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Host (Alessandro): Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators podcast, and our guest today is Andrew Gray. Thank you for your time and welcome.
Andrew Gray: Pleasure, thank you. Good to be here.
Host: We said that we are in some way democracy nerds, and in a good way. If you would like to tell us what you are working on... and I know this is Sephrago, maybe?
Andrew: It's definitely going to come up. And Alex, please stop me because I'm so passionate about this I could talk about it for a three-hour podcast. So yeah, I'm the CEO of Sephrago, which is based in the UK but has global aspirations. In fact, we just announced today our CTO for India has just come on board because we're opening in India.
So Sephrago essentially is a mission or a vibe to make democracies better in every democracy that we can get into. And not to do it in a new colonial way of the UK recolonizing countries via democracy. It's not like that at all. It's more a disparate, cooperative way of doing things.
The idea is actually quite simple, but there's lots of bits to it. So we are a bit of a tech company, certainly politics. We're a little bit media, certainly into AI and meshed into politics. But our theory essentially is that there are two types of people in the world, we think: people who like humanities and people who like numbers. And most politicians are into humanities, and journalists are into humanities. In fact, most people are into humanities. Math is an unusual thing for one to be into.
But in this modern world, we have vast amounts of data, particularly in the United Kingdom. And that data is not being analyzed and it's not being really used to drive policies. The politicians aren't aware of it, the journalists aren't aware of it, and nor are average people aware of all of the data which could help make better decisions. So we're connecting all of those dots.
What we've done in the United Kingdom, Alex, and we want to do it in every other democracy, is we've picked up the census in the United Kingdom, which was recent. So we surveyed everybody in the United Kingdom. We picked up the census. Now we've picked up postcodes or zip codes, and then we've picked up datasets—public datasets. It could be about health, crime, housing, whatever it would be. There's vast amounts of data in the United Kingdom.
Then we have modeled those datasets. And in so doing with my co-founder, Dr. Simon Wallace, we've created data dashboards for every constituency. So in the United Kingdom, there are 650 MPs—members of parliament—or 650 constituencies. Broadly, there's 100,000 people in each one of them. And nearly all the time, the members of parliament do not have access to the data in their area.
That is mind-blowing to anybody who doesn't understand politics. I think an average person who doesn't understand politics imagines that a member of parliament opens their laptop and they see all of these dashboards of all of the data in their area. For example, people think a member of parliament in the United Kingdom will know: How many pensioners are there in my constituency? How many children? How many schools? How many policemen? And frankly, they don't know.
So we have connected those dots as best as we can. And once you do that, you create accountability. You create league tables of 650 constituencies or members of parliament. And just to make things more complicated, we've wrapped polling into each area so we can collectively harness the wisdom of everybody in an area. We've done it in an anonymous way so you have freedom of speech.
On top of that, the missing link we think is the media. In the United Kingdom—I suspect this has happened in lots of other places—print media is dying and local media is almost dead in the Kingdom. Part of the reason is that the media hasn't really understood that anybody with a smartphone who can tell a story is essentially a journalist. In this ad world, this click world, local press are dying. Nobody wants to buy local newspapers.
When local press dies, local accountability dies. There is very little accountability of members of parliament, of more junior representatives, of the police, of hospitals—all of it. Everything we think falls apart when you have lack of media. And the media is being replaced by dodgy algorithms from the tech bros, which are dominating world politics.
So the Sephrago way is to solve a lot of those problems within one system, so to speak. We've hired 30 journalists—or we call them local democracy reporters—and we want to hire another 620, one for each area, to humanize a place and tell stories.
Our view is that very few people like party politics. You've got to be a little bit of a weirdo, I think, like me. I'm a weirdo to like party politics, to join a party. I've been in four political parties, which is terribly promiscuous and everyone thinks I'm crazy, and I'm a little bit crazy. But you'd be strange to join a political party.
In the United Kingdom, and probably the same in Italy and other countries, if you say to people, "Do you like politics?" usually the answer is "No, no. All politicians are dodgy, they're corrupt, they're in it for themselves, they're liars," blah, blah, blah. Everybody says that. But then if you ask a second follow-up question, you say, "Well, do you have a view about the economy or immigration or trans rights, whatever it may be?" People go, "Yeah, actually, I do have a view," and they'll talk extensively about it.
