Eric Wilson 0:04

Welcome to the Campaign Trend Podcast, where you're joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. My guest today is Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, and now the founder and CEO of SOAR and Citizen Portal. Paul built one of the first companies to take an enormous unread archive and make it personal for hundreds of millions of people. Now he's applying AI to a different archive: the meetings, ordinances, and records of local government that basically no one reads. And the newspapers that used to cover that are gone. So most of the conversation about AI and democracy right now is defensive. We're talking about deep fakes and disinformation and labeling requirements. Paul's making kind of the opposite case, which is why I'm excited to talk with him today, that AI can produce a more informed electorate than we've ever had. And so we'll dig into what happens when this data becomes a little bit more accessible and what this might mean for campaigns. Paul, almost everything written about AI and elections this cycle is about what it's going to do to voters. So you've spent the last few years arguing the reverse. What can an ordinary citizen do with AI today that really wasn't possible five years ago?

Paul Allen 1:36

Yeah, I'd love to, Eric, and thank you for having me on the show. Uh about two or three years ago when I started publicly speaking about Citizen Portal AI, and I was fortunate to be discovered by Glenn Beck. He invited me to his podcast, then he invited me to Dallas. And he actually said that Citizen Portal will shift the balance of power between the electeds and the uh and the electorate, the, the, the citizens. Uh, and he said it would save our democracy, it would save our republic. And I was like kind of shocked and happily surprised by his vision for that. But but as I started speaking publicly about it, I tried to make the case, Eric, that doing genealogy today with Ancestry.com's 80 billion records and AI is a thousand times easier than it was in the 1970s and 80s. And I don't think that's an exaggeration. I think it was extremely time-consuming and expensive. When we first built Ancestry.com, we surveyed a lot of genealogists and found that the average genealogist spent $538 a year on correspondence and photocopying and subscriptions to a magazine or buying software, uh, all these different fees, and we tried to put it all in one stop, like one place where all the records could exist, search engines and your family tree software. And then what was fun was a hint engine that would kind of go through the billions of records and say, Eric, we think this person is a little shaky leaf. Yeah. Uh Josh Pedrod designed the shaky leaf, but a few years before him, we had a four, four-star, five-star matching service. We had a free website, a free software program called Ancestry Family Tree. And in 99, when we put it up, a million people downloaded it and started using it to grow their family tree with the back uh in the background, uh, search engine was helping you find the next record in the next record. So that was even a few years before the shaky leaf. But Eric, I do think that accessing government information is insanely hard. And most citizens don't even try because where do you start? And where do you go next? And so the whole kind of a database of all of it, vectorizing it all, making it chat GPTable. And then uh a little hint engine, a little shaky leaf that says, Hey Eric, I noticed you're interested in this. Would you like to see this and this and this? A little proactive coach or guide to help you navigate the endlessly complex world of government.

Eric Wilson 3:56

Yeah, so that's a that's interesting because obviously with genealogy, I'm interested in in where I came from and my history. And, you know, you, you know, is there any truth to that family lore that that you grew up on? And so it's personal and you care about it. I think one of the challenges uh with government documents and city council meetings is most people don't want to think about politics. Um there it's not something that they want to spend a lot of time about. You we obviously see people get very passionate when maybe there's gonna be a data center built in their uh community or some change going on at the local school. Um how do you re I don't know, recapture some of that magic of, hey, I'm I'm learning more about my who I am with my past, uh, and in this case, I'm learning more about who I am by being engaged in my community.

