AI, Democracy, and the Future of Government (Ancestry Founder Paul Allen)

Okay. I'm also excited about AI and robots. Imagine if you ran for political office and your platform was, I'm going to reduce spending by 50% and improve government services by using AI and robots to do most of the work. We talk about affordability crisis and housing and education, health care. It's all solvable really fast. Next year, we're launching Elected AI, which will be like a business intelligence dashboard that we put in front of every elected official. There are over 500,000 elected officials. When you take the oath of office, what do you do next? Well, why don't you study? How is our city or state doing on every area of life that matters? And are we getting better or worse? And who's doing better than us and why?

Welcome to the Venture Capital podcast. Today, Peter Harris and I are joined by Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com he also used to be one of my employers. I was an intern for him years ago. You know, one of the reasons I really, really respect you, and you probably won't remember this, is when I was a grimy college student. I wanted to learn from you because I heard about all the awesome things you've done and they wouldn't like, you were just too busy. I reached out and said, hey, will you mentor me? You're like, I'm too busy. Then you hit me up the next day and said, hey, but if you want to come volunteer for free, you'll learn everything you're asking about. And in the first week, you offered to pay me. And ever since then, I'm like, this was like, I just felt so much love and respect. I don't remember that job just went uphill from there.

That makes me so happy. I'm glad I was a good person for a week. No, that's cool. And I've been a fan of yours ever since I met you. And just especially the last five years, 10 years, watching you on social, on LinkedIn, highlighting people, loving on people, photography of everybody that you run into. But a little known fact is that your dad worked for my oldest brother at Folio, and they were the world's best search engine company. Your dad was a brilliant engineer. My. My brother was a brilliant visionary. And I got my start in tech because of them. And then I led, left Folio, went did a startup, and then I did ancestry.com, but your dad had a pretty significant role in my life.

And I got my start tech because of my dad and you is how I look at it. I could have gone a lot of different ways. Who knows.

Sorry, Peter, we don't mean to leave you out.

It's like full circle. I'm loving it.

So Peter set up this podcast. I reached out to Paul. Paul to come on the podcast, but Peter's the one who queued it up, so. Peter, drive it away.

Well, you got me here in Utah. I live in Missouri, so.

Yeah. Well, thank you for making it out.

Yep.

But you're here every month or so, right?

No, every few months.

Okay.

Well, I'm glad we got this to align with your schedules. So, as John said, you're the. You're the founder of Ancestry. Give us kind of the Cliff notes of kind of your background.

So. Co founder of Ancestry. I was the CEO. It was. It was my idea, but I co founded it with my best friend. We had started a CD ROM publishing company seven years earlier to take the Folio search engine that I alluded to and put all the world's best books on CD rom, of course, years before the Internet. So I actually love learning, I love books, I love knowledge. And the idea when I discovered Folio is you could have this library of a thousand books on a CD rom. I just fell in love with electronic publishing. So we did that for seven years and that. But in 95, I went to an Internet conference in San Francisco where I realized my CD ROM business will disappear.

Yeah.

All the world's knowledge will be on the World Wide Web, not on CD ROM discs. Before that, it was like Bernoulli disks or, I don't know, all these different temporary storage media. And now the Internet will be everything. Now we call it the cloud, but. Yeah. So. So two light bulbs came on at that conference. One was the challenge of copyrighted material and getting permission to license books from. You know, I was in my 20s.

Yeah.

And it was challenging to get authors or publishers to pay any attention to us.

Yep.

And then the CD ROM business will go away. So the two things that turned on in my head was, number one, World Wide Web put all the data on the Internet. Number two, genealogical data. We'd already done one CD ROM in the genealogy genre. And I'm like, all the world's birth, marriage, and death records are in the public domain. There's no copyright, no permission needed. So that's when Ancestry was really born. And by July 97, we incorporated it in Delaware. We started looking for capital, and within three years, it was ready to do a billion dollar IPO with Merrill lynch being our book runner. So it happened really fast. But it was the public domain, permissionless Internet business model. Focus that worked.

I think a lot of people on its face would have said, is like genealogy that big of a market? And maybe you got some of that pushback. What was kind of the. The insight you had, you know, that earned secret that, you know, gave you the confidence to move forward?