Also, people mistakenly say that they are not interested in politics, but they love their towns, they love their country, they love their villages and their cities. To me, that's politics. I think everybody is political, but they don't know it, essentially.
So our view with Sephrago is: if we have our local democracy journalist talking only about local things, with a local accent, recorded in a local way with a smartphone, connecting data, politicians, stories, localism, we drive and collate the wisdom of the area, which is fed into the representatives. Whether they follow the wisdom of the people is solely up to them.
Host: How do you think democracy could evolve using this system or maybe other kinds of systems? Like I'm talking about civic tech software that can be used.
Andrew: Well, there's lots of amazing civic tech software out there and I wish all of them well. Having been the first candidate, I think, in the history of the world to use AI in an election, which was over two years ago now in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom, and having run lots of AI-powered conversations around the world, my main learning point is there is little point having amazing technology with amazing coders who are trying to make the world better if those in power do not hear it. And it's our job to connect those dots.
So we think Sephrago is a sort of world democracy system that needs to have its own flavor for each country, be run by people in their own country, in their own language, with their own ethics and their own people. But we would be very happy if other political tech, civic tech platforms work with us to perhaps do citizens' assemblies with us, to have better conversations in a town hall type way, maybe on bigger areas than just constituencies, perhaps on a national level. We'd be thrilled to work with others and we just wish them well.
I don't know all the things that are going on in the space. What I know most is Polis. I probably use more Polis than anyone in the United Kingdom. And for us, Sephrago is a sort of step up from Polis. I absolutely love Polis and Sephrago is inspired by it, but is also quite different because it's wired into the political system. In the United Kingdom, we've had 47 members log in to Sephrago and the company is only 10 months old.
Host: Talking about Polis, would you like to tell us something about your experience with the data that you gathered when you did the experiment, like the people that participated?
Andrew: Sure. So I'm a politics nerd through and through, and during lockdown, a friend of mine who's really big in the tech world—me and him were wondering: How is democracy going to change? Why is it that you only get a vote every five years and you have to get a piece of paper and you often go to a primary school in the United Kingdom, a small school, to cast a vote with a piece of paper? It seems antiquated given the speed of change of Zoom during COVID.
My friend introduced me to Polis, best used in Taiwan, which came from Seattle, from the amazing people at the Computational Democracy Project. When I saw it, two things. First of all, I fell in love. I've never fallen in love with technology before. It absolutely spoke to me, Polis. But second of all, I was shocked that it hadn't taken off around the world and that I'd never heard of it. It's like somebody being into cars and they'd never heard of Ferrari. It was like that. So I felt there's something gone awry there.
I saw how it worked in Taiwan, which is a very unique use case. Essentially in Taiwan in 2014, there was a Sunflower Revolution. Taiwan is obviously an island. There's some existential crises that they might have with China and so on. People are into tech. And Audrey Tang came along and became the first digital minister and introduced Polis.
What Polis does very well is it collates the wisdom of a group of people. It collects multiple votes and you can see where you are on any particular topic. Now the key one in Taiwan, I think, was about Uber drivers. It was an unbelievably toxic topic: should Uber be allowed in Taiwan? There's obviously issues in Paris as well where taxi drivers are burning stuff over Uber. Anyway, it was a big issue in Taiwan.
Essentially the government used Polis to collectivize—collect the wisdom of the people in Taiwan as to whether or not they should use Uber. And in so doing, they created a law that had broad support. Everybody helped build the law, more or less. Everybody understood it before it was deployed. It had mass engagement. And people were happy. And that was a sort of watershed moment for Polis.
When I came across this, I was so inspired by it, Alex, that I set up a company, a non-profit entity in the UK called Consensus Politics Limited. And I'm such a nerd, I did it as a birthday present to myself. Who buys a birthday present for yourself? I mean, you've got to be odd. And to call it Consensus Politics.
Under the brand The Crowd Wisdom Project, we ran conversations all around the United Kingdom, into America, some in Europe. And then when ChatGPT was launched a few years ago, I'd sold my law firm and just so happened there was a by-election. So a by-election in the United Kingdom is when an MP dies or is basically kicked out. So it's quite a rare event. And I happened to live nearby. So all the planets had aligned.
