Using AI To Make Better Informed Citizens – Paul Allen (Citizen Portal)

Paul Allen:

I think it's a really good time for Americans to say, let's lean into AI as citizens to hold our representatives accountable and to make sure that what they say they actually do and what they do actually works.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech Innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Our guest today is Paul Allen, founder of Citizen Portal, an AI powered platform that helps citizens, elected leaders, and other stakeholders be informed and engaged in our representative democracy. He's also the co-founder and former c e o of ancestry.com, which many of you have likely heard of. He's also served as the chief evangelist for Gallup Strengths Finder. In our show today, we learn more about Citizen Portal and what's John Paul to the political tech space for his next company. Paul, before we dig into what you're building with Citizen Portal, what prior involvement did you have in politics that caused you to look at this space for your next startup?

Paul Allen:

Well, I was a political science major when I started university in the early eighties. So I grew up in the most Republican county, in the most Republican state in the United States, <laugh>. So I was a Utah County Reagan supporter as a high school student. And and I, you know, loved American history. I I had two years of AP American history from a teacher who was actually the highest rated teacher in the state of Utah, a man named Dee Allred, a brilliant teacher and lover of the Constitution, American history. So I had AP prep, US history my junior year, and then I had AP history my senior year, and I got a five on the AP exam, and I just thought political science is so awesome. I just, so I started my college career in that, and then I took an international political class and I decided to switch my major to international relations.

And then I made the mistake or made the fateful decision to take a Russian class. And on day one, I fell in love with the Russian language and the idea of speaking Russian. So I switched my major. I ended up graduating with a bachelor's degree in Russian, and of course came to DC and interviewed with the groups that you could get employed by back in the day when you had a Russian degree, there was really no economic or business opportunity. It was back in the Cold War. It was just, you know, work for the government or become a professor. So I kind of took a detour away from political science, but really with the same goal in mind, like freedom means a lot, and liberty is worth any price. And when you think about political science and the geopolitical world that we live in today with some totalitarian authoritarian governments, you kind of wonder how did they get there and why have we not gotten there? And hopefully we'll never get there. But, you know, it's fascinating to study history pol politics, political science, constitutions, legal structures, and especially today with the geopolitical situation in the world today, like the gratitude I feel for having been born and raised in this country is immense.

Eric Wilson:

Well, it's something that we see a lot with entrepreneurs who, I won't say take the blessings of liberty for granted, but understand how fragile the environment is in which they're building companies and why company creation is happening in the United States and not other places. And then as, as you, you build a track record, you, you circle back to, okay, how do I make sure that this stays in place for, for the next generation of entrepreneurs? You know, Paul, you're a very successful serial entrepreneur with multiple exits. So I wanna give our listeners a window into how you think about building businesses. So what's the problem you identified, and you've alluded to it already, and and what's your hypothesis for solving it with Citizen Portal?

Paul Allen:

Well, you know, the great Paul Allen, the late great Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, if you've read his bi, no relation. No relation, unfortunately. But if you read his biography, it's called Idea Man. And what Paul did in his 50, 40 year career as an innovator and a financier and as a entrepreneur, was he would ask the question, what should exist? And then if he answered that question, he would go build it. You know, once he realized something should exist that doesn't, he would build it or fund it or back it. So I think I've kind of had that same D n A, I just like think what should exist. When ancestry.com was born, I was in the right place at the right time and realized that all the world's genealogy records could sit on the internet and be available to every human being.

And that was in 95 in September of 95 when I was in San Francisco at an internet conference. And then because we have freedom, we can go do stuff like that without permission. And so we just, you know, public domain content was our best friend back in the ancestry era. And birth, marriage, death records, military property records, all the kinds of records that you could gather, digitize, index, and make searchable were available freely to anybody. Anybody could have done what I did. Yeah, the, the thing about Citizen Portal and the hypothesis is that the internet actually totally disrupted newspaper industry over the past two or three decades. And the dollars available for local news, specifically

Eric Wilson:

Craigslist, right? <Laugh>,

Paul Allen:

Yeah, exactly. Craigslist, the

Eric Wilson:

Lines on, on, on classified advertising

Paul Allen:

For sure. That was a huge factor. But then also just attention and readership and viewership, like, think of all the eyeballs that are on TikTok every day and, and YouTube. And so the video first advertising supported model has largely sucked the dollars out of the newspaper industry. Yeah. So there's almost no good journalistic coverage of the governments that we live under. And so if they can't afford to send a journalist to a state legislature meeting or a city council meeting or county meeting, the citizens don't have that fourth pillar of government, that fourth estate functioning anymore. And I think personally, my hypothesis is that the decline of trust in government, which is really tragically low, I think Gallup did a poll a week ago that said Mexico, 75% of the citizens of Mexico think the Mexican government is corrupt. And 74% of American citizens think the government is corrupt.

