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Indy Johar | The boring revolution humanity needs most

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Since 2011, anyone could have downloaded an open-source house design, cut out the parts and assemble it themselves. So why is building a new home still so hard?  

In this episode, we talk with Indy Johar, founder of Dark Matter Labs. He argues that the real barriers are the hidden rules behind what gets built, like warranties and access to land, and his team is working to rewrite them. 

We cover:

  • What it really takes to give people the power to build their own furniture and homes 
  • Dark Matter Labs’ work with the Taiwan government to build a decentralized, digital identity system for its citizens
  • The importance of keeping many possible futures open, and thinking at a very large scale to prevent things like climate change from closing off some paths
  • How AI’s electricity demand could set off a chain reaction that ends up improving the way we produce energy
  • How AI could help us reorganize society based on continuous learning instead of top-down control 
  • Why we should build AI that questions us instead of offering certainty

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Transcript

[00:00] Beatrice: Welcome to the Existential Hope Podcast. I'm Beatrice, and today I'm speaking with Indy Johar. In 2011, Indy's team created an open source house. So basically a house that you can 3D print and put together yourself. But that didn't make building a house a lot easier, because you also need a warranty and the land, for example. And so Indy has been thinking a lot about how we can also change these more hidden rules that govern society. We also talk about keeping the future open to different options. Because things like climate change are closing off some paths we could take. But there are other things, like AI, that could open up some very unexpected possibilities. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

[00:45] Beatrice: I'm happy to be here today with Indy Johar, the founder of Dark Matter Labs. And you're doing a lot of really interesting work on the rules and mechanisms behind technology, because a better future often takes more than better tech. So let's talk about that. Indy, tell us a bit about Dark Matter Labs. What is it that you guys are doing?

[01:07] Indy: Yeah, it's probably best understood. I mean, Dark Matter Labs is perhaps best understood as part of a journey. I mean, we were at zero-zero. We built multiple things, all the way from Opendesk, an open-source furniture company, to WikiHouse, open-source housing, which could be 3D printed in 2011. All of these things were about how do we distribute decentralized agency and explosion of sovereignty in making the future.

[01:31] Beatrice: Hey, quick note on something Indy says a lot: explosion of sovereignty, or sometimes decentralized agency. He means giving a lot more power to act and decide to a lot more players, not only governments and big companies, but also individuals and communities.

[01:48] Indy: So how you build a new capability to make futures? And that's what we were really passionate about. That's, you know, we've written and built things and that's really where we were going. But what became very clear is, for example, if you want to decentralize the production of a table, it's not just the production infrastructure, it's the warranty infrastructure. So what we started to realize behind everything we were seeking to make, there were a whole set of rules that unless you could build those capabilities in different ways, you could never really democratize the means of production. So for example, if you build distributed manufacturing production of say a table, sure, but if your warranty infrastructure was centralized, you would precode, you would have to precode and preauthorize what materials could be used, what the processes were, so you started to centralize actually the coding at another level. And what we were interested in was how could you take that further? Basically, a lot of Dark Matter Labs was like, okay, yes, we've been trying out the means of production of the future, but actually it's the coding of this invisible dark matter which needs to be reconfigured.

[02:56] Indy: And that really became the mission about 2015 onwards, where I pretty much stepped off the boards of all the kind of things that we were building to say, well, actually that's what we're having to build. So it was like everything else. We kept pulling the red thread and then started to realize there was a kind of fundamental problem. So for example, housing, every architect you know will talk to you about how to build cheaper housing, but the problem isn't housing, it's land. And land, the value of land isn't actually intrinsic to the agricultural value of land. It's the relational value of that land. So for example, you take this building, you move this into Nova Scotia or Siberia, how much is it worth? Nothing. The value of this land comes from its relationship to labor markets, people, culture, transportation hubs, all sorts of contextual frameworks to which the values accrued. So what you started to realize was unless you could recode these things, we would make marginal dents on all the other things that we were trying to do. And that was really basically where we were.

[03:56] Beatrice: And when you say dark matter, that's kind of what you're talking about, like the sort of invisible rules that govern society, or maybe not so invisible?

[04:04] Indy: Yeah, so basically behind everything we make there's a whole bunch of, whether it's standards, whether it's norms, presumptions of norms, right? So what we started to sort of realize, it's not just rules. Rules are the manifestation of norms and ideas which have kind of predated and structured those rules. So it was really starting to go back into that stack and start to recode them more fundamentally.

