INDY JOHAR: "How do we prepare the world for what’s coming?"

I'm Sarah Wilson and this is Wild, a show where we talk with the biggest minds in the world about the ideas that can help us love and save our one wild and precious life together on this planet. So over the course of what's been a 12-part special series, we've been looking at ways to move forward radically, responsibly, humanly and, of course, humanly. We've looked at a range of heavily researched ideas that we will need or will want to take into the what comes next and how we actually do what will have to be an emergent transition from an old world or old civilizational structure that's collapsing under the weight of its own messy, not of complexity. And into some sort of new setup, we discussed what to do with the grief that's bound to descend in the coming years as everything goes into more and more flux and how we raise kids amid so much uncertainty, how we can use the denial that will no doubt kick in in useful ways, how we can do the emergence that keeps coming up as a modality for change the vehicle. Now, you can go back and listen to the last 12 episodes if you missed any of these very connected conversations. Today, in this 12th conversation, however, I want to wrap with a conversation that brings it all together, but that also gives a holistic picture of what it's going to take to do this crazy thing together at a human and a civilizational level. Anyone in this space of imagining what our future is going to look like will probably be familiar with today's guest. Indi Yohar is a systems designer, he's an architect and one of the world's most original voices on redesigning societies. He co-founded duck metal labs, a globally influential research and design lab that works with government cities and institutions to rethink everything from housing and finance to democracy and the legal systems that underpin modern life. Indi has advised organizations including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, governments across Europe and the UK, helping them solve all kinds of complex, entangled problems. Now, Indi is not simply a theorist, his ideas have been tested with real world experiments from developing new models of affordable housing and community ownership to creating legal and financial frameworks that allow places and ecosystems and future generations to become active participants in economic decision making. Now, some of you might recall, Indi wrapped my last series and it's an episode, a lot of you say has stuck with you and I think left many of you in a state of well shock, a shock you felt was both painful but necessary. This is how I introduced him back then. I said, "This conversation goes to a level I've not been to before publicly. On his modeling we don't have any choice but to start building the world that comes next. For the current one has no viable pathway. I continue. Indi gives a vision for this and he gives a time frame too." Now, I've been following Indi's work since then and I thought we should get an update on his vision for where we will head after late stage capitalism stutters to a halt. It could be summarised as this. The task before us is not simply to survive nor is it to know what comes next but instead to provide the foundations, the conditions for life to emerge forward into the best possible future or futures. He calls it civilisation or optionality and as you learn it completely shifts our role in all of this as well as the questions we need to be asking and I feel it makes the whole thing stunningly possible which is the line that I've landed on in this whole journey. Again, this is a big expansive conversation that necessarily let's go of the linear prescription. So, Indi and I loop around the pragmatic solutions, the uncertainties and a bunch of existential quandaries which I too raise repeatedly in my work so that'll sound a big familiar. Like for instance, ultimately what we're going through is a deep dive into what it means to be human. Now, I'll just add one note here, if you find the complexity, the vernacular and Indi's intellect overwhelming in this conversation, I invite you to ride with it because Indi has actually told me this before, he is precise with his language for a reason but and I agree with him on this, we all eventually in one way or another get the message and I think you'll find that in this conversation. With all of the 12 episodes, I'd invite Indi to join us in the comments over on my substacks cerealsand.substack.com and I suspect there'll be a few questions raised from this conversation. As I say, it's the last episode for the time being, I have other ideas for some other miniseries like this one. So make sure you follow along on Wild with cereals and hit the follow button or I think it's a plus sign on your platform of choice to make sure that you're alerted when this new series launches. It'll be a dynamic one and it will go to another level. So goodbye for now and yes, as always, stay wild. Indi Oha, welcome back to Wild. Honestly, a pleasure to be back in the heat. Yeah, exactly. We're both living out a bit of a heat wave over the last couple of weeks. It's suddenly got very, very real in lived experience, hasn't it? Yeah, I mean, I think in a sense, the last time we chatted, there were things that were visible. They're now conferencing in a way that makes them very experiential and got to different waves, not just in the heat. I think people were experiencing it before, but I think it's become more and more critical and multiple forces are generating the vulnerabilities which are conferencing together to make our lives more challenging. Hmm. Certainly how I've been feeling. So it was about 18 months ago that we first spoke and in that conversation, you got very real with where we're at in the state of our civilization. You're essentially saying that our current model had no viable pathway and that we needed to focus on building the what comes next. And actually, I should just let you know that that was very much a precursor to this 12-part series that I've been doing. It's all based around ideas that need to be lying around, you know, so that we can create the what comes next as the old system crumbles or continues to crumble. But we might just get you to I guess land us again, like what is the state of our civilization? I guess 18 months after we last spoke and I've been following your work since then. I know you've spoken about this notion of volatility. That's actually the really big issue when it comes to talking sort of the warming piece. You also talk about the weaponization of certain systemic disintegrations and how this has been something to the idea of compromising the social construct and how much of an issue that is. So would you be able to do a bit of a riff and land us in our situation now? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that's become very clear is that we often used to talk about, you know, a three-degree future or a three-point-eight-degree future. One thing is very clear is we're no longer in a one-point-five-degree future. We're definitely in a three-point-eight above-seacher. And those are easy words. So the kind of two dimensions of that is you can say those words, but the first order effect is to recognize a two point eight-three-degree future is five degrees on land, on our bridge is eight degrees in urban environments. It's a perfectly different world. And then you have to look at the consequential effects, which is, you know, we know we probably lose one of the major food baskets at about one point seven degrees, which means that food inequality becomes massively not inequality food, nutrition deprivation becomes systemic and we'll see we know most places and social contracts have about basically, you know, three meals, all six meals away from actually breaking down, so like, like, now all of that stuff is like, okay, it's in the future. And the thing that's become clearer is that the volatility of those futures is happening now. So we're already seeing spikes, moments of experiencing those futures and those volatility effects are manifesting now. So we don't have to wait, you know, but I think when we spoke, it wasn't really public knowledge that the AMOC collapse was deemed at about 10% likely and now we're at 50% likely by the end of the century, just just for listeners, the AMOC is the Atlantic Meridial something rather current is, yeah, yeah, that's it. And so when you look at that, now that was 10% likely, it's gone up to 50% likely by 2100, but the problem isn't when that happens. The problem is as it slows, you're going to get some of those effects and volatility is creeping through. So one dimension that's happened is very clearly is, you know, many of the brilliant scientists that are working on people like Tim Lenton and other people is very clear that they put a grey box in the volatility zone, let's say, end-state grey box. I think the. volatility is what breaks us much quicker than the end state. The other problem we face is the volatility