Automatic transcription, it may contain errors.

Alessandro: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast. Our guest today is Magnus Strobel. My guest is working on Nexus Politics. Thank you for your time, Magnus.

Magnus: Well, Alessandro, thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here and finally be able to join your podcast and talk about all the important things that are going on in the ecosystem right now.

Alessandro: I opened the same as the first question: What is Nexus Politics? You want the long or the short answer? You can start with the short one maybe, and then we'll get to the long one.

Magnus: The short answer would be: it's a digital democracy platform that is partially a GovTech solution, possibly a civic tech solution. So we are offering citizens the opportunity to easily voice their opinions, concerns, and problems. And then we are connecting them with the responsible politicians to make sure that they can be accountable and give updates on what they're doing in order to address these problems. And also give them insights into public opinion. So that's it in a nutshell, I would say, but there's more to it.

Alessandro: And what about the longer answer?

Magnus: Yeah, the interesting part. The long version would be: First of all, the problem that we want to address is the growing dissatisfaction with democracy. So that's something which is not just prevalent in Germany, but I guess it's all over—at least in all Western democracies. And in our opinion... so that's me and my co-founder Christoph Waffler, and we had long discussions and many thoughts about what the core problem is—why people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with democracy. And one of the reasons that we came up with was a lack of representation. So many people don't feel represented anymore by their elected officials.

And I think it's not just our hunch, but it's also backed by data. So for instance, a study by the Pew Research Center which was conducted, I guess, in 2023, looked at citizens from more than 24 democracies and surveyed more than 30,000 people. And they found that overall, 59% of the citizens are dissatisfied with how democracy is working currently. So that's a shockingly high number, in our opinion. And 72% of the citizens didn't feel represented by at least one party in the parliament. So that's also a shockingly high number. And lastly, about 74% of the citizens did not believe that politicians care about their opinion—so what people like them think.

And these numbers, I guess, show that there's a huge lack of representation. People don't feel represented by their politicians. And of course, there's also a core problem to this—this is just the surface. But the underlying core problem is, in our opinion, a lack of reliable real-time data on public opinion, which is basically limiting politicians in their ability to make data-driven decision making and good representative decision-making.

And this is due to a couple of effects. If you look at the status quo—how politicians right now form their beliefs about what their constituents think—there are a couple of ways they're doing it. For instance, they can use polls, but polls are quite expensive and conducted very infrequently. And also, this might be done on the federal level, but probably not so much on the local, municipal, or state level. Then there's legacy media. The problem there is that you have editorial bias, so depending on which newspaper you read, you get a totally different opinion on what people might think. Then there's social media, of course. And in social media, you get all different voices, but the problem there is it's very unstructured, it's noisy, you're within your echo chambers, and so on. And then, of course, there's citizen feedback. But citizen feedback—the problem there is that it's very unrepresentative and selective. So if I would be a politician, I get approached by my voters mostly, and so there's a huge selection bias in what I get to hear and what I get to see.

And then, I guess, the solution we came up with is a platform which allows citizens to voice their opinions. Because people have their beliefs, have their opinions, and then are basically looking for tools they can express them with that can reach politicians easily. And empowering them by giving them an easy tool which they can use to effectively reach the politicians that are responsible. So the way it works is we have kind of a chat window where citizens can just voice their opinions—what's bothering them, problems, issues, etc. And then artificial intelligence will analyze the expression of the citizen, identify the core issue, and then classify that. And based on the location, based on the category, and so on, it will automatically assign it to the responsible politician.

So that's the first problem we're solving here for citizens. Because, for instance, me as a citizen—if I have a problem, I would not automatically know for sure who's the right person to contact. But we're facilitating that process by directly sending it to the responsible politician. And then that issue—once you get assigned as a citizen that got a problem ID—and based on that problem ID, you can basically track the entire legislative process, from problem creation all the way up to it being resolved and hopefully ending up in a legislative act which solves or addresses this issue. So this is the whole process.

And then, once we have all the data on what people think, then we can help politicians make better informed decisions by giving them a dashboard for public opinion analytics. And on that dashboard, they'll have different features. So they can analyze by category, they can analyze by time so they can see what problems are trending, for instance, in their constituency. They can see it on a heat map, and they can analyze it by socio-demographics and so on. So this is all data that citizens can provide voluntarily in order to allow politicians to make better informed decisions.

