Garrick (00:01.634)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Garrick Jones and I'm one of the co -authors of the book The Curious Advantage and today I'm here with my co -author Simon Brown. Hi Simon.

Simon Brown (00:17.36)
Hey, hi everyone.

Garrick (00:19.343)
We're delighted to be joined today by Indipul Johar. Hi Indy.

Indy (00:24.519)
Hi, Garrick. Hi, Simon. Love to be here.

Garrick (00:27.084)
Welcome to the curious advantage podcast Indy.

Garrick (00:44.078)
You're the co -founder of Dark Matter Labs, founding director of Open System Labs and the award -winning Architecture Zero Zero. You also helped start Open Systems Lab, Wikihouse and Opendesk. And you're to my mind an architect with a very special focus on people systems and how our environments can radically impact our experiences and outcomes. I mean that's...

way too less around what you actually do. But can you tell us more about your journey and how you got to where you are today?

Indy (01:17.262)
Yeah, I mean, I think at the root level of it, I think what I've always been interested in is how do we democratise the capacity to make the city or the urban. And democratising the capacity of the city, by democratising, I don't mean...

devote, I mean, capacity to genuinely make the city in place. so the journey has largely been all the way through, has been on that, like whether it's making open source housing or whether it's open source furniture, or even actually, you know, part of building the impact hub network or whether it's helping build two social investment structures. It was all about how do we democratize the making of the city. And fundamentally, Dartmouth Labs was just a recognition that actually at the back

end.

of the physical democratization, there's a structural dark matter questions, the nature of the company and the nature of the firm as such, all the way through to the nature of property, all the way through to the nature of regulation and how they actually constrain or how they are rooted in what I would call is a command and control theory. A lot of that logic model is rooted in a 19th century theory of control orientated or dominion orientated models. And not even 19th century, you could go back to the

enlightenment and the kind of thesis of dominion as a means of orchestrating the world and they've been rooted in that and I think what we're seeing around us is the after effects of a dominion theory that's gone wild and is no longer able to deal with the complexity and so a lot of our work has really been rooted into the dark matter around us and how that works.

Garrick (02:52.701)
Now you've already in this small introduction.

talked about the scale of the city, you talked about the individual, you've also talked about organisations which we're going to unpack, I'm sure, in our conversation. But you've also mentioned the global. And the thing that is remarkable about you and your work, to my mind again, is you're not afraid to talk about global transformation and the challenges facing the planet at this time. And this is an enormous perspective. But when we talk to you, you have an opinion about how this can be changed, which

and how that can be done in action. So can we talk about what is the scale of this transformation we're facing and what do we need to do about it to your mind?

Indy (03:38.091)
So I think the scale is both, I think the effects are planetary. So I would argue climate change or climate breakdown is effectively a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

And I think, so, and that's really, in my view, really important kind of lens to look at the world. And whether it's you look at biodiversity losses, they're similarly rooted in this being an effect of the problem space, in that problem space. And I think when we look further along, what becomes really clear is that actually we have to stop.

Simon Brown (08:53.062)
So lots that you've opened with there, and India, and a few sort of back to basics questions from me. So you talk about open sourcing housing, open sourcing furniture, and dark matter. I'd love to understand all of those in a little bit more detail before we move on, if we could.

Indy (09:07.755)
Yeah, mean, so what we did with Wikihouse was we created effectively a model where you could download and 3D print the primary structure of the house using 3D routers and that went global. There's lots of communities around the world now doing exactly that and that's been growing as a global movement. Now, whilst that was great, what we started to realize very quickly was that yes, you can 3D print the house, you can route the house and you can construct it, but the

There's two fundamental questions that still left on the table. One is warranties. If you can't construct a warranty, you can't actually get a mortgage. then you're left with, how do you produce warranties for distributed manufacturing and distributed material production? And what's your theory of quality control? That's a classic, what I would say, a dark matter problem. So what that does is centralize quality control. As soon as you centralize quality control, you centralize the innovation capacity of the system passively.

in the model. The second problem was effectively land. So land, example, the value of a house in most parts of, say, southern parts of England, the value of the house is marginal rest to the value of the land. And the value of the land is not the land itself. It's actually the monopolistic access to public goods. So if I take your house and I was to grab it and put it in the middle of Siberia, how much is your house worth? Nothing.