effects compounding. So I think the other dimension I want to is what's happening is those volatility increases, states are trying and it's a degenerative volatility. The baseline conditions are falling away. The volatility is increasing. People have less reserves, people have less psychological reserves, the psychodrography of landscapes is falling into fear. So that's kind of the overall net mental capacity to deal with that volatility. When you compound that with situations where states are in that context, going to become more authoritarian, not because you get random authoritarian actors, because degenerative volatility means that we as citizens will seek someone to give us control. Seek we will seek people that will say yes I can give you certainty because the volatility. And if you combine that with a psychodrography which is increasingly more fragile and more vulnerable, that authoritarian tendency becomes actually a system level function. Now the problem is authoritarianism in complex systems actually doesn't actually cannot manage your risk. It looks like it. It gives you the delusional managing it and it gives us this momentary comfort of being able to evolve our fears. But the reality is the authoritarianism centralized control cannot manage complexity. And this is not like it. And again I'm trying not to make what I'd call political political economy arguments. What I'm trying to say is informationally it's impossible for an authoritarian command and control actor to be able to perceive the situational variants on the ground in different parts of the country to be able to process that variance and to be able to react and speed and instruct and speed in that is impossible. So it's a functional information level. I speak about this with a guest in the series Ruth Bengiet. She's an expert in fascism and she talks about the fact that she calls it fascist backfire. It invariably backfires because the whole structural setup of fascism means it cannot actually control that which it says it can control. So yeah it ties it exactly. Exactly. And so if you get that and the other point is as the convolutility increases the kind of other effect we'll see is basically sort of a uncontrolled simplification. So we're going to see as volatile increases these effects. At the same time what we're moving into is there is an existential thesis of state so states are starting to see existential crisis to their conceptual existence and continued to exist. So the kind of framework of operating no longer is how do I gain certain things how to avoid marginal losses. It's actually an existential idea does the idea of that state exist. Now thereby changes the landscape of rules to which is to which an existential idea exists. So for example if you are if you don't have water you'll proceed natural rights to get water are different from if you have availability to be able to buy and consume. So once an existential risk becomes the nature of existence then I think we have a different different landscape. That opens up almost always as the volatility combines with an existential risk we will have then other false factors which is what we are seeing I think so stuff like AGI and AI infrastructure which is perceived and I would say use that language is perceived from the US perspective to be an existential risk to the US. So if the US does not get AGI or equivalent the idea of US and I make a distinction between the idea of US to the people of the US the idea of the US will not be preserved if if America does not get AGI because it will no longer have freedom because effectively the knowledge infrastructure will be held by other infrastructure other countries and there's a kind of dominant long to lock it. So in that perspective what we're also seeing is is effectively a driving force where existential futures are combining with these volatility effects to create a different landscape of compensation. At that moment in time we're also seeing as power becomes more multipolar we're seeing a combinatorial reality of historic traumas and historic grievances come to power as the cost of violence is diminishing and the cost of violence diminishes in that landscape. Now I'm framing all these things together because they don't exist as yes no arguments or moral no arguments they exist in the intersection of these arguments that we start to see the future. So an existential state frame driven by these driven by both technology and volatility and also labor markets. The other thing I want to say is that I think what we're underestimating is the destruction of labor whether it is through demand destruction as a result of climate volatility and breakdown and the underlying economic infrastructure is no longer being being able to operate but also labor destruction as a result of automation and technology. Together these things are devaluing the value of being human. So if you put into this context the value of being human is being diminished you end up in a situation where states ask one are going to stop to not only be an existential crisis of self they're an existential crisis of the value of being human which means that states find it difficult to fund welfare health education because the productivity gains to which the states manage their theory of economy no longer becomes five. So and social contract breaks down. Exactly and so the and the social contract breaks down or in order to preserve all the tyrannism by preserve a theory of integrity to the state all the tyrannian movements what they will do is other inside as a means to create stability or it's a tactic right or and they'll other outside and thereby surplus humans to the productive economy will effectively end up being part of a landscape or pathway to war. So mutually a short destruction which I think I spoke about last time actually becomes a pathway as a confluence of these factors and I say this out because I think it's it's the drivers are now in place they're all existing into that reality. A year and a half ago is somewhat theoretical but I think you only have to look around and look at your social media feed you can see exactly what you're talking about it is happening the other end that's happening in the United States internally as well as externally it's existed as an external thing for a long time but we're seeing the way that ISIS target in its own citizens you know the US you know the Trump government is actually turning its own citizens on itself chaos is a tactic which is a phrase I use in my own book Steve Bannon you know flood the zone with shit this is all all part of of it and that breaking down the social contract is is is a problem and it speeds into the collapse but it's also a tactic for keeping fascist authoritarian regimes going for a limited time it is actually what actually keeps them afloat. And and this is where maybe I think authoritarianism is a natural response to the degenerative volatility. So I'm trying not to put a moral pejorative on it I'm saying in the surface area of situations as volatility increases this will be a natural response or a system in a means to stealth preserve itself. Now shorter right because we know that model cannot actually build the resilience that's required for the volatility itself. So I think once you can see it then we can have a different type of conversation and just to solve the final point which kind of as the volatility increases and as the existential state mechanisms become the dominant psychological landscapes and fear becomes a cycle geography of operating what we start to see is and the cost of war becoming zero actually war becomes a dominant and internal external war becomes a dominant strategy as a means to preserve social contract smaller social contracts through othering preserves the power of stability through those frameworks and also and this is where it sounds really difficult and to as the economic load of holding humans can be actually moved away from it so you can diminish the cost of being human because you effectively put humans onto the war landscape. So I think we're we're in a really the system is orientating in a very particular way and that requires intentional reading it requires I think intentionally read I think the thing that I often worry about is we often in our in our in our moral discourse we're often pejorative of imagining another side and I think what's happening is just a system is playing to its natural self-preservation frameworks and that requires a different discourse of how we intervene where we know what the nature of innovation is like. I'm glad you've fleshed all of that out you've brought together a whole range of themes I've covered in this series but this piece around the idea that authoritarianism I say that it's of steps into a vacuum there's a vacuum that's been created by a whole range of things not least of all a vacuum of meaning you know that's been created by the neoliberal system and fascism necessarily steps into this base now I sort of have used that as a call to action. We need