're talking about, is our theory of governing, organizing, and capitalizing the 21st century in radical new pathways. But it's going to be found in these sites of discovery. And it's going to require us to be able to open up and imagine and work out a whole bunch of problems that we don't know how to solve. How do you understand these cascade risks? How do you put maths behind these cascade risks? How do you understand a completely different part of the equation, which is often not brought to the table?
These are London numbers. The total value at risk in London just on residential property is 3.8 million homes. 668,000 is the average price of a home in pounds. That means the current total value at risk is 2.52 trillion. So when we talk about these cascading figures, we're working off the economics of that background. Not the marginal gains of growth, not the marginal gains of job discovery and losses. We're working on that scale of numbers.
How do we... I've given you some examples of the critical locations where we're going to have to introduce these firebreaks. Where are these firebreaks? How do we capitalize them? How do we finance them? How do we build machine-assisted learning infrastructures? I think the deepest revolution is almost certainly going to be in our shift of our theory of organizing in two different frameworks. Our organizing theory is rooted largely in control and instruction, recognizing humans as poor machines, to actually learning becoming the foundational framework, and unbounded organizing being the second framework. So moving from a bounded theory of corporation to a non-bounded theory of organizing rooted in learning, that's the
paradigmatic move that I think we'll have to make to be able to deal with a coupling entangled world. It's not a dream, it's just the means of organizing. How do we thicken them, Markov blankets, in terms of actually giving us enough time and capacity to be able to support the pritence of that decoupling or that space and time? How do we do that? We're going to have to do that. Thicken those environments. What are the new forms of capital? Yes, what's the role of fiat money, but then also what's the role of stablecoins? What's the role of next economics around this stuff? These are all going to be opened up in many of these landscapes. And I think also stuff like the valorization of opinion or the valorization of conversation.
And conversation holds much greater bandwidth to be able to discuss and converse about the complexities of the world than any form of opinion. This is why I find, for example, you know, I was often accused that, Indy, your language is too complicated, it's great for Westminster or whatever, but it doesn't work in the real ground. And actually my lived reality was completely different if you actually speak with people on the ground. I remember one gentleman, 89-year-old gentleman, walked up to me and sort of said, hey Indy, I didn't get every word you said, but she put words into what I was feeling.
And the objective is the conversation, not the opinion. The bandwidth of what's made available as a result of that is much larger. The surface area of coordination and organization is much larger, and machine-assisted capabilities are opening up a landscape of possibility which I think will be systemically revolutionary around those things. How do we build that shared perception of risk? I go back originally to my point. If I'm hungry today, I don't have a shared perception of risk with you. And that means we have a fragmented capacity to be able to organize.
How do we pool these liabilities? How do we build an outcome accelerator? And the reason I'm saying all these questions is these are questions that we are dealing with and we don't yet have answers. This is my invitation to all of you.
These are vast problem spaces that we are going to have to resolve and solve in different ways. And this talk for me is an invitation. And behind these questions, I guarantee you there are other questions. Forget about outcome accelerators, organizing them, term sheets, value distribution between multiple lead value points, a whole bunch of questions after questions, but we are going to have to solve them. And I think this is a surface area that's going to yield vast amounts of benefits to be able to organize around that.
How do you build the deep attractors for these sorts of futures? We played with the term, what is a prophecy lab? Think about the term, the prophecy lab. Can we engineer deep attractors, as we've done previously, to be able to create deep attractors for a different future? What would it mean to engineer those environments? What are those conversations? What's the legitimacy around these conversations? And this is where I sort of say we don't have pre-coded answers for this, but we certainly think these questions are valid and need to be explored and need to be capitalized. And that's some of what we're doing.
And the pathway here, and I think it's only, we are living in a fork, a fork between mutually assured destruction and mutually assured thriving. It's not much of a choice, you know. It's Jurassic Park, lovely quote: life wants to live. Well, [ __ ] let's live.
I think there's a genuine question about everyone everywhere long now. Not a long now for the few, but a genuine long now for the expansion of the planet which has become self-aware. I think that is a [ __ ] interesting invitation for all of us, and that is the work that I think we are all holding together in many ways. With that, I'm going to thank you.
