This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello everyone. Today we are here with my co host, usual co host, Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello, everyone!

Simone Cicero:
And with my longtime friend and — you know, inspiration I would say — Indy Johar. Good morning Indy.

Indy Johar:
Good morning. Good morning, everyone.

Simone Cicero:
So Indy, I think we could discuss really lots of things with you, but there is a, you know, an opening question that we have been thinking about. And lots of the work we’re doing these days — trying to understand how do we reshape organizing for the times we are living in — deals with this transition that we are living in, in the information age. And the question that we believe is important to share with you as a start is really about: how do we build institutions for the information age? And what does it mean, because we’re pretty sure it’s not just a matter of reshaping, you know, our public institutions, but it’s also about understanding the new context where these institutions are being born. And once you also made me think about these overlaps between the public, the private and the “open space” and, of course, all these changes in cultures and also in constituencies that need to be part of this conversation. So what are your ideas today about these topics?

Indy Johar:
So firstly, delighted and thank you for inviting me! I think there’s multiple aspects to this conversation and I suppose the way we’ve been looking at it is that, in a way, it is not just the information transition — it’s a transition from what I would call “the way we organize bureaucracy”, right? I would say that the big transition we’re in the middle of is how we think about…ehm… So, we were historically in the Renaissance and other periods — operating in a worldview where the world was seemingly infinite — and the world seemed infinite. And certainly the Western European perspective was, you know: there was no edge of territory. And by implication it meant that, actually, we had to create a new way of seeing the world. In an infinite world what you create is silos, you put things “in vitro”, you understand things by isolating them from the influence of the world. So we put things in vitro, we divided, we physically divided territories into geographies with fixed, boundaries, called states. We did lots of things, right, over that period. And we impose those theses around the world. So whether it’s in indigenous nations, which were much more dynamic and cohabiting, we oppose the idea of physical geographies and physical boundaries and those things. But at the same time, we also did it to science, art, culture, we separated everything out and we took the same thesis in how we understood land, how we understood everything around us. And that conceptualization of bureaucracy has been happening for a while, right? It’s been happening for maybe 1000 years and we’ve been slowly moving on it and so while property rights were the remit of the few — actually, you know kings, queens and a few Lords over a period of time — we’ve been extending that worldview as our bureaucratic capacity is increased to a different worldview. Now, what I think the information age — as you put it — has done, or the age of digitized information, is changed the transaction cost of bureaucracy to near zero. And that has basically allowed for the cost of connecting information to become near zero and has — by application — changed our relationship in the world. So it is no longer about how we see things in isolation, but how we see things in a small world scenario. So I think over the last 30 years, what’s happened is that our interdependencies are now starting to feed back. And this is not just informational, it’s also the fact that for example, climate change affects the externalities were generating. So externalities, which were: you isolate something, you know all the externalities because they’re outside your in vitro — those externalities and now feedbacking to impact us. Now you can talk about climate change, you can talk about plastics in our water supply, you can talk about ecological destruction — you could do all these sort of things — are our feedbacking. That feedback mechanism is enhanced by information capacity. And it’s thereby starting to make a paradigm shift of how we operate in an infinite world, to a small world thesis. So in a way, what was the privilege of the great philosophers of the last thousand years — who would talk about your relationship in the world, being about interdependence — has now become an informational reality to everyone. We are all Buddhas now in a way, because in a way we are now all able to see and exist in the reality of being in interdependence. And that’s the human potential moment that we’re in. So in this transition of going from infinite world to small world, interdependency becomes key. And that itself is if structurally transforming our institutions, infrastructures, our culture, how we see the world all the way through. And I think that goes all the way through to corporations and everything else. So I think this is the macro transition that we’re in the middle of, and you’re right to say it’s enabled by a new thesis, a new thesis of digital information infrastructures, and our relationship in the world. So that’s the way how we conceive it and we see the time period, and it’s the democratization of this reality. So in a way, whereas historically that interdependence was a preserve of kings and queens, now it is a preserve many, and maybe most people in the world, and the effects are interdependent. So we’ve seen a radical democratization of this small world scenario for everyone, rather than it being the preserve in the 15th or 14th century just to the high kings and queens of the world. And that I think it’s a paaradigm we’re in the middle of.

Simone Cicero:
That’s interesting, I think it makes me think about this idea that, you know, John Robb mentioned a few days ago on Twitter, when he said: “we are transitioning from a politics of fractions — like right and left — into a politics of consensus and dissent”. So, consensus, you know, feels like you can express your consensus through networks on a unifying hypothesis. So, when you talk about, for example, this democratization of a small world, the idea feels like a natural response would be to ensure more coherence, so ensure more centralized decision, let’s say. So maybe the question that I want to share with you is, you know, it appears that our response to broader recognition of the importance of externalities and this feeling of a small world would be a centralized policymaking answer. So my question is, instead — I’m sure that you have older ideas on the other facets that have this transformation, which is more distributed or more complex — so what are your reflection about this friction between the coherent aspect and the complex aspect?

Indy Johar:
So I think the interdependence actually does exactly the reverse. It doesn’t drive. So interdependence forces us to recognize situational realities in new ways. So I think that interdependence make evident the complexity of the world that we’re operating in that interdependence also makes us much more globally vulnerable to risks and shocks and other capabilities, other other issues. So you could argue that we’ve had pandemics before, right, this is not first pandemic. But the reality thta makes the covid pandendemic rather unique is both the scale and speed that it’s operated at. Right? Scale, speed and scope. Scale in terms of its global implications, it’s extraordinary the speed at which it’s happened in over months, two months. And then actually, the scope of it in terms of its cascading effects on everything in society: how we live, how we eat, how we work -, everything. Now, so that is to do with the fact that in an interdependent age, your risks are — because you’re interconnected — these risks flow through the world, but they flow through “situationally”, right. They don’t follow through uniformly. So many of you will know that one of the key things that every government around the world is trying to do is to keep R — which is the reinfection rate — to less than one. Now R in a country — in a whole country — will be completely different in the middle of rural landscape to R in the middle of its capital city. So when you have uniformed singular models of seeing the world, what you get is quite a problematic analysis, because you assume it to be — the R average of the UK might be 1.5. right now, might be 1.6 might be 2 — but the R in London will be fundamentally different to the R in the middle of Northern Scotland. So, what becomes really critical is that the situational reality is different. And so if we understand — and this is often written about — is, you know, complex, turbulent, emergent world, that underlying issue is also a function of that reality. And that’s why centralized models don’t work because centralized models create averages, centralized models create uniform thinking. So what you need is different ways of looking at this.