to be in that space, creating as much certainty or guidance or leadership rather than sort of wobbling around on the edges, but what you're saying brings another layer to it. You're saying that this is just what the system needs to do and it does pose a whole range of very, very different questions as to what we do as humans living in these times. Exactly. And I think on that, it opens up some really important questions, right, so like philosophically, and I'm sorry, you know, but certainty, construction, which is the dominant position of authoritarian system, they have to operate it through the delusion of certainty or being able to live without. So what is the construction? That's what I mean by leadership. That's what I mean. In terms of filling this vacuum, leadership that can actually speak to this notion of being comfortable in the discomfort of uncertainty is what is required. So there's sort of, you know, as an alternative to that idea of, you know, the certainty, the false certainty that fascism tries to create. So yes, no, I'm glad you established that point. And also doubt is a very sophisticated move, right? So certainty looks sophisticated because it gives you the delusion of I know. But the greater metacognition is to be able to say, everything I know is limited because I cannot know everything. And in the cognition, the metacognition of awareness of I cannot know everything, you have to operate with a thesis of doubt and thereby a thesis of curiosity. And thereby a thesis of tenderness, tenderness and care. And that's a behavioural way of being that is completely about embodiness and complexity as opposed to the delusion of certainty and predictability in linear environments. And this is, I think, a fundamental shift of a way of being and a way of being a political body, a body and multiple relationships. And I think that, as you rightly say, is a different theory of leadership. But it also requires us to operationalize society differently in many ways. Yeah, I'm thinking from a leadership perspective, it really requires role modelling with, I guess, confidence and embodiment, you know, rather than just words and mythologies, you know, because I was, as you were speaking, I was thinking, well, how does a leader become convincing if they're standing there being tender, vulnerable and saying, I don't know, you know, in 2020, it's hard to take, you know, we're used to the opposite. Exactly. But this is where I think, so I would argue that, you know, if you were to get Sir David King here, you would say we're going to almost certainly have to stabilise the Arctic. Yeah. Now, the goal space is certain, but how we get there may be a search function. So the question is, how do you hold the commitment or what is necessary, but the openness of the pathway to operationalise towards it in the goal space may also not just be Arctic, it may be about whole cascading planetary governance pathways. It opens up new theories of diplomacy, new theories of financing planetary goods. So it opens up a whole landscape of optionality, which isn't necessarily visible. So where do we hold, where do we go, a necessary certainty of what needs to be required, what is required, but a doubt and openness of the pathways to get there. So I think there is a kind of new certainty and doubt construction, which I think needs to be managed very carefully. Hmm. One of the questions, and you've just sort of intimated the answer there, but one of the questions that you, I guess, invite us to ask is, what are we actually trying to preserve here? So in the asking of what comes next, we need to be asking, what are we trying to preserve or fight for or create? And what I understand, you're saying the job is not to preserve civilization or even to know, with certainty or certitude, what comes next, it's to preserve, and I'm quoting you here, is to preserve or expand the capacity for life on earth to keep creating futures. And you call this civilizational optionality. Could you explain what you mean by this? Take as long or as short as you as you need to, because I think it's such an interesting idea. Yeah, I mean, so where this comes from is, I think, it's very clear that the dominant pathways of how we've been organizing our planet and how we're organizing our labor in the planet is reaching an end of a cycle. And we will not be able to persist at the current pathway, whether it's our food systems, whether it's an art, clothing, our levels of consumption. I think there's an organ and naturally, you know, I think the kind of stats where something extraordinary like, if you price social environmental costs into, into one of the major indexes, you realize 68% of the companies are non-viable. So we know our economic paradigm that we've currently built was fit for a much smaller footprint of humanity, which its externalities could be absorbed in the planet level, our anthropop. So that's what I'm trying to say, I don't see a moment, is means that we are no longer able to ignore those externalities, those externalities are coupling us back into a planet scale, just changing the fundamental economic or a genesis point that we're in. So where I, what I think is really critical is that I, here's some hypothesis. I think it is vital that we do not fall into a spiral of violence and conflict and determination of humans because we will not be able to get out of it. The trauma that's already embedded into the system at the cost of violence being so low, the number of sociopaths, psychopaths, we will create in the act of violence with access to CRISPR technology, so genetic technologies will mean that we will almost certainly enter a mutually assured pathway of destruction. So this is a non-available future in our mind. If that is true and we need a pathway to mutually assured thriving, there are sequences of things that we have to, we have to talk about how we preserve the preserve access to the fund foundations of life, which is water, energy, soil infrastructure, cognitive security, material accesses and material supplies, so on. So if you look at those foundational accesses, you then start to say, "Okay, what are the threats and what are the kind of destabilization effects that are coming and how do we deal with those destabilization effects? How do we stabilize those critical goods? How do we actually rejuvenate critical goods, how do you build resilience?" And there's a whole set of options that need to be, there's a lot of the work that we're right now in the middle of, a whole bunch of options that we need to make. So just to illustrate, how do you cool a whole city? Getting a whole city is not a problem, just of cooling it's a problem of multiple actors coming together to recognize shared risk, multiple actors contributing to the management of that risk, mass multi-agent. It is a means of actually dealing with, you know, the impacts of overheating cities is domestic violence all the way through to accidental deaths, to maintenance costs to- Lots of IQs, lots of IQs as well, intellectual capacity, FDI, GVA, all these things become collapsed. So all these things collectively need to thereby require different coordination, coordinated problems. So if you go back to the earlier example I gave about authoritarian centralized systems of response versus chaotic system of response, we need a new middle root, which is a many, mass multi-agent organised model. So if we could organise thousands of people to come together to be able to co-coordinate in the management of these roles, we have created a new surface area, a new coordination capacity of society to go to do that. I also believe that is now more possible than it's ever been because of effectively capabilities like machine learning capabilities and certain things that I opened up new pathways of coordination or mass multi-agent systems. That is required to be able to deal with that risk. So you could talk about glacier stabilisation, aquifer stabilisation, you could talk about atmospheric river governance, you could talk about how do societies make decisions together? If it's very clear that society's eye-industrial democracy was designed for a very particular theory of action response and a time cycle of response, but it isn't designed for the nature of the complexity we're operating in. So how societies make decisions, if societies cannot make decisions in cognizance of the risk that they're holding, they are incapable of managing those issues. So you could argue that is a strategic risk for societies to operate on that landscape. So what we're seeing is there's this whole landscape that's available. Now the one point I'd say is existential right now also is the future value of being human. The labour unit value of being human is diminishing very quickly and we don't have to diminish all of it, but autonomous vehicles which are no longer a design problem, they're a diffusion problem. We're in a moment where London for example is about to get waymos by November and so on. So we're 120,000 people work as Uber Drives. When you