Thank you, my friend. Thank you, Alessandro.

Yeah. Absolutely. No. Of of course. Listen. First of all, thank you. I've been, you know, following, you know, the your your podcast for a while, and I've seen, you know, a bunch of of friends of the community, personal friends as well, coming on as guests. So it is an honor, and and I'll hope I'll you know, happy to follow in their in their footsteps as well. And and, hopefully, you're, you know, you're surviving that that, you know, fifth hit wave in in Europe at the moment as as you were telling me. I sit here on the other side of the the ocean for once, so normally based in in Europe, but I'm I'm in The States for for part of the summer. So, yeah, we I mean, listen. We we can start a little bit where, you know, where where the journey is sort of, like, taking us. And when when you first asked me this when we spoke a few weeks ago, I I I thought about that question. What's the background? What's the journey? And and how does it relate to democracy? So I come from from a family of of immigrants. I think, that that's that's the main things for for the past, I think, five generations. Each generation was born in a different country from, you know, India with my, you know, grandparents. My parents were born in Madagascar. In Africa. I was myself born in France, where I grew up, and then I immigrated to The States where where my kids were born. And so I think that journey is also a journey of, you know, when you're an immigrant, you're looking for, you know, economic and political empowerment. I think a development, you know, when when you're always trying to find maybe a better place for you, for your family. And when it relates to that question, I think democracy and and, you know, collective agency, self empowerment, ability to, you know, make decision together, the freedom that comes with it as well, the representation that comes with it, I think, is a major driving force for, you know, immigrants around the world. Right? And my family was was was definitely part of that. I had the chance of, you know, growing up in, you know, in the Western world. In France, so far, relatively stable, you know, democracy. I know you're you're based in in Italy as well. And so I think part of that that early journey was understanding that, you know, in order to settle somewhere, you know, democratic conditions have to exist. Right? And they comes with, you know, the rule of law, with peace, but also, you know, self empowerment and political empowerment. So that I wanted to share at the beginning. And then, you you know, the background is is relatively classic, I would say, growing up in in in Europe. I I I followed a a traditional path of, you know, studies, etcetera. I I ended up, working in finance for, for a long time. I think, you know, I mentioned earlier, the the empowerment, I think, the economic empowerment is also part of the immigrant journey. And, you know, working in finance for me was was probably part of that. Right? And so I ended up in The States, worked in in traditional finance, impact finance as well for the past more or less two decades. I had a chance along the way to, you you know, meet great people that have also opened my eyes in the way that a citizen can interact with the system, can interact with institutions, can interact with the their community and how to help. Right? You know, as people have been, you know, Audrey Tang with with with whom I've I've worked, Glenn Wall, Matt Pruitt, Indi Joer, who I joined recently at at Dark Matter Labs, and all these folks along along their journey. You know? Alessandra, your community, you're you're part of that as well. And, you know, I'm happy to share a little bit more around, you know, that journey and, you know, the different organizations I've had the chance to join, but happy to, you know, give you by the mic and and let me know if you wanna pursue a little bit more of that path or we dig into into other things as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think beyond technology, it was also just the system thinking. Right? When I first, you know, joined, you know, RadicalxChange Foundations back in the day, it was it was early on. We were talking about quadratic voting, now that we call, you know, plural voting or and it was a different way to think about democracy and citizen participations. And one of the ways to test out that, you know, hypothesis, and and and sort of, like, roll it out and be able to experiment with it was actually building the technology that goes with it. Right? So for me, technology early on was an enabler of these new systems that we were thinking about. So going away from just maybe one vote, one person, the sort of, like, old school way of thinking about democracy because this, we know, can be corrupted in one sense. Right? And I've always trying to think about fairer ways to represent people's views and build consensus. And and and one of the one of these ways was, you know, Glenn's thought around, okay. How do we build these new wage, you know, consents consensus building, you know, systems and tools. Right? And and quadratic voting was was one of them. And one of the ways to easily implement that at scale was using technology decentralized technology as well was part of the conversation, and we experimented with that with where I see RxC voice, what we called RxC voice in different places in in Colorado and Brazil and and in New York and New York state as well. Early on as well, I had the chance to get in touch with the folks building. That now is very well used at their same thing as a consensus building tool and a dialogue building tool, and I think same thing. Their their starting point, obviously, is this, you know, system thinking idea, but underneath is a very strong open source, software and technology. Right? So I think these moments for me were super important because I realized that, technology could be an allowing mechanism for us to implement these new systems. And as I dug deeper, got to work with with Audrey as well and, you know, understood what was going on in Taiwan with Gulf dot Zero and and these different, you know, platforms as well. I think, you know, it opened my eyes on the fact that more fundamental, we say, oh, we you you know, there is a default in imagination, I think. And these technologies, these these builders as well were able to offer, a new path, I think. And that that's for me, I think, what was what was super exciting.