And yeah, this is the first step in our project. But of course, we're very ambitious, so we want to extend the whole process. The product by adding additional features. Because once we start from the very beginning—from the problems all the way to the solutions—there are, of course, different steps in between. So yeah, we want to add additional features like polls, for instance, so that we can engage citizens more in the legislative process. And also opinion polls so that politicians can get additional insights on what citizens think.

And yeah, for public officials, we are offering a customer relationship management system. So it's a dedicated system for public officials where they can manage their constituents' requests and give better updates on what they're doing. In contrast to how it works right now—so status quo would probably be like I send an email to my politician, voice my concerns or issue, then I get a very nice email as a reply saying, "Thank you, Magnus, it's a very important issue," and then I probably never hear back from them. And with our tool, you can track the whole process.

And for politicians, that makes it much more efficient because they have their own workspace, so they can collaborate with other politicians from the same party, for instance. And therefore, be closer to their constituents and give better feedback on what's actually happening. So we are opening up the black box of politics, so to say.

Alessandro: I was wondering when you first had the idea that technology could be helpful to political life. When did you have this idea? Maybe many years ago, did you read a book or you realized that it was useful to use technology inside the political sphere?

Magnus: Yeah, but first of all, as a young person, I'm one of the many who are very frustrated with how public administration works here in Germany. The other day, I spent a whole afternoon in the municipal office just to register my apartment for another place. And yeah, so I feel like there's a lot which can be done more effectively and efficiently with technology. And so that has been a feeling for a while, and I think I'm not unique in this.

But in general, I came very much in contact with these new technologies like AI during my PhD. So I got the chance to sign up for OpenAI as a beta tester, so I could use the product early on, see what it could do. And yeah, but back then, to be honest, I didn't have in mind that we can directly apply it to politics. So that was more like we came up together with my co-founder. So he's the tech guy on our team. I tend to call him a child prodigy because he's first of all very young, but also super smart. And he noticed ways to use technology for the better and help us with making our products efficiently.

Alessandro: And about your PhD—would you like to share something about your academic background? I'm sure that started...

Magnus: So by training, I'm an economist. So that probably happened by chance, I would say. So I got my high school diploma in 2008, and back then, as you might know, there was the great financial crisis. And I was always interested in what was going on, so I read the newspapers. But to be honest, I didn't have any clue about why it should affect me and my small town in Germany if some stock market indices are crashing in New York. So I got interested in economics, and everyone told me, "Well, if you want to understand that kind of thing, you should study economics." So that's what I did. I got my bachelor's and master's in economics and was always also very interested in the human side—so the human side, I mean the psychology of people. Why do people behave the way they do? I mean, that's also a big part in the financial world because you have all kinds of irrationalities people tend to exhibit, and behavioral biases like herding behavior and stuff like that.

And yeah, this is what I focused on in my PhD. So I got a PhD in behavioral economics—so just in between economics and psychology. So why do people behave the way they do, and how can we achieve that people make better decisions? So for instance, save more for retirement and stuff like that. And yeah, I got lucky that I was accepted at Technical University of Munich for my PhD, studied there for five years, got a lot of interesting insights, also worked with machine learning through my PhD, became familiar with the basics, at least, of how it works. And yeah, after that, I worked in finance, got some experience there. But it was always very interested in entrepreneurship. So for instance, even during my bachelor's already, I was working as a student research assistant at the entrepreneurship lab at Santa, and got my first exposure there, met some incredible people, and ever since, it was on my agenda to maybe also become an entrepreneur one day. And finally, yeah, now I am.

Alessandro: I was thinking about... because you mentioned behavior economics... now I was trying to... because there is this question in my mind every time: Why people do not participate in public life? Why they do not behave in this way? And I was wondering how it can be associated with something you mentioned, like behavioral economics. Now, I don't know if you have any idea...

Magnus: First of all, I guess people are lazy, and you have to make it very easy for them to participate in public life and to be civically engaged. And I guess that's one of the key problems we're facing. But there are a lot of formats which require you to be available at certain times—for instance, so you can go to evening events and talk to politicians, et cetera. But you also have to be there in person, and that makes it tricky for people who have regular jobs and so on.