[04:27] Beatrice: This sounds like a very difficult challenge. It's not something simple and concrete that you can just sort of dig into. So how do you go about it?

[04:38] Indy: So, I mean, like everything else, I think things for me have always been like, you just keep pulling the adjacent possible, right? So we didn't start by thinking about this stuff, we started by building open source housing and then you start to see it. So the question for me is always about pulling the adjacent possible issue and you start to see the next issue as you do one thing. So as a map it looks complex, but as a lived experience it's like a flower. If you talk about every microbiome that exists in the flower or every molecule that's operating in a flower, it's complex. If you look at a flower, it's not complex, right? It is what it is.

[05:18] Indy: So I think that's how it's done. I think the one thing I would say is that one of the things that I'm realizing is the big challenge is it requires intersectional knowledge. It requires knowledge that exists. Yes, you need technical knowledge, you need rules kind of knowledge, you need policy knowledge, you need legal knowledge, you need finance knowledge, you need philosophical knowledge. I think it's the, and you need real world expertise because a lot of these things without knowing the kind of impetences of real world assets, real world thinking, it falls apart. So I think the real challenge is the intersectionality of knowledge, especially when these knowledge, knowledges and knowings are fundamentally fractured. And that I think is the real, real complexity right now.

[06:02] Beatrice: And your own journey, you started as an architect, right? And came to this. What was your journey?

[06:10] Indy: So my journey was as an architect, which I think is a great discipline because I think it gives you a capacity to synthesize. Very quickly I realized that consulting as a means to synthesize was just never going to work because architecture is boxed into a particular domain. So for example, if you're building a health building, you will be existing to the precodes of what other health workers assume you want. You couldn't really think about prevention, systemic prevention, so the kind of boxing in of the architect as a response is usually a brief has been pre-written. So you can't take a systemic response. And that basically drew me to the conclusion that the only way to really systemically innovate, and I think there are times when you need to systemically innovate where the present no longer coheres, wasn't available through consulting. So that meant that we had to act as entrepreneurs. So then we just started to build things.

[07:01] Indy: So whether it was working with Melissa Mean and building the Urban Beach, or whether it was building Impact Hub Birmingham with Immy Kaur, or whether it was building, you know, we just like to build Impact Hub Westminster, or we built social investment structures, we built Open Desk. So we just realized the only way to learn was building things and we had to be the initiative partner or building things and we don't really work in consulting. We do partnerships with people and meaningful shared partnerships where we own the mission and the fundraising responsibility. And that's really been how we've done this. And again, I think the key theory was the adjacent possible. Do one thing. The Impact Hub got us to understand how to run a micro multinational. It got us to understand the need for distributed furniture production. It allowed us to think about that. So we've just been pulling one thing after another.

[07:45] Beatrice: And out of these projects and experiments, is there one that you're the most proud of or that you've seen had the most impact?

[07:55] Indy: I think what I'm right now most excited by is what I'm doing now. We're in the kind of next incarnation where we're looking at how to build a capital pool around basically a foreclosure of the future. What I'm sensing is that the optionality is collapsing with regards to the future as climate breakdown and other forms of volatilities increase, and that requires new types of intervention at the scale that I think is unprecedented for our generation.

[08:24] Beatrice: Hey, this section might be a bit confusing if you've never heard of optionality collapse or foreclosure of the future. It means that right now, we can still choose from a lot of possible ways the future could go. Indy worries that things like climate change might shut off some options. One reason to keep options open is that nobody knows what the best future looks like, so locking ourselves into one path is a huge bet.

[08:49] Indy: Our generation are locked into marginal edge of state and edge of market enterprises, whereas I think what we need is next generation infrastructure scale thinking. How do you cool the Arctic is the question of the age. It's not like how do I build X, it's how do you cool the Arctic or how do you stabilize, how do you prevent the Amazon from effectively becoming a desert and after a tipping point? Or how do you stabilize glacier systems? Or how do you cool a whole city? The nature of the problem space is fundamentally out of whack with what we're all talking about relative to the collapse we're facing.

