Ep 238 | Indy Johar
Optionality Collapse: We’re Investing in a Future That Won’t Exist
Description
Traditional financial management tells us that, if we invest right, we’ll be able to retire and sink into a future of comfort and stability – and even pass on your wealth to your children and grandchildren. But this vision is built on an anomalous period of stability in which climate, energy resources, and labor markets were all predictable. As ecological breakdown, resource conflict, and AI-driven labor disruption begin to feed into one another, that predictability is slipping away. How can we better position hundreds of trillions of dollars in claims on the future to withstand uncertainty in the increasingly volatile world ahead?
In this episode, Nate welcomes back Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, for an exploration of how coupled systemic risks are reshaping capital, institutions, and what it means to invest for the future. Indy explains why most financial forecasting – built on linear, siloed models – misses the compounding, coupled crises we will have to face, and argues that “civilizational optionality” is diminishing, threatening the value of our claims on the future (money). Indy presents the Civilizational Optionality Fund as a way to protect these claims, while also increasing the ability of societies to adapt, mitigate, and respond to crises from various directions. Indy and Nate also discuss their deeper philosophies about humanity, emphasizing doubt and humility as critical mentalities for anyone attempting to navigate a future that will look very different from the past.
How much money is currently being saved for a future that isn’t even available to buy? How might a “civilizational Sharpe ratio” – one that weighs returns against systemic volatility – change the way wealth is allocated, and broaden how we measure the capital returns? And if moments of crisis are when cultural narratives shift, what can each of us do now to cultivate the ideas, relationships, and courage needed to meet them?
About Indy Johar
Indy Johar is the co-founder of DarkMatterLabs, where he is currently building a stealth initiative to expand civilizational optionality. He is a professor at RMIT University, and the Executive Director of Project 00. An architect by training, he is also Non-Executive Director of the WikiHouse Foundation and Bloxhub, as well as a Vision Keeper at The Collaborative for Systemic Climate action. He writes frequently on his Substack.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
Download transcriptGuest:
Indy Johar: Co-founder, Dark Matter Labs, Co-founder, Project 00, Professor of Practice, RMIT University, Non-executive director, WikiHouse Foundation and BLOXHUB, Works
- Previous The Great Simplification appearance: “The Foundational Challenge: Stewardship, Responsibility, and Designing a New System”
Grab-and-Go Resources:
New? Start here:
– Why the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart: The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes (Frankly #97)
– The Great Simplification (32-minute film)
From the Archive:
– Ep 230: Olivier Hamant, The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile
– Ep 95: Sir David King, Global Heating: The Science and the Response
Episode Foundations:
– Civilizational Optionality by Indy (Civilizational Optioneering, his Long Now talk)
– Money as a Claim on Future Energy by Indy
Next Steps:
– Loading the DICE Against Pensions
– The Bioregional Weaving Guide
– Global Risk & Stabilization Summit: Field Synthesis Report
Resources by Timestamp:
01:07 – Expanding Civilizational Optionality (xCO)
02:52 – What does it mean to be human? (The Great Simplification Ep 147)
03:29 – Subject–object separation, Birth of linear perspective, Reductionism, Dominion over nature, Externalities
04:24 – Humans as units of labor and units of cognition, Technological unemployment
05:56 – Collective trauma from war, Falling unit cost of warfare, CRISPR and biological weapons risk
06:53 – The future of being human as a frontier
07:36 – Humanity’s emergent behavior as an Economic Superorganism (Frankly #97)
08:00 – Consciousness, Entanglement
08:34 – Roger Penrose on Orchestrated objective reduction (quantum consciousness)
09:03 – Scale of capital flowing into AI
09:28 – Artificial general intelligence, Recursive self-improvement
09:46 – Large language models, Transformer architecture
10:06 – Manifold hypothesis, Platonic Representation Hypothesis (AI models converging on a shared representation)
10:56 – Alchemy and the birth of chemistry
11:13 – Theory of value
11:30 – More-than-human consciousness
11:56 – Earthrise (1968)
12:24 – James Lovelock (referenced quote), Gaia hypothesis
13:23 – GDP growth as society’s goal
13:39 – Efficient-market hypothesis, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
13:55 – Holocene climate stability and the Neolithic Revolution
14:35 – Leaving zones of predictability: Climate volatility, Demographic decline, Energy supply
15:23 – Alpha (finance)
15:40 – Evidence on AI’s labor-market effects
15:53 – Copper demand forecasts
16:01 – How crises interact and amplify one another: research on the global polycrisis – Coupled, non-linear systems, Polycrisis, Feedback loops