So we should definitely decrease the threshold or lower the threshold for people to engage by offering them digital access. And then also making it possible to do it asynchronously—so not in real time, but share your opinions whenever it's suitable for you. Because you might come up with something that's bothering you at one point, but then you might have forgotten about it until there's an opportunity to raise your voice in your community or to your local representative.

And I guess whatever we can do in order to decrease that participation threshold helps to get more and more people engaged. And the more people we get engaged, the higher the representativeness and the better for democracy. So this is what we are trying to achieve—creating a very inclusive environment which makes it very easy for people to participate when they want, why they want, and the way they want. So either by voicing their opinion publicly or privately, because sometimes you might have issues or concerns that you're not willing to share publicly but which are still very important to you. And therefore, you have to give citizens ways to achieve that. And that's what we're trying to achieve with Nexus Politics.

Alessandro: And from the idea to the product, how was the journey? So the steps...

Magnus: A roller coaster ride, as probably might be for most entrepreneurs. But let's say, well, but to be honest, right now most of the roller coaster has been going up, so it has been quite a good phase. So I met my co-founder Christoph last year through the entrepreneur network of Technical University of Munich. And then we started brainstorming about our product, about our idea. And towards the end of it, it got more serious. We started applying for funding, and then we got lucky by having been selected for the EXIST scholarship—EXIST is what it's called in Germany. And we get support by the Federal Ministry for Economics and also the European Social Fund to be fully funded for one whole year.

And yeah, we've tackled most of the obstacles at the beginning. We also got office space at the Technical University in the incubator. We got all kinds of support from Technical University, so it's a really great environment to build your company. It's probably one of the best in the world, I would say. You get startup consultancy which you can use for free, so we had our startup consultants, shout out to them, and big thanks for the help. And they help you navigate all of these steps that you're required to do at the very beginning, giving you insights on funding opportunities and so on.

And now we got office space, we got funding, and currently we're enlarging our team. We get some students supporting us in our project. And yeah, we are currently working on a prototype. So we got some politicians we are working with. We've spoken with lots of politicians from all levels—on the German side, federal level, state level, so the Bavarian parliament, and also the local level. And many of them are sharing insights on what they need, what they would like us to build. So we're trying to approach this whole thing very need-based, in a sense that they tell us what the pain points are, then we're trying to address it directly and incorporate it into our product.

And yeah, of course, there are obstacles, but that's the fun part, I guess. You want to challenge, accept the challenge. And yeah, it's been quite enjoyable so far. It's going well. We have a lot of... we're getting a lot of traction and attention. So we have been invited to many different events where we can present our idea. And yeah, we already are getting to this point where we're not just reaching out to people—people are reaching out to us and offering their support and so on. So it's a great journey. I highly encourage others to also embark on this journey and give it a try. And I guess that's the most important thing—you just have to get started at one point. You'll probably pivot another million times, but that's part of the journey. And yeah, eventually it will hopefully bring you somewhere and allow you to make some impact along the way.

Alessandro: Yeah, sometimes we do think too much, and maybe doing it can be a way of... I mean, we might find our idea changing our idea underway. And I was curious because I remember that you organized a hackathon with students. How did it work? Was it a great success?

Magnus: So we're always looking for people supporting us, and one idea of ours was to engage students who are very interested in our idea and give them the opportunity to collaborate with us and provide us with some interesting insights. And there's a great student initiative also at the Technical University, and they helped us set up the hackathon right there at the campus. And at the beginning, we were expecting maximum 20 students to participate, but it turned out we got more than 40 coming to our event.

And we posted three different challenges where students could come up with their own solutions—technical challenges. So for instance, showing different visualizations, creating a heat map, for instance, where we can exhibit all the issues which citizens are facing. And yeah, and at the end of the day, we got very interesting results out of that and very good connections with the students. It was a great atmosphere, and I guess it helped us quite a bit on our journey.

Alessandro: And the politicians—you said that you talk to politicians of every level. And I was wondering what was their perception compared to these kinds of technologies. I mean, were they excited because it was something new? Do you think that they were... I don't know...