Paul Allen 4:52

It's a great question. I think there's a very, very simple answer. And that is uh find all the things that are super meaningful and relevant to each person, a citizen. What do you want to accomplish in life? What do you want to see uh uh the world be like, and uh and then show them how easy or hard it is to accomplish those dreams where they live. So here's an example home ownership. It's been touted for many cent decades as the American dream. And I actually think there's a much better American dream, which is um David Friedberg has articulated this recently on the uh Diary of a CEO podcast and also on the All-In podcast. David is a great scientist and a brilliant AI practitioner. He says, uh, socialism, if socialism takes hold in the United States, will permanently assign consign every worker to permanently be in the working class. You will work for your wages for the rest of your life. That's what socialism does. You can't own and control businesses or means of production, the government owns it all, and now you work for your wages. And oftentimes in the Soviet Union, you were assigned your job. Like it wasn't even something you get to choose. There was a kind of assignment. I studied Russian in college, and so it was fascinating to see how a tiny number of people could control 250 million people in the Soviet Union. Okay, so David Freeberg makes the argument that the number one KPI, the key performing metric for the United States of America, should be graduating 2% of the labor class uh every year into the capital class, meaning you've worked hard, you've saved money, you have enough money now, and maybe you built a business and sold it. That's probably the fastest path to graduate from the working class to the capital class. But if 2% a year for 50 years could make that graduation, then 100% of Americans would be so wealthy that they could choose to work if they want to, but they could also uh live off their investments, live off their savings. In Singapore, one out of every six people is a millionaire. In the United States of America, we have far more resources and a lot more knowledge and experience and innovation history, a lot more patents. I don't see any reason why 2% of Americans can't become capitalists or have enough money to retire or live on uh and not work if you didn't choose to. Um now most of us would choose to work because it's fulfilling, it's exciting. But um I think that's a great uh vision for the future. So the way that we are launching a website dedicated, a whole company dedicated to that 2% per year thesis that David Friedberg has articulated is to build freedomportal.ai. Uh it's being fundraised right now, a million dollars. We're actually uh we're filing under SEC rules to uh to do uh uh an open public solicitation for accredited investors. But the Freedom Portal will take the dream of homeownership, the dream of starting a business, maybe the dream of building your own home or expanding your home, repairing your home, uh, maybe the concept of getting married and having a family, and it will look at the regulations, laws, requirements, permits, all the hassle that is required of you to get permission to do any of those things. And we will then calculate in simple dollars how come it's so expensive to buy a home in my city. Well, there are state ordinances that have minimum lot size requirements. So developers can't just carve up parcels that are small and build homes that are small. There's almost no starter homes being built in the United States. Why? Because of state laws or city and county building code. And so there is a pretty clear path that the that or pretty clear insight that 25 to 40 percent of the cost of a new home is not labor and materials. It's bureaucracy, red tape, permits, inspections. Some people can't remodel their bathroom without a hundred uh yeses from the bureaucrats in the city, county, or state government. So I think Freedom Portal will, for the first time in U.S. history, use AI to analyze all the rules, laws, and regulations that you live under. And when you want to accomplish something like start a business, or my friend uh had two buddies in college uh in Charlottesville, Virginia, they wanted to start a snow shack business to make money during the summer so they could pay for their tuition, they gave up after six weeks of wrestling with bureaucracy. So Freedom Index, Freedom Portal will launch a freedom index for all those things you want to do that the average American thinks ought to be available to me because this is a free country, right? This is the land of the free and the home of the brave. But if AI can dissect every local ordinance, uh Berkeley has a data set called Locust, 2.2 million city ordinances on hugging face. We can use AI to analyze city laws, county laws, state laws and regulations, federal regulations, what the EPA says you can't do on your own property if you have a puddle of water. We are not a free country anymore, Eric. And it's harming people at scale because we think we're a free country, but you can't do almost anything without permission from some levels of government and sometimes multiple levels of government. So when you translate local laws and ordinances into the terms that how does this affect me or my kids or my desires to start a business or build a house or sell a business or whatever, we will translate it. We'll show you the encumbrances you're personally facing, and then we'll reverse engineer all those laws and say, Eric, why don't you vote for people that have a pro-freedom agenda? They want you to be economically free. They want you to be able to use your time, your talents, and your property in a way that you choose as an adult to build, to dream, to make, to harvest, and not to be told no or slowed down or have two or three times the expense required to do something that an American would want to do in a free country.

Eric Wilson 10:58

So, Paul, we I think this is a really compelling use case for AI of almost like the missing manual of how to interact with government. And and and you know, I I'll be maybe devil's advocate here a little bit, which I believe that most of these are well-intentioned regulations. I would say, you know, we we want things to be better, but what what we know about bureaucracy and government is that you only add to it, never nothing ever gets taken away. There's a a bill that's been around several uh, I mean, over a decade now called the Rains Act, which is basically having a regulatory budget. You know, you can propose a really good idea, but something else has to come out because as you as you correctly point out, that once we add sort of regulations. Um and I I think that that's one of the really interesting use cases that we're we're we're seeing for AI at the local level. What do you see the role of? I mean, I I think it's very difficult right now when we don't have a business model for local journalism, right? Yeah, we we just can't keep an eye on all of the things that we need to keep an eye on if you don't have reporters going to the you know city council meeting and school board meetings, and and that's just not happening in most communities. Is AI going to replace that or or create something new? Uh where do you see that fitting in the transparency layer?