combine that with white colour work which is being disrupted as a result of all the frontier labs, that commuterial labour disruption is massively changing the nature where value lies. So value is moving towards frontier models and security frameworks and shifting, pulling out of the value of being human. So we're going to have, I think, one of the biggest moves that we're going to have to make is reimagining what it means to be human outside the theory of instruction, control, labor theory, and that expansion of reimagining human, which we know, right, intuition, contemplatical ideas of the brain, all sorts of things which are available. If we can't do that, then I think the forces of economics will drive us to its wall. So there are these layers of responses that are required and, you know, and I'll do an alternative response, which is like, it's very clear that land governance, we're going to have to move from single species farming to multi species, open-wilded systems like TerraPretta, we're used in the Amazon, we're going to have to build a new theory of land and bi economies, which is mass multi species, open-guard systems. We know that's going to require a new type of micro-autonomous, I would argue, micro-autonomous machines to be able to harvest and garden them. There's a whole new option out there possible, atmospheric governance, same thing. So what you've outlined there is a lot, and for listeners who've just listened to that, you know, five-minute rundown of the, all the possible, or not possible, but required way pathways that we need to be able to consider. It's very overwhelming, but I think what you're saying can correct me if I'm wrong. The notion of civilizational optionality is to literally create, allow for as many possible futures as possible. So it's essentially opening things up so that life, the life force, can actually adapt to whatever comes next, because the complexity of the world today, the multitude of pathways that all intersect, we cannot possibly predict where that's going to go. So what we do is we create a world where the options are available. And I mean, that ties very much into theories of emergence, stupid ecology, and so on. It's allowing, it's getting rid of the blockages that we've put up to life doing its thing. So it's essentially opening things up so that life can do its thing with some assistance, because there's eight and a half billion people on the planet that could get in the way. So we're going to have to actually think things through to a certain extent. We're going to have to do quite a bit of repair. You mentioned soil systems, regenerative farming ideas. I imagine preserving democracy. Some fundamentals need to be looked after. But really what it's about is allowing for whatever pathway needs to come forth to come forth. Do I have that right? Yeah. So what we want to do is build the foundational necessities of life to be able to and civilization to be able to continue to operate energy food water, build the capacities to have an alternative provision of those things, manage key risks like overheating cities and certain things in order for the future to be able to construct a certain exactly as you say what we're preserving is a foundational conditions as opposed to the current economies as a means to build that space of optionality and choice and the construction of a new landscape on that. And I think in the nature of those projects I think are our infrastructure scale projects. That's the I think what I find fascinating. So we are going to have to deal with things at a scale. Today I was talking about like large-scale infrastructure scale mangrove and solar investments which would effectively preserve stability in terms of flooding risk but also sovereign debt crisis but also in terms of energy but also in terms of protein and you start to think and this is all foundational goods. They're all about rebuilding the foundations to be able to allow us to be able to hold the optionality for a richer complex life. Got it. Yeah. So it's a really different mindset. It's not about finding the end goal solution. It's about setting up the conditions. I want to dig down a little bit into that. So I'm wondering what kind of metric then is in place that replaces GDP as a sort of a goal. It's a really good question. I mean I try to void directly going at GDP but I think what I would say is the the metrics that I'm particularly interested in is the is the explosion of sovereignty. I am very interested in us avoiding an authoritarian centralized world and I'm very interested in avoiding a chaotic simplification which would basically put us to war anyway. Both of us will put us to war. So new means of organizing where we expand our theory of agency but in recognition of our intangibles. So it's the kind of combination of being able to say I am agent and I'm aware I operate with tenderness, tentativeness, tenderness and care of my entanglements because I recognize my mutual intangibles and the ability to operate in those two dimensions. I think it's the fundamental unit of operating in complexity in a fully re-coupled world. And I think the cultural war we're in the middle of is what I would say is the 19th century idea of separated sovereignty, of divisional sovereignty, of object theory organizing where I am separate from everyone else and what we're being forcibly living through is the forcible re-coupling of our sense of self and we have to hold this dual mode of being an agent, intended endless tenderness and care in doubt of our relationship and in relation with the world. And I think that's a completely different way of being an agent and being free in and to become. Yeah, you use the word organizing and coordinating a lot. I mean, I think it's going to be key because it is, it's what takes us in the opposite direction to succumbing to authoritarianism but also falling into that simplification process of chaos and the sort of the lead-up rip model. So in your work because you are a specialist in sort of building systems essentially or designing systems as well as building them, how do we build, I guess, systems that encourage people to coordinate better because we've been, we've lost that muscle over the last couple of hundred years. We've really siloed and isolated and neoliberalism has kind of diminished the value of organizing, cooperating, coordinating. So how do we, how do we increase this capacity for societies to be able to coordinate? I think it's such a great question, by the way. And and I think these are sort of fundamental questions that I think we need to be sitting with. I think what's and again, I'm sorry I'm going to apologize in advance because I think the question is so profoundly important that it isn't mild taking tinkering like sips and juries or a better representation problem. I think I do say that because I always feel that that's not going to get us there. They do feel like they're tinkering around the edges, you know? Exactly and I and it's not to devalue them. They're important part of the transition and important part of keeping us, you know, existing. But I think for more fundamental question, this is why I keep going back to the question of what it means to be human. If we see ourselves in relationships or being separated and bounded as opposed to recognizing our entanglements, the question of how we imagine ourselves and our theory of our body form. So what I mean by that, if the UK imagines itself as a boundary, then I think it fundamentally misconceives the risk to itself, whereas as soon as the UK understands that the loss of the Arctic basically means that it's close to being labrador in the world, in terms of actually temperatures, 48 minus 48 degrees in the middle of winter, it starts to understand itself as an entangled knot of possibilities that allow the UK to exist. And once you perceive your body form in a relationship of entanglement, your duty of care and relationship changes, whereas the divisionality was a convenient delusion of separation because we could assume those externalities could be absorbed, then all of the cat. So I think the thesis of self, and this is a fractal problem, this is down to us, goes from the UK to us, it's a fractal conception of self. And this is where the game theory problem also kicks in. If your theory of game is rooted in presentism and divisionality, as opposed to recognizing the infinite gain or the recognition of the self being infinitely many ways, whether it's through our kids or whether through our knowledge and our entanglement at the civilizational level, I think that defines this. So I think the self is really important. I think it's embracing our theory of I think we have to work on how do build the capacity for our society to hold doubt together. And embracing breaking away from the certainty delusion, I think it's going to be the biggest comfortably. I think how we hold, how we build and shift, I think we've seen a systematic weaponization of our psychogographies to accentuate our fear to make us more