Oh, of course. Of course. I think early on when I I, I joined RadicalxChange, I think the the, the idea was to, you know, scale these experiments to different places. Right? So, back then, I was I was based in in Latin America in Buenos Aires, first in New York and then in in Buenos Aires. And and the idea was really to, you know, find the places where the conditions existed for us to be able to experiment, build the community work. Right? It's always been about how do you push the boundaries of imagination so people can see for themselves that by, you know, building collective intelligence, for example, we can really improve the way we do things, and, you know, in our economic life, in our political life, social, you you know, interactions as well. But there needs to be manifestation of that. Right? And I think that's the power of, you know, radical exchange community is having those practitioners around the world, you know, experimenting, building. And so one of my first role was, you know, working with that global network, was also pushing a number of these efforts in in Europe as well as in in Latin America. Very early on as well, I think the question around, online rights, data ownership, how do we think about, you know, representation online, regulation of these platforms. This is, you know, late twenty tens. You know? This is where we start thinking about, okay, how do we recapture, how do we retake agency and ownership before data, for example. And so we happen to do a lot of work, around that and what it means to build, these proper sort of, like I remember you had a guest talking about, you know, data spaces, but data unions. Right? And we worked a lot with, you know, the European Union back then as well to think about these new forms of, you know, organization as well that could help citizens retake ownership of their data. So besides the sort of, like, participation, citizen empowerment, there was also this this train of work around data. And and the third one, which I think led me to where I'm at right now was thinking about, okay, how do we rewire the, you know, political and economic system of our world, right, to face the challenges, to come up with the responses to the risks we're we're we're facing, which are existential risk, right, beyond climate, also institutional, erosion, and and others. And one of the one of the ways I I love doing that is is thinking about the rewiring of a system. Right? What does it mean to claim something? So ownership, currency, capital deployment, value creation, all these, you know, concepts that we take for granted, all these, you know, tools that we take for granted. And I think in one sense, we are prisoners of these these own systems and these own, you know, mechanisms. And if we don't challenge them, if we don't reward them, as I said, I think it's a mister Patani to go beyond and be able to come up with the right right answers. And so that has led me to the past to make that, you know, system builders, system thinkers, community as well among, among which, my my my friends at at dark matter labs, Sid, and and in particular, in the in the drawer and the team. And so that's how I sort of came to to join Dark Matter Labs, and and doing, you know, different things. I'll I'll come to it in a second, but what's what's extraordinary with with DML is this ability to, you know, push the boundaries of of imagination. Right? We have the specific name of dark matter. What does he mean? And he's really exploring that, you know, that matter, that substance that, you know, allows us to live together, rely on different systems being natural or social interactions or technologies, not necessarily questioning them. Right? And that's, I think, overall and not only quest questioning, but also being able to build, you know, new forms of interactions. Right? And, you know, what I think defines us at at dark matter labs is this ability to, bring people together, funders, technologists, researchers, artists, and being able to manifest the type of change that we think is required, a deep change, through, you know, projects, through labs, and always trying to, you know, concretely show what it means to rethink food systems, to rethink, built in environment, to rethink, you know, democracy, etcetera, etcetera. And so there are a number of of projects that that we work on. Specifically for for my part, I co run, an initiative called, the civilization options or expanding civilization optionality, XCO. I know it's a mouthful, but it's an initiative that is basically a formation studio to fund the responses to the systemic risk that we're facing. Right? And so in that, capital deployment initiative, one of the verticals that we look at, there is climate resilience, there is, planetary ecosystems, etcetera. One of them is, institutional erosion. And, you know, it is critical to think today that we live in a very volatile world. We live in a world that needs us to come up with collective responses and collective agency, and this is precisely the moment where our ability to make decision together or ability to gather and think collectively is actually more under pressure. And it's it's and it's been maybe in a century. Right? And so how do we come up with, new ways, new vehicles, new funding mechanisms as well to make sure that, we keep these institutions and our ability to collectively decide, together. And and and we can dive into that. At at dark matter labs, there are others initiatives around, democracy and civic tech that I I wanna come back to a little bit later. So that gives you a little bit of a picture, but, you tell me where you wanna go next. We can dive a little bit into that, the civic infrastructure that we're working on. But please go ahead. I'm gonna take a sip of water, and and you tell me.