Stina Heikkila:
You were talking about this decentralized, then the problem problems with averages and, and you know that you have to look at the context, obviously, when dealing with risks like what we’re seeing now in the pandemic. And what I was I wanted to go back a little bit to an earlier point, when you were talking about this, that the information and connecting information is nearing zero in terms of transaction costs and so on. And I wanted to explore a bit with you, like, why is it slow then? And why are our institutions being holding on to what seems to be inflated transaction costs when in fact, this might not be needed in the current information environment?

Indy Johar:
Well, I mean, there’s two interesting questions in there. So one, I think the really scary thing is if we make the transaction cost of our existing institutions near zero, and what does that do? And two, because I think as Simone was also saying previously, I think when you make institutional costs of bureaucratic cost near zero, you should transform the nature of the institution itself. So the real risk we have is that, so I’ll give you an example: Fractional trading on the global market has meant that we have, we are now 70% of shares and stocks are traded in million milliseconds, right? Fractions of seconds. Now, that’s basically bureaucratic costs going to near zero, manifesting in that way. But if 72% of stocks are trading at that speed, what it also means is that there is no longer any functional shareholder governance on 72% of stocks. That means that we have now destroyed the governance architecture that was inherent in the system, where shareholders had a perspective on the long-term governance of that vehicle, where the governance of that vehicle would make votes, would be entitled to make votes on who the directors were. And so what we’ve had as a result of that process is effectively the stock market — or the machine market — has destroyed our governance thesis, and changed it in a way. What we haven’t done in the same time is transformed what is corporate governance into that future. So this is a really classy example of where we’ve used the zero transactional cost arbitrage system more efficiently, but haven’t read and reimagined what is the institutional requirements of that new age. And that I think is one of the great delaminations we’re seeing. So we’re in this messy period where where the bureaucratic costs of the existing system are going zero, and thereby allowing for unusual — or what I would call a non moral arbitrages — of the system, which is allowing the existing governance infrastructure to break down, yet new “businesses” — and I use word businesses and in brackets — new economic opportunities to unveil which are probably in a historic model of thinking, pretty much corrupted. So this is what’s currently going on. So I think the real problem is that to transform our institutions, we also have to transform our capacity and mechanisms of thinking, and that really isn’t happening yet. And so, I’ll give you another way of looking at this problem. So if we look at the thesis of say, again, let’s just keep going with this right? So, one way of looking at it — let’s keep talking about COVID because it’s kind of in everyone’s heads right now. But the thesis of COVID, i.e. the idea of a pandemic was pretty much in every global futurologists chart, right? It’s not like this was not known. This was well into our predictions, it was well understood yet somehow it is still taken the world completely by surprise. And one of the thesis I would say is that the pandemic is an example of how future risks — things and activities in the future — could manifest in the present. And what we didn’t have — so we had lots of people thinking about that — but we were never connecting that to our risk charts, never connected it to our Treasury. So our Treasury functions were never saying “what Is our allocation of capital to manage these risks?” And if we’re not allocating capital to manage these risks or investing in managing those risks, then what is our provisions? I.e; What are the capital stores that we need to be able to manage these risks? So we had a disconnect between our risk management theory and actual capital allocation theory. And unless these two are connected, what you have is a problem. Because this is a classic example where we’re doing one thing, but actually isn’t connected yet. So this is a really simple example of our relationship with the future.

It’s also understood only through, you know, understood through risk but isn’t connected to our capital allocation theory. The second thing is in our relationship to the future — so we say how does the future present risks to the present? — what we don’t talk about sufficiently is: how does the present limit the risks, the possibility to introduce risks for the futu re? So what is it that we’re doing now? How does that define and reduce possibilities for future citizens of humanity? Now, so this other model risk has no mechanism of being manifest in our technological, in our institutional hardware. So what I’m trying to say there: these are both conception problems. These are technology problems. There’s also arbitrage going on very clearly, to create new monopolies and new powers and new value in a way that destroys — and that’s why we’re seeing, I would say, a structural breakdown in our governance economy — because those arbitrage create legacy and dependency. So people are now dependent on the arbitrage to survive and to create profit. So actually unwinding It is very difficult. So I think we have to see it from this kind of multi-dimensional perspective; that this isn’t a simple transition, it’s a complex transition. And I’ll keep going with this just with one final example. So if we look at the thesis of say, property rights. So if you own a piece of land in its conceptual thesis — not true because you have lots of other regulations on it — it is conceptual thesis, you enslave that land to your needs, right? That land is enslaved to your needs. And I use that word very particularly, because I would say ownership is a thesis of enslavement. Now, historically, that language has always been: ownership make sure you look after things, ownership makes sure you look after the inherent value of things. The reality is: that’s not true. Because you can own something, but you can be instrumentalized — so for example, if you’re a farmer, you can own a piece of land but in order to make a day to day living, you have to destroy that land slowly, because that’s the only way you can survive. That is inherently what you do, right? So the idea that ownership somehow magically equates to stewardship isn’t true. So what we have to start to do is think much deeper about this in terms of actually saying — and we also know that ownership only optimizes your interests — it doesn’t optimize the interests of bees, it doesn’t operate optimize the interests of flowers, trees, all sorts of other ecosystems that cohabit that land with us and in the cohabitation, which is critical. So I think I think that’s a really great example of our thesis, the stories we tell ourselves, you kno., Sort of my my house is my castle, all these sort of narratives that have been borrowed to us from the lands of kings, how they manifested stuff like property rights, how they entrain a thesis of our dominance on the landscape, and our simple utility of the landscape, and how that utility is then optimized and extrapolated to destroy the value of ownership, turning us into instrumentalized actors in that reality, which means that we are destroying inherently the assets that we own. Because actually those are the incentive systems that are created on it. Our governance architecture just can’t deal with it.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I love how you weave these complex thoughts together, thank you.