Thank you so much, Indy. Also, of all the things that we talked about, the toaster stuck. And I actually wanted to pick up on the toaster because it came up in the context of thinking about fundamental entanglements at the nation-state level. And we're in a world in which politics is becoming rivalrous again, where nations are trying to re-erect borders and talk about national sovereignty. And what we were discussing was this idea that nations are essentially flows of all kinds, and that it doesn't actually make sense to bound ourselves in the way that we've been bound, and that we're subject to all kinds of planetary dynamics that are not governable at the nation-state level.
And so I'm wondering if you can expand on that. And the toaster was essentially this idea that no one country can actually make a toaster on its own. Even though it has seven component parts, you need to source that material from a complex supply chain, the manufacturing; even something as simple as a toaster, no one nation state can do on its own. So can you talk to us about the geopolitics of this moment and how to actually assert a planetary perspective in the context of nations trying to reassert this very bounded notion of relationality?
Yeah. I mean, I think there's, I'll talk from a UK perspective because I'm a little bit more familiar. I would best describe the UK as a knot in global flows. It's a knot of flows, and to govern the UK, it would be a mistake to think you could govern the boundary of the UK. And if you recognize it as an interdependent knot, like I said, UK is existentially linked to the Antarctic. UK is existentially linked to the Amazon. Any delusion that UK would survive without those ecological contributions is just a delusion.
So if we start to see ourselves in entanglement and in relationship, I think our theory of governance doesn't go from what I'd call planetary collective, but situational and relational, and the object form of the UK becomes actually in relationship to Kenyan soils, in relationship to the longevity and the mutual development of those environments rather than an extractive relationship, because it destabilizes those contexts and itself in that time.
So I think there's a third position. We often fall into the two conversations I've witnessed even here: this idea of the universal good, like we pretend everyone's great and we sort of all act for the common good. There's been an active critique of that reality. And then the other thing is the Westphalian state, which is the bounded theory. I think there's an intermediary position, which is enlightened self-interest through a systems lens, recognizing mutual development as a pathway to stabilize your own realities as well. I think that that works. I think it's available to us. I think the science supports that stuff. I think it creates a different landscape.
One of the things that struck me in your talk, and that I found very compelling, was this notion of optionality. And one of the questions I had was, you know, in thinking about the rise of our human civilization over the last even 50 to 70 years, where we have now created, as you said, an 8.5 billion person civilization, that has come at the expense of the optionality of the biosphere, and you know, we've radically reduced biodiversity. And so I'm curious to hear from you how do we negotiate the types of optionalities? How do we negotiate between the optionalities we're creating for more humans on the one side and decreasing optionality for the biosphere on the other? And then also now with, you know, agentic capacity, how do we negotiate between the optionalities we're trying to create?
I think it's perhaps the most complex question available. But I would, and it's true, right, but I also would say that, you know, I often sit in a room and somebody will say, well, okay, this negotiation, but the hard reality is that it's about a billion people in the world that are actually living multiple times the planet. It's about 7.5 billion which are perfectly within planetary boundaries.
And then I think when you look back at, this is why I use the example of terra preta and the Amazon, you start to realize that our industrial logics and our means of organizing fundamentally are systemically deeply unproductive over time. They're efficient in terms of capital, but they're not systemically productive. So I think we are opening up a pathway where terra preta futures, multispecies, open gardening, far more diversity, far more nutrition available to us in history, and with new technologies we're able to do that at a type of scale that we could never do before, and a contribution of labor which has transformed.
So I think the optionality expansion isn't just about negotiation between the lifestyles we want to lead. That's why I'm saying I think we're going to have to go back into the root level of these foundational goods and reimagine how we construct that space. So I have a kind of deep hope that there's something extraordinary available when we start to move outside the industrial logics of simplification and seeing like a state, James Scott's book Seeing Like a State, and monolithic systems as a means of making sense of the world.