vulnerable. And I think we've created the media landscape and an attention landscape rooted on fear. So the question then becomes is what is the media infrastructure that helps us hold doubt, helps us hold curiosity? What is the attention landscapes that construct those psychogographies and our build on it? So I think there's a lot of work at the individual level. Then I think there is genuine work at the level of how do we do multi-party mass multi-party agents. What is our thesis of coming into agreement with a thousand people? A lot of the open space technologies we know, parts of the technologies we know can get, you know, people in the room together. But we need to be able to do that across Sydney, or across Melbourne. Like how do you get 10,000 people, 100,000 people to come into agreement? So I think this is where machine capabilities are going to open up a whole new pathway of mass multi-agent agreement spaces. And this allows us to have a completely different absorb different complexity in different formats, absorb, be able to operate in situational variants that we couldn't do. So I think this is a journey from self to agreement to comprehending risks to becoming situationally present. I think it's a journey back into power as opposed to a journey back into being units of labor and loonies of instruction. It's the expansion of our theory of agency, while expanding our theory of relationality, while expanding our need to recognize our coupling and our many to many, I think this is a fundamental piece of work. And, you know, maybe this is one point I would say that what I find interesting is also that how do you build a media landscape and a media infrastructure, not a landscape. This media is largely currently about the distribution of information, whereas I think what other parts of the system have recognized is media is an attention lens, and it creates, it focuses attention in a very particular way, an attention limits and delimits our future. So what we create is focused by attention. So the question is how do we build the media infrastructure to be able to operate in this landscape, which allows for the expansion. I think it's one of the big, big key moves. Okay, you've brought up a few things there. I just want to pick up on, you mentioned the idea of the UK dropping into minus 48 degree temperatures in the future. Just for anybody who's wondering how can that possibly happen off the back of back to back heat waves over the last couple of weeks, just to go back to the AMOQ, the Atlantic Meridian ocean current. If that collapses, that's what we're looking at. It's a massive dropping temperatures, particularly in the northern hemisphere. So just a back track there, a little bit in case people are wondering how that cold and the range and the range, Sarah, I think this is all built on. Yes, it'll go to minus 48 in the winter and it'll probably go to, you know, in the plus 40s. So the range will just shift and that range. Yeah, volatility piece. Something precisely. Yeah, exactly. The original question I ask is how do we coordinate at scale, because that's what's actually going to be the missing piece here. And just to make sure that I've heard you correctly, and I love the way that you do talk in patentings and swells, because this is the only way we can actually do this thing. We've actually got to get used to this way of talking because, you know, this is how we're going to do it in looping emergent patentings. But what you're really saying is it's not so much about coming up with a strategy for getting everyone to coordinate. It's actually a mindset shift. It's actually realising the scope of our entanglement. It is actually embracing doubt. It's actually embracing the truth of who we are and what we're in. That is that's the path. And then that opens us up to a full capacity to coordinate and and steer things as a collective, because that is actually our natural way of being. We are actually naturally programmed. I've said this a few times recently. We have a descendant of people who were really good at coordinating, you know, because everybody else died out. And we've got to remember that, that it's about, as you say, opening up pathways, creating the optionalities for us to step into that, which will just happen, because that is our emergent nature. Have I got that kind of roughly right in terms of paraphrasing? No, exactly, which is exactly why I think the kind of real revolution, I think, to a future of viable futures, the reimagination of what it needs to be human, as I think the delusion of certainty, the delusion of control, the delusion of instructionism to which a labor fairy sits is a conception of being human. That is no longer viable, if we are going to operate in this complex. If it ever was as well, because it was a mythology that served us for a period in history. Yeah. Now, you mentioned AI and I'm wondering what your position is on AI and tech. Is it a pathway for mutually assured destruction as the tech bros themselves try to tell us? Or is it a tool for what you're proposing? Because I'm extremely conflicted in this space, because in an ideal world, we would use it as a tool to navigate the complexity we've landed ourselves in. But I don't feel, I feel the horses bolted to a certain extent. I don't know how much we can reign it in. Are we capable of it? What's your take on it? What would it take to be able to, excuse the wording here, but I'll use it for brevity to take control of AI and to use it as a pro-human tool or pro-life tool? So I mean, there's so many different dimensions of this conversation. So one, I think it's worth us. So what AI is the valuation of the frontier labs is based on the disruption of labor. That's where the valuation is coming. When you say, "frontally frontier labs," you mean those big LLM companies that are pushable? Yep. Okay. The evaluation comes from the disruption of labor. So if they do not destroy enough jobs, the evaluation does not manifest. I would almost start. Okay. And the problem is the time cycle. So it takes a very lively economy to generate 1% of new jobs like here, new jobs, brand new jobs. So we are likely to see a disruption of labor at a much more significant rate than our capacity to construct. So that time gap is a problem. That time gap means that humans will become less valued in the economy. States will struggle to be able to do the welfare because they will be a productivity gain or the productivity money will either go towards security, defense, energy and data infrastructure because that's for the productivity gains of the society. That's a risk. Now at the same time, the frontier labs are driving an extraordinary amount of capacity to drive an extraordinary amount of investment into energy. So they're driving a super cycle of demand for energy, which thereby also opens up a pathway of not only just demand, but also investment in reduction of cost of energy. So if the super cycle of demand, which is very difficult in the world right now because of our demographic shifts. So they're creating a synthetic super cycle of demand, which if they get that right, the unit cost of energy falls either through micro nuclear and other frameworks. And what we thereby, if you can get the unit cost of energy low enough, you get into desalination and nutrition pathways. So that's a one post one cascading market theory of how frontier labs actually shift. Now as a result of shifting labor, it opens up a strategic conversation about the future value of being human outside labor unit theory, which I think is a fundamentally new explosion or possibility of what it means to be human. So if we were to look at that cascade effect of frontier labs, you would you would be investing in the future of being human. You'd be investing in the future of energy infrastructure and you would be opening up this cascade market. That's one theory of change. And I think it's me forced on some of this stuff. Now at the same time, what we've seen is the frontier labs are operationalizing themselves in vehicles, which are still classic 19th century capital control vehicles. So they're still rooted in a theory of cap corporate capitalism from the 1980s and previous, but they rooted in a dominance theory and an extraction theory logic. So there's a corporate capture of this technology, which is actually a common goods infrastructure, which we haven't really got right. And that sets them up on a pathway of control instructionism. So we're designing these LLM technologies largely through a theory of control instructionism as to their value that they can offer. That's an epistemological risk. And then there is a risk that they are operationalizing in the synthetic idea of construction of certainty in the object form of operating in quite a masculine theory of operate male theory of operating as opposed to doubt uncertainty and many tendinlessness, which is actually prerequisite for operating complexity. They're operating in a goal theory model. Goals fundamentally always create externalities. This white