Shifting the Dark Matter of Education - A Conversation with Indy Johar and Adam Purvis

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

All of these are command and control systems. They're not rooted as learning systems. So the wide angle goal has to be how do you create learning society? And that learning society is learning organizations, a learning neighborhood. It is the fundamental shift from not using control as your means of coherence, but learning as your means of coherence.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again this week. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. This week we're thinking about what places might be the first movers in a radical educational shift. And by radical, in this conversation we're not talking about small tweaks in the types of individual competencies and credentials that we optimize for in our current version of school. Rather, a completely different set of logics, values, meaning, and purpose for what education could be, set in a broader context of the transformation of systems and radical democratic renewal. It might all sound pretty grand, but I believe, like my guests this week, that building for this transition is the work we all have to do. I've been a huge admirer of the work of Dark Matter Labs for a long time, and so it's an incredible opportunity for me to be able to sit down with Indy Johar and Adam Purvis to explore these big and important issues. Indy is an architect and co-founder and mission steward of Dark Matter Labs, which is an organization developing new support frameworks for collaborative system change. Specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting, and governance for deeply democratic futures. He's also a founding director of Open Systems Lab. He seeded WikiHouse, an open-source housing, as well as OpenDesk, an open-source furniture company. Adam has spent over a decade building mission-led movements and networks. His primary role at Dark Matter Labs is holding the team and driving internal clarity. Previously, among many other things, Adam was co-founder of Future X, a major influence on how the Scottish government supported entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation.

Hi, Indya. Yes, how you doing? I'm here.

Good to see you both. Thank you so much. This is super exciting. And if I may, before we get into some of the big heavy stuff, I kind of wanted to preface the conversation with the fact that humans are extraordinary. And this is something I heard you say, Indya, in your Wild Hope lecture. And I just, I think it's important to say that because I like, I believe it in my core. And I really resonated with when you said that, just how profoundly important that is. And when you see, I think you said, when you see a human being holding a door open, this is like a deep travesty. So I think just before we just disappear into a hole of doom and data and all of this kind of important and essential stuff, I wanted to start with that. So I don't know if you had any reflections on that before we get going.

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that is the intuitive value that for me has been really important, is that if you start with that preface that, you know, whether you say, you know, we're functions of stardust becoming self-aware, which is pretty fucking extraordinary if you think about it. And we're significantly more powerful than any machine learning agent that's currently out there, yet we're spending, you know, billions upon billions of machine learning agents and having humans open doors, which sort of says something about the perverseness of the system at a systemic level. And also I would say for me, this miraculousness has been systematically dethroned at every level. You know, you could argue the Copernican Revolution was the initial dethroning, cuz you go the Copernican theory, which sort of decenters humans, decenters the planet, decenters the solar system, decenters the galaxy, decenters, you know, the universe, potentially even in a multi-universe landscape. They're all about the decentering of and making peripheral the human. Whereas you could make a massive argument that actually at the center of the universe, or the kind of core of the universe, not the center, is consciousness. And, you know, from a quantum level, you could say it's the attention, the capacity to construct attention, that creates resonance of the field. And if that's true, then you would argue we are in a de-Copernican turn moment, which starts to put not just humans but all conscious systems at the core of the universe experience.

Yeah.

And that's just one level, but then you have to just cascade that down because when you start with that, then you also have to sort of, I mean, the other thing for me that's really front and center in the last few months has been I'm starting to fall in love with doubt and the unknowable because I, I think the central fallacy that we've got locked into is the certainty fallacy. And actually, we know for certain that we cannot know everything. It's informationally, computationally impossible. And that means that we have to work in a theory of doubt. Yet we've created this synthetic illusion of certainty. You know, Descartes has been reduced to, I think, therefore I am, as opposed to, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. And if you put doubt and uncertainty of the unknowable at the center of our experience, then you start to change our behavior of how we exist as interbecomings. And I say, so the only reason I bring that whole stack of conversation out upfront is because I think we've been systematically decoded away from it.

And maybe in a way there was an important decentering of the human, right? Like the kind of human exceptionalism, et cetera. But at the same time, I absolutely hear you. It's like critically important to hold that in somehow in tension, right?

And that's also why I try not to get into situations where I say we are going back to the past. I don't think it is a back to the past. It rhymes with the past. It has rhymes. It's sort of, it's a spiral that looks similar, but it's fundamentally different because exactly as you say, we had to decenter to recenter consciousness as opposed to the human physical body, which is the function of kind of the illusion. And even that wasn't quite true, but so there's a, there's a sort of spiral which looks similar, but it's fundamentally different.

Yeah. Nice. Sorry, Adam, you wanted to come in?

I was just saying, exploring just how this invites us as well to explore like a new thesis as well of freedom. So, you know, moving from, I suppose, the thesis of freedom that I would say that we operate with in the world today is one of leave me alone, freedom from constraint and freedom to consume, to actually we're all in this together. And the joy that is experienced through collective agency and collective doing. See, when you talk about humans being extraordinary, it is incredible that, for example, we have a system today where our attention is a part of the economy. And then if you move into the thesis of value, I find it's just really, really interesting how we're moving from one state to another at the moment as well.

Yeah.

No, I mean, I'd love to, yeah. Freedom and value, definitely. Let's go there. Maybe we preface it perhaps with a bit, again, another little preface, but about the, well, there's two things, right? There's the moment of forced reentanglement that you've been talking about, Indy, and then there's also this idea of the Engels pause, which you shared with me in this really great paper on human thriving, which I, I'd also love to talk about. Clearly they're not the same thing, but perhaps we could just set the like historical moment in both of those things and then, then we can go into freedom and value maybe.

No, totally. And I, so I, I think the big fight we're, we're in the middle of right now is that we lived in the illusion of separation. We lived in the illusion of the infinite world, and those illusions are crashing down in front of us as we are forcibly having to deal with our own feedback cycles in space and time., and that is the world planetary, so the real reentangling with us. And it is thereby changing fundamentally those illusions of the infinite, those illusions of the separatable, and the delusions of those realities. So on one hand, that reentanglement, but on the other hand, what that's doing is basically for people who are rooted in industrial ideas of freedom or sort of 19th century ideas of freedom rooted in separationism, sort of divisible sovereignty, agency over the world as a means to express their, to manifest themselves. For them, this is a catastrophe of the ideology that is rooted the birth of that nation or that place. And that is, I think, what we're in the middle of is a crisis of systemic identity. For America, which was born in the Newtonian Enlightenment. It is a Newtonian Enlightenment state which is now at a systemic crisis because the delusions it was constructed in are no longer viable. And so it's an existential crisis for America. And that's why I understand where this is rooted from. It doesn't come from a discompassion. If the whole identity of a system is rooted in a theory of separationism, all those models This is a crisis to the nature of that nation and its deep psychological root. And then when you root this whole reality also in the fact that, let's use America as a dominant cultural mechanism, and America is rooted in, yes, we the people, but we the people and our property. It is actually rooted in the preservation of property more formally than the rights of people.

People as property.