[09:26] Indy: So in that context, what we're looking at is how do you, and this builds a lot on fundamentally a kind of baseline ideology that we're interested in is like, how do you do large scale many to many organizing, which is from our perspective is a civic problem. So either we can default to authoritarianism via representation where we basically have a single person instructing the world in the face of this complexity and volatility, which I think is going to be not possible to be able to deal with the complexity and situational variance. Or what we're going to have to do is fundamentally find a new many to many agreement space, a radical civic economy, which we've written about in planetary civics and other things as a means of coordinating against these problems.

[10:07] Beatrice: This is what you've talked about when you talked about civilizational optioneering, right? So that's about preserving optionality, making sure we can keep multiple futures open. Why is that important and how can we actually do that?

[10:25] Indy: So I think one is just recognizing the risk. So I think what we're not really configuring in is the scale of the risk that we're facing. So the AMOC current collapse has gone from being a 10% marginal to a 50% likelihood by the end of the century. In that context, what the collapse of the AMOC does is effectively, for example for the UK, temperature goes from minus 20 to plus 40 as a range minimum. And also the hydrological pattern of the UK fundamentally shifts to the point that most of the UK is not really agriculturally viable. So what you start to see is that, you know, and you don't need many of these occurrences. This is not just a UK problem. It'll be a problem for monsoon loss in India.

[11:06] Indy: So these sorts of volatilities, yes, they predict for the end of the century, but the problem is the volatility will kick in much sooner. And the problem that we're facing is that volatility kicks in. In volatility, what you have is a shift towards authoritarianism and you have a shift towards effectively price whiplashes. So food prices go up, other effects go up and the likelihood of that falling into conflict massively goes up. So I think there's a kind of lack of systemic imagination going on and, like, I say this out loud, I think the foresight community, the futures community, just not with the science of how clear the risks are. The risks are in a completely different field space and largely because I think we're operating in what we think is possible, not what is necessary. And there's a massive delta between the possible and necessary.

[11:54] Beatrice: We move the needle there? Or like how can we do what's necessary rather than

[12:00] Indy: I think the risk comprehension is just not there. Second, I think, is I think we need to be able to recognize we're living in an age where we're going to have to build new infrastructures. And I think we have to start to think through an infrastructure lens. That requires also a new theory of power. Infrastructure requires a different theory of how we manifest into power. I think vast amounts of our generation are basically struggling with the theory of power of our relationship with the world. I think unless we figure out how to be in relationship with the world and also recognize we have responsibility to avoiding massive optionality collapse, I think we are in trouble. So there's loads of different dimensions of this, but I think just even seeing this, just even being recognizing this is a big issue.

[12:55] Beatrice: Yeah, so I mean, this is happening also when AI is happening, kind of. What's your take on that, or like how does AI interact with, or the AI developments that are happening interact with, all of this?

[13:10] Indy: Yeah, multiple ways. The valuation of these sorts of models is on the basis of disruption of labor. So, you know, how much labor can be disrupted in society directly, I think, correlates to the valuation of these models. And then I think downstream, what these models are doing is driving super cycles of demand for energy. And that super cycle of demand for energy is rooted in, is creating the pathway for investment in energy, which is unprecedented. And that investment in energy is going to open up horizons, I think, of small, you know, micronuclear reactors and others as a response to the energy demand that's being set up. So that's one cascade that is being set up. Now, inevitably, this is all driven by the moment that you can drive recursive intelligence or intelligence which becomes self-feeding. And if you can do that, that is the kind of infinite goal that opens up a paradigmatic leap in the capabilities of a system. So, but even now the valuation exists with regards to disruption of labor. So I think that's one dimension of this and that could be, if done through a real systems management way, could be very powerful as a transition pathway using cascade theory.

[14:22] Indy: And this is why I think, you know, I would argue that the US strategy is right now rooted, is not incoherent, it's super coherent. So they are basically saying AGI is the goal. Whoever gets AGI basically preserves a theory of freedom or doesn't. So if the US does not get AGI or equivalent to recursive intelligence framework, effectively can't preserve the theory of freedom of the US. It's an existential idea. And in that sense, this is why Eric Schmidt, in my view, turned around and said we're going to deal with AGI first and then we're going to deal with climate change because he could perceive a cascading markets framework of using AGI to drive a cascading markets theory. Now, I have different views, but I think it's worth reading this better. Second thing is, it's very clear that large language models and these sorts of capabilities are opening up a new theory of organizing not rooted in instruction capabilities. They're opening up a pathway for large-scale learning frameworks and learning to become the predominant framework of how you organize complexity, which could massively improve our surface area of dealing with complexity from our institutional frameworks.