Magnus: So I guess you could get politicians from all kinds of walks of life, different backgrounds, and so on. And therefore, some are interested, some are not so much. But overall, I guess we're getting very good feedback from politicians. They're very interested in our product. And I would say it's because we decided that our business model will be such that we're offering the customer relationship management system for free for politicians. And because that gives politicians the opportunity to be accountable to their constituents, and this is creating the largest impact. And also because it offers us the opportunity to gather a lot of data. Whatever citizens complain about to politicians will then be routed via our platform. And with this data, we can solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting citizens or politicians on our platform.

And yeah, since we offer this for free to politicians, there's a lot of interest because it definitely gives them value. And because right now, I guess most politicians don't have a dedicated CRM system which they're using in their daily work. So most, I guess, work with Microsoft Outlook for getting emails—inbound emails from citizens. And then some are using Excel sheets maybe to track who complained about what and when. And sometimes they might send them an update, but mostly they don't.

And yeah, we're basically offering the first dedicated system for politicians that they can use. And therefore, there's a lot of interest in that. Of course, there are also parts about our product which they don't like that much—the transparency part, maybe. And we want to make politics a little more measurable and make it more transparent for citizens, like what their elected officials are doing. But of course, that also depends on the politician. Some who embrace it and see it as a big step forward and the way democracy should work. But yeah, it's as always in life—there are ups and downs and pros and cons.

And overall, I would still say politicians are very eager to see the product finally launching. And yeah, it's also because we engage with them quite well. As I mentioned, we give them the opportunity to suggest features and tools they are looking for, they're needing. And since we work with them so closely, I guess they really feel heard, and they feel like they can get something out of that collaboration. Because at the end of the day, there'll be a great product that they can use in their daily lives which will save them a lot of work.

So just to give you an example: for instance, within one party, sometimes it happens that seven politicians within one party get the same email from the same citizen. Then they, by accident, might find out that they all got the same email. So then they want to coordinate who's going to reply to that particular email. So they just send each other hundreds, sometimes thousands of emails, depending on how many people are in the party, just to coordinate on who's responding to one single email from a citizen. And this is surely not very efficient and would save them lots of hours of work. And therefore, I guess we have them creating a lot of value for them in their daily work. And that gives them the opportunity to deploy this time that they've saved more effectively in other domains where they can have a greater impact than just sending emails around.

Alessandro: Yeah. And do you want to share anything about your childhood? I don't know, where did you grow up?

Magnus: Okay, I'm a little bit private about my stuff. Yeah, as you can probably tell, I'm from Germany by my accent. And I grew up in Baden-Baden. And during my childhood, I guess I was always very interested in sports. I did track and field. I was running the 400 meters. And so that prepares you well for life because you're willing to take on a lot of suffering, and especially the last 100 meters of the 400 are quite hard. And that was a good preparation for life in general, I guess.

Apart from sports, I was always very interested in society and economics, I guess. My parents encouraged me to read the newspaper, so we had lots of different newspapers already lying around in the house. And I got interested mostly in the economics part because I think economics is a very big determinant of how society unfolds. If you're in an economic crisis, then society takes a big hit, for instance. And therefore, civic life will also go in a much different direction than it would otherwise, as we can probably see in Argentina right now and before.

And yeah, that was what I was mostly interested in. But I already had lots of different interests and also in technology. And I like to travel a lot and go to different countries. And you tend to talk to people also about politics, of course. And then you'll eventually figure more or less everyone is having similar problems at the end of the day. And yeah, this is also very encouraging because it means that our product is scalable, so we can not just use it in Germany, but we can also deploy it to other representative democracies all over the world.

But yeah, the way I ended up where I am right now was, I guess, more or less by chance. Of course, I always have plans and I'm planning ahead, but in life, you have to take it the way it comes. So my academic journey was very fruitful and helpful for what I'm doing now. And yeah, let's see where the journey continues and which way it's going.

Alessandro: Yeah, I was thinking about... because you said something related to economics and how it changes... it can change citizen behavior... economy can also be a sort of incentive, maybe. I mean, when they talk about civic education and about... I don't know, giving something, they use that may... the UBI and that participate... I was thinking that this can also be a sort of incentive for people to participate. I know that some people agree to some degree in some way that the citizen that is using his or her own time to participate in public life can be also compensated, as if he's a politician—like a part-time politician.