Precisely. And again, I think we have to be careful not to make this pejorative because we're all part of the same system. Whether you're India, you are actually all part of the same system now. But if you root your society through a theory of property and thereby assets, then the thing that you are seeking to preserve and enhance as assets. And I think what we've seen is a fundamental, and you know, everyone's documented this, I'm not saying anything new, but the return on capital has been doing this and the return on labor is flatlined. And if you take the return on labor as a proxy of the value of being human, Then you start to realize that our financial resources are all moving towards asset models and asset-based futures and property-based futures and humans, not as theories of labor and contribution, but humans as at best capitalists, as, as in allocators of capital at best, right? That's the sort of most dreamy delusion. And so what you start to realize is then if you put those two things together and then you start to put in, we've got the devaluation of what it means to be human. We've got an asset-driven future. And if we talk about an asset-driven future, what we're really talking about is, you know, large language models and artificial intelligence, which I think is both more extraordinary than people think, but less extraordinary than people think for lots of philosophical reasons, which you can get into, is fundamentally when you marry that with robotics and robotic capabilities, which are growing very quickly, you're seeing from an asset point of view, the disruption of labor theory. It is disrupting the theory of labor. Robotics, you know, whether you drones, humanoids, vehicle systems, you basically have full coverage of the planet using robotic systems. And when you marry that with generative intelligence, and then when you marry that with the demand for micronuclear reactors, the industrialization of energy using micronuclear, you create an energy action learning loop which is rooted in assets. And then when you marry that with new mineral economies rooted in extractionism of deep sea mining, you suddenly have created a Promethean asset-backed civilization model, which is labor, materials, energy, all the way through to cognition. And that is entirely asset-backed. So when you put that is where the allocation of resources are going, as opposed to the extraordinariness of being human, you now have set up the precedent. And then when you add climate volatility into the model, you are basically driving a resource scarcity into the model. You are driving us towards systemic war and the destructions of being human. So these forces are being constructed at the macro level, not by individuals, but the coding of our economic engines are rooting towards a systemic destruction. This is why, you know, how you opened or how, what we discussed previously about what it means to be extraordinary as a human becomes really important, right?

Exactly.

Because that's one of the key options of managing that risk.

Right. And that's maybe where we can ground it now. I knew this was going to be a wild ride and it already is. I love it. But just grounding it then back into this idea of what you described there as the Engels pause, which is in the paper, which Adam, maybe you can kind of connect that back to the audience for the podcast is, you know, educational. And so what's that got to do with education? I mean, there has been a previous Engels pause in the Industrial Revolution. Why does that matter from an educational perspective, linking in with some of that, of what Indy just said there?

So the reason why the British stole a lead with the Industrial Revolution is because they did the wholesale reform of their education system before the Industrial Revolution happened. So they essentially stole a first mover advantage. They prepared a generation of engineers and mathematicians and scientists that were there ready to make use of what was coming next and the shifts that were coming. And to bring it to present day, there will be first movers. In the world today. Some of the Nordic states are looking very, already looking like they might seriously move into this, where you'll have a nation state will look at the way it's educating its public and understand that there needs to be an incredible shift in the way that they are approaching education to prepare their population for what's coming next. And actually, one of the things that we're really interested in is exploring who are those first movers and how does that work unfold?

Yeah.

And what is the nature of that shift.

Yeah.

Can I ask, I mean, there feels to be a really fundamental tension in that though, in the narrow boundary orientation of defining what an education system does based on what the needs of the industrial questions that we're holding, right? Like surely we're talking about something which is more of a, a wide boundary idea of what it means to be human fundamentally. So there, I don't know, there feels like a really interesting tension between those things.

So I think you're right. Firstly, I'm not sure this is about education or not education as we see it. Like, I think this is a deep structural recode.

Yeah.

So I think step one is how do we operate in a theory of doubt, right? So this is about coding us to operate not through the illusions of certainty. Yeah. But the space of doubt. Then the second thing is remembering that all of our institutional logics are rooted in instruction. Control and dominion logics. And we created an education system which was largely there to replicate and make the ease of instruction, control, and dominion, right? So our 9-to-5 systems or 9-to-3 systems, what we did in that logic. And we've also replicated this in the nature of the firm. All of these are command and control systems. They're not rooted as learning systems. So the wide angle goal, I mean, it has to be How do you create learning society? And that learning society is learning organizations, a learning neighborhood, all the way through to— it is the fundamental shift from not using control as your means of coherence, but learning as your means of coherence. Yeah. But in order to build learning as your means of coherence, you have to grow and scaffold our capacity to understand our interbeing. You have to understand the deep structures of recognizing our own, what some people would call inner development,, but the capacity for interbeing, recognizing ourselves fundamentally differently, that allows us to then operate into the landscape. So this is not like, oh, let's do a minor fix to schools. It is fundamentally a different societal position for coherence.

Yeah.

And it also requires us thereby also to break the illusion of individual intelligences. Mm-hmm. It's, that's why I think a lot of the work that Adam's been doing has been about what I would call sort of mesh intelligence as human machine institutional emergent intelligence. And, you know, and the plurality of those intelligence. So this is a about the emergent function between human machine institutional logics. And it's recognizing this as the aggregative function level, as opposed to trying to talk about individual level. So it also changes where you measure value. It also changes how you orchestrate for it. And it also starts to create a fundamentally different model, which is like this idea of tender machines and doubtful humans. And what is the symbiotic relationship that exists in that dance of that reality? So it's a full stack question.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, the thing that I find interesting personally from an educational perspective is the very concept of education with the emergence of civilizations. I mean, some will argue was based on a concept of instruction, and I, I find what you talk about instruction as one of the first ever human technologies, just so interesting because right at the beginning of the emergence of civilization, education was woven in with that idea of instructing people in literacy, numeracy, market pricing that they could not learn through imitation and, and just kind of small group learning that had happened in small-scale societies prior to that. So like the very origin of, of education, wherever you put it, is so interwoven with this. As you say, it's a full-stack thing. Clearly it's not just about education, but that's for me, those are my questions. But it's, I think it's really profoundly existential for educators because of that, you know, particularly in the US, it's called instruction, right? You know, education is, synonymous with the word instruction. And so it's predicated on this idea. And so I think bringing learning in is great, but then the way that learning has been historically brought in by Senge and others, the learning organization, is still quite a single-point optimization kind of concept. It's not the wide boundary exploration that, of like, based deeply in doubt that you're talking about.

If we imagine we're moving from a world for single-point optimization to multi-solving, Mm-hmm. And so every location is situationally multi-solving, and multi-solving is fundamentally relational and situational in that context. And so you, as you rightly say, it cannot be through the optimization of a single discipline or single perspective, and thereby the role of embodied intelligence becomes fundamentally different. And it challenges all of our taxonomies. This is part of the problem that we've got, is our language no longer is adequate to describe what we can almost linearly, what we can project, our language no longer can describe. And that starts to make many of these things very difficult to discuss, just because you're right. Like, so a house is not a house. I use this example often, right? A house is a pollinator. A house is a storage of carbon. A house is a human development engine. A house is an air quality purifier. A house is a soil regenerator. A house is an energy generator. A house is a water purifier. A house is a playful environment. A house is not a house. It's not the function of the inhabitation of human. It is a generator function of these relationalities. And that's really just the first point in that journey. But learning to do that, I think, is a really different question as opposed to learning a discipline. And that, I think, is quite a different way of being and the role of embodied intelligences in that way. And also what I find, just as a last point, if you look at recent paper by Google on the era of experience, which basically is saying LLMs are going to reach the top level of their current capacity. It's basically, in my perspective, making an argument for embodied intelligence, which is the only way you get to any significant real intelligence capacity, because universal intelligence is an abstraction theory, will never get you there sufficiently. And I find that super interesting because it's pointing to exactly what it means to be human as a mimicking path.

