Optionality Collapse: We're Investing in a Future That Won't Exist with Indy Johar

Indy Johar (0:00)

I'm not inviting you to be kind. I'm just inviting you to be smart right now. I think we're looking at a 2028, 2029 disruption where these crises come into apex. As a steward of claims on the future, which is what money is, it is incumbent on you to understand the optionality collapse that your claims on the future are facing. There's a different theory of portfolio where actually those are not just managing risk, they're acting in a virtuous framework. So those options are working progressively to actually create a greater value than any one of those options. Our role is to put the kind of conduits of resource and claims into these positions and with audacious energy. This is a courageous invitation and I think the courage invites us to be more human than anything else.

Nate Hagens (0:54)

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. 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 very pleased to welcome back Indy Johar to the program for an exploration on how we might rebuild and adapt our land, our institutions and our capital markets to expand the number of better possible futures for humanity or as he calls it, Civilizational Optionality. Indy Johar is an architect and co-founder of Project He is also a professor at RMIT University as well as a non-executive director of WikiHouse Foundation and Bloxhub. Most recently, Indy founded DarkMatter Labs, a field laboratory focused on building the institutional infrastructure for radical civics of societies, cities, regions, and towns.

This was one of the best conversations I have had on this platform. It was in New York City during Climate Week. I was exhausted going into this interview. But something about Indy's energy and his ideas pulled the best out of me, and perhaps that created some two-way synergy. We talked about the importance of financial markets seeing the dead-end aspects of our current path, and about humanity becoming self-aware, and about our moment in history. When I talk about emergence, this conversation is an example of that. I do expect it's for some going to be pretty academic and fancy concepts, but the implications of what we talked about here, in my opinion, are one of the few pathways forward for humanity in the biosphere. What a great dude. Please welcome Indy Johar.

Indy Johar, namaste. Welcome back.

Indy Johar (3:20)

I'm Indy Johar. Welcome back.

Nate Hagens (3:23)

At the end of our last conversation, and I think we've had a Zoom call, you told me that the biggest central question of our time is, what does it mean to be human? There's no greater question now. What does it mean to be human at this time?

We left off there, and I'm wondering what you've reflected on and where you've arrived with that question.

Indy Johar (3:46)

Perfect. Let's start with the simple questions, I think.

I think that question for me is a systemic not, and actually, I think the worlds that you and I and many others talk about. At a philosophical level, I think our subject-object separation from the world and our distancing, our birth of perspective, our birth of object and non-orientated worldviews, our separation, which gave birth to many things, science and art separating chemistry, the kind of atomization of the worldview, actually is also the part which allows that distancing for it to be dominion, for separation to turn into dominion, for separation to turn into externality. I think we're living at the apex of that problem as how we understand ourselves. So that's why it's called the deep problem of the future of being human. Then there is a narrow problem of the future of being human. So if you take that logic chain and you marry that with effectively, I think what we're about to see is the disruption of two key aspects of being human, humans as units of labor and humans as units of cognition. Those two disruptions, when you marry those with an atomized, individuated self, and I think those two disruptions from the economy, as it's currently framed, the commodity theory of being human in terms of cognition and in terms of labor, I think we enter a systemic crisis, a crisis where the economy starts to export people and de-expunge them from itself.

And in that process, as humans become, in our current unitized labor form, become outside the economy, I think we will create the pathway of war. Now, I think my biggest change has been that I used to think that the disruption of, say, climate breakdown, which I think is going to be significant, would be in advance of this. I think we're looking at a 2028, 2029 disruption, where these crises come into apex. And that will lay out the pathway for effectively conflict within nations, as nations start to remove people from themselves to preserve the kind of economics of the nation. And in that process, set up the pathway to war. And I think the war scenario and the conflict scenario cascades us into, in my view, a non-retrievable position. Because I think once we enter significant war, where trauma is introduced into the inter-society at such scale, and the unit cost of war has reduced to such small components, when actually someone with, someone who's been psychologically traumatized is basically 129 IQ points, has CRISPR technology, has the capacity to do things of a horrific scale that we've never imagined.