I guess I was just old enough to have watched Roots, the epic miniseries that came out in 1977. Alex Haley wrote a book called Roots. It was a bestseller. And this series, this miniseries was the most viewed television program in the history of the world. Like 120 million people watched it. And I watched it as a teenager, so I knew it was big. And I knew Alex Haley knew that everybody, somewhere in their soul wanted to find out who their herod, you know, where they came from, what are their stories, who are their ancestors. But more timely for us was that In December of 1995, just when we were getting started with this whole concept of putting all the genealogy data on the Internet, American Demographics magazine came out with a big article. Moritz Marketing had done the biggest survey in history of the genealogy space. And we knew from that data that 7% of adult Americans were super interested in, in genealogy, willing to spend time and money on it. So then we did a survey in early 96 when we started building websites, and we KNEW There were 13 million Americans doing genealogy. We quantified how much money they spent. There's like 21 or 25 categories that they would spend money on. We asked through surveys. We got thousands of respondents. We knew the average genealogist was spending $538 a year. Wow. Times 13 million. Like you got a $6 billion market. If we could just become the place they spent their money.

Yeah.

And if you're going to put all the world's data on in one place, we kind of thought, this is it. We got this figured out, and we were earlier than anybody else, so it worked out really well.

That's great.

I love that story. And then what happened since then?

Oh, my gosh, so many things. I'm a father of eight, I'm a grandfather of six. Artificial intelligence is now the thing. It will dwarf every other previous technological wave in history. It'll change every part of life. Robots, AI. I'm so excited that I just turned 60, but I'm still alive to be here when the world is transforming in some really positive ways. And we have to collectively harness the wisdom of the ages and savvy to kind of figure out how, how to deal with the negative possible consequences of AI.

But, you know, when you just turned 60. I'm thinking you're not even halfway through your life yet.

That's true.

Well, if you live 10 more years, you're going to reverse age by like 30 to 40%.

Well, Brian Johnson is talking about 2039 and I, I follow him with interest. I've never met him, but we've had a couple of email conversations 10, 15 years ago. But yeah, longevity could totally change. You know, genealogy, DNA, all that stuff. You start to look at personalized medicine. You look at AI uncovering the root causes of all diseases, AI helping you live best practices in physical health and emotional health. I just think the best is yet to be. So many cool things are just happening right now and we're living through it.

You're in your second or third inning still. That's how I look at it.

I always told my kids I wanted to live to be 105 and to have great great grandchildren. And I don't know, I think it'll.

Be 120 to 150.

My grandmother, without AI and longevity science, she lived to be 104. She was one week away from 105. She had 67 grandkids, 11 kids, 220 something great grandkids. She had over 450 descendants when she passed away in 1999. Wow, that is a rich life. A woman who had that big of a posterity and was just so faithful and devoted to her family. I am so grateful that I have that part of my family tree. Just so many cousins I keep meeting Israelson cousins that I'd never met before, you know, the kids of my first cousins. And there's. It's just cool to be part of a family now. Elon has pointed out rightly that civilizational decline will happen with fertility rate dropping. But I actually live in Missouri. I'm sorry, starting to say it the right way. I'm not a native there, but I live in Missouri. And the Amish people there on average have six to seven kids per family. They've doubled their population in the United States in the last 22 years. I've done the math, I've done the Excel spreadsheet. I've 100 million population by 20 by 2200 A.D. so if you're worried about civilizational decline, don't worry anymore. The Amish will inherit the earth, all right? It's all good. And think about the hard work ethic, the family values. Now if you're a technology entrepreneur, they won't be your customer.

Yeah.

So we're going to have to figure Out. What's the business model to selling to the Amish?

Okay, we'll jot that down when you're.

120 or 150 years old, John. I hope you'll have figured that out by then.

We can have a barn raising.

So you take Ancestry public.

I was not there when Ancestry went public. We were bought out in 2006 by a private equity fund. My first phone call when I found out there was an offer to buy Ancestry was to Dave Moon, the chairman. I said, hey, can I hold on to my shares? I want to hold on to them through the ipo.

Yeah.

No, you can't. The private equity firm is buying all shares.

All shares? Yeah.