I thought, "I am going to be the first person to use AI"—this is machine learning—"in the world." And the way I did it as an independent, so I wasn't in a party, was I had 50—five zero—instances of Polis. This constituency was disparate. It's quite old-fashioned. It's rural. It's quite conservative with a small C.
I ran 46 conversations in 46 villages in an anonymous way and I did TikTok videos in each one. I said, "Hi, I'm Andrew, your silly AI candidate. Here we are in your village. Here's a Polis anonymous conversation about your village. Why don't you answer some questions? Answer lots." And then I did three for the towns and then I did an overall Polis about people's political views in this constituency, all done anonymously.
We collected all this wisdom and then created the world's first, we think, AI-powered manifesto. And in so doing, I met my now co-founder at Sephrago. The manifesto, which is more than two years old, although it was in a sense frozen in time because it's built on data from that period, it has an element of prediction to it as to where the United Kingdom would go, which is quite interesting actually.
A lot of objections I had from some of my friends, particularly Jewish friends, was: "If you ask people really what they think, we're going to have the death penalty, and we'll have pogroms of Jewish people. Adolf Hitler came to power due to the ballot box." That was an objection that people had to really asking people what their views are.
But having done so many of them, I know that that's not really how people are. If you do it anonymously and you collate wisdom, you collect something just delicious. It's like a fine wine. It's of that place. And everybody's views are involved. So I don't personally think there's such thing as left-wing and right-wing anymore. I think that's gone. I think that's an old idea.
Just because your parents voted one way doesn't mean that you will. Just because you're pro-environment doesn't mean that you're anti-Brexit. The world's got much more complicated. And if you collect people's wisdom anonymously, you create amazing manifestos. Essentially, any member of parliament who would listen to the will of the people will be in power forever.
Host: Would you like to tell us something about your background? So, academic, professional.
Andrew: Yeah, my background really is what inspired Sephrago. And I speak of my parents, so it's a little bit weird on a podcast as a 45-year-old man to speak of one's parents, but I cannot escape them. I was born into a very political household. My parents are minor conservative, sort of right-wing politicians. They believed in Brexit, which is regarded as quite a right-wing thing. I'm very close to my parents. That was how I was. It's in my DNA.
I went to university to study politics and I did what nearly everybody else in the history of the world who studies politics does when he's 20 years old: you become quite left-wing. So I joined the Labour Party and my Labour Party friends didn't like my parents, but my parents are great people. I don't think my parents were thrilled that I joined the Labour Party and then became a candidate many times for Labour. I joined trade unions, I was on marches, I saw it all.
All of the time I was sort of split with this: "That team are horrible. They're scum. They're scum. They're scum." I'm thinking, "I love them all." And what unites them is everybody's trying to make their country, their world, their town a better place. They're my people. I love people who want to make the world a better place. It's just sad that we end up in these football teams. And for me, politics is not a football team. It isn't. And I think to treat it as such is silly.
So during this time, I became a lawyer as well because I was interested in politics. I chaired my Labour Party, saw local media die. I saw Brexit, which happened in 2016, and that was a very politically difficult time for the United Kingdom. We're still trying to get over the ruptures through families that we had with Brexit.
The big learning point is that if you were a Brexiteer, in your social media feed, you only got Brexit stuff, because all of your friends voted Brexit and retweeted. And Remainers only saw Remain-y things. For the Remainers when they lost, they were surprised because they didn't know a single Brexiteer. It felt really weird to them. But our country is massively split through North and South. The South mostly voted to Remain. The North majority voted to leave and just "up yours," essentially. It wasn't an anti-European thing, anti-immigrant thing. It was a "don't like the way our country is going." It was more of that vibe.
So we've lived through that. And then COVID as well. I've been in the Liberal Democrats and I see all these wonderful people who are hating each other. And I think there's got to be a better way. And me as a lawyer, I know law better than most, Alex. If you're not a lawyer, I am a lawyer. If there's a legal question really in the Kingdom, probably I'm a better person to answer it than you. But why should I necessarily have a view on the health sector that I know less of?
I can see how using AI-powered conversations harnesses people's collective wisdom wonderfully well to essentially make their areas better. And who doesn't want that?
Host: I'm thinking about technical and political decisions. And about your personal life, is there anything that you'd like to share?