Yeah, and I'd love to bring that back to where we started around, you know, humans are extraordinary and the idea that the shift that superintelligence or emergent AI, even in its present form, is going to bring to our democracies, to the education systems, and to the role of the human in the workplace. I personally find that as an enthralling invitation for us to be radically more human. And that's where we should be putting our energy and effort. In manifesting that future. And there are ways in which you could see some of those shifts happening already. Like, for example, you could imagine, and actually, Indi and I are working on something at the moment, but the House of Lords reform is a real thing in the manifesto of the Labour government. Well, what would it take to transform the House of Lords into a 100-year house? And a 100-year house that, you know, had a responsibility to future generations, but its relationship and its boundary with children in schools and the role of education had transformed as a result of that, and the role of children as stewards of long-term civic imagination, how the boundaries between our democracy and the endeavor of us educating ourselves at young age and unlocking those young minds have been brought together. And I can see ways in which this is going to really create the conditions in which we get to be radically more human while, I suppose, meeting some of the, the points that Indy was just making.

Can I just come in on the radically more human? I think there are so many dimensions of this I think are worth the science of the recognition at a biological level that we are multitudes, right? So our intelligence is not a function of our brain, it's a symbiotic function, emergent function of not just human DNA but non-human DNA, right? So like, that's just a really primary biological level. Soil, then you realize that humans are fundamentally functions of microbiomes. If you separate humans out from the microbiome, which is one of the big challenges of space, is that if you detach humans from fundamentally planetary biomes, actually the projections are all that you become less intelligent, you erode as a human, which means that we are symbiotically— we're a function of the largest planetary mass organism, which is soil. Then if you look at epigenetics, then you start to say, well, actually our DNA is triggerable to context. So we are symbiotically over longitudinal time, like grandparents, crises in time carry through in time. Then if you look at the role of the human brain, even if you take it at the face value of our tools of language, our color blue is a social construct, our brain is wired as a social brain function, it's not a divisible brain function. And then when you— in that, I've not even taken it to any crazy level like Neuroscientists would tell you that consciousness is a download. It's not a function of the brain. It's not a chemical function. It's a quantum function. I know you've taken it there, but if you imagine that, you've already basically exploded the myth of the divisible individual human. And I think the problem is our myth of the human is rooted in Leonardo da Vinci's Platonic Vitruvius Man. And I think the science is already there. Yeah. It breaks all of these things.

Yeah.

And we haven't taken science into culture and we haven't taken culture into institutions. We have a 50-year problem that our science is completely somewhere else and our culture is stuck in Newtonian Enlightenment.

Yeah, 100%. And the thing I find so interesting about that though is, because all of that stuff, yes, completely agree with. The science is there, as you say, and at the same time, I have a deeply felt sense of me at this present moment of me being in my body in this space of, of me-ness, right? And then I have my own children and who have their own me, them-ness, and I want them to flourish and et cetera, right? As a parent. And, and then they're in those institutions that are designed around their own individual capital accumulation, credential capital accumulation. And all of that's really real to me, and it's really real to the teachers who are in those classrooms, you know. So both of those things are true, right? And so that's one of our sticky challenges, right?

But I would say that all those are constructs. So we've constructed the institutional context, which is now feedback. We make the environment and the environment makes us. So we're trapped in this symbiotic sort of fall. Yeah. And the question is, firstly, is minus A moment in time? Is it a minus in time? Is it a minus in relationship? I think that is a developmental question for us. And I think there's, you know, whether you look at other historic cultures, whether it's sort of indigenous or whether it's Buddhist or other things, they are exploding those things to allow for different possibilities. And I think the problem space is that we've become locked symbiotically, a classification theory, identity, all these things have been trapping us into a very particular theory of minus. Test results, boring stuff like test results, right? Test results reinforce the meanness, the feedback system.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would say again, part of what I'm exploring, I think, is the experiential, like spaces in which people can experience not that. And I think that's what's critically important from an educational perspective, because you can't talk it. It's not a knowledge problem, right? I can't tell someone, I get Indi Johar on a podcast to tell, you know, to tell everybody how it is and oh, oh, there we go. We, it's like it's a deeply felt sense of this experience, as you say, of these billions of feedback loops that are reinforcing the same message. And so that's why I'm interested in the kind of the emergent institutional forms and spaces where we can actually have people experience value and freedom in a more entangled, in a different kind of way, right?

Yeah. And Tim, I, at this point as well, I, I mean, I have listened to almost 100 of your podcasts just to It's been one of the most incredible ways of me getting myself up to speed in this field that I've kind of started playing.

Amazing. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

One of the things that really came through from that is that there's so much that, you know, people that you've spent time with and so much going on in the world that already invites us into this. There's so much good work, like so really beautiful work on temporal justice and engaging kids in long-termism and thinking across generations. There's really good work out there from moving from like testing individual recall to moving people towards, you know, group decision-making capability and really engaging with that. The science of embodied cognition, you know, the principles of kind of ecological design, all these things that kind of really unlock the qualities that help us lean into this. A lot of this already exists.

No, absolutely. I would say that's been the thing I've been thinking a lot about really recently is absolutely that is true. And so how do we bridge and amplify across all those communities who for hundreds of years, some of those communities, or thousands of years, some of those communities, and then in the last decade or last year, they've been creating opportunities for these kinds of things. So how do we bridge and amplify across all of those? So that, yeah, so that absolutely it's happening. No, I completely agree.

So I think it is happening and what I wanna say is that we have to also understand that our economic engine is systematically driving precarity. It is systematically rooted in the construction of vulnerability because that allows for the instrumentalization of labor to the function of assets, right? So we've created an economic engine rooted in precarity. The response to precarity is fair. And fear reinforces the individual of the me as a means of self-optimizing in the face of vulnerability. And I only say this because we have to know the nature of the winning machine in order to unlock from it as well. So this is not just about classification theory. It's also recognizing there's this macro game that we're in the middle of that is also dividing us as individuals, dividing us as nations, dividing us— like, it's sort of a divisional framework that is accelerating up. At the same time, you're right, both of you, that yes, we're seeing forest schools, all this sort of stuff happening all over the world. I think the question I've been sort of asking myself is that, and I think the question I think, Adam, that you and I are playing with is that, where is the unit of change? Where is the kind of optimal unit of change? Is the optimal unit of change the individual? Is the unit of change the school? Is the unit of change the neighborhood? Where is the unit of change? Because I worry that our unit of change is wrong. We often focus on a school or a service or addendum of an app, and these are all discrete units. This is an intuition, so it's open to critique. I think the unit of change is place or a city. The reason is that if you can perceive the value of, let's use a hypothetical, the collective intelligence of Helsinki, And by intelligence, I don't mean IQ. I mean embodied intelligences, plural intelligences, agencies. If you perceive that this is going to be one of the key assets of the 21st century, because collective intelligence allows you to be able to outperform, engage, react bodily, emotionally, react in different ways. And then I sort of say, well, okay, if that's the collective intelligence field and collective intelligence is a function of multiple interventions, multiple interventions. So individual work at the home level. I can now imagine we can measure a new form of collective intelligence. We can allocate resources to that collective intelligence, and we can perceive the value of that intelligence because it's operating not at the divisional level of the individual, but at the entangled level of many-to-many. So I think that provides a framework for what I would say is traditional asset and economic frameworks to engage with a pathway of entanglement, but also with a pathway which can be economically constructed in the old world with a view to the new world, where doubt can be systematically structured at a population level. And I think the question is— and this is also why for me, and I think Adam, one of the things that's really been important is not to separate the human and the machine out, is to talk about this as being a symbiotic process of value. Because if we can talk about this as a new human-machine pairing, function. And by human-machine, I just don't mean two things. I mean human-machine entangled function systems. I think we'd start to create a whole new possibility. And that has to be rooted in a new machine logic because our current machine logic is rooted in still control and sort of instruction orientation and answer orientation as opposed to data orientation. But if you can do that, I think we start to create a whole new paradigm space for this island.