Paul Allen 12:31

Well, one of my great experiences in life, because I studied Russian, uh, I got invited to uh Utah Valley University uh lecture by Dmitry Morotov, the Russian journalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, along with a Filipino journalist named uh, I believe Maria Rice. And um, he spoke about if you don't have independent journalism in a country, you don't have freedom. And of course, he's been outspoken, a critic of Putin. It's amazing that he's still alive, uh, but he's so courageous. He reminded me of uh Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov, those great Russian dissidents who challenged uh the power of central government. So Dmitry and I took photos together. I told him about citizenportal.ai, that we could transcribe every public meeting in the United States. Anything that's been recorded, it can be uploaded to citizenportal.ai and it's transcribed, and then uh dozens of articles can be written about any particular meeting. We have a newsworthiness score, and so if there's a topic of a meeting that's newsworthy, the AI writes a headline, writes a very objective article, but then we click, we, we try, we link to the actual transcript. So if you don't like how the article describes the vote in that city council, you click through and you watch the replay of it, or you read the transcript. So, but I don't think AI can ever replace independent journalism and the free press. Um, so we are now talking to lots of press associations, a lot of news organizations. We're like, okay, how can a business be built that allows what doesn't make economic sense today, which is a local newspaper or even a digital online newspaper? You can't afford the labor costs to do all the work. But uh, we're launching a newspaper business in a box. So let's say, Eric, you have uh 15 Brock bots that are perfectly trained to help you gather the news, transcribe stories, build a newsroom, and build your website for you, build a mobile app for you, build your Substack for you. And for a couple hundred dollars or maybe a thousand dollars a month, you pay Freedom Portal and our AI experts uh a little bit of money to get 10 or 15 full-time AI agents doing most of the work, except the important and essential human value of wisdom and perspective and context. So the AI can go do all the tedious tasks. It can transcribe, it can, it can write headlines. But then the human, you could have a one-man newsroom or a one-woman newsroom with all these AI assistants. It's probably economically adviable. We're starting to track every newspaper that's been shut down in this country in the last 20 years. We're gonna go back to the brand, go back to the owners, and say, what if you resurrect uh as a kind of a solopreneur business in a box where AI is doing most of the heavy lifting, but the humans doing the most important part, which is showing up and presenting uh uh context for the raw news that's being presented. Like, and then you build an online community. We're launching discourse uh community on Citizen Portal and Freedom Portal, where every citizen can can weigh in and share an idea or or critique a proposal. Like, I think the world is about to change for the better, and that independent and citizen journalism will absolutely become a viable business. There will be tens of thousands of targeted niche community newspapers, online, mobile apps, and we're ready to start doing deals with people all across the country to be the turnkey uh provider of those of those raw data sets and those AI tools.

Eric Wilson 16:00

Yeah. And and Paul, I think one one of the really interesting aspects here. I mean, I I love the vision that you're you're you're um laying out here. And I think we are not that far away from it because you it it was a business model problem. It wasn't that demand for journalism went away, it was the business model, just didn't work. Um and and I I think that there's something to be said there. And especially when you think about news and being involved in your community, it's kind of like eating your vegetables, right? People you when I was growing up, what did we do? We watched the TV news because you wanted to see what the weather and sports were going to be. Well, in order to get that, you had to eat 15 minutes of vegetables in the form of national, regional, local news. And and then once I got an app that told me the weather and apps that told sports scores, you didn't have to eat your vegetables anymore. And so I think if we start to have AI that can eat the vegetable for us or at least, you know, make it taste better, and and going out and proactively doing that sort of thing, I I think that's really, really compelling. And and I I think people would welcome that. The one group of people that I don't think are going to welcome this are elected officials. So I I remember, you know, there was public records in the Senate. Public in quotation marks there. Um, you know, they should have been online. They weren't available. You go to the basement, you have to sign in, give your name, get the documents, and then pay a lot of money to get them scanned and printed. Um lot of what counts as public nowadays is is, you know, a scanned PDF that you couldn't do anything about. Um it sure felt like the obscurity was a a feature, not a bug, on a lot of the the public information. Is AI taking away the incentive for uh these elected officials to hide what they're doing or obscure what they're doing? Or are we starting another cat and mouse game where they're just gonna figure out how to hide their moves somewhere else?