Andrew: Happy to. Yeah, I'm lucky I'm married to my law school sweetheart who's a lawyer, Julia, and we have two teenage children as well. Health-wise, I have quite rubbish health. And when my health declined and I stopped being a lawyer, I thought, "Well, what's the most impactful thing that I can do with my time?" And to me, it was always politics. And I realized it wasn't inter-party politics and fighting and knocking lumps out of each other. It was bringing people together.
I also sort of religiously, if you will, I come from a Quaker background and Quakers historically don't have any clergy. They don't have vicars or priests and everybody's voice is sort of equal and we run our own meetings and the collective wisdom sort of comes out of a Quaker meeting. I like doing that in other groups, bringing people together.
That's how we've grown Sephrago from sort of Simon and I up to about 50 people who are now involved in less than 10 months. We've grown quite quickly. And then in India we'll be growing that as fast as we can. So that's sort of my life. Do the most maximally important thing because you don't know how long one has on planet Earth.
Host: I was thinking about the experiment that you did with Polis. Do you know about other experiments that they did around the world, if you had maybe some contact also?
Andrew: I'd be thrilled to. Two that I've been involved with, if I may, because I know them well. So I helped to facilitate a conversation in Ohio, United States, about gun control. I did that about two years ago. An American organization approached us: "Can we use your Polis instance?" Because it was anonymous. And for us, we really strongly believe that anonymity is incredibly powerful online. One becomes more honest when one is anonymous. We become less horrible. There are no points to be scored.
So this organization in America approached us to run a Polis between Democrats and NRAs—i.e., the people that are most into guns in United States versus those who are most anti-guns. And this organization called Dinner with a Fight—they were called a fabulous organization—put this Polis conversation out, which I helped a little bit with, or helped set up.
To the outsider, anyone would think there was no way that Americans can agree on gun control. That is the narrative. Americans cannot agree on gun control. That's why there's very little gun control in United States. That is untrue. Polis proves that it is untrue.
The outcome of this Polis, with thousands of votes on it, was three things that stick in my mind. The first is that whether you were an NRA member and you wanted to have as many handguns and machine guns in your house and do what you like, just in case the government ever comes for you, or whether you believe that all guns are wrong and we should go back to an agrarian society, where everybody agreed is that no American should have a gun more powerful than what the police have as a starting point. And that sounds obvious.
But I'd never thought of it. No American should ever have a gun that's more powerful than what the police have access to. There's almost universal agreement between these parties. Amazing, people agree.
A second thing was vast agreement over how long it should take you to get a gun as well. And again, in some states in America, apparently you can go into the shop and go, "Hi, I would like to buy a gun." They give you a gun there and then, and you can go and do something horrible with that gun. Well, everybody agrees that there should be a cooling-off period, like a seven-day period of time. Whatever side that you're on, amazing.
And then the last thing was agreement that everybody more or less agreed: If you had particular types of mental health issues, you should not have access to a gun. And when I saw that, I just thought, "Hallelujah." We all sort of know this, that our neighbors are good people. They're not horrible idiots. There's a lot of wisdom around.
If the Americans were to deploy that as a law, not only does everybody agree, just imagine the lives that would be saved, the carnage in America. And it is to me an absolute tragedy, a travesty to everybody that that is not the law, that what the people want in Ohio isn't the law. They're craving for it and they ain't getting it. And that's terribly sad.
Second example, if I may Alex, is close to home in the United Kingdom. One of the local councils in London, one of the local boroughs, was wanting to run a Polis conversation about the environment, about clean air. Now what they did was they ran a citizens' assembly in London. Now I love citizens' assemblies, but you have to be an engaged citizen that wants to spend four weekends in a row discussing clean air. There are very few people who are free. I wouldn't be free, my kids need me, I can't attend a citizens' assembly. It doesn't seem to scale. And you've got to be super interested in that topic to want to, like jury service, to be there.
Anyway, this council, wonderful council, had a citizens' assembly over four weekends, and with that, they created their Polis that I helped to run. And then this local borough, London borough, they promoted this Polis conversation everywhere in their borough about clean air.
Now I thought, "I know my politics, I love the environment, and I've run lots of Polis conversations. What could Andrew Gray possibly learn from moderating a Polis conversation?" And boy was I wrong.