Yeah, no, that's super interesting. And I guess a couple of reflections I would say the unit of change has to be all of those things. But at the same time, you know, I've been really holding this question of like, how will parents respond with increased risk perception, right? Like more openness to more radical educational options when their risk perception of what the Game A, this old Game A thing isn't working anymore. What do I want for my child? So there's that. But also what you're saying about place, I think is there's an orientation. I was thinking about this the other day, like, if all of the, even just the, the principals of all the schools or the teachers in a particular location, say Helsinki, asked the question oriented around what if the value was the collective intelligence of Helsinki, how would that change what we do every day?

Exactly.

Like brilliant, right? That's so interesting.

Because if that's the asset class that I'm capitalizing, remember that's an emergent asset class I'm capitalizing. I'm not capitalizing your results. My results, your son's results. I didn't give a shit.

Exactly.

I'm looking at the collective intelligence field.

But that's a radical move for parents, right?

It's a radical move.

Yes. And also, it reminds me of—

so we sat down with two beautiful— we've done some early work with two beautiful human beings that have spent a lot of time. One of them is from Lithuania, from Vilnius. And we were talking about this concept of improving the collective intelligence of a place. And what one of the reflections they made was actually over the last 10 years, the collective intelligence of Vilnius has gone up 5 times because of the developmental cycle that city has gone through. Now, if you could show that to somebody from the city council 5 years ago, what they were about to untap, the value is utterly incredible that is unlocked by investing in the collective intelligence of a place. And I think if you imagine what AI is going to unlock as a result of that in this Engels pause moment, in this shift that is coming,. And that's why we were talking about the first mover. Like, it is a place, but I can foresee a scenario where an entire nation state makes a really bold move. And they, they look at their democratic infrastructure. They look at the way that their civic infrastructure, they look at local government and they look at how they educate. They are already looking at, oh my goodness, what is happening to our workforce? And they make some systemic moves and they orientate around this.

And it has history, right? So Denmark went bankrupt, right? 1813, I think it was. And in 1815, it decided to invest in education as its pathway out. And then afterward, the vault. So I think there's a sort of pathway of that. And I, what I also enjoy is, and I think Adam, as you were rightly saying, this can't just be about a network of schools coming together. For me, this is actually about network of schools, network of startups, a capitalization, a network of institutional logics. So it's a network of firms coming together to talk about learning as a coherent organization. So it's a sort of mass multi-agent alliance towards that as a strategic goal and the capitalization of that. So it's a field shift as opposed to being a server shift.

Yeah. But it can't, I was just thinking it can't then fall into the trap of becoming the next single point optimization, right? Like suddenly everyone's single point optimizing for that thing. It's like, It is like you say, it's like, yeah, some kind of vision shift, some kind of reorientation because it's an emergent property of all these doings, right? The collective intelligence. Exactly. You can't, you can't optimize for that thing, right?

And you can't own it, right?

Right.

But you can't, you can't contract it by the way. You can't own it, but you can contract into the value that it generates. So, and I think that's the kind of really interesting paradigm that it opens up is there is a theory of value to price. On that allocation that allows to open it up. So I think that's why we are focusing on the shift in the unit of change, but also shifting the underlying structure. 'Cause it allows for capitalization in a particular way.

Exactly.

And that, I mean, that's the boring revolution. So other people want to go and look at your stuff. I mean, I just find that again, just so interesting and important that the affordances of what's possible so often are based on really boring things like the contract or the insurance policy or, you know, all of the things that you talk about and, and, you know, you talk about a unit of change, like that's, that's a huge piece, right? Of this, like the webs in between everything that we just kind of take for granted. Okay. Yeah. 'Cause you, you've gotta have an insurance policy or you've gotta have an employment contract. Well, we've only got these available. Like how, what would happen if there were other options available for those choices?

And also, like you said, right? The idea of the goal. Does the goal become a single point optimization? How do you hold the goal in doubt? If learning is your fundamental objective, then one of the most beautiful things for me is that you have to hold your certainty with a framework of doubt of what is the goal and how is the goal ever emergent. So you have to support the divergence to your— to say it has to be a learning orientated self-correcting system as opposed to goal oriented instruction system, which is often where we go wrong. We say, exactly, this is the IQ that we want every— this is the collective IQ, what everyone go for it. Whereas what you want to say, we think there is this ambiguous, doubtful, gray goal.

Yeah.

And what you want is continuous coherence and decoherence to those goals as means of exploration. And this is really challenging for bureaucratic systems because they look for certainty positions as opposed to doubt exploration positions. So even in the theory of the contract and the capitalization is a different theory of allocation to value.

Yeah.

But that makes me think of Forrest Landry and the value, purpose, meaning kind of, you like, you need all of them, right? Because if you just got a bunch of values, then you're not actually doing anything. But if you've only got purpose, then you're like, you get locked in this optimization game. But actually, I mean, he talks about meaning. I just, I think it's a bit slippery, but I do think meaning is something important underlying those things. But yeah, so I don't know, something really important there.

Tim, just, I want, I want, yeah, please.

Yeah.

Okay, just to bring us back to something that you brought up a couple of times is how do you move the parents? And I've heard you talk about it repeatedly on previous podcasts, and I just don't think that is a thing at this Engels pause moment. For example, in the area that I live in, scouts and beavers are completely oversubscribed. Like, the parents have figured out something's coming, they understand that their children are not being equipped for it, and they're already moving their kids. Into— and when I say completely oversubscribed, like years-long waiting lists now.

Wow, interesting.

So there is this really interesting shift that is happening. And as a result of that, I just, I think that so many things that have held this paradigm back in the past, and as I said, that the first mover, that the whole idea that a nation state will probably be the first mover. Well, the one thing that I know from working with other governments that motivates governments to move and a wholesale shift is, has anybody else done this? There will be a first mover. Once that first mover goes, I think it's going to be a domino effect. So scaffolding that first mover and the work that happens around that is absolutely critical, is absolutely critical. And you talk about, you know, what is this rooted in? You've both been talking extensively about what is this rooted in? That work is so important.

Yeah. I think the other part of the problem that I just want to say is like, it's not that Adam and I are special at all. Like, I think this is what I think we often get wrong. So Adam's special. I'm just, you know, but, um, You're both extraordinary. Come on. But the point I was trying to get to is like, why is this not happening everywhere? And I increasingly think the why this is not happening everywhere is to see this, you have to have experienced not only the educational problem, but the price problem, the contract problem, the finance problem, the machine learning problem, the human interrogation problem. So it's an intersectional future born out of tacit knowledge, complex tacit knowledge. Around all these domains in order to perceive the viable space. And that is what I think is restricting this. So when people often say to me, it's like, oh, ID, why is this not going everywhere? It's like, yeah, it's kind of one of those things. Once you've said it, it's easy to say, but to get to it is one of those things that you have to have every one of these proclamations that we've made. They're a function of like years worth of fuck-ups. Pardon my French. You know, things that you've not got right and you go, that doesn't work. 'Oh, things that is philosophically wrong, it gets us into trouble.' 'Oh, different theory of value, but that doesn't work because actually if you construct non-stewardship relationship, that doesn't work.' So behind what seems like easy is the emergent function of tacit knowledge is what allows these intersectional positions to emerge. And that I think is where the difficulty lies.