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And and and it's true that, I think, yeah, both of them are needed, and they probably also, you know, join in a number of, in a number of ways. Right? Sorry. And I've been a little bit under under the weather this past couple of days, so I apologize if, you know, at one point my voice or or my noise get get a little bit caught up. So the the, the the funding the funding part, I think, is very interesting, and this is something and I remember when I first joined DM, I I I called India, and I said, listen. I have I have an idea. I have I wanna launch a a VC fund or I wanna launch a fund for democracy. Right? Like a civic fund. That wouldn't be philanthropy. That wouldn't be regranting. That wouldn't be but it would be with the goal of generating return value, but investing in, in my mind, what is crucial at the moment, which are civic infrastructure. Right? And that was the starting point of what, you know, one of the verticals we we we invest in. And so let me let me backtrack for a second because, obviously, the the funding mechanism that exists today to support civic organizations, that support citizen engagement, that support, citizen assemblies, that support community, you you know, engagement, etcetera, etcetera. All the work that is needed at the local level, but not only but at the at the citizen level, I would say I'm not necessarily talking about institutions. Right? It's being it's under attack. Right? I mean, every organization out there is being defunded. I think the last, sort of, budget that I looked or or or from philanthropy was, you know, divided by four something in these areas. Right? And we know the reasons, Right? Because of the situation in The US and other places, and it's becoming really and harder and harder for funders to continue to, you know, fund that work. Right? And so that that's the general premise. Or view and and and my view is that in order to continue to fund this work, we need to think about these structures and these these infrastructures, the civic infrastructure as an asset class. Okay? And I know maybe on this podcast or people listening, they're gonna say, okay. We're we're poisoning democracy with capitalism like what we've done what we've done before. So I know it it is a little bit contentious, but I think the point here is to say that in a democratic system, and when we have the or or ability to make collective decisions is actually benefiting to all the actors in the ecosystem. Right? If you think about, you know, company investing in a territory, right, or, you know, a municipality building a project, right, or any type of investment. If you don't have the conditions to be able to engage with the citizens, get the feedback, make sure that the community is on board, make sure that, you know, all the stakeholders have been consulted, that project is is more likely than not to fail. Right? And so thinking about civic infrastructure as an asset class means to be able to invest in those infrastructure in, you know it could be companies. It could be, projects. It could be, structure that allow for citizen engagement, citizen participation, participation, collective decision making is gonna help to create value for the entire community. Right? And so that's our goal, and that's something we've been working on with the World Bank and others around the world is, how do we come up with the vehicles, the instruments, with which we are able to fund these infrastructure, these civic assets so that they benefit the investors, they benefit the communities, and they are able to create that that positive feedback loop. Right? And one of the early concept that exist or the democracy bonds. Right? And and and I think the democracy bonds are very, very interesting because what you're doing is basically a municipality. It's like a mini bond, but for democracy. Right? It's like a and and we call it a civic bond. You can call it a democracy bond. What does a democracy or civic bond does is basically when when a a municipality is gonna issue this bond to fund community organizing, community sensing, you know, community representation as well as citizen empowerment. They're able to tap into an institutional market because the the result of the bond so the the positive externalities that the bond is gonna generate is gonna help generate return for these investors. So for example, you're in the municipality, you issue a bond to, fund a community center, for example, right, where people can come in. They can, you you know, you can run citizen assemblies. You can run, you know, community schools. You can run a number of, you you know, community led, projects. Right? By doing that in the neighborhood, by doing that in a specific place, what are you gonna do? You're gonna generate value for the citizens, but but also for the community and the actors around it. Think about it. You may be lowering crime, maybe increasing the value of, you know, the assets and the real estate. You're also gonna help train better, you know, people, right, that can go back to the workplace and the workforce and benefit all the actors around. So by investing in democracy, you're actually creating economic value for the entire ecosystem and the entire neighborhood. And we all know this. This is quite, you know, straightforward. We all have a hunch by investing in democracy. You are able to, generate the conditions for better economic conditions. Right? The question is, what are the instruments? What are the vehicles and the and and the onboarding rails that exist or that you can create that will help to manifest that that positive, you know, feedback loop. And one of the ways is a civic bond, right, where you're asking investors to fund this work because you can demonstrate that this is gonna help the economic conditions in a specific place. And not only that, you can also ask the local actors to pay back or help you pay back the the coupon on that bond. Right? Because if you think about