And I was wondering if, with all of these kinds of technologies that are being developed now—I mean, the civic tech software, GovTech—if in the future we will see some... if everyone will become in some way a part-time politician, because we participate, and maybe we reach some AI, at least, and then the right person to the right politician. Then I don't know... what are your ideas? If you had that... have you thought about possibilities for the future? I mean...

Magnus: That would be awesome, I guess. With AI, I always have to be careful, of course, but I tend to see the positive sides as bigger than the negative sides. And of course, with great potential comes great responsibility and great threats. But I guess AI is definitely something which is very helpful to see the patterns in the noise that we are seeing right now in public opinion. And because just starting from the way citizens express themselves—sometimes they have problems expressing the underlying core problem, what they're trying to say.

So just to give you an example: I might say, "My local kebab is becoming so expensive—it's doubled in prices." And what I really want to say is that inflation is hitting hard, purchasing power is decreasing. So that's the underlying core problem or the meta-problem which one citizen is facing. And I guess AI is very good in identifying this core problem and then clustering it together with other opinions of the same category. And therefore, giving politicians good insights into what's going on.

And coming to your point of everyone becoming mini-politicians, so to say, I guess that would be awesome. I like that direct democracy component of it. Because right now, we are picking... we're picking a whole menu of political stances that we're avoiding. We're voting for one party, and that might be some parts in the party that you're voting for that you like, but also something that you dislike. So in Germany, for instance, we have this so-called "Wahl-O-Mat." And prior to each federal election, you can rate different statements based on whether you agree, disagree, or see yourself as neutral. And then at the end, it suggests which political party might fit your political view.

And typically, at least for me, I get a maximum overlap of about two-thirds, maximum 80% with one party that overlaps the best with my political views. But still, nonetheless, I have to vote for one party, which means I have a further 20% of that particular party which I don't like. And therefore, I see it as an improvement if we could pick à la carte, so to say—entire direct democracy like in Switzerland. Because metaphorically, you would also not go to a restaurant where you can just pick one fixed menu of entrée, main, and dessert, and then you say you don't like one out of the three, but you still have to take all of the three at once and pay for it.

And therefore, I guess it's a good way forward if we create tools which allow us to express our views on different topics. Because I guess in the past, it might have been easier in terms of... you had one view and you fit it very well to one party. But these days, the world is becoming more and more complex. And with this complexity, I guess the different variations of political views that you're seeing increases as well. And therefore, the mismatch of citizens and the parties. And therefore, technological tools provide a good opportunity to address this issue.

Of course, technological tools will not solve all problems because they can, right now, they can just be enabling tools to help with the processes that we set up—the political processes. And if they are flawed—if the political system itself is flawed—then there's only so much you can do about trying to help and fix it with technological tools. But yeah, maybe in the end, politics is also adaptive. And maybe we end up in the future making all voting decisions on platforms like Nexus Politics or others, where you can voice your opinions and then politicians follow the public opinion which is expressed there to make sure that preferences are aligned with outcomes in politics.

Alessandro: Yeah, I was thinking also about all possible evolution. Because there is... you know, civic tech can go back that sometimes they are very connected. And so in some way, like a Facebook or something, other than solve that kind of problem in the chat, the software can connect the citizen to the politician—the right politician—or in some way. And if they're not... I don't know if they require more citizens, they're software can also put more citizens in contact to citizen together, so that they... that approach will be more civic tech in some way. But that is what you are saying about pivoting on the way that you can always change your vision for the future.

Magnus: Exactly. And then... and yet you mentioned some... our features that you wanted to... other... I don't know, you have some sort of vision about the future where we were saying... that it could be possible that there are part-time politicians or multiple... I don't know, little politicians. I don't know if you have any idea about... I mean, I'm sure you have and also we talked about it before. And how do you expect democracy to be in five, ten, twenty years? Do you think that there will be major disruption? And I think there will be changes coming for sure because what I'm personally foreseeing is that we, as a society, we're facing lots of challenges ahead. First and foremost, the technological revolution.

And what I see there is that, so of course, we always had technological progress over time, meaning that new jobs were being created, and it was always very beneficial for society overall. And I think this time it might be different. And the reason for that being is that in the past—we had the industrial revolution—so first, people were working on the fields, but then the industrial revolution basically freed them from the labor in the fields, put them in factories, and they were there. But then in the factories, they also eventually became obsolete because machines could do much better work than human labor could do there. So they ended up in the service sector, so doing cognitive work.