This conversation went viral. The average person in London who voted, voted 99 times, either agree, disagree or pass. And for those who don't know how Polis conversation works, they will say, "Here is a conversation about the environment." And they'll be given a statement. It'll say, "Would you give up your car to have clean air? Agree, disagree or pass." And at the moment you're just clicking and it's rapid. And once you voted one way, you don't know what statement's going to come up next. And at any moment, you can go, "Actually, I've had an idea," and you tap in your own idea, and a moderator may or may not accept that idea. But the conversation flows in this organic way, and it becomes addictive.
Now, I've never heard of anybody in any survey or anyone I've ever spoken to who's voted 99 times as an average. Some people were so into this conversation they were voting 400 times. That was like the maximum number of votes. There were that many statements to vote on and that much wisdom collected from that area.
What happened—I could sense with these people, I've not been able to follow up with anyone who voted because it's anonymous—but what I think is happening is if you're voting on average 99 times, you're seeing an argument from multiple angles. And once you've exercised this muscle that you thought you understood economics or environment, you realize actually you don't. There's some wisdom out there. It's a mind-blowing moment of, "My goodness, there were other things I don't know about. There were so many smart people in my area, I didn't know."
The very act of doing it, I think it builds—I've got no research on this, but I think it builds neural pathways in one's brain, opens the potential, brings people together. And I think people can take it into their daily lives, whether dealing with their partners, with their children. There might be multiple ways of handling one's kids.
So I saw that and thought "amazing." But what to me is sad on both occasions is amazing amounts of wisdom collated, hardly anybody hears it. The politicians are under no pressure to enact it because there's no media. And that's why at Sephrago we believe we have to be engaged and meshed or have our own media output.
Host: Thinking about other applications or projects that maybe you're following or maybe that you tried and you think they could be helpful.
Andrew: To me, it's just Polis. I've not seen anything better than Polis, actually. So Alex, I'm aware of some other platforms around. I think I've seen DemBrain around and there's lots of other cool people I've had conversations with, but I'm so thrown all my whole lot into Sephrago. It's hard to think of others, but we would love others to sort of bolt their system into ours. Not so we can monetize theirs, but that citizens in any country can go, "I'm gonna have a go at another platform."
In fact, I might get my friends on here and we're going to see whether we actually get consensus using that tool or do we get a better answer doing that one? That's our thinking, but we think the key has got to be anonymity. I really strongly believe that.
And it's a rude story about anonymity, Alex. I don't know whether your viewers are old enough to hear it, but there was a Stanley Kubrick film a while back called Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and I think possibly Nicole Kidman. And there was a moment where there was a very erotic party, shall we say, and it only became erotic because people wore masks. And when people wear masks, nobody knows who they are if they wear a Superman's outfit. They then act in a different way, possibly more honestly, because they're not being traced. You're not going to be held to account.
In the United Kingdom, one way to express a view on what's happening in Gaza—you may lose your friends or family each way, and in some respects, you might even get imprisoned. And this is percolating into the United Kingdom conversations, and it's happening everywhere.
We've seen, I think there was a Norwegian student who went to America, and I think the border force there looked at one of his memes on his phone, and apparently it was anti-Trump, whatever it was, and that Norwegian student, I think, was put back on the plane: "You're not coming in here because you had a meme of a political leader." And that is going all the way around the world of everybody needs to be careful what they say online.
Now, although if someone was to say some absolutely horrible things, we would report matters to the police in the Kingdom, we think that matters such as trans issues, which are complicated in the United Kingdom, Brexit/Remain still, Gaza, Putin, etc.—we have to have these conversations anonymously.
And if I can refer, Alex, to a psychological experiment I'm most driven by: it's the question that Americans often see when they go to a fair in one of their towns. You often see it in Hollywood films. You go to a fair and there's a big jar with M&Ms in it, like 3,000 M&Ms in a jar. And there's two ways of doing this.
First is you have a look at the jar, you pay your $1 to guess how many are in, and you have a look and there's other people's guesses. You can see, "Oh, someone's guessed 1,700, someone's guessed 100," etc. And you can see, and then you guess. That's one way of doing the experiment.
A different way is you look at how many M&Ms are there and the piece of paper is blank. You don't know what anyone else has said. And you go, "Okay, well, I'm gonna do a bit of math from school, make it all up. I've got my own wisdom. I'm gonna write my own number down, not impacted by what anyone else has said because you don't know."