Simone Cicero:
I have a quick reflection to offer. So, from your words I get that: first of all, we have an institutional failure of the bureaucracies that are supposed to be the stewards. So you said that very clearly, you explained that very clearly with the pandemic, you know, it sounded like an institutional failure. Because we knew the risk, but we did allocate the capital. And on the other hand, you also said, ownership is not stewardship. So, you are questioning the idea that the individual or the small player can really take over this institutional role. So may I offer a reflection that maybe this is exactly the space where this new institutions are going to be needed. So it looks like to me, it brings to me the idea of the commons that, you know, for example people like Michel Bauwens are working on since ages now. So is this local landscape related, community related space possibly a space where this new institutional layer is gonna be invented?

Indy Johar:
Yeah, I mean, yes, though I resist the thesis, of the local. I think I prefer commoning to commons. And this is, I think, really critical. So I think a lot of our thesis on the Commons is based on bounded thinking. So it sort of like the individual is a bounded act. The Commons is a bounded act of “that forest over there, that water pool over there”, which has us as key stakeholders. So in the act of creating a commons you created in-group and an out-group. Now, I think that’s a very industrial idea. It’s an idea that belongs to the 19th century, rightly so, it was a counter thesis to the market. But what it creates is the same — It’s got the same intellectual framework — as the bounded siloed model of thinking of industrial age. Because the reality is: the commons failures that we’re seeing are global commons without bounded systems. And that I think is requiring a different thesis. So when, for example, we pollute the air, it is not only the three people that sit next to me that are polluted. It is also the whole world that’s polluted. So it is an unbounded and interconnected Commons that I think we have to deal with. And I think this is a philosophically important point. Because I think much of localism conversations that we see end up being about saying how does the local deal with these problems and how to create new bounded models of ownership or thesis or optic. Now what I prefer about the commons is — and this is where a lot of the work that you’re doing — I think the trajectory that we’re on of, you know, distributed ledgers and various other technologies, they’re opening up a frame of allowing for local global accountability in a radically transparent way, in an unbounded way, exploring how we relate to the commons. And that’s why I prefer the thesis of a commoning economy as opposed to the commons. Because I think DLT trends transform that relationship of does everything have to operate in that same format. So that’s one thesis that I would really put onto the table. Now, I do think we’re going to see the shortening of supply chains. So shortening of material goods transfers, because of actually the efficiency conversations. I do think we’re going to see different forms of relationships, for me, but I think long-term. Short term, I think we’re going to see the rise of nationalism and other things that has to do with complexity, has to deal with vulnerability and in vulnerability, people return to defensive positions. But long term, if we’re — as a human civilization we’re going to survive — I think what we have to talk about is a new global interdependence. And that’s non non-competitive economy, or what I would say: there’s a class of value in the world, which is only unlocked if we’re post-competitive. So I would say commons is a post-competitive infrastructure as data, as is probably machine learning. So we’ve got a whole section of DLTs. They are post-competitive economy. So there’s a whole new infrastructure being built for post-competitive economy, which I think is going to be vital to that transition. I’m not saying everything has to be post-competitive. I’m saying we’re building a whole new tranche of the country, to me, that is not organized on a competitive economic thesis. And that foundation creates that possibility. So I would say there’s something else coming. I don’t know what the languages, but I, if I was to play with the words that you’re saying, I would say it’s a new common economy, and it’s probably global in that infrastructure play.

Simone Cicero:
Indy, do you have any ideas on — jumping a little bit into the foresight — how this is possibly playing out? Is this going to be distant, this transition how it’s going to be? Is it going to be a chaotic one? Do you believe that the existing institutions can play a role into that, both the private and the public? So, how’s it going to be happening?

Indy Johar:
Wow, I mean, let me look at my crystal ball. I mean, I don’t claim to be a futurologist. I mean, I can tell you what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing. I think firstly, you know, if we talk about the future, in that sense, I would say COVID, one is a trigger, two it’s a probe into our vulnerabilities. So economies that were designed for efficiency are found to be fragile, are found to be brittle and are breaking. I think what we’re going to see is a transition in what we value from being around efficiency to antifragility. At the same time, what we’re going to see is, as we make that transition, short term we’re going to see — so I think it’s Germany that’s looking at how you really localized medical production — so we’re seeing state terrorism and other effects starting to be, you know, state non-state terrorism, state piracy, where states are Effectively stopping PPP equipment being transferred. So in a resource constrained environment, as we receive more shocks, we’re going to see smaller cells start to emerge, which will create in- and out-groups. Some economies will fall into that trap, some economies will no longer be able to govern. Societies will no longer be able to govern. So we’ll see the rise of Haiti type nations around the world. Some economies will become hyper — what I would say — introverted and defensive into their positions. And then some societies and civilizations will make global pacts or transnational pacts for development. And they will create new larger frameworks, perhaps in a fundamentally different way to the European Union, which created a framework in a very particular way. But I think when we talk about new models of interoperability, new alliances in a digitally advanced institutional economy. So imagine if the European Union have been built fully digital up. What would have been our norms? What would have been our mechanisms, or even some of the most contentious acts, of how much borrowing can happen into completely different formats. So I think what we’ll see is a new form of interoperability. And the new interoperability pacts, new models of growth pacts, which will I don’t mean growth in GDP driven growth, but I mean, growth is in much richer form of civilization growth that I think can be dealt with and can be talked about, which will be a combination of psychological growth as well as new form of cognitive emotional economy’s growth. You have high levels of circular economy, low level material waste, and thereby low level of material, high level of material resilience in the economy. So we will see a reconfiguration of those economies. So I think we’re in a very messy period, where I think we’ll see multiple states coexisting, and multiple models of the future coexisting, and some real risks at the same time. And the future, as I would say, is that we’re entering not an age of just a pandemic, we’re entering an age of risks. And we’ll see these risks cascading through us. And I think too often we try to design the future in a very simplistic way. And I think what we have to design — the future at institutional level — is for building its capacity to be anti-fragile. And I think it’s the institutional capacity to be anti-fragile and to build rapid. So a lot of the work we’re doing is on, you know, how do you design how to rapidly build lead markets, rapidly building real lead markets over four or five months to new goods, new products? No, let’s for a moment ignore the market as has been currently described. A market is a distributed, decentralized supply-demand matching infrastructure. It reduces or distributes the knowledge infrastructure requirements, data infrastructure environments to make it possible. It’s an extraordinary idea in his thesis. I think we’re going to see new, digitally advanced machine learning, advanced market infrastructures come into play, which are going to actually open up some really radical possibilities into that thesis. So I think there’s a whole bunch of stuff happening on that side, which I think will challenge the possibilities.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you. Stina you have a question, right?