When we can embrace that complexity and situational variance, which I think is now technologically and bureaucratically available to us, whether it's kind of Summer of Protocols work that's been going on, victra, or a whole bunch of other work that's been going on that's opening up these landscapes. Smart contracts open up a contingent landscape, a parametric landscape of organizing. We are creating a whole new bureaucratic regime which I think is able to absorb that surface area complexity and actually build much more situational variety, which we would never be able to hold historically.
Even the theory of material governance, I think, are mechanisms. So for example, if you have a timber house, in reality what you have is an obligation to steward that timber for 500 years. You own the liability of the carbon stored in that house for 500 years. We haven't had the institutional frameworks outside theories of ownership, and ownership includes the right of abuse and burning, to be able to actually think about material stewardship chains, open means of organizing that. So I think there's capabilities that are available for us to be able to organize these different forms of economy in radical new ways, and I think that sophistication, I think max will unleash a type of optionality we've not perceived before, and at different layers as well.
Could I ask you? So, you shared something with us last night about all of us being bad capitalists. Can you provoke us here tonight with the same?
Yeah. I mean, there's a part of me, and this is, there's a part of me that just sits here and says if you look at the risk profile and you look at where value sits, there is a fundamental arbitrage right now available between what we're pricing and where value and risk lies. And I'm not asking for any form of enlightenment. I'm just saying follow the numbers and the science. There is an extraordinary moment available, like once in multiple generations, available to be able to arbitrage where value lies and what we're pricing. And they are totally out of whack.
And the science is giving us the numbers. We just aren't able to absorb them because we're locked into paradigms that are actually old-fashioned and unable to price them. So part of me is just sitting there going, this is no longer a moral debate, right? If I was sitting here five years ago, 2016 or whatever, it'd be like, hey, would be great, let's be better people. I'm not asking for any inner development work. I don't think you need it anymore. The numbers of losses that we're talking about make it very evident there is a different theory of value available and what can be organized.
So in a sense, I think I'm just asking us to be shit-hot capitalists right now, to be able to shit-hot understand that risk framework and to be able to organize against that framework in a really, really smart way. And I think that's entirely for enlightened self-interest. I'm not even also asking for any form of altruism or do-goodness in the kind of, I'm just saying be smart intergenerationally, be smart as to the theory of risk and value, allocate and move.
I think the conversation we were having at breakfast today too was essentially that there are real and legitimate institutional barriers for capital owners, for asset owners and asset allocators to recoup themselves to the economic logic that you're providing. I'm sure there are folks in the room tonight who are capital allocators. Maybe you work for a family office or in venture or in some other framework. What would you advise them to do, and how would they know that they're on the right path to the type of value capture that you're describing?
So first thing, I think if you're institutional capital, I fully recognize institutional capital is right now bounded and structured into an old worldview at multiple layers. So this is where I think family offices have a unique strength, because they can start to take a different risk profile with regards to the worldview. Second, I think I would actually have a worldview. Genuinely, even if you're an institutional capital holder, build a [ __ ] worldview, because I don't think I've seen capital holders really systemically look at the risk profile and say, how are we allocating capital and what's the impact? And it's some of the best funds, right? Really good guys have not even done that, let alone the not-so-good guys. So I think those two differentials.
Third, actually, I think the pathway of risk, like I was saying, forget about when London gets to minus 20, plus 40; worry about the volatility effects. And I think there's a different risk model, and I think there's work required into those risk models. Focus on the volatility, and what you should be pricing against is, I think the biggest worry is how fast we cascade into total value at risk and expose that total value at risk in ways that we've never talked about before, and those risks are all available. So I think there's work to be done around this stuff.
And I also think continuity value will be really critical. So continuity of water, continuity of energy, continuity of nutrition supply, these will have high levels of premium for actually stabilizing those assets. We've been doing a lot of work around security economics, security and stability economics. There is a different economic logic that starts to become manifest in some of those realities as well. So again, none of my stuff is right now in any form of like be nice, be kind. I just think it's be smart.
I think on that point about risk, you know, risk management is different than risk mitigation, right? And I think most of our institutions have a risk management perspective for their own portfolios or their own, you know, set of things that they're orienting around. And that's different than figuring out how to proactively invest in resilience or invest in mitigation from some of these cascading risks that you've described. Is there a way in which you can see the possibility of changing that dynamic from a kind of make sure I'm managing my own risk, i.e. my own pension fund or whatever, the liabilities that I currently have, to actively and proactively allocating capital in a way that would, you know, contribute to the mitigation of the risk?