And then now we're at the point in time where also cognitively, machines are becoming better than humans, or at least a part of humans. And the problem that I see is that there's only... there are only so many domains in which humans can do work. So that's the one component—labor. And that's the other one—it's cognitive work, physical work, and cognitive work. These are the two which humans can do, and maybe a third—emotional work as a third category. But at least in the physical and the cognitive domain, machines are now at par or becoming even better than humans. Meaning now when humans are becoming also obsolete in the service sector—so the white-collar jobs which are being replaced—then I don't see too many domains left where humans can do any work.

And because capitalism dictates that everything that can be done by machine faster, better, and cheaper will eventually be done by machine. And therefore, I guess we're running out of domains where humans can retreat to. And one, as I mentioned, might be emotional work, which also... where I also see entertainment, for instance, sports, and that kind of stuff, which might become more and more important. I guess we also see this in the salaries already, where sports stars are earning crazy amounts of money because when people are freed from labor, hence they have more free time, hence they need to consume, hence they want to be entertained. And the more attention is being directed into this entertainment industry, the more money there is, of course.

And yeah, what I'm trying to say here is that we're facing challenges because technology will free us even more and more from work. And then, I guess, the transformation process up to a new society setup will be the challenging part. So we have to find solutions and how we want to structure our economies and our societies when there's not enough labor for everyone anymore. So if there's mass unemployment and it increases and increases, then I guess we have to come up with solutions—be it universal basic income, be it other forms of how people are rewarded for participating or contributing to society.

So you mentioned earlier, for instance, that you can become a mini-politician. And by doing that, you have positive externalities, and then we might have to think about maybe rewarding these positive externalities that you are having—the work that you do for society. And so it's going to be very interesting. To be honest, I don't have any solution. Otherwise, I would express it here. But I can clearly see some challenging challenges coming up. And yeah, I guess Nexus Politics is going to be one platform where we can have a decent discussion about how we want to address these issues, what kind of societal setups we want to implement in the future. And yeah, hopefully, we get it operational if everything goes well in time to have these conversations.

But to be honest, I think the technological revolution always takes place in a nonlinear relationship. So it's not like every year so many percent of jobs will be replaced, but it's more like nonlinear exponential growth patterns. And so right now, we're talking about it, but we don't see any progress. But then all of a sudden, it's omnipresent, and many white-collar people will lose their jobs. And then we should definitely be prepared. So we have the conversation now and make sure that the transformation process will not be that nasty.

Alessandro: Yeah. And if you can share anything about the industry... I think of all kinds of... maybe I don't know, products, software, companies that you're following or are excited because I don't know, maybe they are doing something complementary to Nexus Politics or...

Magnus: Well, there are very interesting projects out there, so I'm always open for having conversations with like-minded people. So I'm reaching out to a lot of platforms that are doing similar work in the same ecosystem, and I find some very interesting. So Crowd Insights, for instance, are doing—I would say similar work to us—so giving a civic tech solution where they also give citizens the opportunity to participate by voicing their opinions. I guess GoVocal is something which is related to our work, which is quite interesting. But then the most prominent one, at least in Germany, is probably the Wahl-O-Mat, which I mentioned, which gives citizens the opportunity to find parties that are matching for upcoming elections with their preferences.

And then the more established ones which might be Change.org, which is a petition platform. And yeah, I guess all of them—they share that they offer one particular solution to one particular problem. And the difference in our approach is that we want to have it all integrated into one platform, such that you don't have a million apps on your mobile phone which you use for each individual use case, but you just have it all combined together on one platform which allows you to easily do everything that is related to politics.

And we are very open to collaborations and so on. We decided from the start that we want to do the whole project open source because first of all, open source creates transparency. Transparency builds trust. And trust is very much needed because in the political space, we want to make sure that everyone believes us that we are nonpartisan, which is our objective. So we want to offer everyone a platform to voice their opinions, concerns, etc., to make it very representative. Because that's what, at the end, is needed in order to make it useful for democracy and not just creating one echo chamber there.