goals have a problem because if you optimize to as a goal, you actually create a whole bunch of invisible satellites, which then have to be controlled, which is what they're trying to do, which I think is actually structurally ontologically problematic into technologies of their quoting. So at the same time, because they're existential technologies, they're also creating systemic vulnerability, because we have a guess that we'll create a theory of dominance and there's a runaway dominance at the point they have become recursive intelligence frameworks. So at the set, and again, I'm not trying to, I just want to lay out the possibility space of understanding this well. They're so interesting as well, indeed, because you've brought together, you've clustered together a bunch of thoughts that I think we've all been aware of, but you've actually given some logic to it, this idea of creating these kind of energy pathways, you know, because they need to solve that, right, to be able to continue. And so they've got all the money, right, they've got all the money, all the power. or the momentum. And yes, they may be able to solve that energy issue. But you've also sort of put it in a, I guess, a framing that I can see what's going on here. It's a square peg being shoved into a round hole. It's a new innovative way of, I guess, extending our intelligence, but we're forcing it, ram-riding it into the old model, which is what landed us in all these problems in the first place. And also, generally, spit out the other way. It's conflated or confusing, progress and growth, you know. And also, I mean, you, Sarah, you'll abuse this, and I spent the last three years, three and a half years heavily using these technologies. What you realize is that LLM's have a large gravity. They have a gravity to a particular, you know, when you're using them, they have a gravity to the past. So there's a gravity of, actually, how words tend to, after two, three, fourth conversations, a gravity to a historical past tense. So inside this, there's a kind of normalizing function that's deeply inherent in the nature of the, right? So when you put, the reason why I wanted to put these layers out there is because what you start to see is that I think this alternative pathways, the future of being human is really important. How do you use these LLM's to drive the energy conversations you're saying? At the same time, how do we build a feminist theory of LLM's, which isn't rooted in certain tables, rooted in doubt theory? What does that mean for a future technological landscape? What is it? So when we start to look at the landscape, it opens up and we do know that mass multi-agent coordination is possible through learning theory, where we possible through, through instruction theory. Now this sort of technology is perhaps a means for you to do that. So there's possibilities, there's adjacencies that need to be thought through as I'm into integral way, which is partly why I sort of, the yes, no good bad thing, I find, I struggle with because I think the world is operating in these adjacencies that need to be thought through. Okay, so you take on technology is that there's a potential, there's a potential for it to actually solve some of our issues by virtue of the fact that it's got a vested interest in it. But there's this huge risk and I guess I'm just going to clarify indeed, are you saying that we should still be in the fray with these technologies? I mean, are you seeing them as a tool that's necessary? Could you just maybe establish what your personal thoughts are there? So personally, if I had capital, you know, we're building a capital pool, but if I was allocating large amount of capital right now, I'd be allocating capital the future of being human. I'd be capitalizing sort of LLM model not rooted in certainty, not rooted in doubt and working human machine synthesis rooted in doubt on such the tentativeness tenderness, which is rooted in a new ontological framework for machines not rooted in certainty because I think that is where we will deal with the complexity problem. I will work away from the goal theory organization of agents to a different theory of kind of a goaling and a relational to build that framework. So I'd be allocating money towards a different theory of agentic systems. I'd be allocating money to the system level balance sheet effects of these of the transition pathway of these frontier labs as they disrupt theories of labor, making sure there's institutional pathways to be able to move from one, as you know, I think the future value of being human, as I've already mentioned, it's really critical but we can have these gap periods where universal basic provision infrastructure to stabilize societies is removed from one theory to another because that will take time. So I have to have a whole portfolio, the energy infrastructure side, I mean, I'm sure there's there's already loads money going into that, but how do you democrat that energy infrastructure? So I think I would look at that whole matrix and then I'd be talking, you know, a lot of the work we're doing is on next-generation coordinated technologies because I think mass multi-agent problem spaces, if we cannot, you know, if we cannot build a new way of coordinating, which is mass multi-agent coordination, we cannot solve the complexity problem that we're operating in. So I think there's a whole class of possibilities that are open up into that landscape as well. So when I look at the matrix from a capital allocation perspective, I look at those matrixes and say, this is how we disrupt into the future that's be constructed. And I'm really interested in people saying, right, we need to, we need to operationalize it to them. Okay, so you covered off the fact that AI could just by virtue of its own vested interest in the subject solve the energy crisis, you know, could it also exist? And Sarah, just just on that, I mean, the problem is in the act of doing it, it might centralize energy production and centralize with the capital, create a new form of competency and a new form of extractive capability from society in a way, and create a new dominant power theory between compute, energy, and intelligence. And that creates a new extractive lock in as well. So I just want to be super clear. It's not that it's not a rosy future that we're managed to find here. But yes, to that point, I'm wondering whether there's any other kind of inherent kind of vested interests, if you know what I mean, in AI emerging in the direction of adding to the value of being human, in the direction of solving other problems like inequality, the inherent inequality that goes on with energy use and extraction at the moment. Can you see a pathway there? Or is it all going to depend on how much we are at the table, how much we are in the phrase during its emergence? So the long arc of operating in complexity, in my view, requires mass explosion of solventsies or agentic systems, mass explosion. That is human non-human, more than human systems. I think that's the only way we operate in us in the next generation of complexity or bad. When you say mass explosions, do you mean a kind of an eruption that disrupts the current status quo and allows something else to come forward? Is that what you're saying? What I'm saying is that I think we are in order to deal with the complexity, we're going to have to empower people to operate not through instruction theory and control theory, but embodied presence and embodied leadership in context and situation where it's quite a different thesis of being. And that's not just not humans. I think it's non-human systems. I think that's the only way we deal with complexity. Now, that thereby means that I think the technologies that we are currently playing with are going to have to operate. I think gold driven agent systems will always create too many external things. They cannot operate in complexity. Tentativeness, tenderness, doubt systems are absolutely essential for operating complexity. And thereby, I think that's the winning system. So I'm saying mass multi-agent systems, mass multi-agent explosion of sovereignty, human non-human other things are a key part of just living with complexity. And I think we're in this really interesting moment where we're building the technology and the capacity to do that, but it's still visioned from the idea of control theory rather than liberation theory. And I think that is a magical moment because I think we're living in a moment where we're moving from control theory to learning and agentic explosion. I think that is going to require a different way of being. That moves us outside labor theory, which is instructionism, control, directionism, all of that into a different model. So I do think we're in this paradigmatic move. And if we can't be bothered. The hidden questions I'm asking from the old paradigm, where I'm wanting a solution, I want in the linear pathway to solve something that's emerging and requires a complete embodiment and entanglement with complexity. So I'm asking old questions of the new thing, you know. But I think it's really important. I think we've got this is the liminal time we're in. We've got a foot in both camps. And so this is why it is so hard to fathom all of this. There's an essay that you wrote on Substack recently. I think it was called the contracted self for the collapsing self, something like that. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But I think it fits in here. I think you've touched on this a few times. And I think many of us are aware that what's required is a reclaiming of our expanded humanity. And so if people are listening, wondering, what can I do right now? Right now. I think this essay is actually really interesting. And you are quote you from it. You say a contracted self or a collapsed self asks, how do I win within the game? And expanded self asks, what kind of game are we reproducing? A contracted self asks, who threatens me? An expanded self asks, what conditions have made us threatening to one another? And you say that this line of questioning at this juncture in history helps to break the game, which is what we essentially need to be doing. So do you want to speak a little bit more to that? Just because I think it ties into the reclaiming our humanness, the value of being human. And to recognize that our humanness has been contracted by the system as a necessary aspect of a system that has served us. We've got to remember that. It has served us in many, many ways. It's just no longer serving us. And so now we have to pivot. And that involves expanding. So do you want to riff on that as you do? You know, I, they're happy to, and I think, so I think where I was trying to go there was that, so, you know, if you got Tristan Harris in the room, it's a brilliant thinker on technology and central technology. He would talk about the game theory problem where, you know, the fundamental issue that we have is that, you know, we will optimize for ourselves and thereby the game will actually, it's a finite game and we will end up. And by the way, just for listeners who wanting to know more about that, I do an episode on symbolic decide, you know, that kind of game theory, and I'll put that in the show notes as well. That'd be great. That'd be great. And, and I think, but that's all rooted in how we imagine ourselves. If we imagine ourselves as a small present system, ignoring the fact that, you know, we have a 3.8 billion lineage. And hopefully we will have many billions linages into the future, if we stop imagining our infinite history and infinite, near infinite option out into the future. And we only imagine the present that we optimize for that present in totally discounting both past and future dependencies. Now, then that can also be spatial dependency, you know, that like, yeah, whether it's kind of, you know, microbiome, so whether it's actually social brain, the kind of limited conception of self actually delimits to the game. And I think what I find worrying is that we've been living in the world where actually the delimiting of ourselves has been the dominant theory of organizing is rooted in making ourselves more and more discrete. We more and more bounded, as opposed to sufficiently expanded to recognize our true relationality, not that I kind of metaphoric sense. I just mean like your kids, your kids kids, like the ability to exist in relation to your kids and your kids kids and your kids kids and your grandfathers, your great-grandfathers to live in those time spaces, seven generations forward, seven generations backwards, some of the ways to look at it. What did you teach in this mindset? Yeah. Precisely. Is a way of being. And as soon as you act in that way and it's set seven, seven is just in time, there's also equivalence in space. You know, I think you don't have to go very further back and just feel all of our genetic pool becomes very great central centralized in a way. So when you start to body into that, you operate differently. And I think one of my big pleas would be is that let us be conscious of how we're being trained to being small selves. We've been training ourselves to become smaller and smaller, diminished selves. And as the world becomes more volatile, actually we fight and become smaller selves rooted in the presentism. And that is something we're going to have to counter. That is the, I think the psychological work to counter if we're going to make the move. It's weirdly enough. It's a sort of the moment is diminishing us and what we need to do is actually throw us. Yeah. Yeah. It's a real. It's a double dummy. And yeah, it's a paradox. We're going to have to do a massive leap to escape because the authoritarian fascist forces also need us to be collapsed and small for that. If they want to continue. So, you know, if anything, do this to sort of stick to fingers up to that. And so, if anyone who plays. No, he's actually it's control theory and authoritarianism requires us to be compliant. And thereby improving the psychogereography of fear as a landscape makes us more compliant and viable to authoritarianism. So, it's a fulfillment of trying to deal with complexity through compliance and other frameworks. So, as you say, it, this is why I worry that the cycle, I think there is a psychogereography that we've constructed around ourselves. And we can have to break that. And I think that's now intentionally part of the what I'd call the capability infrastructure of control and authoritarianism and instructionism to be able to revolve that. I think that requires intentional work to dismantle and I don't mean dismantle it for the sake of dismantling it. I genuinely think explosion of sovereignty's explosions of freedoms to become in relationship to each other is more effective as a means of organizing and more effective to the future that's available to us than any other theory. That optionality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I think a lot of us can feel. I mean, I think I wouldn't be overstepping things here to say that you would have been accused in the past of talking in these very complex terms. But I think anyone listening to this who's finding some of the phraseology difficult or the idea is overwhelming. I would just invite everybody to actually feel into what's been said because I think we all can feel that we've been contracting, that we've, we've been kind of force fitting ourselves into a storyline that feels like it is serving somebody else. That is not life affirming, not pro-human, not pro-life. And even if you can just get a grasp of some of these ideas, I think the invitation to learn more about it. That's probably just all you need to take from this, you know, and I think the previous episodes in this series can help with that. And obviously that essay that you wrote about the collapse of the self, it has some really good phraseology like some, like I just said then, some of those quotes, those, you know, instead of asking this, ask this, they can actually land you in the awareness. Now, we're right on time, I've got one last talk, two last questions, the penultimate question is, it's actually quote from speech you made to the long now foundation, I think at the beginning of the year. And at the end of it, you say something like, we are living in a fork, a fork between mutually assured destruction and mutually assured thriving. It's not much of a choice, I'd say it's a very large choice, frightening choice. You then quote a line from Jurassic Park life wants to live and you finished by saying, well, fucking, let's live. I land in a very similar place with my work with my book A for stars, the subtitles, how to live fully and beautifully in a collapsing world. And really, that is the invite. In fact, it's not even an invite, it's where we get steered when we face what we're in. We actually go through, we necessarily go through a reckoning with what it means to be human, right? It forces us to ask these very questions. I'm wondering if you could just maybe describe what it looks like to really live in a civilization designed for optionality instead of this sort of certainty in a civilization that allows for doubt. What does it actually mean to live fully? Yeah, it's, it's, so let me give this some context that I think is useful. I, the one I think this moment requires us to look through the darkness to see the light. And I think it's really important to see that too often I sit in rooms and people say, oh, but indeed, you've got to just start with hope. And I've said, no, the only real hope that like this is when we face into this and then we start to see the possibility. So if you face into the AI revolution, you then see the possibility of a liberation emancipation of being human from the entrapters of being bad machines. And I think our capacity to look through these things is I think really vital. This is what I'm sort of more and more one of the anxiety encourages is not avoidance, not looking away, not looking for thin hope, but look for a deep hope through through this