Yeah. So we're ranked up there with African dictators in terms of citizen trust of government. Now, that's sickening, actually, but I think it's largely exacerbated by the fact that nobody knows what's really going on in public meetings. We don't have time in our busy lives as parents and wage earners, and, you know, whatever busy things we've got going on in our personal lives, we don't have time to be a citizen to go to all the meetings. That's why we elect representatives to go for us. Right? But if the, if the fourth estate, the freedom of the press and an honest objective group of journalists no longer exists, and instead we get left side talking points, right side talking points, and social media amplifying the noisiest noise because it creates engagement and therefore ad dollars, we're kind of in a perfect storm right now. So the hypothesis is, well, every single public meeting in the United States that's being recorded, which most meetings are supposed to be, can now be transcribed by AI built into a powerful search engine.

And then AI can match your personal interests as a citizen with the very content that is affecting your life at the local, state or federal level. So AI does these magical things, and now every citizen can have their own fourth estate, this direct feed of what really was said by my representatives or others in that elected body that affect my life, that interact with or intersect with my issues that I care about as a citizen. So I think it can lead to a new, newly created generation of informed and engage citizens and really restore that missing element, which is knowledge informed citizenry is required. Jefferson said, if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never has been and never will be.

Eric Wilson:

Right. And timing, as we know, is also a critical part of, of launching a startup that gains traction and achieves product market fit. You can have the right business model and the right technology, but if your market isn't right, you'll flop. So what's the confluence of events that you see happening in politics, media, and technology that makes this the right time for something like Citizen Portal?

Paul Allen:

Well, I agree that timing is actually the biggest factor of all. So Bill Gross, who ran Idea Labs in Pasadena for decades and started over a hundred or 200 successful companies, he's one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history. He actually did a study and found that I believe 42% of the weight of what factors would lead to success for a startup was timing. It was more important than the team, than the product, than the market size or the amount of funding that I

Eric Wilson:

See it all the time in politics too. <Laugh>,

Paul Allen:

Yes. No, it's the, the, and I, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, but if it's the wrong time, it's like, oh, sorry, you know, come back 10 years from now, you know, ship pet food over the internet, you know, 10, 20 years later. But, you know, pets.com and whatever, all the grocery deliveries, you know, there was so many failures in the nineties. Mark Andressen basically said they just missed it, the timing. Okay. So to answer your question, I think that there are several factors that make this the perfect time. I already described the perfect storm of negative reasons why citizens are no longer informed, engaged, and they don't trust their government. Okay? That's, that's been happening for some time. But video as our primary way of learning really came on the scene in Covid, where workplaces and even government meetings were now being zoomed and recorded. And so there was this massive increase in available video content. And secondly, the AI transcription costs have come down based on Moore's law. It used to be, you know, many, many dollars per hour, and now it's actually declining. I actually see the day where transcribing an hour of video will cost like 2 cents or 3 cents. It's, it's really plummet,

Eric Wilson:

Right? I mean, it's just built into the products, right? I mean, the, the, the software we're using to record this podcast has transcription built into it.

Paul Allen:

Well, they're paying quite a bit for it. You know, they're, you're,

You're paying them. But I'm saying the cost, I mean, for me, I've seen it plummet, you know, 75, 80% couple years in a row. And when that continues for two or three more cycles, it'll be 2 cents, 3 cents an hour. So almost free to transcribe everything. Search engines are almost free to use and to build. And, and then AI is really powerful. It's kind of expensive to use a large language model to prompt the AI to find the portion of the transcript. It doesn't just have a keyword match, but is actually what you need to know as a citizen or an elected official. So looking at the words and phrases is important. You can do all kinds of keyword searches, but the best part is what Citizen Portal's doing next, which is if you care about, let's say, childhood literacy, and you don't wanna know every time books are mentioned in your school council meeting or or childhood reading, what you wanna know is, are there any new ideas?