it, you can you can, you know, talk about any type of bond, you know, resilience bonds, social bonds, green bonds. But at the end of the day, if, you know, these are only funded by the municipal tax base, then, you know, what's the point? What we're looking at is a way to make sure that the economic actors that benefit from the investment and democracy can also, you know, help you pay for that investment. Right? And one of the ways to do that is a civic bond. But you have you have a number of other ways as well that you can do this. And this is one of the work when we think about civic finance and and financing civic infrastructure and civic assets. This is one of the ways we're exploring, in notably in the global South, in Brazil, in India, and I can I can come back to that afterwards? But I think for me, this is one of the areas that is missing is this ability to tap into private markets to fund the responses to the shocks that we're facing, be it institutional shocks, climate shocks, etcetera, etcetera. Because I think philanthropy alone is not gonna be enough. Right? And so what are the conditions? What are the vehicles to make sure that we can bring in private capital for, you know, the public good? That's that's basically what it is.

I mean,

That's that's what we're working on at at at Xero, right, at at at part of that more direct matter, but it says exactly that. How do you mobilize private capital? And you're not asking for sub returns. You're not initially asking for, you know, philanthropy work, grant, etcetera. You're just offering a different path for returns. And this is not necessarily about being moral. Right? In the sense, it's also about being greedy because you're protecting your investment. You're protecting your assets down the road. We're leaving in a world that is collapsing, where, you know, volatility and shocks are just coming, you know, faster and faster to us. How do you how do we respond? And I think there is a way to mobilize that capital to build a capital stack in order to address those things. And I think, institutional erosion and democratic erosion is one of the key crucial, you know, shocks and risks that that we're facing.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Couple of thing. I think that the question of value, I mean, this it's back from from from, you know, the sixties and the first research around, around positive externalities. Right? And how do you measure the value created by positive externalities and avoid, you know, sort of like a free ride type of, you you know, issue, right, that you make sure that the value that is created by a positive externality is shared. Sorry. But it can also be paid for. Right? And so the question of how do you how do you measure that? I think there is a a basic way to measure this if if you're place based. There are already indicators that exist that a municipality or or local, you you know, asset owners are looking at, you know, value of real estate, for example. Right? If you think about the places where community engagement is the strongest, education is the strongest, access to the job market is the strongest, you're gonna see a natural job in crime rates, for example. You're gonna see an improvement in health. You're gonna see an improvement in school, results as well. And and what do you mean how do we call these things? This is called gentrification. Right? And gentrification is basically where you see the value of property going up. So one of the ways to measure that is on one side, you can measure easily, the benefits of, the investment in the community, in the democratic process, in cities and representation and engagement. And on the other side, you can measure quite precisely the increase in the the economic value of they said the issue is when you're in the neighborhood where, investors are gonna swoop in a a large part of of a neighborhood because they're betting than others are gonna do the gentrification work without participating. This is like, this is extractive behavior. Right? So I think we wanna create the instruments that empowers citizens, municipalities, communities to do their work and at the same time make sure that these these investors, these asset owners can participate. Right? So there is a way to there is a way to measure that. I think and maybe, then then you can also think about, sensing data monitoring that, you know, municipalities can do installing, you know, for example, pollution, you know, measurement. You can also install a number of captors in the city, a number of sensors, I'm sorry, where you can very quickly, extract a bit of a mapping of, you know, how the city is responding to this investment. Right? And you can see that maybe the number of kilometers or miles that, a worker has to, you you know, has to go through to go to his work, maybe it's being reduced because jobs and so you can also measure maybe the pollution and, you know, going down. So there are a number of ways and especially now with sensing, measuring, and modeling technologies that you can do that as well. Maybe going into a a a specific example that could be could be interesting for you. So, you know, at Dark Matter Labs, we, we have a lot of, people work working around, you know, data, data modeling, data, you you you you know, sort of, like, sensing, etcetera. And so one of the work we've been doing is is in is in India, is in Mumbai. It's called risk sense. And the idea behind that is thinking about how a community's experience that is that doesn't exist in register, in books, etcetera. That is really something that exists between a community the the the community memory. Right? The ability of a community to sense, risk. How do you have that surface and be helpful to a municipality or a company running a business, etcetera etcetera? So, for example, in Mumbai, one of the main risk is obviously heat floating. You know, you have