16:39 – Fiduciary duty
16:49 – Family offices
17:28 – First principles thinking
18:38 – Narrow- vs. wide-boundary thinking, Net present value
19:02 – Olivier Hamant (The Great Simplification appearance) on leaving the era of the mean for the era of the standard deviation
19:45 – Sir David King (The Great Simplification appearance) on refreezing the Arctic
20:00 – *Sir David King: ~7.5 metres of sea level rise if Greenland’s ice melts
20:08 – London housing stock of ~3.8 million homes
20:14 – *London average house price of ~£550,000
20:42 – Bioregional decline in northern Spain: Monoculture forest plantations, Overhunting and defaunation, Forests and cloud formation
21:29 – Soil compaction, Mycorrhizal networks, Rural depopulation in Spain
21:54 – Regime shifts: Desertification in Spain, Farmland abandonment
22:43 – Super El Niño and the Strait of Hormuz crisis as a food security risk
23:04 – Food price shocks and inequality, Social contract
23:55 – Eric Schmidt (referenced quote)
25:12 – AI-driven surge in electricity demand
25:35 – Near-zero cost energy: Desalination, Carbon sequestration, Vertical farming
26:42 – AI as a partial mirror of the left hemisphere (The Great Simplification Ep highlighting such)
28:31 – Claims that Earth can support only ~1 billion people
28:50 – Carbon inequality
29:41 – Carbon Pulse
29:51 – *World population of ~8.2 billion
30:21 – Longtermism
31:09 – Climate variability and human evolution
31:44 – Fermi paradox
32:27 – Colonising the future
32:49 – Whale Nation (Dark Matter Labs xCO project in development)
33:16 – Arctic stabilization and Planetary Civics
33:53 – Metacognition
34:28 – Terra preta, Swarms of small autonomous farm robots
35:17 – Overconfidence effect, Intellectual humility
35:52 – Scientism
37:01 – Nominalization (nounification)
37:15 – *”I doubt, therefore I am, or what is the same, I think, therefore I am” (René Descartes)
39:02 – Dark Matter Labs’ proposed Madrid cooling target, Urban heat island
39:45 – Demand-side innovation
40:22 – Autopoiesis
40:56 – Wide-boundary step back: Global GDP of ~$118 trillion, Global debt of over $365 trillion
41:22 – Money as a claim on energy
42:10 – Financial markets underestimating climate risk
42:16 – Civilizational optionality
42:35 – Pension funds, Sovereign wealth funds, Internal rate of return
43:06 – Coupled risks: Nutrition, AI exposure of labor and cognitive work, Resource conflicts, Climate volatility and extremes
43:52 – Climate impacts on crop yields, Fertilizer prices tracking natural gas, Heat-related labor loss
44:29 – Optionality collapse of claims on the future
44:49 – Nate’s civilizational Sharpe ratio
45:19 – Unpriced risks invisible to markets
46:15 – Upton Sinclair (referenced quote)
46:59 – Cascading risks
47:13 – Urban cooling (Madrid 2050°), Managed aquifer recharge, Atmospheric river governance, Zero-material growth of a city (Extraction Zero)
47:39 – Collective decision-making
47:55 – Bioregioning (Dark Matter Labs)
49:00 – Interspecies diplomacy, Rights of nature, Related example: the Indigenous declaration calling for whale personhood and rights
51:23 – Theory of change, Related research on change thresholds, Experimental tipping points in social conventions
51:50 – Overton window
52:39 – Memetics
56:09 – Hedging
58:47 – Biochar
59:20 – Pre-Columbian plant domestication shaped Amazon forests
1:00:16 – James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State
1:00:36 – xCO’s $350 million pool of existentially aware capital
1:01:17 – Cognitive dissonance in financial services
1:02:24 – Space of the possible vs. space of the necessary
1:03:01 – Embodied carbon of concrete
1:03:14 – Mortality cost of carbon
1:03:31 – Adjacent possible
1:05:23 – Billionaire doomsday bunkers (xCO’s two false exits: the frontier and the fortress)
1:07:59 – Fertilizer scarcity threatening 2026–27 harvests
1:08:07 – Global conflicts: Russo-Ukrainian war, 2026 Iran war
1:12:41 – Money as a transferable claim on the future
1:12:59 – Elon Musk and pooling capital for future technologies: xAI’s 2024 funding round
1:13:20 – Electrification of New York City: Pearl Street Station (1882)
1:13:59 – Modern portfolio theory vs. a portfolio approach to systems transformation
1:14:56 – Limited partners
1:15:33 – Fundamentals that are off: Energy, Demographics, Velocity of M2 money stock (GDP vs. M2), AI infrastructure, Climate breakdown
1:16:19 – Money as a supernormal stimulus
1:17:23 – Land value uplift and value capture: Indy on why private asset values depend on shared infrastructure and functioning systems
1:18:30 – Agglomeration economies
1:19:32 – Continuity of provision: Indy on reliable water, energy, and food supplies, Research on underpriced climate risks, Critical-mineral supply vulnerabilities
1:20:21 – Civilizational Sharpe ratio explained: Risk and loss aversion, Volatility drag
1:21:19 – Conspicuous consumption
1:22:19 – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (1987)
1:22:32 – Prisoner’s dilemma, Tragedy of the commons, Game theory
1:22:47 – Continuity value of provision, Derivatives, Blended finance
1:27:14 – Jeremy Grantham (The Great Simplification appearances: #155, #99)