And I also though wonder whether there is, we were actually speaking of Helsinki, Ray Ison and I were there doing some work recently and We had some interesting reflections around some of that kind of work that they have done around systemic governance, humble governance, et cetera. Super interesting work. But the question we were holding was, why has it not succeeded? And some of the perceptions around maybe why that was, was, you know, when things get hard, people go back to the tried and true that they're like, they grasp tighter to the control-based paradigm, right? You know, you hear the politicians saying it, straining every sinew and like, we've got control of, I mean, it's like, it's all nonsense, but they just say it harder and louder because everyone's like looking around thinking, wow, this like shit's getting real. Like it's really quite scary out there. Who's gonna help me just feel a sense of security, even if it's fleeting. But there is a, I don't know, there's something about creating opportunities for people to, as you say, kind of experience how it does work so that they can get a felt sense of assuredness in the face of real challenge.

Yeah. And can I also, can I just jump in, like where, where to engage young humans in kind of group decision-making and civic action and being able to deal with uncertainty. These things give that visceral feedback loop that actually there is a different way of addressing and leaning into these things that isn't based in certainty that will enable us to deal with the future that's coming at us. In a more generative way. And immediately, that, you know, one of the initial improvements in that area is mental health. Like, people's mental health improves when they engage in collective action, collective sense-making, when they build empathy with each other, when they build empathy with other systems with different value sets other than those. Like, the value— just understanding what's the value system of a market, understanding the value system of an ecosystem and AI models and indigenous knowledge systems and how they're all different.. And just for young people to explore those different value systems, I think also unlocks understanding that, that there is something beyond the certainty that is going to equip us better for what's coming next.

Yeah. A couple of things I'd add to that is one of the challenges for, say, places like Helsinki right now is it's— I was in a cab in Helsinki and But Kabdar was Turkish and he said, 'Indy, you don't know how poor this place is.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'There's a poverty of relationships which is so systemic that people are so isolated in their individuality.' The reason why I say that is that the individuation is so extreme. And then when you add the increasing securitization that's happening in society because of the Russia relationship, which is adding a sense of fear into the system. So this is a real systemic drag. So if I was worrying about Helsinki, I'd be like, shit, we have a problem at the fourth phase of collective intelligence, embodied collective intelligence as being the field value of operation, yet we've optimized for individual intelligences and the hyper-individuation and the fear is amplifying it. That is how I would be looking at a societal level risk framework. I'd be going, we have a problem. Second part is that I think where you intervene, I personally think the space of intervention, if somebody, if a city turned around to me and said, look, indeed, we got to do this. What's your first horizon of intervention? I'd be going, right, let's build a massive art and technology program at a cultural level of people exploring this as a ground field level, which is Adam, exactly like what you said about beavers and cubs and scouts. You almost build a cultural version of that at the ground scale level to shift the appetite of the future. Through those informal learning environments and invest hyperly into those informal environments. And then what you do is, by implication, you act that as a driving function because it's not a force function, but it's an opt-in function, but it starts to change the condition field.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, just really practically, I mean, I love this, the new Beaver Theory of Change, but I say that all the time. I just feel like even just when you, again, narrowly, again, looking at education, Education is not school, right? It's all like, you know, so I just see that as a distributed function anyway. So Beavers, that's the same thing. It's building relationships, it's building the capacity for learning and being together and co-creating, et cetera. And then it's the same thing as, as you say, and it's happening in, you know, learning labs, culture hubs, whatever you want to call them, right? And I know even in Helsinki, I met a fabulous guy called Ricardo Dutra who's working at Aalto University who's doing some of this stuff. And so, yeah, there are brilliant people exploring it. Absolutely. But yeah, I mean, it's difficult, isn't it? Because there's a question of back to the game that's present and in front of us, which is the Game A optimization thing.

And it's all focused on products and services, right? All right. Because the only thing the system understands is services. Oh, can you build me a new service, which I can plug into my existing school or my additional learning environment or the additional curriculum environment? So we've got a plug-and-play problem into an OS system, just fundamentally broken, which is why I think the investment has to be at an infrastructure level. So we have to see collective intelligence as a new theory of infrastructure, emergent infrastructure, a capability of society. And then you recode all your products and services slowly towards the emergent function that you want out of that. And that I think is a kind of different way of driving change. 'Cause I think my problem is we're still plug and playing into the old model and that erodes the system.

That's amazing.

Another, not alternate theory of change, but, and this is why I am, you know, enthralled at the moment at the idea of, for example, what, you know, what would the transformation, for example, in the UK of the House of Lords into a 100-year house accomplish? What would happen if that started operating? What sort of decisions would the 100-year house make about our education system, about our healthcare system? What sort of things would it encourage? And in its very nature, through the delivery of something like that, couldn't that dramatically transform the boundary of the school, the role of the school within civic democracy, the role of young people as we educate them and their role in society and what we invite them into if the foundation is long-termism and if the foundation is understanding our interbecoming. I can foresee a scenario where there is a move doesn't have to be in the UK, from somewhere else. And that's the other thing, the exciting thing about talking about Europe is that there is something about Europe's labor laws as well. There's something about the position that Europe finds itself at this moment in history where its labor laws and the lock-ins that we have around our labor market are more likely to force us down a positive direction. Another interesting thing that has been going around my head recently, and I've been reaching out to some old colleagues because I used to live in China. And one of the things that really struck me when I lived in China is how so many of the qualities that we're talking about here that are quite important are actually intrinsic to the way that the Chinese, Chinese citizens operate. They see themselves as part of a greater whole. Now, there's lots of problems with the way that China operates, but even how they're using TikTok, they're using TikTok, they're using their attention economy to educate their population. They are using their attention economy to build a muscle around some of the things that are critical to what we've been describing here. Whereas in the West, we have let the attention economy loose on making our citizens less capable of engaging in what's coming next. And there's a stark difference there. And I, we don't know where change is going to come from. You know, imagine a shift at the top of the way that China operates. You've got a population ready to move in the right way. And the way that that country then is governed shifts. That's an also unlikely, but scenario that could happen.

Yeah.

And it does open up a more difficult question, I think, also of, let's use the loose term of curricula, as in who defines that learning reality? And this goes back to the question I was saying about the capacity to hold doubt, the capacity to hold uncertainty, the capacity to be curious, and thereby truth is an emergent function and an ever ephemeral function rather than a foundation function. Science is about the means for society to hold uncertainty. Science is not about telling us the truth. This is, I think we've conflated the two really badly. And if we are going to build new forms of democracies, we have to be able to construct the capacity to hold uncertainty well for periods of illusions of certainty in a really fast way. So if we are constructing curriculum, what does it mean to hold curriculum in that reality as opposed to curriculum in the kind of false construction of certainties?. And that's really important if we're going to talk about democracy in a really radical way. And I don't mean democracy as representative democracy. I mean the expansion of human agency and the unfurling of full capacity, as opposed to just sort of parliaments and non-parliament systems or one-party, two-party systems. I'm talking about the kind of systemic agency. I think there's a really interesting philosophical and structural question about the theory of the curriculum.

Yeah, absolutely. And just to get really practical for a minute, I mean, I do a lot of my work with the IB and that is is predicated on the concept of an inquiry-based curriculum. It struggles with the boundaries of that as it interacts back into the market economy because it then has to produce credentials to then, you know, sure, pragmatic move. But at the heart of it is the concept of, yeah, holding questions rather than answers as the driver for learning. I mean, that, that for me, fundamentally it's a critical move, right? In relation to all of these concepts we've been talking about. And the challenge I think we've had in talking about that publicly is that we've got locked into an argument that inquiry-based learning is better than direct instruction for, for generating exam results. Like that's the wrong argument. The thing we're talking about, about why inquiry is important as a frame for curriculum is a wide boundary question of what, like all the things we've been talking about. What does it mean to be human? How do you hold doubt? How do you hold uncertainty? How do you move together in that? I mean, it's a profoundly different argument to be making as to why that's a good curriculum model.