[15:36] Beatrice: Hi again, just a bit more context for this point. Here, Indy is contrasting two ways of organizing people. The old way is control, so someone at the top gives orders and everyone follows them. The new way he's suggesting is learning. So instead of being told what to do, the system adapts as it goes. We might want this because when the world changes very fast, top-down control might lag behind, while a system that learns fast could handle it. Indy thinks that AI will make that learning possible at scale.

[16:07] Indy: So what I think it throws up a real fundamental question of what it means to be human. Because I think we're existing at the end of labor theory of unit value of being human. So we're in a moment of collapse of labor theory. And I would argue labor theory is about instructionalism, is about control theory, it's about how you instruct people to do the role they're doing. Whereas I think embodied explosion of sovereignty that we're seeing as a result of these sorts of capabilities is going to ask us to be different types of being. I think it's going to ask us to be, recognize one of the, I think, most beautiful things about being human is our capacity to hold doubt. Yeah, we often valorize opinion and we often value our certainty.

[16:50] Indy: So doubt is a recognition that we have a horizon of knowledge and knowing. That means that if I can recognize that I can't know everything and you can recognize you can't know everything, it would mean that you and I can exist in curiosity. It also means that I have to exist in tentativeness, tenderness and care with regards to how I behave because I cannot know everything of what my implications are. So I think there's a different way of being that is being opened up as we break the illusion of certainty and control, which I think then mirrors an opportunity for machine systems to be also rooted to tentativeness, tenderness, and doubt as an epistemic framework for organizing a new machine logic.

[17:34] Beatrice: You wrote ten years ago about, like, two different AI futures. I think it was the artificial intelligence built as a layer above humanity and augmented intelligence that extends the individual in the commons. Ten years later, which track are we on?

[18:02] Indy: I think the delusion we're on is trying to get to an instruction, meta-instruction AI, but I think that's a delusion. I think we have not reached the expanded possible of what it means to be human. I think human machine augmented intelligences are going to be extraordinary. I think it requires a new epistemic way of being. I said, doubt, tentativeness, tenderness, machine systems don't operate in theories of doubt. They operate through the construction of certainty. They're optimized for certainty in many ways. And so I think there's something really interesting there for me. And I think the question for me is not necessarily... Yeah, I mean, I would say fundamentally the explosion of sovereignty and the explosion of agentic capacities and systems, I think are going to open up a whole new pathway, and agentic capacity can be human-machine ecological systems in a completely different way. I think that's the only way to deal with complexity.

[19:00] Beatrice: If you had to sort of envision the best track that we could get on in terms of our AI future, what would that look like?

[19:10] Indy: So again, we're doing work around all of this stuff, right? So I would say getting the Cascade Markets theory of AI to work properly. I think that would be really interesting. Second, I think deploying AI not through individual consumers across a whole city or a large landscape can start to build new forms of intelligences. I think the other thing is the personas of these models, I think, need to be opened up for greater interest. So I think I'm very interested in doubt doubt-expanding models which actually invite us to exist in doubt and invite us to expand our optionality. So what is a new type of assistance framework which isn't rooted in certainty but is rooted in questioning us?

[19:52] Indy: I think that's completely available. I think there's the challenge of goal systems. I think goal systems are really problematic. Any goal system will create vast amounts of externalities because it actually, if it drives towards achieving the goal as an optimization, you have to then constantly control all the externalities that it could do to achieve that goal. I think goal theory is fundamentally problematic in the design of our agent systems. You are not a goal-driven system. You continuously goal, you continuously search, you continuously open up. I think we've got our agentic models wrong. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that's available, which I think is super interesting.

[20:33] Beatrice: So if we go back to some of the work that you've done with Dark Matter Labs as well, I know you did some work with Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs.

[20:45] Indy: That was Fang and several of colleagues here. So let's start with the identity question, which I think is almost fundamental to this. So a lot of the identity question has been trying to sort of build identity as a single point idea. How do we authenticate you? and the authentication could be through state or it could be through other means. The problem with all of those things, and you could argue there's a very interesting way that even how my identity is built. I was born, I was touched with a wrist wrap with my mother's name on it. That then was turned into being registered into the hospital, that then turned into a birth certificate, a birth certificate then was compounded by a passport, then compounded by a driving license, and so then it was compounded by national insurance.

