I’ve just realised we’re up for time. Thank you so much for this.

A minister’s schedule.

I talk to many people in government, new people who have gone into government, and I feel like they are experiencing that feeling of being so overwhelmed by the responsibility and just by the pressures of the job that you can see them wanting to shut things out rather than ...

Amazing.

So that’s an AI application you don’t like.

And I think it speaks to that. It’s describing an emerging generational trend of people feeling like other people take energy away rather than give you energy. It gives examples like the rise of noise-canceling headphones where people feel distractions are hard. But there’s an amazing experiment in this article ...

Yeah, it came out a few weeks ago.

Did you read a very, very, very long piece in The Atlantic called “The Antisocial Century”?

It’s about relationships.

Is there any other type of democratic innovation that is beyond digital democracy and deliberative processes that’s inspiring you at the moment?

Tokyo, yeah, with Anno-san. I think digging into that example tomorrow will feel quite tangible to MPs; they will understand the application.

That’s really exciting. We must talk about that tomorrow with the MP. Was it Japan or was it California where they’re using the voice clone?

Do they have a citizen assembly duty then?

Who’s inspiring you at the moment? What inspires you? Coming back to the original question around democratic innovation around the world. It sounds like you are just on an amazing global odyssey, all over the place learning about what’s going on. What’s inspiring?

And I think thinking about some of the mission delivery, it needs to be really kind of letting go at the centre and almost giving permission. Like, there are councils around this country that are doing the most extraordinary horizontal work with people. I did a lot of work in ...

I don’t know, because also GDS is quite kind of centralized.

There are definitely people in government that understand that’s the position they’re in, but they don’t know what that looks like in practice or how to do it. Or, you know, the muscle isn’t there. What could we do to support them to grow that kind of enabling muscle or ...

We can do that.

Yeah.

And it’s always been like that?

Levers. Everybody wants a lever. Whereas actually what’s needed for this to happen is, every time two people sit together, they do something different than what they’re doing now. I feel like the challenge is in the nature of expectations of vertical rather than horizontal relationships and the culture change ...

Can I ask you, is this kind of going slightly in a different direction? But I want to ask you about the kind of cultural change that’s needed within the government to achieve what you need to do. We published some work a couple of weeks ago about the UK ...

Because one of the big, like where this kind of segues into social capital theory for us, is that, you know, you see the bonds of trust crumbling all over the place, except in very small groups in this country. So family groups, community groups, those. And that, you know, ...

When you use the term bridging, do you mean it specifically in the social capital bridging term? Or do you mean it more broadly than that?

Because the criticism of Bluesky and everyone moving on, or kind of everyone of a political persuasion moving onto Bluesky, is that they were ghettoizing.

Yeah, I think you always do <em> with </em> .

So that’s fascinating because, I mean, Trump is on one hand rejecting the whole world and on the other hand, really building a political movement across the world. Do you see it as your mission now to do similar <em> with </em> Taiwan?

Would you want it to go further towards direct democracy?

And in terms of how democracy is functioning in Taiwan now, has it fulfilled your wildest dreams?

So the term unbanked is for people who don’t have a bank and therefore can’t access the economy. If you’re unnewsed… I was a journalist at the time. Now I think about it more as, you know…

Yeah, yeah. And people… That is losing ground now. The term I used years ago, thinking about this, was “unnewsed”—like “unbanked.”

And because counter-misinformation is such a… I think it’s one small part of something, and it starts to… It’s very judgmental of the sources of that information.

That idea is getting more political traction. I think there’s more comfort in thinking about it in those terms at the moment.

Have you just heard the term epistemic security from Elizabeth?

Very useful, yeah. Brilliant. That’s so helpful. I kind of feel like I want to go and reread the book to draw out the evidence. I don’t remember the individual pieces of evidence now. What’s the most compelling evidence, from Taiwan or elsewhere, for this approach for the government?

Which chapter?

What’s the best data on trust that speaks to that? What’s the source of the data?

Yeah, exactly. And what I find inspiring from everything I’ve heard about what you achieved together is that it told a different story about the kind of democracy Taiwan was. What do you think gets you to that tipping point of getting political buy-in and the urgency to make it ...

Yeah. How are we doing for time? I’m fine. Anything else you’d say, just going back to that first question around the enabling conditions? It’s a very clear answer: the urgency, the air cover. I kind of like, just coming back to that idea about scale of ambition…

Broadcast rather than listening.

It’s so funny. I talk to a lot of MPs who are using AI to draft responses to their constituents, but they’re not thinking about how to use AI to get across the incoming.

This is a really extraordinary time. How many years ago would you have not been able to imagine that?

Could you have imagined that 10 years ago?

Yeah.

And then it has a kind of scaled, with a video element, deliberative aspect to it. And the “waves” are the waves of deliberation.

So this is the project we’re launching that I mentioned, in May. It has an AI application which is about processing the evidence and the sense-making piece.

Has Carl talked to you about Waves?

Yeah. That’s so interesting. And it speaks in a very visceral way to MPs here who just feel overwhelmed. You know, I’ve met so many new MPs who were elected last year who are just so overwhelmed by the scale of correspondence, by the scale of legislative bandwidth they need ...

So just moving in different kinds of political positions. Rather than… one of the challenges I hope to address with this project, one of the questions is: how can you make this idea of a more collaborative democracy, of a more sense-making, bridge-building, inclusive democracy… how can we make <em> ...

And how, I think, the political system is looking around the world, seeing incumbents not winning, and feeling like they need to be disruptors—even in government, to be seen to be disrupting the system and not part of it. And in that, I guess some of the discussion at the ...