Exactly. And currently we make a, we basically focus on inquiry as a better way to get to an answer.

Yeah, exactly.

Inquiry is a better way to get to a better answer. And it's like, no, no, inquiry is a better method to manifest answers full stop. And it is a way of being that we need to be not even evaluating, but building for, as opposed to the solution. And that's where the construction of the argument, what I'd call the social argument, and our ability to construct that social argument is really problematized right now. And that's also the thing, right? How do we construct the argument that's at the level? This is why I think place and cities become really interesting because you can cohere a form of societal argument and logical construction in place, in dialogue, in deliberation to allow for these manifestations of change.

Well, and it's real, right? I think that's also really important is that a lot of this conversation is just like, 'Whoa, what do I do with this? It's out there. It's up in the kind of the abstract clouds.' But, you know, I live in a place and that place has direct visceral impact on me and I have impact on it every day. And my kids go to school in that place or my, you know, my partner works in that place or, you know, all of these different things that I think are really, we have to engage people in the visceral reality of their lives as well because sometimes Unfortunately, this stuff we're talking about, it feels very abstract even though it's not.

And this is where I think, well, Adam, what you were saying is that unless we can— so we're doing some work around human-machine deliberation systems. Unless we create the deliberative architecture to allow for societal deliberations around these problems. So we are stuck in our deliberation architecture being through representation and representation is not sufficient to build the consensus for these sorts of shifts. So the problem space, actually, if you look back at it, is where do you prove this? On one hand, you've got to do this in the BEAVER model of change. Let's use that. And then you've also got to create the deliberation mechanism, the human-machine deliberation, create the legitimacy. And then the third dimension is you've got to create the economic model. So if you can create these three axes, then we start to move. Yeah.

Can I just add that the BEAVER theory of change—

It's now a thing, Adam. You realize you've just— We've created a thing.

One creates the demand for the other. So my experience of running the Beavers— so I run a group— is that actually what you end up with is a group of young humans that are constantly pushed out of their comfort zones. They are engaged in the stuff that you do. Their curiosity grows, their desire for participation grows, their capacity to deal with uncertainty grows as a result of engaging in activities that anybody can do. But we don't mainstream generally. And that creates the demand for what we're talking about here.

And can I add one other element to that is that they're doing it in their bodies with other bodies. And so like I just had a great podcast with some amazing cognitive scientists and embodiment practitioners and I, and that to me is just increasingly important is that when we then put them into this, this so-called learning institution called a school, it's just so disembodied. It's painful and people are, our young people are feeling that deeply as some deep dissonance and, and kind of some kind of violence trauma in a weird way. Right. And then they go to Beavers and they hang out with you and their bodies are there with them. And it's like, it's a fully embodied experience that I think is not insignificant.

And I just, I just want to point to one experience that I experience regularly when running the Beavers is that we have a hall that we do it in. And it's a bit like a classroom. If I take them inside, which I tend to do once a term, they go wild. They're crawling the walls. What on earth are you doing putting me in the classroom environment? If I take them outside next to the earth and the trees and there's a fire, they go quiet. The capacity to gather their attention and for them to find something that's going on between them and experience something else, they are just tapping into their humanity and they're experiencing life. They are having an embodied experience and not complicated, it's not difficult.

Exactly, exactly. Beautifully elegantly simple, right? Actually.

And I also don't want to slate schools wholesale because our local school gets the kids outside as much as possible and, you know, and learning outside has become a core part of everything that they do. And putting the kids into situations, you know, probably behind the parents' back, where they are in more risky situations. Like, I think teachers really get this. A lot of teachers really, really get what we're talking about here and are breaking rules maybe sometimes.

Yeah, no, and I really appreciate that. And I've been prompted by both of you to remember not to other this, you know, because like we do that. I mean, you know, we set up this whole podcast really as a way of exploring alternatives and that can really, you can often fall into the trap of othering the system, the mainstream as it currently, but that is the reality and people are working within that, doing all sorts of things there, which is So yeah, I just wanted to flag that. I appreciate that.

It's worth saying—

Exactly.

Sorry, Indy, just quickly. So one of the organizations that I've worked with on the way on this route to here, we engaged with a brilliant teacher who's taught his entire life, and he's on the board of an organization that was, was helping out. And he has always come in as a voice of, okay, here comes the latest craze. I don't believe that, for example, the emergence of the internet is really going to affect the way the school is working. I don't believe the emergence of this, that, and the other is good. He's now come back to them and gone, okay, AI has changed everything. AI is changing everything. And he moved from a state of initially being fearful and here we go again to a actually there is some— there's an invitation here for us to elevate education to a place that brings much more of our humanity out of us. And I'm excited by that. When the people who are long in the tooth, who are tired of being told that their work isn't good enough, you know, are actually going, actually, no, I see this, I see AI potentially as an ally in terms of what it's going to do to the economy, in terms of what it's going to do to the way that countries are run and our democracies, and especially the space that opens up for how we engage in learning as humans together. In society.

Nice.

One thing I wanted to add was what— for the point that both of you are making, but actually I think at a human level, teachers are operating through a relation. The best, or even most of them, are operating through that relational level. The problem is a macroeconomic argument which talks about the instrumentalization of education towards feeding an old economy. So we're constructing an education system rooted to feed a late 20th century economy, a Fordist economy. And we haven't made the macro paradigm leap, which means that what's happening is that we're still creating institutional structures, logics, accountability frameworks, risk models rooted on pigeonholing what is fundamentally already culturally a different behavior. So our challenge isn't the teachers, our challenge isn't the people, our challenge is the roots and the dark matter, the structures of value and the structures of optimization, the structures of all of that stuff that's wrapped around it. And I think it's really important, as you were saying, Tim, to kind of just narrate that well, because that's a mutual challenge, not a kind of othering challenge.

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe if I can, this, I mean, Adam, you brought in freedom at the beginning and maybe this is a nice point to bring it in because it felt to me there, this phrase, education is the practice of freedom, right? From bell hooks and Rorty and Dewey. And this idea that if sometimes a slightly romantic idea that, you know, some people would think instrumentally, yes, the education system is there to feed the economy and the industrial— that, great, that's what it's supposed to do. And then other people would react to that, the progressives, and they would say, no, education is the practice of freedom. And their conception of what they mean by freedom in that statement is perhaps not the way you at Dark Matter Labs and others now are thinking about this idea of freedom. So maybe we could open that up a little bit, because I think that's— that feels important as Yeah, as something we're working towards.