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. I had a question related to what you were talking about the post-competitive economy. And then you also mentioned this richer civilization growth. And I think that’s really interesting. I’ve heard some previous talks that you have made about this transition from the idea of labor to the idea of work, and I’d love for you to expand a bit on you know, what happens to the human in this transition? Because clearly — also as we start to make our way, not past I’d say, but like in this transition that we’re living right now — a lot of attention is going to be towards jobs. And a lot of people have already lost their jobs. And we have no idea how to deal with this massive scale of unemployment. And the risk here is that we really focus on the wrong things in the recovery and try to artificially, you know, keep things in business.

Indy Johar:
Yeah, I think that’s a very clear and accurate analysis. I think the challenges that we face… so I can just tell you what we’re thinking about this: so on one hand, you’re right — job losses. We’re going to see, we’ve already seen 22 million people lose their jobs in the US in under four weeks and that will probably most likely carry on increasing. We’ve seen massive job losses around the world, with India projected numbers of something like 160 million, maybe even more. Lots of these things are happening around the world and across Europe. Although the figures aren’t being made transparent yet, I’m assuming they’re gonna be similar sort of percentages. And to just to give a figure: I think that projected job losses in the US are perhaps even higher than the Great Depression. The speed of the job losses is unprecedented. Right. Now, there’s two aspects to that: one, I think it’s worth recognizing that some of those job losses as a result of fragile industries that were at the end of their life cycle as well. Some of those job losses are accelerated by the fact that they are legacy industries that will just go on the Bible. And so as I’ve said, but they’re also as a result of — there’s another dimension to look at this — is that I think psychologically, what we will be buying and what we’ll be consuming will be fundamentally different in the next stage. So you know, if you look even back into the Great Depression, and we’ll be looking to do some research around this, is buying patterns changed. So buying patterns became much more conservative. So people became much more thrift orientated. Because these sort of psychological shocks and trauma changed buying patterns, people will, I think buying less and less, and what I would call, there’ll be a burst of “psychological buying”. So in any former recession, people buy psychological goods to, you know, chocolate, now things go up. But what doesn’t go up is white goods. What doesn’t go up is other sorts of certain intermediate goods. What will happen almost certainly is that we will buy for thrift, which will be things that add value to our lives, things that transform that. And the other thing to just — sorry, I’m gonna take a bit of a divert, but I think it’s important — is that I think we must be really clear that this transition we’re seeing is the transition between the power of markets, the power of government, the power of households and Parson’s society: and all these things are reconfiguring. So the household is becoming more important, as we all recognize that our ability to live and be safe and be evident in our house is such a primary capability that was largely masked away, that we’re going to see a rebalancing to how we build the care economies around us to be able to survive. At the same time, what we’re recognizing is much of the market hubris was just that: market hubris. And the power of the state has been re-established. At the same time, what we’re seeing is the relationship between market and state starting to be deeply questioned. Is there such a thing as a private economy, or is the private is actually just an just an economy to which everything must have public value might be independent of state, but it’s still a public good economy. So we’re seeing a new you know, the best quote I’ve seen is “we’re all China now”, where the kind of thesis of public and private, which is a divisional thesis, a silo division thesis is no longer functional in an age when the interdependence becomes more critical. So are we moving into a different thesis and I — you know, just to see if some of our friends and listeners will be saying I’m advocating the China model, I’m not — I’m not advocating any model; I’m saying I would argue that the individualistic model of Western societies focused on the primacy of the individual versus the collective model of many Eastern societies are both problematic, because both are bounded system models. Individual as a bounded system, collective as a bounded system, both print in- and out-groups. And I think the thesis we need to look for is an interdependence model, which is fundamentally different. I don’t think we’ve seen that yet played out. So just to come back. So I would say that it’s a major transition that we’re on in terms of actually our economic thesis. Now, going deeper, I would say that one of the things that we need to bear in mind is that, as a result of technology as a result of other things that are in play, what we’re seeing is the destruction of the procedural labor economy, the the role of humans as managers of process as operators of process that is increasingly being automated, whether physically or through algorithms or through sort of any form of process mechanisms. And it’s being optimized, it’s being that procedural economy using rich forms of data is much more high precision than humans could ever make it. So I think one of the big disruption and genuinely people would say that automation. So what we’re seeing is a huge swathe of automation, which I think will increase in this thesis, as people start to move towards, sort of, in a way, capital allocation or capital focused investments. And so we’ll see a whole swathe of automation. Now what that throws up is that the whole human contribution has to be fundamentally different. So if you go back to the 1840s 1800 to 1840s, the Engels’ pause as it’s called, there was a 40 year period in the industrial revolution where human were sort of, human wages or wages for human and the return on capital delaminated. Return on capital carried on going higher human wages flatlined. I think at a macro level, we’re in that same period and the COVID quest is crystallized that reality, where what we’re seeing is effectively, the human development thesis is stalled. Yet our machine development thesis has been escalating. And I think what we’re about to enter is a new period of human development. And historically, we’ve done this, our investment into schools industrial schools to everyone was a thesis that we knew that human development had to be at the center of it. So the British turning around investing in schools to make them better bureaucrats, i.e. procedural economy people was effectively a foundation — keystone — to the economic growth thesis that we saw. Now, I think we’re at the same pivot point, yet the thesis no longer is around procedural work, i.e. you know, getting kids to turn up at nine and go to sleep, do six hours of lessons, and then go home at three. It’s not about the procedural capabilities of children, but actually on our new psychological capabilities of children. And so psychological development, which is at a societal scale, not an individual scale, it’s at a societal scale is actually the premise of the future, in my view. And that psychological development is actually about how we perceive ourselves, ourselves, our relationship with other people, our relationship with the cosmos, and it’s about creating the foundations for that to be progressive, progressive, but to be a developmental theory. And there’s lots of much more brilliant people than me, who’ve spoken about this that I think we should be looking at. But I think that has to be at the anchor stone of that thesis. And that’s about it: giving us the capabilities to deal with risk, the capabilities to be creative, the capabilities to be emotionally intelligent, the capabilities to be collaborative, the capabilities to learn. It’s those foundational goods that I think we’re going to be focusing on. And that’s going to change us to not focusing on telling people how to use a computer. That’s easy. That’s a huge problem. What is what is more difficult is having the capacity and the capabilities to do it. And that’s where I think the future of our institutional developments like schools and universities, and any learning platform, right, so most corporations out there at the executive level, we’ll be learning platforms is going to be our building the psychological development infrastructure for that group of people.