major climate shocks every year. Right? And it's very hard for the municipalities or or or or businesses to respond to that risk. How do we adapt? How do we change the way we build? How do we change the way we operate business? So we establish a number of of these businesses, right, or schools, etcetera. And one of the ways to to understand that risk is by talking to the community, right, and understanding how they're leaving through the risk and their memories as well. Three years ago, that street got floated. Two years ago, that street got floated. So this year, I would change the bus route, you know, to go from, you know, this neighborhood to that school because, you you you know, these kinds of small details where which I think matters for for, people's lives. And this is, you know, when we think about what is democracy, I think this is exactly that, the ability of community to help its citizens and, representative to help its citizens to have a better life. Right? And so risk sense is basically this this tool that is able to bring together, visualize this community sensing memory, this community sensing risk, and have it, emerge as a very visual tool that you can then feed into a number of, sectors and actors. You can you know, the municipality can use it. An insurer can use it as well. In that case, what he would do is the insurers would pay for it because this is extremely valuable data. Right? This is data directly coming from, the community. This is not AI trying to reproduce, you know, model, etcetera. This is very much rooted in the community memory. Right? And so an insurance could an insurer could pay for that. A a real estate developer could pay for that. A business owner association could pay for that as well. And so you see how from community memory and sensing, you can create via technologies and contracting the tools and the railways to crystallize value, bring it to the business owners, the municipality, the community organizers, and having it brought back to the citizens that have helped generate that risk sensing these risk risk sensing data. I wanna stop here because I wanna make sure, you you know, you have the picture here, and, we can dig into it. But this is there are a number of projects, ideas, labs at Dark Matter Labs that that we that we work on that I think are trying to exhibit that. Another one is is Civic Ledger formally permissioning the city. I can come back to that in a second as well. But I wanna pause here, give you back the the floor, and, you know, we can take this wherever wherever you want.

know, digital twin is one thing. It's existed for a while, and and and a number of, you know, companies do that very well. And nowadays, you can actually build that easily. I think digital team is one way. What I'm interested in, and I think, this is something that we we we need to to explore more is is token economics. Okay? Is in practical terms, how do you, distribute that value that has been created in a neighborhood by, you know, improving community sensing, citizen engagement, participation overall, education, etcetera etcetera. And here, I think only monetary value and only, you know, sort of like fiduciary value is not is not enough. I think we need to find other ways to crystallize that value to I'm sorry. And to share it as well. And token economics is one of the way you can do this. For example, you can think about creating a a a municipal balance sheet for, you know, risk sensing and community sensing, right, where I apologize. Sorry. Yeah. These tokens can benefit or can be associated to an increase in value in property, for example, or taxes raised on that value. So they're they linked to a specific, monetary, value creation, but at the same time, they're also linked to, you know, the citizens, bringing that, you you know, that knowledge. Right? That that that sensing that we talked about. And, I mean, using, a decentralized ledger, using a blockchain, for example, could be the win. This is something in our radical exchange, and we were very close to the web three community at Dark Matter Labs as well, because token economics allows you to, crystallize value without being in an extractive model of, you know, if I get one, you get minus one type of thing. I think these tokens and you can also use those tokens. Think about or example, in Mumbai where, you know, a a family has helped, you know, and, you know, sense that there was a specific risk in periods of extreme heat or floods or something. They should be able to be rewarded, right, for that for that knowledge. And how do you do this? Yeah. Of course, you can maybe give back some of that economic value, but you can also issue a token. Right? I think it's a it it's also interesting. And with that token, maybe that help them participate in another project, send them send their kids to school or, you know, buy your air conditioning if that if that's that's what they need. Right? But I think the token opens the realm of possibility in terms of sharing the value that has been created by the community. Right? So I think more than digital twins, the technology here is token economics. And, if there are people listening that are interested in this kind of work, that's that's the type of folks that we're looking at at the moment in our projects. Right? Because it could be, you you know, a community balance sheet, you know, that we talked about. But in other projects that that we have, we'll talk about cooling a city, so extreme heat. How do we respond to heat in urban environment? And we talk about cooling balance sheet. And, you know, this is more for climate as opposed to democracy, but same thing. Token economics could really be helpful as well to reward, and bring together a number of, you know, stakeholders, actors, and and it's much easier to share value with tokens as opposed to just, you know, dollars or rupees or these kind of things.