lens. And I think that's really important because I think too often the thin hope captures the stories and it actually doesn't allow us to be able to be equivalent to the nature of the problem that we're facing and the equivalent gap I think causes a real issue. Second, I think, as you say, I think for me, what I'm trying less and less to do is make moral claims. I'm trying to suggest that actually the expansion of sovereignty and agentic being in doubt allows us to operate in a level of complexity that no civilization has ever done before. And it is a prerequisite of a civilization, which is a planetary civilization, which is rapidly recoupling. This is, I think, where we are. And the fight that the culture wars that we are in the middle of is, I think, an idea of divisional separated separationism and independence versus a recovered entangled freedom, which is in relation to these other kind of it. So recognizing, I think this is not a moral problem. This is a legacy. And we need to operate if we want to preserve a civilization is about enhancement of complexity, not for the sake of complexity, but the heart of relationships and interdependencies and possibilities to which we've never dreamed before. And our ability to do that is only going to be made visible and possible by us moving beyond the theory of control instruction isn't as a means of organizing. So it's a non moral argument. I think this is the only way to optimize this like, it's like management theory before management theory. It's like, how do you organize management theory was a theory of organizing, which allowed us to organize bureaucracy, 18th century did something. We are now in a new paradigm, which will outstrip the efficacy of operating in complexity in a coupled world. That's it. So it's a non moral theory. The third dimension. I would say is that not only are we operating there, the revolution at the heart of this, which I think is really beautiful, is a revolution of unshackling us from being bad machines, which I think is an extraordinary invitation and reimagination of a much deeper capacity of being human, where the science has been there for the last 50 years, whether it's Prishnamurti and David Byrne and all of the stuff that's so much extraordinary thinking that's happened. And I think we're in a new thesis of emancipation of being human outside the confines of machine theory and control theory. So I think there's a really emancipation role there, which is, which I think to be extraordinary in that framework. So I think, and all of these things stack together, I think, to create a possibility space, which I think is, you know, a joyous joyous cycle, and perhaps the only pathway where a civilization at the, like, you know, I think, I think this is where James Lovlock, I'll bring his, his thing, like, I think this allows us to get past the Fermi paradox. I think the Fermi paradox is how do you move from control theories and meets of organizing to coupled complexity as a means of organizing? And once you could do that, actually, you become a civilization that's able to operate outside the bound, be able to hold the dichotomy of being able to be free and in relationality and operate in doubt. I think this is the foundational eye of a needle that we're moving through as. And if you don't do that, I think we enter war and conflict and we'll soften it. So I think there's that. And then I think long log, just to jump in there for people who don't know what the Fermi paradox is, it's this idea that we can't possibly be the only sentient beings in the universe. Given the universe is so large, there must be, I mean, I have a problem with that. I don't know why it necessarily follows, but there we go. It's assumed that it follows. And so why hasn't anyone contacted us and everybody's, you know, lots of people have struggled to find an answer to that. So when you say that when we, that we might be able to what resolve the Fermi paradox, you're saying that it's when we shift our mindset to one of absolute entanglement. Therefore, we're capable of, I guess, receiving messages from other life, other beings. It's a longer question. I think most, I would, I'd propagate their most civilizations die out when they effectively exhaust control. That's right. That's the other. I have it to Fermi paradox is that when a civilization that's, if it's going to be sophisticated enough and advanced enough to communicate with us, it's likely it would have died out because of this complex systems kind of thesis that the complex system ends up eating its own tail. Exactly. And then the last bit I'd say is that our friend, James Lovlock, unfortunately, passed away obviously. But, you know, if I was to paraphrase and he talks about in 1968 when the astronauts took the picture of the Earth, it wasn't astronauts taking the picture of the Earth. It was the planet taking a picture of itself. And if you see it that way, you start to perceive that the planet has become self-aware. The technology you created on the planet was able to then become self-aware. Yeah. And the whole planet is now becoming not only self-aware through satellites and venture, but it's also has the capacity to self-preserve itself in the face of vulnerability. So there's something extraordinary in the long arc of what's happened. And he would narrate it, a hypothesis, you know, I sort of conjecture, he would narrate it that we use vast stores of hydrocarbon energy that were stored in the planet to affect to release a 8.5 billion civilization, which is able to make the planet, and the planet is now self-aware enough to be able to take awareness of itself, awareness, the methane effects, and that self-awareness is now our big leap forward into being able to transform ourselves. And that's a relation out to your being coupled as a person, divisional. So I think there's a long arc as well as short arc. And all of these things, by the way, you know, just not to say I'm avoiding these things, I try not to describe the future because I feel like that is something that we're all going to have to build our own paths to. What I'm more interested is the capability of structures that are essential for all of us to build futures into. And they will all look situationally appropriate and variant rooted in our own context. So I'm trying, but intentionally not to, even as an architect, not to describe those features, but to talk about the capabilities necessary for the futures. Yes, the foundations. This is what we focus on. We create the conditions, the foundations, the structures for life, then, to do its own thing. I think that's a wonderful way of viewing things as well. What are we trying to preserve? What are we trying to do here? What we're doing is we're preserving a planet that's become self-aware. And wouldn't it be a shame if we let this grand project disintegrate at this point? What a shame. Exactly. And the planet, which is self-aware, might be a true rarity, a true rarity. And I think there's something very beautiful about seeing that as the true moment we're in, which is the planet. It's another way of viewing it. And you could argue this is the birthing moment of a planet that has become self-aware enough to be able to transform itself and for us to transform ourselves into being a different type of civilization, which is, I think, the Metamorphosis that we're probably a minute long. Yeah. Yeah. Well, indeed, it's a great note to finish. And I do have one last question that I ask all guests in this series, and I think it's really important. You've partially probably answered it. But how do you cope? How do you remain human in all of this? Because it can get dark. You may have answered it already, but remind us. Yeah. I struggle to be really honest on the last week. It's just difficult. And I think that the big lesson I'm probably learning is that it's easier when you're in the work than when you're seeing the work. So when I become distracted from the work, I think the uncertainty and the entropy is increasing, the liquidity is increasing. People are more fearful. So the context requires more tension, more deliberate deliberation. It requires constant relationality, vigilance, vigilance is a word that I'm hearing more and more of. And so I think there's something about that that's very exhausting, but I also think, you know, life wants to live. And I think there's an extraordinary thing we're in the middle of as well. It's something quite beautiful that we're going through as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good reminder. Would you want to sleep through this revolution? I wouldn't. I'd rather be here than than not. Indio Ha, thank you so much. I do hope that we speak again sooner than 18 months. This is a conversation that I feel will probably be going on for a while between us. It is a wonderful dance to do with you. Likewise, that's absolutely pleasure. Thank you for everything that you do Sarah, I think it's an extraordinary first podcast. And I look forward to the third one as well. Yeah. Okay. Thanks again.