Simone Cicero:
What you talk about like, this new space of the human development thesis and where we can really escalate that sounds like — sounds like actually — the question is: how should we frame it maybe as an entrepreneurial opportunity? So I have a couple of points that I would like you to expound a little bit more. So one is: what are the fields? Let’s say, what are the aspects of human experience that will create the space for human development and entrepreneurship? So, what are we going, you know, what kind of things that we’re going to build from these perspectives? I get that a lot of what you spoke about is about care. So, I can imagine, you know, how we care about our, for example, our food, or our elders, or our kids or our personal services, let’s say. And on the other hand, what are these capabilities that you are talking about? So, you know, we touched a lot the topic of education in previous episodes, because we believe — the impression is that — to build this new space is to create these new students, where really the human can develop itself. And we need new tools, new psychological tools — new skills, as you said, they’re not just youth problems — so what are the skills, the capabilities the psycho-technologies (as John Vervaeke sometimes calls them)? And what are the fields where we can express this human development potential and entrepreneurship?

Indy Johar:
Simone, I think It’s a great question. And I think I’m always conflicted by this question in two different ways — there’s kind of a split personality aspect to me on this. So on one hand, I think we have to build the infrastructure and the conditions. And I love your term about psycho-technological tools to build the capacity of humans to unlock the future. At the same time, we have to build new things and new ways of looking at things itself, the world itself around us. And one of the things I’m sort of — and I don’t and I think your point around around these things — is that there’ll be multiple realities. So okay, let’s talk about this one way: I think our cities are designed, not for psychological development. Our cities are fundamentally designed for transactional optimization, human transaction optimization actually, not even material transactional optimization. And that thesis has been very good for a while. Yet, there’s a brilliant book called “Slow Down”, which is talking about how human development slowing down, demographics, everything else. Now, why I think that’s a critical is that a thesis of human development has been firmly up to the state, focussed on transactional efficiencies. So what we’ve been doing is building cities which are focused on greater physical density of habitable rooms, you know, ease of buying things. So making sure we can have a shop get access to services, school, other things. So what we’ve tried to do is create the efficiency of transactions through density. But what none of that does is talk about how you build the capacity for human development in a different format. So we already know that schizophrenia for example, is twice as likely in urban environments than rural. We already know that if you sleep next to a busy road, you get huge amounts of sort of persistent levels of stress, which manifests in your bloodstream as cortisone, which actually actually reduces your length of life and other things. So we know that there are, you know, we’re talking about quiet zones, super quiet zones. We also know that density doesn’t build better relationships. So the thesis of our offices, so you know, you and I probably worked at, and I was part of building some of the Impact Hub Network. And what was very evident was that actually, we kept saying, “oh, co working is great!”. It builds communities and relationships. Actually, it wasn’t the co-working that was doing it. It was the community building was doing it. The co-working was actually probably — and all the data is now suggesting it — actually reducing communications. So what we’ve got is, you know, the communication in an open plan office reduces, doesn’t increase. Actually what people need is greater reflective space. So when was the last time you walked into a city and went — you know, so when did you get yourself to walk into the middle of a city and sit in an empty square, and have the capacity to reflect? And we’ve optimized ourselves for transactions, not for deep complex thought. So our innovation thesis and economic thesis has been entirely focused on efficiencies of transaction, not deep, complex innovations, nor actually the kind of complex rich situations that are possible in high performance human societies. So I think the key, one of the key foundations and certainly one thing we’re very deeply interested in is a structural transition in our city. Then the same thing applies to all food groups. So if you look at our food systems, our food systems are designed to give a calorific content at best, or psychological goods at worst, and psychological drugs at worst: sugar, all these sort of things. What they’re not there to do is provide us nutritions. And so what we’ve seen over the last X number of years is that — and you’re living in Italy, so you’re certainly privileged, but for the rest of us — we’ve seen a structural decline in our nutritional quality. And I think that becomes a key thing in that reality.