Are there any programs across the country that people are trying or reporting that they worked? And so all of a sudden you can use a chat g p t Prompt or some other large language models that we're experimenting with, and you could say, okay, go do a query across the United States, what, what every school board is saying about a certain topic. But look for the times where people are saying, Hey, we tried this and it worked, and here's the statistics. Like one of the cool things about democracy is it's this laboratory. It's actually thousands of laboratories where we could try different policies, but if they don't work, if they don't result in the outcomes that we were aiming for, they were bad policies. If they do work, they ought to spread across the country, right? So we think Citizen Portal, because of the availability of video transcriptions, AI to look for intent, and to look for success, and then spread that success, I mean, it's perfect timing to launch this and to make it freely available to every American citizen for the local content and state content that affects their life. If you want to understand what's going on nationwide, you pay a small monthly subscription fee similar to an ancestry.com, although much less expensive mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and you become a super powerful informed citizen that can advocate forcefully for things that worked in Oklahoma or Kansas, but they need to be introduced in Missouri. That's the kind of exciting goal that I think we're, we're looking at here. It's gonna require lots of citizens to be involved. I like to say that self-government requires a lot more selves than we are currently providing <laugh>.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Paul Allen, founder of Citizen Portal about connecting citizens with information about their governments and using new artificial intelligence technology to do that. Paul, one of the challenges that we have in this space is that elected officials and bureaucrats don't always want public information to be easily accessible for, for obvious reasons. We see a lot of malicious compliance, for example, with, with Freedom of Information Act requests, where, you know, they've got the, the data on online and in some sort of cloud-based software, but then they send the requester PDFs or printed out documents. So what are you doing to overcome that with Citizen Portal?

Paul Allen:

I would not want to be an elected official that doesn't believe in transparency, and that has something to hide.

Eric Wilson:

And yet they, they exist.

Paul Allen:

Well, they do, but their days are numbered. If you think about the surveillance state that we were all worried about with Edward Snowden's revelations, what the N Ss A or the C I A or any law enforcement in the United States is, you know, hoovering up US citizens' data mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or metadata, and what could be done with that in, in the wrong hands? That's kind of a scary prospect. Well, public meetings are, are public and government documents largely, unless they're classified or public. And so there's gonna be a massive amount of access that citizens will have powered by ai. AI will start to detect patterns of bad behavior among elected officials. I, I think it's a really good time for Americans to say, let's lean into AI as citizens to hold our representatives accountable and to make sure that they're, what they say they actually do and what they do actually works.

And then they aren't, they're not self-serving. They're not self-dealing. You know, there is a revolving door. I've read the payoff, I've read, throw them all out. I've read research about corruption in Washington and in both parties and insider trading and things like that. So that exists, but the time for that is limited because citizens will soon be very tipped off by AI about what's really going on. And I think honest and good politicians are gonna have to step forward because they're the ones that will actually survive the scrutiny. You know, the surveilled are gonna soon be surveilling the surveyors. And I know that's kind of, you know, sci-fi type thing. I, I'm, I'm, I'm not trying to reminds Be crazy about Yeah, yeah. The Circle was amazing. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That was an incredible book. But, but I do think that access to knowledge is power and citizens will soon have incredible access to AI filtered knowledge on the issue you care about and the things that have worked and the things that don't work. And so I'm very, very enthusiastic about the resurgence of representative democracy in the coming years, powered by ai.

Eric Wilson:

There's an interesting microcosm of this, right? So there's a, a, a, a Twitter account called Unusual Whales, and it's, it's tracking you know, the stock trades of, of members of Congress. Yes. Well, that, that data has been available for decades now within the last 10 years became available online, but only with that mix of, hey, we have a kind of a post wall Streett Betts in investor, retail investor culture mixed with social media and talk about timing. But that, that data now comes together in that that, that useful way, which is now leading us to look at, okay, well, should we restrict members of Congress on the individual trades that they're able to make? So

Paul Allen:

Well, and Sunlight Foundation, sunlight Foundation does a good job of attracting donations, but there's no central place if you had a citizen portal with tens of millions of active users, and, you know, Ballotpedia is fantastic because people go there to kind of find out who to vote for, but after you vote, we kind of basically say, we're done. Like, right. <Laugh> citizens aren't doing anything after that. Like you, you put your I I voted sticker on, and you feel very patriotic, but if the barbarians are running the asylum, or that's the, that's the wrong, that's the wrong metaphor, isn't it? Just

Eric Wilson:

A few metaphors. Yeah.