Exactly. To that, place. And and your point around technology is that technology used in in the right way. I think this is exactly what the what that can, enable the data sensing, the risk sensing, but also, you know, the value sharing part. So when you bring those two together, I think it's very interesting.

We we often think about when you're building these new systems, right, and rewiring existing systems, I think the key part is gonna be the incentive mechanisms. And that's exactly what you're talking about. That geometry. That geometry is our incentives. Right? How do you align incentives between different parties to make sure that, they can work together? You can build contracts. You can build together. And, you know, I invite your listeners to to look at one of the the the ideas at dark matter labs around many too many, and this is exactly that. So this is a multidimensional, contracting system between many different actors. And I think using technology and, for example, AI in that case is super powerful because you demultiply. You leverage the ability to contract between different people and align incentives. And I think that geometry that you're talking about, that matrix is exactly is exactly what, what you have in mind. One thing I wanna comment on what what you said as well is, it is it is at at the municipal level. It is at the the local actor level, but something I wanna add as well or idea in in building these, you know, instruments to fund CV infrastructure, it's not only at the local level. The goal is also to have a global markets of these instruments so you can tap into the very large asset managers, insurers, etcetera. So you could have those liquid instruments that you can invest in, and we're not initially just at the local level. Right? Yes. At the local level, it makes sense if you're an industrial operator, you wanna invest in a place, etcetera, etcetera. But I think, again, pushing the boundaries of imagination is going away from or beyond the just local funding scheme and mechanism, and being able to think about it. Because this is if you think about a way to rival the extractive model that we have right now, either for the planet or for democratic systems, which are being exploded and and perverted in both cases, if you're not able to build the system to rival this and scale at the global level, then you're already failing. Then you're only just a pilot. You're only just something in the corner to look good in a local place in Mumbai or Santiago De Chile or Madrid, etcetera. If you're not able to build at the global scale and unify the systems and and offer a value proposition as well for for for, you know, these investors, I I I think you you you're missing something here. And that's at least the way I think about this. I think about the mission. That's what I look at.

Society in the sense how, we we interact with each other? Okay. Give give me maybe a, a little more here.