Its value is largely a function of, and its ecological value is nominal, it's there but it's nominal. So most of the value of the house is actually a function of the monopolistic access it provides to labor markets, culture, transportation rights, all these other things. And so what we've seen is the inflation of the house, the house itself is a depreciating white good. It costs more and more to maintain. But ecological value of the land is nominal, it's useful but nominal.

that's really been inflating is what I would call is the monopolistic access to public goods. So when you buy a house, what you're really buying is the equity into the city. And what you're really seeing the inflation of is the equity of that equity of the city to the house owner. So what we started to discover was you could unbundle the house, you could physically transform the house, but actually the problem space was somewhere else. And that's been the journey into sort of going into dark matter, into saying actually the problem spaces are rooted into the

Indy (11:36.182)
things that govern the bureaucracies that we've constructed to be able to understand value and construct value in different ways. And that's really been, we've always gone along this journey of what I'd call the adjacent possible. Our innovation theory has always been rooted in adjacent possible. So we started off being architects, we built with people like Melissa Meen, the Bristol Urban Beach, then we were, ended up co -designing the Impact Hub, then we ended up building an Impact Hub, then we built open source furniture because when we talked, learned about the Impact Hub, we recognized you had to decentralize.

the production of that furniture, then we started to say how could that technology then be used to open source housing and then we sort of realized that actually there's a fundamental problem with the dark matter quality. So we've been unfurling almost all the way through into these adjacent possibles as a means to build capability, understand the problem space and work through it.

Simon Brown (12:25.67)
There's a real example of that. So I live here in Switzerland on the border with France and Germany. And so you have land that is literally meters one side or other from the border. You could have an identical house on one side or the other. The land is physically the same. But I guess what I'm hearing is it's the dark matter, if you like, invisible constraints of taxation and

the rule of law and all of these pieces that would make one side double the value of the other side.

Indy (12:57.428)
Precisely. Precisely. And it's quite disrupting to say, well actually, most of the equity inflation that we've seen in our houses are not houses. They're equity inflation in the places that we live. And what we've seen is effectively that value that's been inflated has been, I would say, captured like an enclosure by property. Whereas actually that value was constructed not only by property owners, but everyone that participated in the city or the place.

Garrick (13:09.064)
Hmm.

Indy (13:27.582)
interesting third horizon of enclosure of public value in this kind of last period of using housing as a mechanism. So I think this is exactly the sort of work that we've done, you for example right now we're in the middle of looking at how does land become self -owning and how do you make a house which is self -owning. So we're changing the theory of ownership into property and what does that do to release our economies in different formats.

Garrick (13:45.448)
Hmm.

Garrick (13:52.026)
I really want to explore adjacent possibilities in a moment, but before we get that, I mean, you've talked already about cities and policy and people, individuals, organizations and the global. And the thing about your work is you very openly talk about global transformation and the challenges facing the planet at this time. And this is an enormous perspective. And you also talk about things we can do to actually make that change happen.

dark matter perspectives and so on. So to your mind what is the size of the transformation we're facing and what do we need to do about it?

Indy (14:31.846)
Okay, so there's multiple layers to this conversation for me. One is, I would argue that climate breakdown is a symptom of the problem.

And if we understand it as a symptom, then you have to sort of say, where's the root cause? I would say biodiversity loss is also a symptom of the problem. So if we understand these as structural kind of self -terminating symptoms, then where's the root of the challenge? And then the other part of the story that I think is really important is that, and I would argue fundamentally, the root of the problem is rooted in how we imagine ourselves and our relationship with the planet. It's almost a 400 year where

living at the cycle of a 400 year world view of how we've imagined ourselves as discrete individual definable objects, the objectification of the world, the subjectification of the world, the dominion, orchestration of the world, the theory of control as a means of organizing, all the way through to classification theory. This modality of seeing the world, Newtonian enlightenment, has coming to an end of a cycle. Science has already killed it 50 years ago. It's just policy and culture hasn't caught up.

So what we have is a gap between what I'd call a residual cultural vehicle that's running. When science has already killed it 50 years ago, pretty much most of these conceits that we've been operating, we've been killed over the last 50 years of kind of individualism, meritocracy, all these things that are normal cultural discourse in business language because you say, you know. But actually when you look at, for example,

For example, a child born in a stressed household is going to significantly, perform significantly worse than a child not born in a stressed household. And that's to do with multiple layers. That's to do with actually the food nutrition. They won't absorb the nutrition space. The quality of sleep. So if you live on a busy road, are two to three years likely more to die earlier than other people just because the micro levels of stress in your body and the cortisone levels.

Garrick (16:37.132)
Hmm.

Indy (16:40.826)
to your social networks actually fundamentally determine actually have such a powerful correlation between your cognitive performance. If many of us were actually in a different social network, would we be anywhere close to where we are in our business positions or our locations? And I think we often take these as individual privileges, but they're really not. so the social brain, and Garrick, you've been doing loads of work around this thing, the social brain, all these sort of theories, you start to realize that epigenetics

Garrick (16:55.808)
Mm.

Indy (17:11.107)
you start to realize that we are entangled constructs. At the same time, what you start to realize is the institutional economy that we built has actually advanced what I would say an extractionism through a theory of dominion. Once you go into a power over relationship with the world, you optimize for extraction. We saw the earth as a resource to be extracted from. And we've also...

Garrick (17:14.827)
Hmm.

Indy (17:33.052)
we've driven extractionism and externalization. So you're optimizing for single point gains at the point of externalizing other costs. And those two worldviews were fine when the world was near infinite, but when the world becomes near finite and visibly finite, those externalizations and those extractionisms are now effectively self -terminating us as a civilization. So we've come to a cycle, end of a cycle of a way of being. And I think this is, we can be melodramatic about it.

we can be whatever. But I really want to be very cool. It's just an end of a cycle of a way of viable being for the growth of civilization in any meaningful format.