[21:44] Indy: So there's this relational function of identity formations that create the cluster of who am I as a known system. And that's actually a multi- like if you see that, that's an additive process and it's a relational densification process. And what I like about these sorts of process when you look at them through that way is not single points, they're evolving theories of identity. So one of the kind of core questions we were asking there was like, how do you construct identity in this age? And what would happen if you saw identity as a relation approximation, density of relationships that you're correlating as opposed to being possessed by one variant, one framework. And why that's important is that allows for evolution and movement and that sits at a more fundamental series of questions that we're asking, like what's an identity of a river? So is an identity of a river a boundary or is it the emergent function of the relationships that are held with the river?

[22:44] Indy: So is it an approximation of relationships that constructs that river? Or is it the boundary and objectification? So one of the key questions we were asking was how do you construct these things, and how do you construct these things to have authentic route into that? And that builds on a lot of work we're doing around autonomous self-sovereign land. So how does land become self-sovereign in a relational framework? So what we're trying to do is move these fundamental thesis away from state theory or even market theory into a relational theory framework as a means to start to construct a new type of authentic ground for power and legitimacy to operate there. And so that was one dimension of it, but we were looking at river systems, identity systems, and how do you construct them through that landscape.

[23:31] Beatrice: What would you say your relation to technology is at large? How can we use technology in the best way possible, or like what's the best case scenario?

[23:44] Indy: Yeah, like I'm very pro-technology. I have no issue with technology. I would say technology is like an extension of the kind of planetary intelligence. As the humans are an extension of the planetary intelligence, so is technology. So I don't see it as another landscape. I think the question is less to do with technology. It's actually to do with how we're imagining ourselves. So if we imagine ourselves as objects of control, objects of dominion, objects of empire effectively, you could argue, then we construct technology to be an extension of that empire. And the question is that are we able to move from control and dominion theory as a means of organizing, which I think we're facing the end of that capability. That was a kind of built on a delusion of control theory as a means of organizing and complexity. And we could pretty much approximate to it. Right now what we're getting is so much complex feedback into the system that control theory is non-viable to be able to operate in the complexity that we're operating in.

[24:50] Indy: So as we reach the end of that cycle, I think what we're having to do is start to reimagine our relationship with the world, which is why I talk about, you know, operating in this sort of relational identity model, operating in explosion of sovereignty, human, machine, non-human systems, operating not in a control theory, but in a learning modality. These all become part of that story. So for me the issue is much more what's our theory of organizing and our theory of how we perceive ourselves. If I perceive myself as independent, isolated individual, then I impose a theory of dominion with the world, or do I see myself as entangled, a becoming agent, so a developmental agent in relationship, I have a different theory. And I think what we're seeing is a challenge to our theory of self, a challenge to our theory of organizing to preserve surface area complexity, and that then opens up a different theory of technology.

[25:39] Beatrice: And before we started recording, I brought up this term called d/acc that Vitalik Buterin coined to sort of capture this idea of as we advance technology, we should try to do it in decentralized, differential, democratizing and defensive technologies. How do you resonate with this way of thinking about advancing technology?

[26:04] Indy: Yeah, I have massive respect for Vitalik. I think what he's done is extraordinary. And I admire the fact that he's sort of fully committed to an exploration as opposed to being captured by the empire and the theory of power and control very easily. I would argue that lots of decentralization movements are focused on the fractionalization of power and agency. And I think that's one important dimension. The other dimension is the recognition of entanglement. So it's not just the fact that you distribute power, it's also the recognition of entanglement of the agent back into the system. That's the self-balancing act. So lots of the things that we're interested in is how do you finance common goods because they have entangled value functions later. So the separation is not enough. Decentralization and re-entanglement is enough. So I think we have to talk about these two things in dialogue rather than in just one way.

[27:07] Beatrice: You've called the work of, you know, changing the rules of the dark matter the boring revolution. Why boring, and why is it revolutionary?