No. No. I mean, listen. And he brings us here, I think, to a a a deeper question of what is the value of human society, right, and what is the value of being human in our current world? And I think it is being challenged every day because more and more value is being ascribed to AI, machines, you know, autonomous systems. Right? And so the value of being human is being reduced. Right? People talk about the life beyond work and how, you know, we can only become entertainer or or caretaker. Right? There is no there is no point in other, another role for for humans. And I think you touched on that a little bit with your question. It's what is the value of human interaction, and what is the value of, you know, humans in a society? And I think when I think about at at the global scale, that's a little bit what what I'm imagining, which is humans still being at the center because investing in human investing in human interactions, education, participation, civic, you know, systems, it's basically investing in the other systems that that allow the rest of the planet to function. And this is the idea is that to prove that by investing in that, in the human capabilities, you replace humans at the center of the at the at the center of the planet. Right? I know some people wanna leave the planet. The option is to go and terraform, you know, Mars, and, you know, we just gave $80,000,000,000 to, you know, a billionaire to list this company and and and help us, you know, send data centers into our four Mars. The other option is to, you know, build a fortress somewhere in New Zealand and and and stay there while the rest of us are are burning. Right? My view is that and I think, you know, at the end, this is what we try to build is the systems where human and nature are put back at the center. And one of the ways to do that is to show how they can create value for, the entire, you know, ecosystem of of different stakeholders, public, private, etcetera. I mean, this is at the center of this movement around nature based solutions, right, by original financing, etcetera. So how do you use nature as a vector for, you know, value creation, not only financial, but others as well, systemic value? And I think when we think about investing in democratic, institutions, civic infrastructure, that's exactly that. Being able to replace human at the center of the system globally. And and and because we know that this is gonna benefit the entire system as well. And one of the way to do this is to create a a liquid market for investors to come in and say, I'm gonna invest in in in democracy because I know this is a create value for my assets, for my business, etcetera, etcetera. You know? And I know it is contentious. Right? Because we're saying that one of the ways to help democracy is by, you know, having private capital invest in it in a sense. And and and I accept the debate, but I'm I'm thinking what a point where we're starving for money to not all of us die in an authoritarian regime. Right? Nowadays, only 7% of the planet of of human beings live in a true liberal democracy. 7%. Okay? That's less than that less than 500,000,000 people out of 8,000,000,000. Right? So I think the urgency is there. The urgency is not necessarily ethical saying, oh, we're gonna get more grant money and philanthropic money. No. The urgency is the system has collapsed. Only 7% of us are still free to say and do what they want and what they think. Right? How do we change this? 7%. And, you know, elections are in France next year, in 2027. Are we gonna drop under, you know, 6% with France joining the rest of the illiberal democracies, right, etcetera etcetera. Anyway, so I just you know, I get I'm getting animated because I think sometimes ethical question, don't allow us to, again, push the boundaries of of imagination, right, and how you we rethink those systems.

So Of course. Yeah. I mean, listen. My my my last, point still still stands. I think we were and I loved, by the way, the the conversation today. And, I must say, Alessandro, you're a a fantastic listener as well because you took us on this path of this journey, and we ended up where we really talk deeply about those planetary, you know, issues, risk, how to rethink about all this, and how to rebuild those systems. So, one point, great great kudos to to you on this. I think for the for for the people that are really, you you know, listening and the people that that you interact with, there are a number of of of ways to to think about us. First of all, you know, please, you know, get in touch, because we are always looking for, you know, vision aligned, mission aligned folks, and we're, you know, building the team at the expanding civilizational optionality at at DM. And so, you know, as I said, you know, system builders, system thinkers, I think, are are are super, super important. Right? So one one, get get in touch for for sure. Two, I think this ability to not think in silos. You know? We you have the democracy practitioners. You have the, you know, the money practitioners. You have the technology practitioners. You have and they hold congregate in conferences. And I I do believe that at the end of the day, what what's really important is our ability to question how we, you know, do things and pushing, you know, again, the boundaries of imagination. Right? And, thinking about how technology can help you know, democracy can also help rethink the way we own things. We pay for things. We reward value. We decide together. And I think the point of your podcast is exactly that. How do we innovate in democracy but by tapping in other places, right, is is critical. And and and the people that have great admiration with, which I I mentioned in the beginning, but folks like Audrey, like Indie, were, you know, mentors to me. I think they have this capacity to bring together these different worlds and have them collaborate. And this is super powerful. And if I had one hope, I think this this is that. Right? That it's not because you work in finance, or you work in blockchain that you don't care about the environment, that you you know what I mean? Like, it's not because you work on AI that you don't care about human rights. So, you know, sort of, like, collapsing these worlds where people have these pre, you know, pre the this this preform models. Right? And, quite the opposite when we think about plurality, which is one of the key initiatives we worked on, and I know you've worked on that as well. And I recommend you guys to read read the book at at plurality.net. This is exactly the country. Right? It is using the technologies that for the past twenty years have divided us to actually use our differences to bring us back. Right? This is exactly and and so this is a case in point. And and so so I'll stop here. This ability to tap and not saying that because you work on, you know, again, finance or other places, you don't wanna participate in the democratic renewal of our societies is a mistake. Quite the opposite. Bring, you know, these folks in and what what you're working on. I'll stop here. I just just wanna thank you enough. Very happy to continue that conversation, with with your listeners, with our friends, the community, and and yourself, Alessandro. Huge, huge appreciation for for your work.

Thank you. Thank you, my friend. Be well.