Garrick (18:03.529)
Yeah.

Garrick (18:12.585)
I'm really struck by when you talk about the discourse we have today and how it's lagging behind the science and our understanding of what really goes on. You talk about 50 years ago that science has debunked much of the common discourse that we have today. Especially, it really makes me think about organizations. Organizations have discourse within them. They have various constructs that shift from organization to organization, but there's a broad

broad level of constructs and thinking that is taught and that is propagated through business. what, we talk about the problem at the moment, what do you think would be a different set of language or a different set of conversation or constructs that we should have within business today, given what we know about the science?

Indy (19:08.308)
So let me start two layers to that. Layer one is I don't think business yet understands the scale of disruption that's coming for it. So if you look at the fundamentals, so if we say that if we carry on externalizing and we carry on extractionism as a means of organizing at the same scale,

human civilization most likely will not survive. We're looking at three degrees temperature rise. Three degrees temperature rise globally is five degrees in land, is eight degrees in urban environments, up to eight to 12 degrees urban environments on average. We'll lose food baskets, we will go into perpetual states of war probably way earlier than we'll see the environmental effects which will have an accelerating effect. So I think one thing we have to just realize is the path we're currently on is definitively self -terminating. And I also want to use this

moment to take out the myth that I often see in...

business leaders communities where they say well you know the planet's gonna really only support a billion people and we're gonna get down to a billion. This is a common parlance amongst the rich and my common retort back to that is really simple and this is also retort by environmentalists that the carrying capacity of the planet is a billion. It's not. The carrying capacity of the planet is a billion if you live American lifestyles. 7 .2 billion people are just fine.

So the question is which who is favored in this future. The second myth I want to really go for is that actually when you

Indy (20:47.668)
If we end up in a situation where we effectively drive the genocide of 7 .2 billion people, there is nowhere we're going to stop at that moment in time. The release of trauma and war that we'll see will almost certainly mean, and the scale of weapons of mass destruction that are available to us, we will not stop. So the pathway to civilization is not rooted in some narrowing or throttling of the human race. The pathway has to be fundamentally different. Now why I say all that is that I think this is a path

conversation I'm seeing amongst capital providers to imagine this viable future. I think what we're facing is a much more structural transformation of our foundational economy and that means our energy systems, our material systems, our biomaterial base.

our human machine kind of cognitive economy all the way to our nutrient base. This is as big as the Industrial Revolution was in both philosophy and the practice of what we make and how we live. And it is rooted at every level. That's why I talk about the human machine economy as a new human economy that's being given birth to as a result of the capabilities that we're building on machine capability sites. So this is a full stack transformation from energy upwards.

I think.

And that will change, so this is kind of the scope. And then what I do think is really important is most of our economy, certainly in the West, is a derivative economy of a hydrocarbon economy. So as we start to shift our energy base, we're going to have to shift most of our derivative economies that we've been living in. And this is a root and branch transformation as close as I can see it. And to give you a figure, I think I was quoted, was that if you priced in social environmental costs on businesses, if you really priced in

Indy (22:37.782)
social environmental costs, then you would, think 78 % of the SMP 100 would not be viable. Right, right. And I think this is really important to put on the table. So this is not a marginal transition. It's not a marginal transformation. This is as close to World War II rebuild of our economies as you can imagine.

Simon Brown (22:45.206)
haha

Garrick (22:52.833)
you

Indy (23:02.108)
It's a rebuild of our economies at root and branch level. That's just the what. Then I think Garrick, as you rightly say, is the how question. And the how question is also fundamentally different because I think we've created an enterprise economy that is rooted in command and control and cannot deal with complexity.

So, you know, as quick shorthand, would say one of the biggest transformations we're seeing, we're going to see an enterprise is a move from control theories and means of organizing to learning theories and means of organizing. So in complexity, what you have to do is put your agency and your embodied intelligences at the front of the system. And you have to operate much more like a football coach. You know, the back end of the system is not even a coach, it's a learning system for the front end actors.

Garrick (23:47.978)
you

Indy (23:53.31)
move from the role of what does executive leadership look like? Well, executive leadership is an enabling infrastructure, is a coaching infrastructure, is a learning infrastructure, and your real actors on the playing field are the people at the front of the business line. And you know, philosophically we understand that, but actually what we haven't yet understood is that's how value is going to be created, and that's going to change and disrupt theories of how risk is held. Currently the problem is we centralise risks in the hands of the C -suite.

And if you centralise risk in the hands of the C -suite, you force a control theory on the table because they are the holders of risk, so they need to be able to control and manage risk. But if opportunity is an entangled problem in the surface, we require a different theory of corporation. And I think this is going to be one of the most radical transformations of our theory of corporation in different formats, especially when you look at machine -assisted infrastructures and what that does to learning and development capabilities in that same cycle. So there's a transformation of the human economy in the birth of that

Garrick (24:32.082)
Mmm.