Paul Allen:

<Laugh>, yeah. I mixed a few metaphors together, but, but if your representatives aren't doing what's good for the country, you've abdicated your responsibility as a citizen. Absolutely. So, so I think there's a chance to take all the dataset, and of course, ancestry.com is a pretty good example of a group of people getting together saying, what if we put tens of billions of records on the internet and millions of family trees that are already connected? And what if we used AI to help everyone fill out their family tree going back as many generations as possible? That's a pretty big data problem. Politics compared to that is really small, actually. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so there's this a awesome opportunity to build a platform that tens of millions of people can use, maybe even hundreds of millions can use it freely, and then some percentage of them will become paying customers for some supercharge features. But imagine AI that detects legislation sponsored by different representatives that has a bias where there are certain winners and losers in defense industry or in the healthcare industry, or in the energy industry, like maybe that legislation was poorly written, and AI will be able to start detecting who will be the winners and losers from this, from this policy.

Eric Wilson:

Let me challenge one of the assumptions to your business model here, because we have a lack of informed citizens. And, and a theme that we discuss on this show often is that voters are consuming politics as entertainment. And for better or worse, these local governments, regulatory agencies aren't as exciting to watch. So how do we get American citizens to take more of an interest in the, the less entertaining aspects of self-government?

Paul Allen:

Actually, that's probably the best question. Eric, so I, I don't know if I have the perfect answer for that. I am idealist and optimistic, and I think the long arc of history has, has been good for the world. People kind of figure stuff out. I I think the pendulum really swung away from citizen involvement over the decades to entertainment. And, you know, it's a gladiator contest, and the different amplified polarized media and social media has just made it worse and worse. And so it's toxic and polarizing, and that's very entertaining for a lot of people. You love to watch the debates and the blood bath and how many insults there are. When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had their debate, it was one of their famous debates, it was really ugly and brutal and, you know, bitter until the moderator asked one question, name something good about your opponent.

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it was very touching to watch them provide compli to try to compliment each other. And a couple of them, a couple of the things that were said were quite sincere, I think. And and it was a totally different tone. It wasn't ugly. It was actually moving. And, you know, most political campaigns are negative, and the country finds that engaging and entertaining. Maybe it works 'cause of how our brains are wired, but I also think we're all waking up to the fact that, hey, things aren't going in the right direction. So whether it's Gen Z or Millennials, or Gen Xers or whatever, somebody's gonna identify that the direction we've been going isn't working. And, you know, I'm not saying civic education in high schools is good, or that there isn't as much of that. I, I think the million citizens in this country who get naturalized every year know more about the country and its history and its values than almost any high school student.

Eric Wilson:

I mean, I, I, I wonder what percentage of Americans could pass the 10, you

Paul Allen:

Know, 10%. I doubt very many, honestly. I think it's very small, but there's a million naturalized citizens per year, Eric. And you know, if you know lots of those people, and I know dozens who've been naturalized in the last few years, including one person who's gonna be Utah's wealthiest person in the next few years. He came from Canada and got naturalized. My friend from Lebanon who runs the social media for S H R M and a bunch of other great organizations, and, and it's the most moving part of their life experience to become an American citizen. And the rest of us take it for granted. Okay, well, what if you start with those million, what if you take the 20 million who've been naturalized in the last 10, 20 years and help them become extremely involved in local government or state government? They are grateful beyond measure for what this country provided for them.

They left some other less than ideal situation to come here. And many of them are very entrepreneurial. As you know, most entrepreneurial businesses are first or second generation immigrants who, including Silicon Valley, a lot of the trillion dollar companies. Okay. So I think there's, there's a, there, there, there's a subset of the country that really loves this country and cares about preserving what's good about it, start there. And then those people could influence others to actually care as well. Now, if your local school board is, is passing a ruling, that's gonna definitely affect your kids, you do show up, right? Like parents and kids, like if your live, if the lives of your family are affected, or if a zoning thing is gonna pass that's gonna, you know, cost your home value or change your quality of life, you know, rarely people get involved, but they do when it really affects them.

So here's the point. If AI can help you find out just the right time and just the right issues where you really do care, instead of watching boring C-span, that is just like talking heads for hours and hours. It's like, oh, I got a three minute clip that actually affect me. It's a call to action. AI can go from, you know, ad nauseum content from the congressional record to your local meetings. All the transcripts like that don't re relate to you at all to the ones that affect your career or your neighborhood, or your school or your taxes or your wallet. And all of a sudden AI could actually help you do things that, that will matter and improve the quality of life. So I'm, I know I'm idealistic Eric, and you're probably right. I, I watch C-SPAN all the time. <Laugh>. I love it <laugh>. And I know I'm not a, you know, I'm not a very common personality type. I get teased a lot for my, my

Eric Wilson:

Want this. Well, for what it's worth, I think that's right because I mean, when we see examples of this throughout projects on the, the internet you know, Wikipedia, most of the articles written by a few really dedicated volunteers That's right. Open source software projects, few people. I mean, it's, it's astonishing these big companies that rely on one or two volunteers to update the dependencies of some open source library. Well

Paul Allen:

Said.