[27:22] Indy: For example, in the room we're in, you've got plywood on the walls. Who owns the liability of that carbon over the next 500 years? Right. It's not clear, but the reality is we're going to have to be able to sequester that carbon and hold that for 500 years right now if we're going to be viable. So there's all these invisible mechanisms of like, is that a stewardship problem? So I think there's a whole bunch of things that are sitting behind the system that we're going to have to operationalize in really radical ways. So that's where, for me, the kind of attention of the boring, the things that we don't really care about, but actually they're the revolution where I think the deep revolution lies.

[27:59] Beatrice: And let's say someone is listening to this and they want to help sort of join the boring revolution. Where do you suggest people start, or how can they contribute?

[28:11] Indy: Ask questions. I mean, that's the simple thing. I think you can touch anything and see the world through it. I literally think, like I said, if you can look at your responsibility to the timber in this room and say, actually, who owns that problem? How do we store it for 500 years? That's the real problem. So I think you can pretty much touch anything right now.

[28:34] Beatrice: And do you suggest then that just like starting experiments in the world is the best way to go about it, or?

[28:41] Indy: Yeah, I would say do experiments, make yourself legible. So put your questions up, put your hunches up, put your assumptions up, make yourself legible in terms of those explorations with the sciences, build coherence around that. And there are many, many people, I mean, I get emails and whatever from loads of people around the world that are doing some of this stuff. So I think there's loads of people doing it. I think the question is how we make ourselves more visible and more coherent. And I think the bigger challenge that we face is that we live in a world where we're drowning in opinions. To present our being, we almost need to have an opinion, as opposed to being able to operate in doubt. So there's something quite fundamental about how we create the space for conversation and doubt between the languages and the conversations that we're all having. So it's also really important that how we do these experiments is rooted in doubt and invitation to conversation as opposed to certainty as well.

[29:42] Beatrice: I want to go back to one of the things that you mentioned in the beginning, which is open source housing. How does that work?

[29:52] Indy: Yeah, so WikiHouse, and Alastair Parvin built this with us. We were doing it together a long time ago. So it was basically about how do you print and 3D route housing. And that's what WikiHouse has been doing. It was built using 3D CNC routing technology, which was there, enabled to kind of modularize it, optimize it, build the instruction kit around it.

[30:17] Beatrice: Instruction kit as in like building

[30:20] Indy: Yeah, it's literally like, like almost like an IKEA catalog, you can download it yourself, you can get it printed, you can get it delivered, you can stand it up. But like I said, the production issue is important, but actually the real issue is land. So there's a whole bunch of issues behind that that we talked about. Warranties, how do you get the warranty infrastructure? How do you get the engineering validation to be able to get the mortgages and so on? And that's the brilliant work that our department's been doing as well.

[30:54] Beatrice: And as I understand it, Dark Matter Labs, you have sort of offices all over the world now, or in many places. There's a lot of people working on different things. If you had to mention one or two that you recommend people check out, is there

[31:10] Indy: Yeah, I critique Shankar's work on a risk sense and getting citizens to be able to perceive the risk of the future. I think that's really critical. Leon Seefeld's work on bioregionalism, in terms of how do you stabilize critical bioregions. There's work that we're doing with cities in terms of how do you pull risk in terms of cities, like how do you cool Madrid. In order to cool Madrid you have to be able to get people to perceive the understanding of what the risk is or what the desire is, then pool that risk, then to be able to build a capital pool that's able to fund outcome accelerators to be able to cool that stuff. That's work that colleagues are doing, from Malik to Joost Beunderman to Aleethia, so this work that's going on all around that and the city's work that we're doing more broadly with Yorn and Yost.

[32:06] Indy: So there's a whole, I mean, this is a system of like many, many leaders across the system and the work we're doing on the Permissionless City, which is creating a new form of machine-assisted permission landscape for how you create permissioning, which is again building off the work that was done with Taiwan and other frameworks that's led by Eunji Kang and Fang. One of my big things was I didn't want to be, you know, like I wanted to be in a group of leaders who were extraordinary because I don't want to operate in the classic form of an organization where you get one mildly interesting person and a lot of dull people sitting behind it. I wanted to be part of a community of extraordinary people and that was the kind of objective of how we even designed DM. You know, even our pay structure, the highest paid to lowest paid is 2.1. I know I'm not the highest paid in the organization, so we designed money to not be an incentive, but money to be an enabler for people to do the work. We changed theories of money allocation. We've changed how we govern ourselves and organize ourselves. So the whole of the system is built fundamentally in a different route.