If you average those two out, the one that's been done anonymously more or less is exactly the right number of M&Ms in a jar. If you look at what everyone else has done, humans are just gauging others all of the time, looking at how each other dresses, how we all act, we're all copying each other in a memetic way, and the average is wrong.
For us, it's so important that we go back to the ballot box idea that when you vote in the United Kingdom, it is anonymous. And that's why voting in the United Kingdom doesn't always follow the opinion polls. Opinion polls are not anonymous, are often wrong—they were in America. Anonymous voting is always accurate. So our platform for me is always that way. And if anyone wants to build their tool into ours, we'd be thrilled to hear from them because there's some really smart, ethical people out there and you've had loads of them on your podcast.
Host: I think about this anonymous conversation and how would you like to see the next steps to make that happen?
Andrew: So we would describe it as nearly anonymous, because I don't think one could ever be absolutely anonymous. So for the United Kingdom, if you were to engage in Sephrago and you need a UK postcode, we'll know your email address and then which constituency you're in. That's it. And we don't follow how you voted on certain things. If you put a statement out there, we don't trace it back. But anonymity is only broken if someone says something that is against the online laws in the United Kingdom. For example, "I want to kill a politician." That would be incitement to violence that breached our terms. Anyway, that is how we are.
But for us, it's so important that our platform is trusted. Now, your podcast is gonna be put on YouTube. I've been out meeting Google people. Do you like Google as a company? There's a general sense in the world, I think, when I speak to people, of lack of trust in big tech. Whether you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump, anybody who saw the inauguration in the United States where all of the tech bros all lined up there to pay homage and to pay into the inauguration—I'm not going to get into politics whether that was right or wrong, but the optics of that is American tech is controlling all of our lives and essentially it's now being controlled by the American president and I think that's a terrifying thing.
So for us, Sephrago has to be trusted. That's why we're trying to build within the parliament system in the United Kingdom, why MPs have their own dashboards, why we have real people telling stories, not just AI-generated news—it's not that. And we have an AI and data ethics council that marks our homework. There's a board within us checking how we handle our AI and our data ethics. And we have a political neutrality council that checks all of our hundreds of videos and opinion polls that we're putting out to ensure that we're not going biased one way or another.
For us, technology has to be trusted as a first point of call. And that's our absolute obsession. So when people join Sephrago—and I say there's about 50 of us—only the people on the political neutrality council do I really know what their politics are because they're sitting with a Labour Party hat on or a right-wing hat on, whatever it may be. They have occupied those seats. Everybody else, we do not know what their politics is. I've got a clue.
We're just trying to be neutral and trusted. And then once that is the case, people will know that they are safe on our platform and our data is true and our statements are a source of truth in this world of disinformation. We hope other platforms might try and work with us within those confines. So it could be that we are the ecosystem that helps create something that's better than Sephrago that comes out of it. But we think that it has to be built into politics, has to be anonymous, has to be a source of truth and trusted. You have to have those before anything takes off in the political world.
Host: I'm thinking about—I mean, now there are normal parties and it could be that in the future they will use some civic tech software to engage citizens, whatever. Or it could be that new parties will arrive. So what do you think about it?
Andrew: Yeah, interesting. So I don't think there are many people who are really into any political party, really. I think I'm not just seeing things through United Kingdom-tinted spectacles. Wherever I look, people are saying, "Well, I quite like bits of that party and a little bit of that party, a little bit of that party." Nobody quite fits into any of those things. That's why I see that everywhere.
But let me go back in time. I'm sure the people who watch your podcasts are democracy nerds that know that essentially democracy comes from ancient Greece. Back in ancient Greece, most people know that free men—so no slaves, no women—they would go to the Parthenon or the Acropolis, I forget where it is in Athens, I confuse it too, and they'd listen to a debate. For example, should they put Socrates to death? Yes or no? Everybody would have a pebble, black pebble or white pebble, or sometimes they'd show a hand. So they'd listen to a debate. The key citizens are there. They vote. That's the law.