I don't think there's anything special about the way that Dark Matter Labs is thinking about it. I think it's intrinsic. I think people, and Indy just alluded to it in what he was saying beforehand, like the thesis of freedom at the moment that feeds our present economy, that is gearing itself up for, you know, putting all of its energy into resource and war. Actually, the basis of that economy, the thesis of freedom within that is leave me alone. I want my freedom to be unconstrained and I want my freedom to consume. Whereas, you know, the new three, the real thesis of freedom, I would say the thesis of freedom that the vast majority of teachers would understand as to be real is it's our freedom to care. It's our freedom to understand that we're all in this together. It's our freedom to be curious. It's our freedom to get involved in being a part of society. I think that speaks so much more naturally to what people, humans know to be true. And so many of the things that we experience in the world that feel wrong, out of place, like for example, the attention economy, we know that they're driving us towards something that isn't generative, that isn't a generative future. So there's the, I think the thesis around freedom does need to be rooted in, okay, so what is our thesis for the economy that we're being invited into? And this is the sense that I'm starting to get from the teachers that I engage with is that Yes, AI is being massively disruptive at the moment, but some of them are going, it might open up a window. It really could open up the opportunity for us to explore a future in which humanity gets to become more aligned to a thesis of freedom and existence that is more generative.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I know totally. And the way I'd build into that is I think the freedom from, and I'm more interested in the freedom to become and to become human. And I think the violences I experience are usually when I'm forced to lose my humanity. And I think the kind of— the freedom is not a freedom of choice, which is often what was deliberated. The freedom of separation, individuation, is the freedom to manifest our humanity. And that is an internal coherence function and a sort of an urgent coherence function. And in that, our humanity is, as we rooted back to, if we recognize ourselves epigenetically, microbiomes, social brain, you open up a different thesis of its emergent function fundamentally. And I think the deep freedom, like if this was a podium and I was standing in front of thousands, I would be talking about not the freedom of the choice of selection, a synthetic freedom, but a freedom to be radically human and humane in our own being. That is the coherence that we're fighting for. And that then manifests in different ways. And, and I think because it manifests through the reality of I into becoming, it manifests through all those things. And I think that is the kind of freedom space that I think is really vital. And also what you start to realize is that it's like a wave particle function. You have to coexist as a wave and a particle. You have to coexist in the I am into becoming, and you have to realize that your into becoming is entangled. And this capacity to act as both wave and particle is, I think, the real— you know, when you first started talking about the me thing, I think that is the problem space. Our ability to exist in those two mindsets simultaneously is actually the developmental leap. Yeah, as soon as we can make that leap, we're into a different world.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I wanted to pick up on the word you used, Adam, unconstrained, because I think that in a lot of the explorations I've been doing, it's been super interesting that there is no such thing as unconstrained. Like we are, you know, we are sensory motor beings moving through the world and there, you know, through landscapes of affordances, right? Ecological psychology. I mean, it's, it's becoming clearer and clearer that, that there is no such thing as unconstrained. And so therefore, if we, I mean, I don't know, in a way the in, in that constrainedness is something about responsibility. Ray and I were talking about this idea of resp— the ability to respond in context to the constraints, the affordances that, that you are existing in.

Can I just sort of say, I, I think constraint is one way of looking at it. The other way to look at is relational. So the constraint always puts in the theory of the boundedness of what it whereas the relationality opens up not its boundary-ness, but its emergent function-ness, the capabilities it opened up.

Okay.

So I also think, I also think we, and again, it's just, this is what I meant originally about the language, our own languages. Sometimes we see this inside DM all the time where our own languages, we stumble, we create our own obstacles from them.

Yeah, sure.

Because they create the politics of that same problem. So this is like, if you see it through a relational lens, it's not like Because even in systems languages, I got into a room and people sort of go, oh, we're thinking through systems. Can you tell me the boundary of the system? I was like, hmm, okay. We're then still falling back into the trap of boundary-oriented thinking as opposed to relational thinking. Yeah. Relational thinking is non-finite. Its function is its non-finiteness. The doubt that you have to operate in is the project. Whereas if you're creating a synthetic certainty, you've created your own problem again. We've just replicated the old world into the new. Yeah. This is like, it's a subtle point. It's a subtle point. But do you know what I mean? I find myself sitting in the room going, everyone goes up, but we have to have a boundary to be able to understand it. It's like, that's the point. The point is you can't understand it. The point is you are building emergent doubt and relationality, and that is non-bounded, and that is behavioral, and that is a different way of organizing. And so I think we, and this is why I often get into rooms and people go, let's, so cooperatives. And I was like, cooperatives are 19th century problems because they're bounded theories of organizing in response of single point extraction of capital, the right response for the 19th century. We're living in an unbounded problem space where relationality is the way to organize.

Yeah.

So it's like, is this stuff—

No, that's super interesting. Can I, yeah, if I can just reflect back, I could, I think that's so super interesting. And the way I use the word constraints is, is I had Alicia Herrera on the podcast and I just love her work, Theory of Constraints. And I don't actually know, it's beyond my expertise to know how she would respond to like the relationship between relationships and constraints and boundedness. I can't speak to that, but just at a, again, at a very kind of visceral level, I find that maybe I find it challenging, but also I think other people find it challenging emotionally, psychologically to hold those two things that you were talking about, the me-ness and the we-ness, right? Because this relationality, this like, what do you mean there's no boundaries? This like, it's really threatening, right? To kind of step into that space emotionally and psychologically.

Because it's the 500-year worldview.

Right, exactly. Yeah, it goes deep.

This is a 500-year accumulation of object-oriented languages, classification theory, perspective. It's so deeply genetically coded into our civilization logic that we default to boundary. And if you default to boundary, this is why I don't like the word community, because I'm like, okay, you know, community, thereby you assume there's a theory of boundary. And if you assume there's a theory of boundary, there's the other on the other side of that boundary. As soon as you've created the other, you've created permission for violence and extraction. And that is the problem space. Like that is the genetic twist.

Well, it's, I mean, you know, I do some work with Nora Bateson and it's where is the edge of me is the, you know, it's the phrase that she would use there, right? And that is deeply challenging to people. It really is psychologically. And that I think is part of the work as well, is holding spaces where people can experience what that feels like, like Warm Data Labs, for example, where you experience that in a safe holding environment because it is, it's not a small thing to ask people to jettison 500 years worth of baggage, right? I mean, it really is not a small thing.

It's not a small thing to ask an adult. It's a different question to a kid. Like children—

Great point.

So, so that, and that is why it's kind of like one of our most important domains of change. And, you know, and I think there's, as adults, we forget. Indi, you did a beautiful talk recently in Paris where you told everybody in the room we'd failed. And I think it's worth building on that because as adults, we still see things through the big lies of, look, just give up, folks. Democracy's captured, you know, sit back, let this happen to you. AI's coming. It's all controlled by these people. And, you know, we can't change anything in schools because the parents are going to stop us from doing that. None of that is true. None of that is true. And you put, you put children in the driving seat—

exactly—

over all of the systems we've been talking about today, we end up in a different place. And where we're headed in the changes that are coming is that we do— we are being invited into reimagining the boundaries of intergenerational work and where people get to deploy their natural gifts. And children have natural gifts. They can see through a lot of the stuff that we get stuck on.

Now, I love that you said that because, and we see that in our work all the time. I mean, through Festival of Hope and with the spaces, like we see it all the time that, I mean, they do remarkable things, right? These young humans when they're together. And I would say there is also just the caution towards romanticizing that at the same time, because I think we can also, I do entirely agree with you. And at the same time, I think the water that those young humans are swimming in, even when they were in utero, right, was like communicating things to them about the world. So I like, yeah, I guess I'm just saying like it's pretty deep and it's ecological and they are swimming in that ecology even from the moment they, well, let's say come into the world, right?

I totally agree with you, but at the moment children are not even involved in things like civic society and national Yeah, totally.

No, you're right, we just need their involvement much, much more.

I, I see a school from a silo to as a node within a system where you've got this, their civic involvement, their involvement in our long-term ecology, their involvement with our digital landscape. I just see the role of education within this entire paradigm shifting, and therefore, you know, you're having a better intergenerational approach to the way that we organize ourselves as society.