Eric Wilson:

And, and so you see that, that's, you get enough leverage. So I, I share your optimism on that.

Paul Allen:

And, and the founders was a tiny, like the founders of this country. It was a small, small percentage that was really ready to to resist you know, England and, and to declare independence. It wasn't the majority at the beginning. So yeah, I, I think there, I think there are some reasons to be optimistic.

Eric Wilson:

Well, so, so let's turn our attention now to the media. So there's obviously a lot of concern about the, the decline of, of local media. I'm of the, the mindset that it's more about business model that failed to adapt to changes in technology than a lack of funding. But what's the role that you see corporations, whether that's through lobbyists or trade associations playing in government accountability?

Paul Allen:

Well, I don't think they generally play in the government accountability. I think they're generally the ones that are trying to guide government towards their best outcome, not the general welfare. Hmm, okay. I mean, I just think lobbyists write a lot of the legislation or all of it. I'm not sure how much <laugh> any elected official has ever written any legislation. I'm not sure. Maybe they have. When I was at the Facebook hackathon at the US Capitol in 2011, I believe, and Kevin McCarthy was there, and there were Republicans and Democrats there and Facebook hosted this and my little think tank group we got to be featured on the main stage because we proposed that there should be a GitHub for legislative markup, right? So that every word and phrase entered into a bill would, would, we would know the providence of it, who wrote it, when was it submitted, every word that was changed.

It'd be like writing software where everything you check out and check in is, is traceable to a person right now. You know, you get a lobbyist writing a 75 page financial bill and somebody puts their name on it and submits it. Okay, well, AI will soon be able to detect, in fact, AI can detect who wrote certain things. I mean, JK was outed for one of her books because AI detected her word patterns as an author. And, you know, some university researcher basically called her out and said, Hey, you wrote that book. And she said, yep, I did <laugh>. So so interestingly, there will be all kinds of ai. I mean, we are entering the very, very, very beginning of what, how AI will change the world. And I believe it can change it for bad, and lots of people will want to use it for bad things.

But I believe that good people will use it for incredible things in education and in work and in the political and, and democratic sphere. I think there will be all kinds of good things. Now corporations have to all decide how to use ai. We don't necessarily wanna replace humans, but you could use AI to augment every human. And Johnny Taylor, the c e o of SHRM recently said that AI plus AI equals R O i. And that means human intelligence amplified by AI is going to be the future of r o I. Well, okay, so for businesses that's true. What about in government? How can Newt Gingrich once challenged me with this question, could AI write better legislation than humans? So a call was set up with Sebastian Thrun, who was running the self-driving cars initiative at Google, and he gave a masterclass to new and me for an hour about how to build machine learning models.

This was like 2005. And he actually gave us some reasons to hope that someday AI will see the outcomes of different laws and policies. And if you had Gallup data or b l s data or economic data that's objective, you could actually start tying good legislation to growth and prosperity and bad legislation to poor outcomes, whether that's corruption or it's just a policy that had unintended consequences that were horrible. And over time, let's say a few years of that kind of feedback loop, AI could detect if a legislation was likely to be good for people or bad for people. Now, I don't know that that that's a slippery slope, and I don't want AI becoming an elected official itself, <laugh> and I don't believe in sentience ever. I don't think AI will ever have a soul or, or the ability to think and act and feel for itself.

I do think it will approximate human reasoning and, and, and it will way surpass us in, in its ability to recall and process. So it's definitely gonna be a super intelligence, but it, to me, it's never gonna be sentient. So I wouldn't want an unfeeling ai, even if it is trained or pretends it can learn how to feel or talk like it feels. I don't believe that. So I think humans are the greatest of all creations and always will be. So we should be in charge of our own countries, our own, our own laws and rules, but we could be aided by AI to find what's good, what's corrupt, what's legitimate, what's not, and to detect the things that we should stamp out in our societies.

Eric Wilson:

Well, Paul, we could go for another half hour, I think so. So definitely wanna have you come back in the future and we'll see how the AI optimism is playing out. I happen to be on your side of that argument. My thanks to Paul Alan for a great conversation. Check out Citizen portal, the link in our show notes. Go play with it. It's live. You can start seeing what's going on in your area. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, you know, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. Remember to subscribe to the Business Politics Show wherever you get your podcast, so that way you'll never miss an episode, especially if this is your first time listening, give it a try. You can check all of our past episodes at business of politics podcast.com. You can also sign up for email updates there as well. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

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