Essentially no need for representatives, no need for parties. It was an issue-based thing. One person, one vote on one particular issue. Makes sense. So it's only when cities get bigger, issues more complicated, probably matters of money come in, do you need representatives then? Of course you do. You need—I mean, citizens will say, "I want low taxes, amazing healthcare, the best army." You can't have everything so you do need representatives. I don't doubt that.
It seems to me the representatives are there now often elected in the United Kingdom with very few votes. And I see this disconnect and everybody senses it. People also sense that they can go to a restaurant in Bologna where you are or in Yorkshire where I am and they can give immediate feedback to the restaurateur: "Was the food any good? Yes. Did I wait for a long time? No. Here's my Google review," an Amazon review of a product, whatever it may be. Everybody's used to giving feedback all the time, but yet you cannot do it with your members of parliament, and that is weird.
Now, people might say, "Well, you can email your members of parliament and let them know what you think." Yes, of course, that is true, but you're only gonna do it on the issues that you are most incensed by, and your vote, your... The MP probably is never going to change your mind because you're voting. I'm very strongly exercised by the situation in the Middle East. I'm going to write to my members of parliament. The member of parliament sees it, maybe sends you a standard reply back. But it doesn't really change your view. A member of parliament knows that.
The sense is we think you have to be taking the pulse of an area all of the time. The collective wisdom, pick it up once a week and the representative can ignore that view, whatever. But the job of our media team is to point it out. A member of parliament has voted this way. The wisdom of the people actually says that way. There could be very good reason for it. Frequently people are wrong. I know that completely. But MPs don't even have in the UK polling about what their local people think. And they also know that what's said on Facebook is not anonymous. It might not be in their area. And the emails they get are just from really incensed people. So they are given really bad information upon which to make a decision.
So what they do is in the United Kingdom and more or less everywhere else: the parties tell them how to vote because that's how you get promoted within the party, that's how your career is elevated and you've got nothing else to fall back on because you can't ask everybody. The technology is there and it's been there since Polis was created 14, 15 years ago to do this and our job is just to connect all of those dots.
Host: Thinking about another experiment not related to Polis, but that happened in Italy, there was the Five Star Movement and they tried with the Rousseau application to receive, let's say, feedback from citizens related to some specific things. What do you think about that experiment?
There are these things that when, like in that case, people had to trust politicians. I mean, there was not like a sort of... I mean, when they were elected, they were saying, I mean, before being elected, that they would represent the people through the platform and also other things. But then also some people changed their mind and they exited from the Five Star Movement. So if you have any idea.
Andrew: I'm aware of the Five Star Movement. I do not know it in depth so I won't speak that much to it. What I do know though is some things are just advanced too early. Like Airbnb were not the first people to say "rent a flat." That's not that radical. It isn't. Facebook was not first. I think it was MySpace or Friends Reunited. Google were not the first. I think it was Yahoo or AltaVista, and all of those things. Some things just catch because the time is right for them.
I don't know the Five Star Movement intimately, I really don't, but sometimes it's just too early. The technology may not have been there at that time, because we are going back probably like 10 years in time. The technology has changed, but politics has changed too. And in the West, particularly the United Kingdom, there's a sense that nothing's working.
And it ought to be like, you know, the United Kingdom was the industrial powerhouse. We invented trains, we had colonies everywhere. We owned the United States, Canada, India. We created trains, all these things that people in the United Kingdom are quite proud of. We now sense that things aren't working, that the dots aren't connecting.
[Brief interruption as Andrew's 15-year-old enters the room]
So yeah, I think there's an element that it's got to be of its time to catch a wave. The tech's got to be right as well. But what I might say about the Five Star Movement from the United Kingdom is that it was regarded as totally radical. Now, I don't think most people would regard themselves as radicals, my people especially not in the United Kingdom. We are more slow, we evolve more slowly. We don't have particularly in the United Kingdom—we've not had revolutions and we've not deposed of leaders. We've not executed a king since, what was it, 1650, and then the king's son was eventually put back on the throne.
So we are not a radical group of people in the United Kingdom. So we think things must evolve and it has to—any system needs to feel as if it's part of the governance of the United Kingdom. And we think we can do that by connecting data rather than just being regarded as total radicals. Most people are not radical. They wouldn't describe themselves that way. We kind of copy each other, we evolve. And so my answer would be that.
Host: And just two other very quick questions because maybe you have to leave. What are you struggling with? Like, is there something in your mind you would like to fix?