Indy (24:53.591)
So in the what and the how, think we're facing a major transformation.

Simon Brown (25:00.194)
So there's a huge amount there to unpack. if I make sure I'm following fully. So we're essentially saying that the path that we're on is not sustainable. And your words probably more dramatic that it's a self terminating path from the symptoms of the actions and the system that we've built at the moment in terms of extraction and hydrocarbon based, et cetera.

If we looked at that in totality, then most of our organizations today wouldn't be sustainable if you priced in the social and climate impact of them. There is a way we can change that we would need to change the system, we would need to change the way that we operate, and in order to do that we need to change how we think as leaders and the role of our leaders shifting from command and control to learning and coaching.

Garrick (25:54.269)
you

Simon Brown (25:54.463)
and enabling of the organisation to be able to learn better ways. Is that what we're saying?

Indy (26:01.605)
Exactly. And what we're saying is that we're entering a worldview at the agentification of the world. Whether it's machine education or human agentification, is we're moving capacity to the edge of the system and the capacity for agency at the edge of the system. This is not just a sort of, it's not a moral theory, it's an efficacy theory and the theory of complexity. And technology is moving us there. So we've got a really interesting moment where technology is enabling the agentification of the world.

And that is also going to drive a new way of dealing with complexity in radical formats. know, Simon Garrick, you'll both have read all the kind of, know, civilizations make and break on their overheads in terms of their bureaucratic systems. As when their overheads of bureaucracy become higher than the theory of value, they die. And I think we are in this transformation of our theory of bureaucracy to an agent -driven worldview, which is fundamental to our theory of discovering value. Now, this transformation to a biomaterial economy, to a

Garrick (26:44.005)
Yep.

Indy (26:59.958)
nuclear material economy, to a new human machine economy, to a new nutrition economy, is going to also transform, you know, we are going to have to dematerialize our economy. We're going to have to move from a material economy to an intangible economy. We're going to have to move value. That's why, you know, some of the work we're doing is like the collective intelligence of a city will be an asset, right? So it will be a fundamental asset. We'll start to move our theory of where value lies in different formats, and that will also change our theory.

of allocation and our theory of governance of material supply chains in radical new ways as well. you what does it mean to steward materials as opposed to own them? Ownership as a means of governing supply chains is a really poor means of governing supply chains. It looked optimum for a different world, but it doesn't work where you're trying to have closed loop supply chains. So this is a root and branch transformation and with much higher value on the other side of it.

Simon Brown (27:56.4)
So what do we need to do to change that? So if we're currently on a path that is not a positive one, you've described a way that we can address by changing to it by material or nutrition -based economy, et cetera. What's the lever that will create that shift? What will take us to that different world where actually things are far more positive?

Indy (28:22.316)
If I'm really honest, it's going to be a combination of facts. So one thing is that we're starting to see the precursors of this next economy already. So if you look at the work that's going on in sort of, whether it's bioregional transformations and bioregional work, whether you look at the idea of rivers being made, given sovereignty, self -sovereignty, or whether you look at sort technological self -sovereignty being explored, and we're working across all of those factors. So we're seeing the emergence of the new.

of whether it's agroforestry changing our biomaterial economies. For example, the UK doesn't have one managed forest for structural timber. We just don't have the infrastructure for a timber economy. So we're going to have to build infrastructure. So we're starting to see some of this stuff. Second thing is, think, crisis. If I'm really honest, think crisis is going to be the greatest driver of transformation. And when we start to price in some of the risks that we're holding, what you're going to

is a very fast fall away of value.

and pretty radical fall away of value. I remember when Mark Carney sort of did a beautiful thing. was one of his most elegant moves when he turned around and asked every, I think it was insurance company to write him a letter from the C -suite to say that they were solvent. All he sort of said was, could you let me know that you are solvent with regards to risk of climate change? I thought it was a great piece of work, right? Imagine asking every director of every company in the world to say, could you personally underwrite that you're solvent with regards to the risk of climate?

Garrick (29:49.566)
you

Indy (29:56.562)
change.

brilliant piece of fiduciary responsibility and declaration of public personal liability. So I think we're just not really understanding the risks. It's kind of like eyes half blind intentionally. We're squinting our eyes away from the systemic risk. The risks are now known as well. That's the other thing. So we're not crystallizing the risks on the balance sheets. I think we're going to see a forcing function when those risks crystallize. We're going to see structural transformation on that side. So this is a kind of move by the kind of attractor side, the risk side,

Simon Brown (29:59.366)
Hmm.

Indy (30:29.142)
the side and also what we're going to see is security is going to drive this transformation. So one of the biggest moves that we're seeing is the rise of secure economics, security economics, which I think is going to be a big driver in these foundational economies. So security is no longer going to be perceived just from a kinetic sense, but energy, material, critical minerals all the way through to nutrition systems and human machine systems. So we're going to start to actually look at security economics as a key driver. So I think these

three drivers are going to be the big macro forces that are going to sort of accelerate the transformation.