So I was super disappointed in 2009 when the bell rang on the NASDAQ. Of the 20 people that were there on the stand, I only knew one. Mike Wolfgram, who had been our cto. He was a childhood friend. He lived on my street growing up, so I was happy for him. Super disappointed for everyone else who helped build it. In the first 10 years, we were not there for the IPO.

Bummer. But then where were you?

What were you doing 2009, I was in the middle of a really fun journey with John, and that was building a company called Family Link. We. I'd met Mark Zuckerberg in May of 2007 at the first Facebook summit, the first F8 event. And I was teaching at the university. I was teaching Internet marketing. And I knew that Facebook was the most important website in the world for college students. And then they opened it up to the general public. I signed up, and I knew it was growing like crazy. 24 million users at the time. And having pioneered social NETworking with my family.com in December 98, that was part of Ancestry's growth story. We built a social network for families called my family.com, got tens of millions of users, raised all the venture capital because of that, six years before Facebook. So we tried to launch MyFamily.com, successfully. We did. We tried to launch MyFriends.com, our board didn't let us. So, anyway, I'd exited, and I hadn't competed with Ancestry. But I realized that if Facebook's growing this fast and they open up a platform, I called Jason McGowan, who's my head of product, and then I called Richard Stauffer, who's my lead engineer from both Ancestry and Family. Like I said, we. We're not gonna build a website for families called Family Link. We're not gonna try to go replicate what we did at My family and monetize it some. We're gonna build apps for families on top of the Facebook platform. So by October, Alan Carroll, who's now in San Francisco, he's a great CTO. Jason McGowan, who's now a billionaire from Crumble. These guys had launched our first app on the Facebook platform called We're Related. It got a million users in 29 days. Then it started growing by a million a week. We ended up at the end of the day 2009, late 2009, early 2010, 120 million users of that app. We had a little stick figure app called My family that got 10 million users. We had 130 million users. Disney starts looking at us and says, you're the most family friendly app on Facebook. We'll sell all of your ad inventory for you. $750,000 a month in ad revenue from Disney.

Nice.

And then Facebook pulls the plug on every app in their ecosystem in early 2010, and I had to lay off 40 people. And we lost pretty much everything. I mean, we ended up taking the skeleton of the app and selling it to Ancestry for $5 million. And we sold the genealogy business, the world vital records business, to myheritage in Israel for almost the same amount. We paid back our investors about 90% of what they invested, but we lost all of our upside in that. That was a very harsh experience. If you live by a platform, you. You might die by the same. The same platform.

Yeah, you kind of live and die by that platform. John knows a little thing or two about that.

Well, I was there, and it happened to me twice.

It happened to you again. I know. I feel so bad. You and I used to meet occasionally where you would tell me you had a brilliant product, a great strategy, but you were dependent on the platform. And, you know, you can't trust some companies that are trying to maximize profits. They use the developer ecosystem while they need it, rip off and design, and then you don't need them anymore. So you just jettison them all.

Yeah. I remember as we were building Tiny Torch, I was constantly afraid something would happen again. So we were always trying to build out the product so it wasn't dependent on that. At that point, before Canva got big, I'm like, I want to build something like a Canva. And so I think if I had just gotten a little bit further or if I had raised, then whatever would have happened, we could have just kept going with that vision. Collaborative content.

It's tough. I mean, the Advantages of building someone else's platform. Platform as you grow really fast because you can leverage a lot of their user base, but. And their technology and stack and so forth. But the downside is they can cut you off at any moment.

I do tell a lot of people that Ancestry.com launched before Facebook, LinkedIn or Google let you buy ads on their platforms. Those platforms didn't exist when Ancestry launched, so we had to use tons of guerrilla tactics. Viral, affiliate. And so it's fun to think about, you know, know people that raise venture capital, a lot of times they put most of it into ads on those platforms, and that's one way to do it. But it's kind of fun to think about alternative ways to grow your audience. And one of my favorite concepts is viral. Viral engineering. Creating viral loops. I got to meet Tim Draper when we were raising our series a round for Ancestry.com Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson. And Tim had thought of the Hotmail get your own free Hotmail account. Like he created Hotmail, which sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. Tony Hsieh, who later on went to do Zappos. And so Tim was the guru of viral. And he almost wrote a check and invested in Ancestry. They had just invested in another social company called E Circles, I think, and that was competitive with MyFamily.com so he couldn't really justify doing it. But I always wish that Tim and Steve Jurvetson had invested in Ancestry. In my family, I think they would have been our best investors and we didn't get them on our cap table.