Andrew: Struggling, well, yeah. Sadly, we've had to set up as a for-profit company. Now I prefer, intellectually or morally, I prefer a non-profit charity-based sort of way, but you cannot compete with Big Tech doing it that way. You won't be able to hire the best coders. You can't scale in the way that a technology company does. So we are copying the Big Tech playbook.
And we are having to speak to investors, potentially venture capitalists to provide us with enough funds to scale across every single democracy. So I would rather not have to do that, but in some senses, for-profit organizations are really good at collaborating with others, actually. They're not insular, normally. They can hire top talent. The people that are joining us are certainly not doing it for the money because we're not paying very much, they are mission-focused because so many people just see "my country is not doing as well as it could, my area is not doing as well as it could," and it brings them in.
But if any of your readers, viewers see this, they might go, "Well, what is Sephrago? Who is that Andrew Gray? Is it media? Is it AI? Is it data? Is it polling? Is it social media?" Well, the answer is Alex, it's all of those things. It's almost like a full system, right? There is no word for what we're doing at Sephrago, no one word. Social media doesn't capture it. So a problem is explaining something that's complicated, that has multiple angles to it. And there is no one word. So that is a problem when you're talking to others.
But people who really understand how politics works get it very quickly. And in fact, we were very privileged that the House of Commons, so the mother of all parliaments that's been there for however many hundreds and hundreds of years in the United Kingdom—they had a select committee, the Science, Tech and Innovation select committee. They invited us in a few weeks ago to present to the members of parliament as to what we were doing. It was an amazing moment, actually.
So I didn't do it because my health wasn't good. My co-founder, Rachel, discussed it with the members of parliament and they seemed to love it because we're on their side. We're wedded into politics, giving them data, giving them polling, giving them media exposure—what's not to like?
So what is Sephrago in a simple word? That is a problem. And because it's a new thing, who wants to fund this new thing, right? There are very few people. You might say, "I want to fund a SaaS business that does FinTech in the Balkans" or something like that. We're not that. Our mission is to make the world a better place. Simple. Who wants to fund it?
Host: And if you have any message for the people that are working in this field, I mean, Civic Tech, that they are trying to find new solutions.
Andrew: Yeah, very much so. I am a sort of democracy entrepreneur, doing it not for money, but to solve problems. And what I've learned from running a number of law firms and businesses—some have succeeded quite well and some have more recently failed—is you don't always know what's gonna work until you do it. So you need to run multiple experiments. I regard myself as the guy at Sephrago with the vision of democracy and obsession with it, but without a particular angle of "Can we make it a bit better?" Anyway, but I also encourage my team to experiment like crazy.
Very frequently over the years of running Polis conversations, I was utterly dismayed to meet some amazingly smart people whose IQ was three times mine who knew more about data and tech and politics than I ever will and they were writing about Polis and they wanted to interview me for a podcast like this or for their books. And they appeared to be more expert in Polis than me. At the end of the conversation, I would say, "Well, how many Polis conversations have you run?" And they'd always say, "None, haven't done any." And they were always scared. People were looking for perfection.
Perfection doesn't exist, but you're gonna get closer to it by experimenting, asking questions, being open-minded. Just doing stuff, don't be scared, do stuff. Do it with a good heart, with a good mission. Try, things won't go right and you'll learn and you just keep adapting. Adapt rapidly. That would be the tip. And that's quite unusual. British people don't tend to want to do that. They want to do it more perfectly and maybe Italians and Germans do too as well. But don't be perfectionist because you'll become more of a perfectionist by not being a perfectionist.
Host: So thank you a lot, Andrew.
Andrew: Thank you, Alex.
Host: If you want to add anything else, otherwise that's everything.
Andrew: Well, if you were interested in bringing Sephrago to Italy or to other countries, please get in touch as well. We want it to spread in a viral or organic way run by people in their own countries. That way, I would be thrilled if people got in touch. And if anyone wants to get in touch with me as well, my email is andrew.gray at sephrago.org. We've named Sephrago after the suffragettes movement, suffrage voting. Apparently, when you Google it, it also means a little bit of a part of a foot in Italian. A horse's foot in Italian. You probably knew that, Alex, but I didn't when we set it up.
Host: Thank you a lot again.
Andrew: Okay.