Garrick (31:06.064)
You talk about this being the biggest transformation or rebuild since the second world war. And you talk about security economics and crisis driving it. If you think about infrastructure and the technology changes that need to happen and companies who will be changed and forced to change by this.

Are there any weak signals that may exist already that you could point to where you say, okay, this is already being accommodated or we're starting to see examples of this emerging?

Indy (31:43.796)
I think the weak signals are all around us. Look at the quality of copper recycling that you've got around the world right now. Copper is almost a fully recycled material right now, which is extraordinary just to see how quickly that's happened. As copper has gone from, know, copper ore used to be 40 % ore to 0 .4 % ore now. if you, 0 .4 % of ore is now copper in mines. So that's driven almost full circularity. So we're starting to see these moves

happen and like I was saying, whether it's the work that we're doing. And I think the futures are also being born in different parts of the world with different capacities. This is where I think we're doing work, for example, with Indigenous nations looking at, in Canada, making land self -sovereign. So moving land outside the theory of property, but actually making land a legal agent in the system in itself. Now that sort of future is being born at the intersection of the crown

and indigenous worldviews to construct these pathways. So we're seeing these futures kind of happen in different frameworks. We're seeing local authorities, municipalities are recognizing that representative decision making as a model of decision making is no longer able to orchestrate a world of explosion of sovereignty. So if the only person represented is humans, when actually the representation cycle needs, you know, if you were to look at a city and talk about what are the agents in a city,

you would say there's vastly more people than just the citizens of the city.

And I use, so if you look at the explosion of sovereignty, we're seeing actually the sovereignty of a state as a quasi sovereign actor is being broken as we start to actually distribute sovereignty back to citizenship, human systems, more than human systems, future humans with the right to live. How do we start to reimagine governance into those frameworks? Those conversations are starting already. So we're seeing the future is, you know.

Indy (33:46.452)
We changed our pay structure. We changed our theory of moving from being a control -oriented organization to a learning -oriented organization. The rise of micro -multinationals, which is, think, much like yourselves, we're operating in 21 countries around the world, and we're distributed as a network. We're a micro -multinational. I think we're going to see the rise of these sorts of activities.

Garrick (34:07.106)
you

Indy (34:16.466)
behaviors are already there and once you enter being a micro multinational control theory becomes virtually impossible to deliver because it's an infinite problem of total control on the screen and you end up with actually loss of results so you have to shift the theory of the organization so I think this is happening all around us

Garrick (34:23.511)
Hmm.

Garrick (34:35.853)
I want to explore further weak signals around the theory of organization. What do you imagine the new organization looks like? Command and control has gone out, the pyramid has been shifted and broken, hyper connected, global. How does it work? How does it function? What makes it work?

Indy (34:52.99)
Yeah.

Indy (34:56.506)
Yeah, it's really interesting. So I still believe that the...

function of a corporation or the firm will be when you're operating with tacit knowledge that's pre -codification. So you can't codify and transact on it. So a boundary of the firm will be driven by actually on the ability of complex tacit knowledge where the cost of codification and that would be higher than actually the value created through the entanglements.

So I think that's one dimension. And I think there's a sort of, I think the second dimension that I think becomes really interesting is more and more, I would say, is the kind of combination of human machine capabilities. I think we will almost certainly be looking at futures of not what I would call machine assisted learning capacities of organisms. So how are you using machines as auto reflective device across a thousand people to support their learning and ennoblement?

and helping them make better decisions. And I think this is going to be a really powerful backend of the feature corporation. Third, think what we're going to look at, what I would call this chains.

I would say sort of chains of corporations working together, microchains working together with shared interoperability. Graham Boyd's work on looking at, think, Erdoganic Enterprises looks at sort of how even sort of sharing of surpluses and creating resilient balance sheets. So I think there's a whole bunch of stuff that's going to happen there. So I think when you look at the financing infrastructure, we're going to see networks. So we're going to see this kind of what I'd call on one hand,

Indy (36:38.76)
narrowing of the firm, the other hand the platforming of different capacities of the firm itself. And those hybridities are going to be really key part of that story in a lot of what we're seeing. And then like I was saying, I think the role of micro multinationals, I think we're going to see a massive move in that direction in those frameworks as well. Yeah.

Garrick (37:02.171)
We're talking to Inderpal Johar, who co -founder of Dark Matter Labs and the award -winning Architecture Zero Zero. Is it Architecture Zero Zero or Architecture Nought Nought? How do you say it, Indy? And the award -winning Architecture Zero Zero. He also starts...

Indy (37:13.628)
Zero zero. Yeah, zero zero.