And yes, since we're doing it open source, I guess lots of opportunities for other projects to collaborate with us—by us sharing our data and maybe vice versa, where they can build solutions on top of our platform. And yeah, happy to reach out to other fellow like-minded entrepreneurs who want to make an impact and help us tackle the problems that we are facing in democracy with good solutions.

Alessandro: Yeah, it's always nice to collaborate. And I was thinking, are you facing any kind of problem right now? I don't know, the reason... can you... would you like to fix or maybe the reason... I didn't know you're searching for something, kind of person or skill? Maybe someone will listen and...

Magnus: Yeah, and so the main problems we're facing nowadays is that we only have 24 hours, and we are already working like crazy, but can't get everything done. Of course, we're using a lot of AI internally as well, but I'm still always looking for people willing to support us. And so I guess there are different forms of support from us. First of all, we created this so-called Democracy Ambassador Program, where mostly students but also other people who are interested can support us with helping us, for instance, with our social media content or other stuff voluntarily whenever they want to. And in exchange, we have some perks and benefits which we're offering them. So we're inviting them to different events or giving them some goodies every now and then in exchange for the work. And so that would be the first thing.

Second thing is, I guess, we have ambitions. We want to grow, so we're always looking for other people joining our team. And so if you have very good technical skills—so this is what we are looking for right now—then feel free to reach out to us. And yeah, also if you are very well connected in the political space, I guess I would be very happy to have a chat. If you can open some doors to us in terms of gaining potential customers, that would be very much appreciated. But also the unknown unknowns—so if you like... if you can contribute to our project by something I didn't mention yet, feel free to reach out to us, and maybe we find a way of how to go on this journey together.

Alessandro: And if you have any message for people in the civic tech space—I mean, people that are exploring solutions, experimenting...

Magnus: Well, I guess my main message would be: keep going. First of all, if you haven't started yet, give it a try. Just go out, try it, talk to politicians, talk to public administration officials. You will find a million problems out there which are worth solving, and you might be amazed how much positive feedback you're getting. Because I tend to say we are riding the wave of political dissatisfaction, which is more like a tsunami right now and not just a little wave. And I mean, this is good for us in the sense that it helps us... we're getting a lot of support and attention.

And yeah, I highly encourage others to do the same because at the end of the day, there are so many problems that every one of us can only offer a single puzzle piece to the whole thing. And yeah, all the work is needed. All your contributions are needed. So if you don't know where to get started, reach out to me, and I can name you some potential avenues. But other than that, keep pushing. And I know it's sometimes very bumpy, the journey, and it can be very discouraging every now and then. But I guess great satisfaction only comes from great suffering. And that's something I learned from running the 400 meters. So only if it was very, very painful during the race, you get this feeling of satisfaction at the end. And I guess it's very much the same in entrepreneurship. So keep pushing, take the big challenges, and make an impact.

Alessandro: Him, thank you. And if you'd like to add anything else—maybe that I haven't asked you about Nexus Politics if you want to add something else—are you... anything that you mentioned, all the important things...

Magnus: Oh, that's so much. I guess I could continue talking for hours, but I would just say stay tuned—there's more to come. So we are very early stage as of now, but we are making big leaps forward. So yeah, there's more to come. And I think I would just make use of the opportunity now to thank our supporters who have already contributed quite significantly to this project.

First of all, a big thank you and shout-out to my incredible co-founder Christoph. He's an amazing guy—super smart, super intelligent, knowledgeable in the tech space. So it's a great pleasure working with him. And then our sponsors from the EXIST scholarship. We're also supported by the Professorship of Policy Analysis at the Technical University of Munich. So that's amazing to have them on board. We have some Democracy Ambassadors supporting us, and of course, the entire TUM ecosystem—the incubator, the startup consultancy, etc.—who are supporting us. So big thanks to all of them.

Also to the politicians we're working with already for giving us their trust at the beginning. I know it's very risky asking politicians to support a for-profit project which is out there, but you don't know yet in which direction that will be developing. But we have great support out there. And yeah, let's hope that we can continue in the direction we have ever have, and... yeah.

Alessandro: Thank you again, Magnus, for your time.

Magnus: Listen, thank you for having me on this podcast. Great pleasure to be invited by you, talking about Nexus Politics. And keep it up—you're doing great work. I love your podcast, and I'm already curious about the upcoming participants. So thank you.