So our food systems, they’re designed for calorific optimization and for psychological dependencies: sugar, carbohydrates, and short-hand carbohydrates. They’re not designed for our cognitive emotional capabilities. They’re not designed for any of this stuff. So we, over a period, have been optimizing our food systems to a very particular model. Now, what that has meant is the cognitive decline. So if you look at, we’re seeing food nutrition decline around the world and Simone — as I said previously, in a different moment, was that you know, you’re living in Italy, so you’re slightly privileged — but in many other parts of the world, we’re seeing our food systems and nutrition system decline, and the current predictions are that as a result of this decline, we will see cognitive performance declining as well, up to 20 IQ points in parts of the world. Now 20 IQ points is a difference between a scientist and not a scientist. So what we’re seeing is that the this deoptimization of say, our food systems, our urban environment, and I can keep going to even the nature of the economy that we buy. So, so much of our economy is focused on building psychological goods to address the deficit of work, and — what I would say — the purpose in our work and the creativity and the foundational capabilities in our work. So I wrote about this a little bit, which is that, you know, people often talk about actually, you know, our consumer economy and I would say the problem is not a consumer economy. The problem is a malconsumer economy. We are consuming things that are not even good for us, and they’re not even good for the society around us. And why is it that we’re consuming those things? And I think one of the reasons we consume those things is because actually, the nature of the work that we do, requires us to be dependent on psychological goods, to fix the holes that the work that we do gives us. So if our work is not psychologically fulfilling, then what we do is we buy goods which fill those psychological holes. And so most of our consumer economy is actually based on filling those holes. It’s not actually filling. It’s not the distribution of innovation, which makes us better humans, smarter humans, more cognitively, smart, more emotionally rich. That’s not the reality. It’s actually filling cognitive holes. So I think when you look at this structure as a structural transition, you can pretty much unpick every part of our segment chain and start to see how it could be re-engineered and re-optimized for a new world. I don’t know if that starts to give you a flavor.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, you know, I think this image that I get from this conversation is critical. And also this idea that the current institutions need to be solid, need to build a new institution that is dealing with creating the conditions in the process stems, like you said before: the conditions for these new things to emerge. And I see that as a crazy hard political challenge, because this sounds like a political project. So my question now probably as we get into the final part of this conversation: how do you see these political projects emerge? And is there a possibility that, as we realize that this is a small world, and we need to get there, this becomes the common political project of our global community, given that all this is going to play out at a local level. So it’s really challenging, you know, from the political perspective or from the praxis that we need to adopt as a you know, governance entities and interest groups in the world.

Indy Johar:
You’re right to say it’s a political project in some senses. I actually think most of deficits are bureaucratic, is a bureaucratic problem. But I think you’re right to say there is a foundational problem that our politics is not able to handle. So let’s talk about that. So I mean, if, if all three of us went up to the “Starship Enterprise” and you were captain Simone, and we were chatting, and we look back at the moment now, I think we would look back at disgust at what we thought was good, right? So we know that everyday micro violence, whether it’s abuse, or whether it’s racial violence or other formats, reduces people’s lives by up to 10 years. So yet we don’t account for this micro violence because it’s not a knife, but it’s a persistent micro violence does that, or everyday noise levels which do that, or everyday disturbances, or at night — as a result of light pollution. When we start to know these realities, which are scientifically backed, yet we do nothing, right, it starts to show that we have a gap between the science and the policy landscape and the policy overturn window. That gap is now significant, I would argue. What we know and what we can create political logics around is actually significant. And that gap is now a quantum gap, so not a quantum, but a significant gap. Now, on that basis, let’s keep going. So I loved your point about how we are polarizing perhaps into, was it consensus and consensus building societies?

Simone Cicero 57:41
And dissent. Dissent and consensus as two difficult, different political ideas.

Indy Johar:
Yeah, I think it’s a really lovely point. So I think consensus is a function of certain things and dissent is a function of other things. And I would argue, and how I interpret it: the theory is that most of our arguments are not no longer based on fact, or factual truths or whatever kind of idea of some form of logic model, but they’re based on emotive responses. And emotive responses are a function of the preconditions of our reality. So if we’ve created a society, which is deeply precarious, if we’ve created an economic model, which makes people vulnerable, that vulnerability manifests into the psychological space and the decision making spaces of those individuals. So if you make all of society precarious, then the thesis of psychological dissent or the kind of in a way the need to not build consensus. Consensus is a frame that you have to grow if you can create not the psychological precariousness but the psychological security to allow people to have different opinions and build new consent through dialogue through deliberation. Whereas the disagreement model, or the dissent model is functionally if you make an opinion based decisions on precarious societies. So when people are precarious and you ask their opinions, they will create their emotional responses to their current emotional state. And so one of the big problems is our, I think our macroeconomic thesis and our labor market thesis has engineered us to create, to make us more precarious and thereby see dissent as an operating tool into that reality. Now, why am I saying that is: societies which can actually reduce the precariousness and build a capacity for actually divergent thought, which can be deliberatively conceived, sort of integrated to create almost like a multitude of conversations a multitude of consensuses which are dynamic and evolving — that society will be able to evolve and adapt to this transition. Whereas societies which are deeply precarious, which are thereby building an emotional response mechanisms will fall into structural models of dissent. And the said becomes the operating mechanism of our reality. And it’s because people, firstly, that people often attack you for saying “that’s not true”. You’re saying x is not true, it’s not about the truth. It’s about the dissent, as you rightly say, and that dissent is a function of a macroeconomic thesis, macroeconomic conditions that we’ve generated society. So I think that is a very powerful case, as you rightly say, I think that is going to create the basis of the political landscape. So the political landscape is going to be a function of those macroeconomic thesis and those architectures that we’ve talked about. And so the politics of being able to create deliberative dialogues and multitudes of conversations which can evolve will be one sided versus another society with the tools and the politics of dissent will be the mechanisms of power. I think this is the reality that we’re facing.

Simone Cicero:
And yesterday in Italy, the PM addressed the Parliament, and he made the distinction, you know, he clarified the distinction between doxa and episteme. So, basically, it told to the parliament, that there is “opinion” and there is a scientific, let’s say, agreeable set of informations, information that somehow manifests as a truth, something that is true and something we can agree on. So I see some kind of double bind or possibly a strange situation where, at the same time, we agreed that we need to overcome materialistic rationalistic thinking. Because for example, this idea to be these institutions that, in process fashion, create the condition for new stories to emerge, which is completely, you know, embracing complexity in thinking politics. And on the other hand, the fact that now we deal with dissent and consensus over networks, somehow is pushing us to have an agreement on our global episteme, or our global epistemic friends. I don’t know if it’s clear what I’m saying, but there are these two directions. On one hand, we say, okay, we need to trust the complexity of the local by creating conditions for these new institutions to emerge out of the relational and local and community relationships. And on the other hand, somehow, the fact that now we deal with networks is pushing us to find a common ground somehow. And so the question is maybe where is this common ground? How can we get to this common ground so that we don’t end up in a world where, I don’t know, someone is going to make great things and someone else in the other part of the world is gonna end up falling into a chaotic situation? Is that even possible?