Garrick (37:21.255)
We're talking to Inderpal Johar, who's co -founder of Dark Matter Labs and the award -winning Architecture Zero Zero. He also helped start Open Systems Lab, Wikihouse, and Opendesk. Indy serves as a non -executive international director of Blocks Hub and advises on the future observatory in the London Festival of Architecture. He's a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School and a professor at RMIT University. He's lectured at institutions like Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. And he received the LEED Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE for services to architecture.

texture in 2023.

Simon Brown (37:57.328)
So we've talked about learning organisations, we've talked about human machine capabilities and that ability to help with learning. What's the role of curiosity in this transformation that we're seeing in India?

Indy (38:11.334)
So I think curiosity and holding uncertainty is going to be one of the key attributes of the new human economy. So I totally agree with your central premises and we often talk about this, that to be in dark matter labs you've got to be able to hold uncertainty because we commit to goals that are yet not known how to be delivered to.

And most of the economy as we rebuild it is going to be rooted in the discovery and the trajectory of moving towards goals that we do not know how to get to.

So if that's the key case, the economy has to be rooted of firms to economies of discovery. And what we are finding is that there's different layers of that. So for example, we talk about mission holding inside the which is the trajectory of a system. is an infinite, near an infinite outcome deficit. You could carry on raising money and doing the work almost at an infinite. Then there is an outcome responsibility, which is rooted

it in the project but it's not just rooted in the project value but the outcome value that's attributed to it and the next cycle of value. Then there's output value which is actually discovering the outputs that are necessary to be held. So what you can start to see is that actually holding uncertainty across these different fields becomes a key function. This changes theories of roles, this changes theories of renumeration, this changes the nature of economies. All these things start to get structurally transformed in order to build economies for that.

And it also means that I think what we have to build is, and curiosity also requires the word craft, would argue, because the other thing I would say is that...

Indy (40:00.126)
This is not a fire and forget economy. It's not that one person can be curious and tell other people what to do. It's a didactic response in relationship to context. It's a craft -based response between being able to philosophize and make simultaneously. So curiosity sits for me in a combination of being able to reflect and philosophize and to intervene, learn, reflect, and this iterative cycle is required to be able to adjust. And this goes back to the kind of point I made earlier about adjacent

to be able to discover adjacent possibilities that are near your reality. I think curiosity and holding uncertainty and building economies of discovery are the kind key organizational focuses for economies that are looking to transition.

Simon Brown (40:47.184)
Building economies of discovery, to my understanding at the moment, is not an area where capital is flowing. So there's organisations like XPRIZE where there are big problems and the market is not investing in those and therefore bodies like that are springing up to try to put the capital in to solve some of these problems. So how do we shift the flow of capital to invest in the unknown, invest in...

large impactful problems but where we don't have the answer is that we need our capital holders to be more curious and to take more risk around solving some of those big problems.

Indy (41:28.724)
Well, I mean, yes.

I'd frame it slightly differently. I think they're currently accumulating risk. So if you're a corporate, currently you're accumulating risk at a very, very fast level as a result of climate breakdown and the pathways of climate breakdown. So I'm not asking them to take risks, I'm asking them to manage risks. So I think it's really critical that we sort of shift the focus. And for me, the allocation of capital for discovery is a theory of optionality to manage your risks.

Simon Brown (41:53.66)
Yeah.

Indy (42:01.174)
So actually what I'm just looking for is competence. I'm just saying be competent. The risk is already there, it's accelerating.

Simon Brown (42:05.028)
Yeah, the risk is there.

Indy (42:10.196)
Now what I'm saying is how are going to manage your risk and the ability to manage risk requires you to be able to invest for options and discovery. So I think there's a, you know, I just came off a call in, for example, Australia, we were talking about the role of public venture capital. So we recognize that there's a whole problem space in the public domain that's going to require venture capital. We saw this with, you know, in the UK response to COVID, which was extraordinary because of Kate, I think Kate Bingham's work in terms of how she was allocated

capital in terms of the vaccine response. And I think we're going to have to start to learn quite different behaviors within corporations to actually build, you know, I think every corporation should be running an internal venture capital fund and it should be running that to transform its existing services as rapidly as it can, every part of that story. And ability to do that in different formats and even also transforming venture capital and not from the kind of late

20th century Y -combinator theory of venture capital, but actually really transforming that to how does it unlock value in different ways. you know, surprisingly, I'd say, one thing I'd say is that where I'm seeing weird successes and weird glimpses of future is luxury brands. So luxury brands, which are literally what I would call karma brands, they're rooted in the theory of the karma that wraps around them.

Garrick (43:14.279)
Mm

Garrick (43:27.473)
You

Simon Brown (43:29.497)
thing.

Indy (43:36.176)
and they have vast amounts of free cash flow because their cost to value is entirely in brand means that they are able to allocate to supply chain transformations at a much faster rate than what I would call commodity brands or utility brands. So we're seeing glimpses of quite different behaviors in those sorts of economies and I think this is going to require this form of risk capital, risk management capital. It's not risk capital, it's risk management capital to be allocated in different ways and actually be able to do that faster and that's not just a private sector problem, it's a private

Garrick (43:40.786)
Mm.