I think the problem is there is no way to keep portfolio in financializing that risk at the scale that it's replicating outside. So if you just take an inward strategy, I think it's diminishing returns, and it's a demise strategy, frankly. The value is going to be about how you operate with a risk-on perspective and managing external risk and being able to find leverage points into that. So I think this is, you know, in a way, you guys are the heart of venture capital. Venture capital is fundamentally a risk-on model. I think this is that moment for you to be proactively engaged into those risk frameworks, looking at the arbitrage between value and price in fundamentally different ways, looking at the derivative technologies that are going
to born in this reality looking at stability as a delta function and all that, all that reality, I think stability is going to be far more valuable than people are currently pricing as volatility increases. So I think all of these things are now available. I think it requires us, you know, I'll go back to the point that was said earlier, I think it requires us to be better capitalists.
Okay, a couple of audience questions here. So this is from Joseph: what are the examples where optionality provides a first order positive influence on innovation, economics or governance?
I would say there's a vast movement of brilliant people working around bioregionalism. I think if you look at the stability and the risk threats with regards to nutrition supply, soil loss, biointegrity losses that we're starting to see, water, other forms of, I would argue that actually restoring and rebuilding our agroforestry landscapes, our water infrastructure, our soil densities, that itself is one of the most fundamental. And I think it's, I've just talked about the effects, I'm just talking about the offtake, but actually on top of that is a whole new class of technologies and capabilities that I think are going to be really critical in being able to organize this world. That to me is one dimension of just an explosion of not just what I would call longitudinal asset, which is the soil, or whether it's the biomaterials and the nutrition economy, or the soil, the water effects, or the fire risk management, or the derivative technologies, or the provenance and standards technologies. That whole stack of values available. And I think that to me is one of those things where you are not only providing resilience, not only providing continuity, you're building antifragility, but also derivative technologies. That's a full stack available.
So something I'm reflecting on as I'm listening to you and to the talk is that perhaps there's a bit of a paradox in what I've heard you share, which is on the one hand that we have these new technologies, we have a new type of planetary sapience where we have the ability, or we have the capacity perhaps, to move towards better management of these incredibly complex systems dynamics. On the other hand, you're encouraging us to embrace doubt and embrace a partiality of knowing. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to that. And one of the questions here is, is doubt foundational to intelligence?
Yes. I doubt, but I think, I mean, I personally like it. You know, when I was reading Descartes, I was sort of like, "I doubt, therefore I think" was a better paraphrase of what his first paragraph was. Felt so structurally more interesting at every level. And I think one of the things that just kind of has been haunting me is just this stack of logic, which is: if I can't know everything, fundamentally the only awareness I can hold is my partiality of knowing. That is like, okay, I can't, that is informationally true.
Once I inhabit that reality, then my curiosity of Denise or anyone here is not like, oh, I'm curious because I love to be curious. It's the only way I expand my partiality of knowing. And if that's true, and recognizing my partiality of knowing, tentativeness, tenderness, and care are not like care of something. It's a way of being in the world. Tentativeness, tenderness is a way of being. You've all probably seen some of these self-learning machines which actually reorganize dynamically to be able to find ways of walking and learning, and they are finding their own path of organizing.
So I think there's a way of being in complexity which I think is fundamentally rooted in partial knowing, curiosity of learning, learning-oriented coherence, that becomes really interesting. So yeah, I would say I think it's a way of being. It doesn't discount us from expanding our possibility. It doesn't say that we can't know more. It doesn't remove the idea of action, but it roots the action in a theory of hypothesis and inquiry and question-oriented organizing, which I think is really interesting.
So is it that we can take that partiality of knowing, that to me feels very intuitive at the personal level, as one small being amongst 8.5 billion, but that we can imbue that within our organizations, which are themselves living complex dynamic ecosystems that have feedback loops of learning, and that there's a way in which doubt can feature in our executions, as you say, but in our institutions, in ways that allow them to become continuously learning entities over time?