Indy Johar:
It’s possible. I mean, what I find interesting. Let’s start at the beginning. I think your prime minister was saying very good things, I agree with what you’re saying. But the reality is there’s a key point in there: things that we agree are true. Agree. The foundational problem is not the logic problem “if this, then that, and that”. The foundational problem is: do we agree? And what are the incentives to agree? And the trust infrastructure required, or the legitimacy infrastructure required to make that actually a shared truth. So I think that the problem is that we keep saying over and over again, “scientific truths”. But the reality is that that was constructed in a world where we had a huge amount of governance architecture, which created some of those realities. And maybe it wasn’t even fit for purpose. So on the one hand, we had governance architecture — maybe we did, maybe we didn’t — but we perceived we had it. But that governance architecture is broken down, possibly true. At the same time, we’ve had human development where our cognitive capabilities to get access to the information and information capabilities, access information has massively scaled and the massive scaling and the ability to produce information and counter information. So I think the reality is that we haven’t built the mechanisms to create agreeability. And I think there are what I called settings to create agreeability, which is like I was saying, if you create precariousness, then you’re not going to create the space for deliberative consent, you’re going to create the space for deliberative dissent. So what is your macroeconomic — if you want that you have to create the right pre-economic conditions. But you also then have to create the institutional landscape to allow for those agreements to be formed. deliberatively. So how do we do that? I mean, Galileo’s time, you know, we know that he was being hunted and sort of fought for his scientific beliefs. So the reality is that the idea that science has been universal, and everyone’s agreed with it instantly, is not true. So how do we start to think about this? How do we create the new scientific institutions, and this is where I think the role of citizen science and culture all of that stuff is very vital in building a shared framework, but that’s only possible on a macroeconomic model which doesn’t advance precariousness, which gives people the space to be part of that thesis. So I think the ability to construct that — and then I think this is all about how we create sense making mechanisms, and how do we create sense making a societal scale? So, you know, our incentive systems in our data are what I would say, you know, our newspapers or our media systems are now broken. So incentive systems in online social infrastructures for our media structures are broken, because they’re designed to optimize false economy. So attention is the economy of a newspaper. It is not the distribution of sets, it is not the distribution set. So if the incentive of a newspapers is attention, then what you’ll see is this diversion of knowledge or facts into driving attention, right, the rise of clickbait. Now that fundamentally means that we start to have a disruption, in our sense-making capability. And if you destroy sense-making capability you destroy mechanisms to actually create consents. So I think this is a full stack problem that needs to be understood in a completely, in both a settings way, but also in how we make knowledge and also how we distribute and communicate it and also how we create the incentive structures in those models. And I would argue the biggest problem is that our incentive systems are deeply corrupted for a complex emergent world, and are not either both corrupted or not real time enough to be able to deal with it. So I think that operates across the whole system at the level of a citizen, perhaps even at the level of a scientist, perhaps even the level of a newspaper, perhaps even at the level of a politician. So we’ve corrupted the incentive systems for all those actors, which is creating the problem, and we keep blaming the citizen, we keep blaming scientists, keep paying the politician, we keep blaming the actors, because actually it is the in the interest of capital or I would say, say not capital but corrupted capital to keep the incentive systems in their current format. And what we need to do is de-corrupt the capital incentive systems in order to realign those mechanisms if we’re gonna construct mechanisms that allow us for distributed, decentralized models of sense making intelligence, multitudes of conversations and new models of consent, emergent consent to be constructed.

Simone Cicero:
Stina, before you close with the last question, I wanted to highlight a couple of points from this so that also our listeners can get it in their minds, I think because this is massively important. I think this last passage, when you said that we need to create the conditions for agreeability, you know, it’s again, another process politics. And I feel like what you’re talking about is somehow at the transition between the Information Age into what we could call, you know, the sense making age, something like that. And the question is what is the equivalent of the internet, for the sense making age? You know, because we are the internet for the information age, we are the printing press for the institutional age. And then, so the question is what kind of institution do we need to build to transition into the sense making age? And this also reminds me a lot of the basis of, for example, Salvatore Iaconesi when he speaks about the data poesis. So this idea that this is a poetic process that we are into as a civilization somehow and it may deal with information and data, and how do we visualize and we internalize what’s happening to an extent that we can all together be part of a sense-making a sense-making process. So that that’s something that I wanted to highlight and then I will leave you Stina, sorry about that.

Stina Heikkila:
No problem, I mean, these are such big questions. But I wanted to try to link it to a kind of closing question also around how this relates to the work that you’re doing, so that also the listeners will have an opportunity to further explore the Dark Matter Lab and how you are trying to embody this change — and maybe more like engaging in an experiment of something that represent what you’re explaining in more macro- and sort of abstract terms. So it would be interesting to hear how you concretely are trying to work with your own organizational model in a way that could somehow be an experiment to move forward with this.