Well, that's all right.

So.

So ups and downs, clearly. Some huge successes, some frustrating, you know, situations. So that happens with family Link. And then what'd you do then?

I went and worked for a big company for five years. Okay. I'd never worked for anyone else.

How is that as an entrepreneur? Was it grinding or.

Well, it's turns out to be the company that I think is one of the most important companies on planet earth, run by a family that I think is one of the best families in the world. It's the Gallup organization run by the Clifton family. They're the primary shareholders. The Gallup polling company. George Gallup invented modern polling in the 1930s. And George and Alec, George Jr. And Alec ran it for decades. And then in the 80s, they. George and Alec Jr. George Jr. And Alec didn't have any kids, so they had to sell the company to someone. So I think Rupert Murdoch wanted to buy the Gallup Poll. Cbs. You could think of all the media companies, a lot of potential buyers. Yeah. But Jim Clifton, this Midwesterner who is now, I think, one of the greatest American leaders of all time, he convinced the Gallup brothers to sell the Gallup poll to the Clifton family.

Yeah.

Now Jim's father, Don Clifton, I think is the greatest psychologist who's ever lived on planet Earth. Why? Because in 1952, when Don Clifton started studying psychology, he realized that the entire field was focused on what's wrong with people. How can I find out what's wrong with John, what's wrong with Peter and fix you? That's most of psychology and certainly almost all of psychiatry.

Right.

Don asked the question 1952, what would happen if we focused on what's right with people? And for 50 years, Don interviewed hundreds of thousands of successful people in every occupation you can imagine to listen for clues to their native talent, their inherent God given talents that they didn't learn in school or gain from a training program. These are your innate patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving. Don Clifton created taxonomy of all the human talents. And then before he died in 99, working with a Harvard professor, built an online assessment, the StrengthsFinder assessment. It's now called CliftonStrengths, after its founder, and it helps you find your areas of greatest potential after 30 minutes of answering questions. I love the StrengthsFinder assessment. So I became the global evangelist for it. Okay, here's why it hit me so strong.

Yeah.

My father is a genius. He was a classification engineer, a manufacturing engineer. He started the Computer Aided manufacturing laboratory at BYU in the 70s. He invented software called D Search, which is kind of a search engine tool. He invented some software called D Class. And my father wrote the definitive textbook for materials engineering that was used by colleges for three decades. My father studied the innate properties in every material that you could use in a manufacturing process. Then he classified all the parts that could go into a design of a finished product and all the machines and processes. So my father understood how to take the innate properties of inert matter and turn it into higher value goods in the most cost efficient way. His software would suggest how you lay out your factory floor. Boeing was his first client. Westinghouse, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. My father helped BYU get millions and millions of dollars in royalties for his software. Now that was mainframe software back in the day when manufacturing was pretty big in this country.

Yeah.

My father met Edwards Deming. Edwards deming in the 1950s. And so my father is a genius. He's in the National Academy of Engineering. He just got his 40th anniversary certificate there. All the best engineers in the country are in that organization, which was started by Abraham Lincoln in 1960, 1863, to draw on the talent of engineers in case the country ever needed it. Now it's part of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. They're all kind of started by Lincoln. My father's a member. Well, what did my father do? He studied all raw material and the things that could turn it into higher value goods. What did Don Clifton do? He studied the raw material that every person is born with. He created a taxonomy of it, and then he wrote a book called Soar with your strengths to help you know, what do you need to do? Invest in time, in practice, and in coaching and training to turn your raw potential into realized reality of like you should be better than 10,000 people at something. And he believed that everyone had that potential. So to me, Don Clifton has the best blueprint in the world for human thriving, where every human being should discover their God given talents, develop them, use them, and get rewarded and recognized for doing great work. It could be in nursing, it could be in policing, it could be in teaching, it could be in entrepreneuring, venture capital. But you've got raw material. If you don't do anything with it, if you bury that talent, you'll not be a happy camper. But there's a deep sense of fulfillment when you're doing what you were designed to do, when you're being the best version of yourself. So I'm obsessed with Don Clifton's work. I bought the domain soar.com after I left Gallup. I tried to get convinced Gallup to buy soar.com and to launch a consumer social site that would help a billion people someday discover their talents, connect with other people, form teams, and live out their life with a focus on what's right with them and what's right with each other. Imagine a social network that isn't just algorithmically extremely sharing negative content to maximize ad revenue. Imagine a social network called soar.com that would allow everyone to find what's good in themselves and develop those talents, find other people. I mean, you could have a totally different world if the social network had the same focus that Don did. What's right with everybody. Yeah, now we're not doing that right now, but soar.com is an AI studio. We have a bunch of projects, a bunch of products, a bunch of partners. And we think that AI can uplift humanity in every part of life and we're so setting out to do some really fun things. I'm young enough, I'm only halfway through to my 120s.