Indy (44:05.75)
sector problem, it's a public sector problem, it's a kind of ubiquitous societal problem. We're not allocating enough capital to the management risk because we're not crystallising the risks on our balance sheet.

Garrick (44:17.114)
Indy, you've talked about curiosity and its importance and infrastructures of curiosity that are required, but you also mentioned adjacent possible theories quite a lot. Can you just give us a little more about what is adjacent possible theory?

Indy (44:35.924)
Yeah, so it's not my thinking. It's actually a function of, I think it was one of the leaders of the Santa Fe Institute and wrote a brilliant book of Beyond Physics, think, and was trying to link up physics and biology. And what the analogy makes, and I think it's a really kind of quaint analogy, which is he talks about the TV couch was born.

Garrick (44:47.611)
Hmm.

Indy (45:04.136)
as a result of the remote control.

So the remote control had to come into existence to allow for the TV couch to be born in the way it was.

Garrick (45:13.327)
That's hilarious.

Indy (45:16.03)
And I thought there was a really lovely anecdote and I think it's a lovely anecdote of saying how one technology unleashes the capacity for another technology and that releases the capacity for snacks in the way that we eat them and there's this kind of dependency of kind of unfurling capacity and it goes back to what I sort of said is that I found that the best pathway to what I call whole value chain innovation is you go one step further than where you are.

not four steps further, one step further because you understand the demand side of the problem well enough to be able to then recognize what the supply side of that innovation needs to be. And that where I'd call adjacent possible transformation pathway is I think going to be really critical or has been really critical. The one thing I would say is in terms of you know...

I think what we have run out of now is the time for what I would call incremental adjacent possibles from single actors. So what we're going to have to talk about is supply chain transformations and supply chain transformations of each actor in the supply chain taking one adjacent step. So we're to have to do this in kind of multiple coordinated ways. But I think adjacent possible theory is a really critical thing because I think for me, unless you construct the demand, it's very difficult to, unless you can deeply understand the demand, it's very difficult to understand the supply side of that innovation.

capacity and that approach has been very useful to us certainly at DM.

Garrick (46:43.669)
Jessica (Producer) (46:46.383)
Yeah, your upload has stopped. So it said if you could... Yes, leave and come back, please.

Garrick (46:53.443)
Just a sec. Indeed.

Jessica (Producer) (47:03.486)
Also Indy, while I've got you here and we're stopped, your internet connection is a little bit lower than the others so I'm gonna need you to stay on at the end. If you wouldn't mind not closing this web page and just muting and turning off your computer and then I'm happy to let you know once it's uploaded. Perfect, thank you.

Indy (47:21.876)
Yeah, no problem at all.

Garrick (47:26.125)
There we go.

Simon Brown (47:28.482)
Okay, all good.

Garrick (47:28.889)
So is your... yeah it's all good. Do you want to go to 16 Simon?

Simon Brown (47:38.675)
Yes, and then we're nine minutes left, so then we'll need to fairly soon wrap up. okay, cool, let's go. So, Indy, what role do the latest advances from a technology perspective, and I'm thinking sort of AI, generative AI have on this? Is that going to give us a positive boost to the speed with which we can make some of these advances or is, yeah, what's your view on the impact that's going to have?

Garrick (47:42.669)
Yeah, that's right.

Indy (48:11.134)
It has the capacity for significant possible views, let's put it that way. I think the kind of agentification of the world which is made possible by LLMs and also small -scale language models is going to be really profound in terms of being able to deal with complexity at the edge of the system and to be able to build what I'd call conversational systems at the edge of the system. And that's really important as a means to deal with complexity.

Garrick (48:24.062)
you

Indy (48:38.546)
I also think that I think one of the big, so I think yes, that those things are going to be very useful. There are obviously, I think one of the big challenges that we face is we're still holding what I would say is 21st century technology in theories of.

of 19th century institutions called the legal firm and theories of competitive theory in economies with the illusion of what I call markets as illusionary mechanisms of governance or orchestration. So there is kind what I'd call an institutional problem at the back end of it. The other problem is obviously, you know, everyone will say this, what I'd call the curriculum or the training data and the bias of the training

data, we haven't really developed the governance frameworks around the training and the training data infrastructure. So it's like kids are going to school with no national curriculum, basically. So we're training wild kids in lots of different data positions with no theory of governance over how we're training these agents. So there's a kind of governance gap emerging. Then the other thing that I think is really critical is the...

Simon Brown (49:48.975)
Hmm.

Indy (49:54.996)
is the nature of how we use these technologies. Do we use these technologies to control humans and to create control models, or do we use these technologies as learning models? What's our thesis of how we deploy technology? And there's lots of really good examples of whether you tell judges what to do, whether you actually get them to become more self -aware, use evolutionary biology as support decision mechanisms, assisted compute mechanisms, how do we build new human machine economies? There's a whole dimension there.

then I think the other kind of question is obviously...

me around the kind of what I'd call the cultural hegemony of current technological bases. So if our models are being weighted and constructed from a worldview rooted in say California, then what we've also created is a kind of cultural hegemony which actually destroys the cultural plurality of places and other things by creating a kind of a single model worldview. So I think then that opens up I think some more fundamental questions about how do we pluralize plurality.