Exactly. And the kind of object form becomes the conversation. So if I am partial in knowing and you're partial in knowing, the really interesting thing is the conversation.
Right.
And the conversation, if you valorize the conversation rather than the opinion, then the conversational dynamic is the means of actually intelligence. So intelligence is not my position or your position. It's the meta possession of the conversational field that's evolving. And I think that's much more interesting than this kind of anthropotic internalization of intelligence, seeing it as a meta capability of the system. And that's why I think conversation for me is the unit product here.
We live in a world where planetary coordination might be more difficult as a result of being in a context of mostly monotheistic eschatologies that are based on end-time salvation and, you know, a messiah coming to save us one day. And so the question is, as breakdown increases, we might expect the power of these types of politics and worldviews to increase. And so how might we break through with this kind of planetary perspective that you are offering us to build really wide-ranging constituencies around this shared optimism of the future?
Wow. [laughter]
That was from Ashoka. So you can thank Ashoka later for that one.
Thank you. I'll buy you a drink. [laughter]
I mean, I'm sort of wide-ranging, but that is going wide. So I think the way I suppose I look at this is that I come from a faith of Sikhism, and what I think has made it interesting for me in Sikhism: God is not a thing out there. Everything is God. So it's a non-divisible reality to a worldview. And I think some of the problems, I think, if you were to chart a theory of our relationship, there's a beautiful book by Sophie Strand called The Flowering Wand, which talks about different theories of masculinity and pre-arthian masculinity, and talks about the power of the wand, partnership societies, and non-monotheistic religious sun god societies, and how we had different relationships with land, different relationships of being with the planet.
So I think, I mean, I would argue that we are on a course of a new form of evolution. And I think this is why for me there was a kind of profound moment when I remember thinking about that Blue Marble picture and saying, what if this was a planet perceiving itself? And if you see it from that lens, I think it changes our relationship with ourselves, but also our relationship with our own divisibility from the planet. So I think there are new ways of perceiving the world. I think there's new ways of being in the world, being with the world, but also transforming our own theory of self.
And maybe the way I'll take the question is that the most radical question right now is not what's the future of AI. The most radical question, I think, available is what's the future of being human. I think every revolution has almost always reinvented the idea of what it means to be human, and I think it is the underdeveloped thesis, and I think there's something extraordinary available there. And I think that's the question that San Francisco and California should be holding in parallel with the extraordinary work that is going on, and difficult work actually, adjacent to the future of machine learning: what is the future of being human? And I think there's something magical available there. If you talk to neuroscientists, if you talk to, sort of, some of the kind of work that's already going on, there's a completely different path. So between the Blue Marble picture of the planet perceiving itself and this kind of expansion of what it means to be human, I think there's something that may be able to break us free from some of the locks that we've got into in history.
I wanted to end with a quote from Stewart Brand. He says, "None of us can save the world, but we can all set in motion a self-saving world." And I wonder if you might leave all of us with an encouragement as we leave here tonight. If there's one thing that we could do to set in motion a self-saving world, to set in motion a world which increases optionality, which increases resilience, what would you like us to take away?
I think the number one thing that, sort of, I would like us to walk away with is this idea that I think we're facing a fork, not a choice. And the choice is: do we want to live? And I think it's as profound and structural as that. And when you look at the world through this lens, and mutually assured thriving is the only viable pathway, I think the options and the ways of perceiving the world radically change.
And I would argue that you are sitting in a place of an extraordinary opportunity of being able to radically imagine into that world. I think some of the core capabilities that have been built here are going to be an essential and fundamental building block of that future. But I fear we're still trapped in the institutional forms of the 19th century, with the capacity to organize in a radically different way. So how do we organize for this world? I think is the innovative step and the transformative step.
And maybe this is where the provocation would really sit. If California and San Francisco in 2001 was the birthplace of the startup as a means of organizing value, I think the question is, what is the form of organizing value in 2026? And I provoke and challenge you that I don't think it's a startup.
I love it. Thank you so much for being with us, Indy. This was phenomenal. We're so thrilled to have you, and thank you all for being here tonight. [applause] [music]
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