[33:14] Beatrice: That's really cool and inspiring. Last question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

[33:21] Indy: Evolve yourself. So in your twenties the world has a different expectation from you in your thirties, and in your thirties the world has a different expectation from you in your forties, and vice versa as you go up. And I think in your 20s you can be a provocateur and it's good to be a provocateur, to be a challenge. In your 30s you need to be a maker, you need to be able to make. In your 40s you need to be able to build organizations and build the organizational capacity. I really found that really helpful, recognizing that you can't always be the provocateur, which is where I was, and being able to evolve my own position and what your theory of leadership is.

[33:56] Indy: I think one of the big questions I'm holding, and people that are more senior than me have told me, like, what does it mean to be a wise leader and what does that look like. The other thing is kind of negate your own power. Design systems that negate your own power. So don't design systems that reinforce it. A king always has a jester and the role of the jester was to be able to give true feedback into the system. Otherwise the king would get dumb. So feedback is really important as a means to being able to hold stuff. So strength and vulnerability, key things. Hold them together, not separately.

[34:28] Beatrice: Yeah, great advice. That's it. Thank you so much.

[34:31] Indy: Not at all. Thank you.

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RECOMMENDED READING

Organizations and projects

Dark Matter Labs: Indy's organization, which works on recoding the hidden rules, norms and infrastructure behind economies and cities.

WikiHouse: The open-source building system started in 2011 by Alastair Parvin and Nick Ierodiaconou, which Indy compares to an IKEA catalog for houses.

Opendesk: A marketplace for open-source furniture made by local makers, the furniture company Indy mentions at the start of the conversation.

Impact Hub Birmingham, by Nesta: A profile of the Digbeth community hub, one of the build-it-yourself projects Indy says taught his team how to run a "micro multinational".

Madrid 2050°: A Dark Matter Labs initiative that coordinates industry, policy and finance to protect Madrid from extreme heat, the "how do you cool Madrid" example in the episode.

Permissioning the City: A community-led digital platform from Dark Matter Labs for governing and sharing underused urban spaces.

Bioregions: A Dark Matter Labs site sharing tools and learnings for place-based bioregioning, connected to the bioregional work Indy recommends.

Planetary Civics Inquiry: A network of researchers and practitioners exploring how societies can govern a planet whose systems are deeply interconnected, linked to the "planetary civics" writing Indy refers to.

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs: The ministry Indy says his colleagues worked with on rethinking identity.

Talks and writing referenced in the conversation

Civilizational optioneering, by Indy Johar: His 2026 talk on keeping multiple futures open in the face of climate volatility and AI.

My techno-optimism, by Vitalik Buterin: The essay that introduces d/acc, the idea of advancing technology in defensive, decentralized and democratic ways.

Eric Schmidt's speech on AI and climate, by The Register: Coverage of Schmidt arguing that the climate goals will be missed anyway and that AI is the better bet, the remark Indy reads as a coherent AGI-first strategy.

To learn more about key concepts mentioned in the conversation

Is global warming tipping key Atlantic ocean currents towards "collapse"?, by Carbon Brief: An explainer on the Atlantic overturning circulation (AMOC) and the scientific debate over its possible collapse.

Tipping points in the climate system: Overview on Wikipedia of thresholds, including Amazon dieback and the AMOC, beyond which changes can become abrupt and hard to reverse.

The "adjacent possible" and how it explains human innovation, by Stuart Kauffman: TED talk on how one project opens the door to the next.

Rights of nature: Overview on Wikipedia of the idea that ecosystems have rights of their own, related to the question of what a river is and who speaks for it.

Bioregionalism: Introduction on Wikipedia to organizing society around natural regions such as watersheds.

Recursive self-improvement: Overview on Wikipedia of AI systems that build more capable successors, the "self-feeding" intelligence Indy describes.

Intellectual humility: Overview on Wikipedia of recognizing the limits of your own knowledge, close to the "capacity to hold doubt" Indy talks about.

Instrumental convergence: Overview on Wikipedia of how goal-driven systems can cause harmful side effects, related to Indy's concern about goal systems in AI.

Labor theory of value: Overview on Wikipedia of the idea that a product's worth comes from the work needed to make it, which Indy says is collapsing.

Commons: Overview on Wikipedia of shared resources governed by their communities, related to financing common goods.

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