Garrick (50:51.921)
Hmm.

Indy (51:00.576)
these weighting systems and perspectives into the world of use. I think...

I think the input data bias is obviously significant. I think was a stat that says 97 % of literature written is written by white men, which is being trained on. So if you look at the kind of input data that's constructing a bias of the future forward -facing data. So there's what I'd call the kind of constructed bias in the system. But again, lots of people complain about that, but the reality is current systems are rooted in many of those biases. So the question is not necessarily the bias.

Simon Brown (51:34.457)
Yes.

Indy (51:36.072)
but actually our ability to evolve those systems and evolve those biases in inherent ways in my view as well. So I think there's a spectrum of opportunities and capacities and constraints, but they require both institutional innovation as well as technological innovation. My problem is we're just relying on institutional sort of technological innovation and not doing and I'm not saying institutional innovation is rooted in regulation, which is I think being our only tool today, which is

has been a kind of low fidelity tool I think to operating into these futures. So the question is how do we expand our field of, yeah, expand our scope of innovation to include other dimensions of it which is not just regulatory.

Garrick (52:21.899)
Indeed, coming to the end of this fascinating conversation. I mean, you've talked about worldviews, cities, policy requirements, people, organizations, global changes needed, you know, to nutrients, energy material, biomaterial, post hydrocarbons, and the new human machine interface that is emerging. Talk about adjacent possibles and the role of business shifting from extractionism to a way more collaborative and new forms of highly net.

networked micro global frameworks. You've talked about the move from control to theories of learning in both organisations and education, different theories of cooperation and corporations. And then we've talked about weak signals of some of the things that are already emergent and that are starting to grow and starting to be seen in the kind of collapse of the old ways of doing things. You've talked about security economics and evolutionary biology.

supporting decision making, control models versus learning models and a new theory of organisation that is probably emerging and required. about how all of this is going to have an impact which is greater than the rebuilding that took place after World War II and that's required now. Economies of discovery, mission holding, curiosity...

and its link with craft and the shift to learning organizations and philosophizing and craft simultaneously working together at a time as we need to make a shift from 20 where we have 21st century technology which is living within the 19th century infrastructure. This is a fascinating conversation and I'm very very grateful you've been here with us today because you offer hope in some way that there are that there are theories and there are mechanisms and there are ways of doing things that

that can enable large -scale global change to take place and it can happen at the level of the individual as an agent as well as at the level of the organisation and society. And I appreciate that very much. If there's one thing to leave our listeners with, what would it be?

Indy (54:35.604)
I mean, one thing I think is we don't really have a choice. I think this is often framed as a choice. And I think if you look at the data and the stats, you realize very quickly the choices between self -termination and...

flourishing. That's the choice that we face. It's a fork, and the fork is one end is not really a choice that life should make. So I think that's really important for me. The second thing is actually I think the integrity of understanding, you know, the point that I think Simon you pulled out which is this

It's not the, you're not taking risks, you're managing risks you're holding. And people often focus on the, I'm taking a risk by allegating. No, no, no, you're managing risks you're currently holding. I think that flip is really vital that we start to actively operate. And third, I think this is, for me, one of the most extraordinary chrysalis moments of civilization.

Garrick (55:24.938)
Hmm.

Indy (55:38.228)
I think we're living in this moment of transformational civilization and you know people like James Lovelock I think have said this beautifully when they sort of talk about you know we've given birth to a planetary consciousness of 8 .5 billion people machine -assisted and ecological are now self -aware enough to become be able to adjust their own own behaviors We've used millions of years worth of hydrocarbon energy stored hydrocarbon energy to become self -aware at a planetary scale. So I also sit with great

hope and possibility for what I think is an extraordinary moment of vast amounts of value creation. So I would sit here with, know, if there are people who are allocating capital, think trillions of dollars of worth of value is going to be constructed in this transition. And I think we need to now start to look at both those sides in an integrated way. So I sit here with deep thanks for both of you holding these sorts of conversations and driving this sort of narrative out there into public domain. It's really vital.

work that you and Simon have been doing as a whole outside Justus Podcast.

Garrick (56:43.027)
Thank you so much for joining us, Indy.

Indy (56:46.885)
pleasure.

Simon Brown (56:48.451)
Thanks, Indy.

Garrick (56:50.291)
You've been listening to Curious Advantage podcast. The series is about how individuals and organizations use the power of curiosity to drive success in their lives and businesses, especially in the context of our new digital reality. It brings to life the latest understandings from neuroscience, anthropology, economics, history, business, art, and behaviorism about curiosity and makes these useful for everyone. We're curious to hear from you. If you think there was something useful or valuable from this conversation, we encourage you to write a review for the podcast on your preferred channel, Saying Why This Was So.

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