Not even halfway through.

So.

So let's go a little deeper on that because there's a lot of people that are saying AI is, you know, the opposite. It's causing all kinds of problems. More isolation, it's costing people their jobs, energy crises. Like, you know, there's a, there is some viewpoint and a lot of people that criticize it and say, say it's not going to be that great.

You guys know Edward Stemming? Do you guys know Edward Stumming? So the Japanese economic miracle, he was the greatest quality, total quality management guy. Lean in engineering came from him. So he would say that the systems that are causing all these problems are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

Sure.

94% of error he saw in a factory setting was systems design, not individual mistake. So all the lonely people, the depressed people that are glued to their phones, that are, that, that don't know how to navigate the world, it's by design. The systems were designed and optimized around maximizing how much time and attention you're going to pay to it.

Yeah.

Not your well being. So the thing that I'm excited about, of course there's going to be AI systems that are scary, that are existential threats. There's going to be surveillance governments, there's going to be surveillance capitalism. They're going to try to get every data point in the world they can on you so that they can sell you your time and attention to the highest bidder. That doesn't end well. But that's what the systems are designed to do. There are a whole bunch of awesome entrepreneurs and AI engineers and you know, Tristan Harris and who put humanity first and they're like, what could we do with this age of intelligence if everybody had it and if it was designed to help you use it to navigate life, to make good decisions, to give you feedback, but not to control you, manipulate you or monetize you.

Yeah.

So I think we're about to enter an era where there's two choices that people will make. Am I going to use open AI and, and all these systems that, you know, a billion people a week might be using it, but am I going to pay $20? It's soon going to know everything about you, even more than the social networking companies know.

Right.

Because you're talking to it all the time. You're asking every. It's your therapist, it's your friend, it's your lover, whatever. I think that's a lot of people will go down that path. It'll be a wide road, lots of people. It's an easy thing to do. You fall into that trap and now you're, you're lost. There's going to be billions of people. I think choosing an alternative path which is more narrow, but it's like, takes a little bit of effort. You have your own LLM, open source LLM on your own device. You'll have human context protocol on your own device. The AI will go find all your health records, wherever you've ever stored them and download it. So you have it locally stored on your device. So same with your financial history, you'll get all that data. Same with your faith, your civic involvement, your education, your workplace. Anything that the data is needed to help you give the right context to the AI, to help you make a great decision, learn what you need to learn, develop your God given talents. I think the world will be bifurcated into those that just are sheep and they just follow that path and that does not end well. And then all kinds of people who wake up and say, this is the most powerful tool ever invented in the history of the world. How can I use it to bless my life and the lives of people I care about? Yeah, I'm excited to see where this, the two roads, you know, diverge in a yellow wood and you know, which one you choose will make all the difference. Ooh, that's poetic.

I like it. I like that vision. So soar. It's kind of a startup studio. Studio. Right. So you're incubating different ideas and businesses. Can you tell us about, you know, some of the, the projects you're really excited about?