Paul Allen 18:03

I I actually challenge one of your premises. I actually think most elected officials who are public servants who are not lifetime career politicians will welcome transparency. Most people that I know who run for public office are trying to make a positive dent in their community. It's not until they get sucked in to kind of the permanent political class that maybe they start playing by some of those rules and games. And so I actually think there's most of the 519,000 office holders in the United States will welcome not only transparency, but efficiency and automation of making things transparent. I've been talking to public records officials across the country and also the lawyers and the press associations who are behind lots of the FOIA requests and the records requests. And there's a huge burden being placed on our public officials, our government employees. They cannot keep up with the AI-generated records requests. It's a really big problem. You know, huge uh increase in records requests. And the painstaking thing that a human clerk or a records official has to do to go through 10,000 emails and do keyword searches and then redact and then follow all the state laws. Every state has different laws and exemptions. And then you have to have a human in the loop, like the city attorney, to kind of release the records. This is expensive. And our goal is to automate the records request, the redaction, all the steps with AI automation. It's very doable. And then we could provide cities, counties, and state agencies and federal agencies with their clerks could have FOIA fleets, fleets of agents that do 99% of the work, and the human always makes the final decision about when and who to release those records to. So I think we can solve the work problem very quickly and very affordably. Um and then to your point about cat and mouse game, um, it's really interesting to see how many tricks there are for making it hard to find things. I I know some amazing people, though, in the open data movement. I I've become become friends with Beth Novak. She was uh under President Obama, she was like the open data czar. She was the reason why data.gov and open data sets were really uh happening. I think she she spent a year or two uh overseeing that. Uh I've met John Hart, who used to work for Senator Coburn, and Coburn and Obama, Obama passed a law 20 years ago on Friday. There's a big party in DC this tomorrow, or yeah, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the uh Obama-Coburn Transparency and Government Act. And that was historic. Senator Obama, for those keeping track at home. Yeah. It was it was bipartisan. And so so I've gotten to know people at the open gov. I mean, there are a lot of people who know where the content is. And I think it'll be harder and harder for those who don't want public to know what's going on. It'll be harder and harder to hide it because AI will give you the power of a thousand uh PhD researchers. Uh anyone who can afford uh to buy Grokbots uh will have their own uh research team. And and uh I don't know, I just think it's gonna be uh promising for the future of government transparency and accountability. And then here's the best part. I am teaming up with uh some amazing organizations. Uh Nick Mastrinardi from Polco, he's the CEO there. At age 29, he was appointed uh out of the Air Force uh to be on the White House Council of Economic Advisors. And in his stint in the White House, he worked with government officials all across the country and found out that almost no government, state and local government officials, were making decisions with data. They were making decisions because of ideology or beliefs or pressure or lobbyists or donors or or, you know, they were just busy and they were not carefully analyzing the long-term uh outcomes of all your bills and policies. And sometimes you pass a thousand bills in the state legislature. How in the world do you know if you've done a good job or not? Well, it's not apparent until one, two, five years later. Nick from uh Polco, he retired from Amazon or left Amazon uh and started Polco to amass all the data sets about municipal uh performance, objective performance measures. He has more data than anyone in the world. And he has 400 amazing American cities where the city managers or the mayor or the or the city itself is paying to use the Polco data to see how well they're performing. And once you are measuring, and once you can uh uh see the good and bad outcomes of policy, you can embrace the good policies, get rid of the bad ones, adjust the budget so that all your citizens are amazed and delighted by the services that your city government provides. Nick is about to scale up Polco and I think uh create a new renaissance of great cities in the United States because you know so many good cities already use his tools, but he's only got 1% of the market. And so when public officials, when the state and local governments, which represent 20% of our economy, when they have data and tools to make great policy decisions every time, I think we're gonna end up with way better policies, sometimes less regulation and sometimes uh uh better implemented laws and rules. But the data will make it really obvious uh who's doing their job and who's not. And I think the citizens need to see the data uh and the tools. In fact, Nick has a budget simulation. Let's say you live in Chicago, Illinois, and you're unhappy with the budget. He'll give you a little SimCity simulation of, okay, what if you were in charge of the budget for a day? What if you change the fire uh fighting budget, the police budget? And he will simulate, using predicted AI, what will happen to the city in the next five years. And you will see if your decisions would be good or bad. And if imagine millions of citizens becoming excited about running Sin City for their own uh place where they love to live, and all of a sudden they show up at a board meeting, a city council meeting, totally informed. The data and the AI has given them confidence that, hey, this policy has worked in a thousand other cities. Here's the outcome three years later. Let's do this. Let's shine a light on the best things that have happened in our laboratories of democracy, and then let's walk away from the policies and programs that never work, and let's just embrace the good.

Eric Wilson 24:28

All right. Well, my thanks to Paul Allen for a great conversation. You can learn more about his work in our show notes. We'll have links to everything that he's talked about. You know that if this episode made you a little bit smarter, we just ask that you share it with a friend or colleague, especially if it gave you something to think about. I know my wheels are spinning. Remember to subscribe to the Campaign Trend Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. And be sure and visit our website, campaigntrend.com, to check out our newsletters and articles there. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Paul Allen 25:04

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