No, I totally agree. Totally agree. Sorry, Andy, you wanted to come in?

No, I was just going to say that I think building on what both of you were saying, I think I often get, uh, go really illustrating this problem that you both are describing is what I'd call the system map problem, where somebody will come in and draw a system map of a flower and it looks bloody complex, but there's a different way of understanding the, observing the flower and its relationality that allows you to understand it through its relationality., which is completely different. And one is a godlike view where we synthesize our positions as gods to oversee the system. And the other one is an embodied worldview which operates relationality in an intuit way. And our problem is our institutions are locked into god views, system map views. And I think what children experience, and this is where Adam is, they're operating always in a relationality view, at least till they're pre-coded out. So it's quasi-natural and this is why I think we create this sort of— the language of complexity in itself is deeply defeating. The language of complexity is a function of godhood views. The language of relationality is an embodied view. Yeah. And I think we're operating often in the languages of gods as opposed to embodiment.

Yeah. And if we understand that we've done work, lots of people have done similar work, that, you know, the nature of this future, if it is rooted in long-termism, if it's rooted in care, if it's rooted in interdependence, if it's rooted in future stewardship, I find that these are all qualities that are, just to hammer home the point, more present in children.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. That is the work we have to do, is the intergenerational work, like creating spaces where those things are possible, that relationality is felt. Because I think, again, to your point, Indi, like, I actually think in the spaces, adults as well understand that they have these intuitions. They live in this relationality, but they don't take it serious. We're not taught to take it seriously, right? We're taught to ignore it, that because the intellect dominates and you've got these instincts that are over here, which we should basically ignore cuz they're, they're self-oriented and egoistic, that the intellect is the most important thing. And the intuition, no, you don't really take that seriously either.

I, I would slightly say that it's not intuition or intelligence. I think we are forced to take godlike worldviews. We operate through the seeing, the objective, the meta, the— this pyramidical worldview as being the privileged worldview of understanding. It is the means to understand the whole system. And I think it's the preference of our intelligence towards that reality that creates the dogma, whereas the relational worldview, the embodied worldview, allows you to operate in doubt and tenderness, still bringing the heart and feelings to it. So I wonder whether it's the point of view that we are taking and we're just systematically encouraged to take rather than the bifurcation of our own capabilities.

That's interesting. Yeah, I guess the language of instinct, intuition, and intellect was Forrest, but yeah, no, I think that's a super interesting thing. And that makes me think of Mary Helen Immordino-Jang's work because there's something super interesting about our default mode network and how our brains sometimes will She calls it transcendent thinking, right? But that's interesting because she, she's, that's how we situate our learning, reflect on our learning, make meaning out of our learning by doing that stepping back. But then we go back into the goal-directed. That's not quite the same thing as what you're saying, but I don't know that it made me think of that, that it's, it's useful to get the bird's eye sometimes. And I guess is what I'm saying.

Exactly. And I think this is the direct relationship between the embodied and the universal. And the ability to operate between those worldviews, but not be fixated to those worldviews.

Yes.

Right. To understand that even the universal can never be the full universal, and to understand the relational can never see, but it's behavioral. So it's the ability to— it goes back to the wave-particle problem that we have to coexist in both states, and our challenge is our capacity to coexist. Yeah.

Well, it's a McGilchrist problem as well. And if you want to choose a left-right metaphor, Exactly. But yeah, it's, it's whichever metaphor you choose, but there's something about the duality of holding both and being able to inhabit both and move and dance between them.

And I, I think Forrest talks about three, right? Doesn't he? There's three. Well, there's a sort of universal, there's a relational, and I think there's one more, cuz I also worry about the dual.

Yeah, exactly.

Whereas the, I like the fact that if it's a three-body problem effectively. Three-conscious problem.

Exactly.

It's non-definable, and thereby it becomes non-predictable and non-computable. And I think there's something important about seeing it as a three— that's what it is, sorry. It's ability to see my perspective, ability to use mirror neurons to see your perspective, for me from your eyes, and then the ability to take a godlike view. It's those three dimensions that coexist. So I think classical compute is universal compute. Whereas embodied compute, mirror compute, universal compute, it's a capacity to operate across all three dimensions. And those are three models of simultaneous beingness. So this is where the McGilchrist stuff is interesting, but it, for me, also the caricatures of it, the kind of reductionist—

Exactly.

—forgets the mirror function, which I think is really critical part of the mirror function. I see myself through you because I have mirror neurons that can actually perceive myself through you. And that's a key part of the sociability of humans. Love it.

Ah, this is beautiful. I mean, is there anything else you want to say? Or I feel like we've been some beautiful places and I can imagine people sitting there thinking, what the hell do I do with any of this? But that's fine. That's a good feeling. Liminality.

It is. But I would say, I mean, look, Adam, maybe you want to bring this in, but for me, this is about doing this stuff now. Like, absolutely. Everything we're describing here is not like, oh, Aren't Indy and Adam smart with Tim? This is a great conversation. I think unless we're actually operationalizing some of the stuff, taking units of place like cities and saying, right, let's build this. I think that's what matters right now. And I think we are on a short time field on this. And this sort of transformation is really critical. So a lot of the work, you know, a lot of this conversation is what I would call the extraction of embodied work that we're trying to do and get learning done. And orchestrate how do you finance this, how do you contract this, how do you even— is a theory of measurement, what's field measurement, what's— how do you hold divergences, how do you hold a different model, all the things we've talked about. These are learnings coming from explorations. Yeah, but I think the object form here is to do this.

Yeah, and I— for me, the answer is very easy, like, what the hell do I do with this? I just think, going back to the whole idea that, you know, I think there's a big lie in the world that a lot of us adults live with, is that, you know, stuff like democracy is dead and everything's going to take over and things are just going to happen to us. I actually think that the 200+ or so people that you've had on your podcast, the thing, the work that they're doing is manifesting different parts of this future and building muscles around this. There's also, you know, I recently started getting involved in local democracy. I realized that my local democracy was an incredible place to start enacting the change and actually learn about how these things can, can evolve. Like, I think I'm already testing, like, like, you know, new tech around distributed coordination and deliberation in my local community. This is going to move really, really fast. Like, I would encourage people listening to this to, like, if you're not involved in local democracy and you have a tiny little voice inside, do that. Because I think that our existing institutions will need moved. And, and, and I also think that there's, there is a risk of us spending too much time consuming brilliant ideas at a time. And I can't, I cannot tell you that I feel like so much that I feel like there were a time in history where the Overton window is is big and it's beautiful, but it's going to close quickly. That's the other thing is we have to move quickly. And so if you are even remotely motivated, it's just one of those moments where we really lean in. No, absolutely.

Get involved. And I would say get your young people involved if you're a teacher or a parent, right? I mean, absolutely bring them into it. So yeah, no, I thank you so much. This is just, I mean, for me, it's just been beautiful, worth waiting more than a year for because it's— but yeah, Yeah, now let's do it. Let's build it.

And Tim, this podcast is an absolute gift. Like it really has been for me. It's been absolutely fantastic. And the other people that you've had speaking on here have routinely blown my mind and given me the confidence and us the confidence to kind of stretch some of the things that we're doing.

Amazing. No, I really appreciate that. I mean, you know, you do what you do, right? And I have the curiosity to explore the ideas. I love it deeply, but I also feel the urgency that you do. That there is this, like, these extraordinary humans everywhere, many of whom are being excluded or not taken seriously. And, you know, that we need to radically change. Yeah, no, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you.

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