Indy Johar:
Thank you. So I think there’s multiple levels, right. So in terms of what we do, this is exactly what we’re working on. So we’re working with Climate kick to build the long-term alliance, which is looking at how do societies think long term. We’re working with century initiative to think, you know, recognizing that democracies don’t have the capacity to think and operate through long term cycles. And that really goes back to this agreeability. In order to build an idea with the future, you have to be able to construct new modes of agreeabilities, as Simone was rightly saying. So we’re doing a lot of work around that. We’re doing a lot of work around how we understand civic goods. So a tree is currently a liability on the books of a local authority, because all its environmental services are seen as free services. So what you see is actually the cost of maintaining a tree and the cost of insuring it for the damage it could cause is the liability of a tree, which means that most trees tend to get chopped down after 10 years when they are barely mature, and barely providing any of the environmental services because the optimization of the accounting infrastructure is focused on that reality. So what we’re doing is actually re rebuilding the institutional infrastructure both at a county level, but also at the level of contracting level of the environmental services and building a new model of looking at that balance of trees, both carbon capture, same about urban drainage, also in terms of human relationships. So not only just financial economies, but human economies, gift economies, of how a cluster of an urban garden could operate in different models. So we’re looking at these micro-machines and human economies and what these sort of manifests like. So we’re working with that around citric acids and again that’s all about this interdependence. So taking away from the tree to the interdependent value it regenerates, and how’d you build the institutional infrastructure for that? At the same time we’re looking at, we’re doing a lot of work around property rights. So how do you reimagine property rights for 21st century which isn’t about enslaving the reality but it is not about cohabitation? How do you start to drive some of those things? And how do you start to build new, new relationships with the land as a result of that, and thereby new models of cohabitation. We’re doing a lot of work around transformation of cities, looking at some of the thesis that I was speaking about earlier, if we take a look at the scientific rationale and the reality of our cities, how do we start to drive that deep transition of our cities to a new psychological cognitive capability since doing that work with Stockholm region, again, looking at through that lens of most that discussion that I was having throughout. So we’re doing all of our work is focused on these sort of missions: longtermism, silos, the human psychological development, transition of cities, civic capital, various missions. Now, the way we’re organized — I think, which is the part that you’re also interested in — is we’ve been challenging the way we’re organized. And you know, let’s also be honest, we’re not perfect at all. We are, you know, we’ve fortunately growing very quickly. And but what that’s meant is that as a result of it, that we’ve got a lot of pressures, but we are evolving. So we’re now all, you know, we’re a global team around the world full-time approaching nearly 30 people, which is pretty extraordinary all the way from friends in Dubai, to South Korea to Montreal. So we’ve got London, to Malmo — we’ve got a pretty extraordinary team. So the reason why that happened was that a good friend of mine, and colleague, Angie, she wanted to you know, she was having to move because her partner was in South Korea. And we sort of said, “right, we’re not gonna, we’re going to make an organization, which isn’t going to be about you leaving if you have to move on” — to make an organization which is going to be radically distributed. So we’ve been building that, which means that, for example, we are globally distributed. But every quarter, we’re meeting physically for three days to actually talk about strategy in shared sense-making. We’ve also changed our pay infrastructure. So, you know, we’ve, how we reward people is based on a proxy, and it’s a proxy, not a reality. But the proxy is that: how old you are plus an x factorial, and the x factorial increases, but increases for everyone uniformly. Now, that’s meant to — the money is almost like a universal basic income — the purpose of that money is to stop you having to worry about money. So we don’t use it as a reward mechanism. We use it as a mechanism to stop people worrying. Sure, if some people have at a young age double parents in need looking after, we will transform, we will try to adjust this pay mechanism to reflect their reality. But that’s about actually changing the discourse of how we incentivize. We don’t do performance beta related reviews based on your income, and sort of saying “bonuses”, because we don’t want to turn financial instruments as to the incentive making mechanisms of an institution. We are changing our contracts with our partners to not being service contracts, or contracts in consultation or consultancy contracts, to mission contracts. This is a mission that we want to co-entrepreneur with you, or co-intrapreneur with you. So we were very much act as co-intrapreneurs, with other agencies and other partners to build possibilities. And those contracts are: we bring social capital, we bring network capital, knowledge capital, they bring financial capital and other knowledge, capital and other resources, and we fuse those together to try to hit a mission. And so often our way of working is different in terms of that process. We are working both in terms of some of the conceptual frame stuff and the political frame stuff but all the way down to experiments and some of the sort of payments into the real world. So that probably gives you a flavor of how we’re trying to manifest some of this stuff into our day to day reality. Everything is transparent. You know, we’re sort of distributed leadership around the world. We’ve got people like Jonathan Lapalme leading, doing extraordinary work in in Canada and do some extraordinary with Marie-Sophie Banville. We’ve got people like Eunji Kang, doing amazing work in South Korea, leading extraordinary work out there, you’ve got Joost Beunderman, doing extrordinary work around cities work, with Tom and other people. You’ve got Adam Purvis doing amazing work in Scotland, with the Scottish Government. So what we’re building is a kind of, in a way, a kind of an infrastructure for like common capability in a 21st century way. That porbably gives you a bit of a hint as to what we’re doing. And there’s a blog that we wrote at the beginning of the year, which is Letters from Amsterdam, which really goes into some of these details and some of the questions that we have, and how we improve our bureaucratic infrastructure on this. So we’ve been doing some of that work, both in terms of what we’re doing, but also in terms of how we’re doing it, and trying to manifest that into how we organize ourselves. And by no stretch of the imagination, I’m not saying we’re perfect, but we are trying to reinvent some of these things. And it’s obviously, yeah, it’s both challenging but interesting, in the same format. I hope that helps.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. Yeah. And we’ll put all this in the notes for the listeners to find more about the work that you do. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Indy, that was a conversation that goes beyond rewarding for me and I think, also for our listeners is certainly going to be foundational to the work we’re doing on this research. And, yeah, I’m thankful for being your friend. And thankful for the time that you wanted to dedicate to this conversation. And I loved having your kids around the birds and my kids that in the background, we’re doing some ugly noise but I think our listeners are getting used to podcasting during the COVID-19. That’s the twist that it’s always in in the background. So you know, thanks very much, Indy, it’s been a pleasure for us to have you.

Indy Johar:
Likewise, it’s been an absolute pleasure. And I, to be honest, one of the reasons why I did this call was I knew we could really get into some of these issues in a deep sense. So I really appreciate your hosting these sort of conversations, and I appreciate the kind of care with which you scaffold this to yourself and Stina. Thank you very much.

Simone Cicero:
And thank you and to all our listeners, we catch up soon. Thank you