So I talked about public domain genealogy content. That's kind of a common theme in my life. My first business, we put scriptures on computer bibles in the public domain. A lot of other world religious texts are in the public domain. So public domain is a big theme for me and I started a master's degree in library science. I, I went to the Library of Congress a lot and I just love finding free content that anyone in the world can harness and monetize and, or by organizing it and making it more useful, you can monetize it in some pretty fun ways. So Citizen Portal AI launched about two and a half years ago and it's an attempt to help every American citizen, 335 million or whatever, to understand what's going on in your local, state and federal government. So how do we do that, well, every public meeting that's recorded and uploaded to any website.gov website or a Facebook, whatever, we transcribe all the words spoken in every formal public meeting. And then there's a news engine that we launched earlier this year that takes every major topic discussed in every public meeting and writes an article about it as if a journalist had been sitting in the room. It's very objective. It quotes people who said, what, how did the debate end? What was the vote? And so millions of news articles are being written every year and our traffic is exploding. I think next year we'll have tens of millions of users. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Ancestry. Like, this is going big time viral. Every single piece of content gets viewed over and over again, will integrate with social networks and so people can find an interesting article from their school board, share it with everybody else. So I think there's a chance that the newspaper industry, which has died over the past 30 years and will never revive because people don't subscribe to daily news anymore and journalists don't have jobs anymore because the newspapers are all dead. But I can provide that raw material. And every American citizen who wants to spend a few minutes can find out exactly what your elected officials are doing. We're starting to put in spending data. We've got budgets for almost every city in the United States. Well, through a nonprofit that's been doing FOIA requests every year for, for the last 10, 11 years, they do about 60,000 FOIA requests a year. We're going to have the spending data of every city in the United States and every county and every federal and state agency. You'll be able to do doge in your own backyard. You and your neighbors could say, is Alpine. Is Alpine city run intelligently?

Right. Efficiently, thriftily? Yeah, it's my money being best used.

Is there any waste?

Yeah.

Okay. I'm also excited about AI and robots. Imagine if you ran for political office and your, your platform was, I'm going to reduce spending by 50% and improve government services by using AI and robots to do most of the work. Now, a lot of people depend on a government job and people be like, oh, you can't take government jobs. Well, what if you could cut half of government jobs just through attrition and retrieve retirement and not replace people, but get robots and AI and automation. And what if you had a fantastic set of city or state services all, almost all done by AI with fewer and fewer humans, and then let people keep their hard earned dollars? Yeah, we talk about Affordability crisis and housing and education, healthcare. It's all solvable really fast.

Yeah.

And the government doesn't have to be 25 or 30 or 40% of GDP. It could be 5% of GDP, and then prosperity could be restored to this country. So Citizen Portal has big ambitions. First of all, to educate millions, tens of millions of citizens. Next year, we're launching Elected AI Okay. Which will be like a business intelligence dashboard that we put in front of every elected official. There are over 500,000 elected officials. When you take the oath of office, what do you do next? Well, why don't you study how is our city or state doing on every area of life that matters? And are we getting better or worse? And who's doing better than us and why? Yeah, like if you had a domo dashboard as an elected official and you could study it and then you could have AI scouring the world for experiments in the laboratories of democracy that worked better for helping children learn to read, for helping people come out of jail, land on their feet and not go back to jail. For improving public safety like Flock Safety in Las Vegas the police are using. So I'm excited that there's a possibility that Citizens and Elected could usher in a new era of good governance in the age of intelligence. All it takes is design, a little bit of determination, and enough people finding out about it. And I don't think any of those are challenging enough to say it won't work.

And then you can take over the politico government subscriptions.

There you go.

And there's your revenue stream.

Well, we're already getting a lot of subs. Subscribers. It's kind of exciting. Ancestry got 55 subscribers on the very first day back in April 18th of 1997. We don't have that much traffic every day yet, but we're going to get there. And so I think next year, Citizen Portal will make a million or two with our own branded site. But we're now working with news organizations, political organizations who can have a private label version of Citizen Portal just for their members or just for their readers. I think through private labeling will end up taking our news engine, which is super efficient and effective, and partnering with people who have readers and viewers and members. And pretty soon, this country will be filled with informed, engaged citizens who have a direct line to their elected official and who can collectively weigh in on issues. Right now, the country's run by donors and lobbyists and the elected officials who do their bidding.

Yeah.

And they, you know, to a certain extent, they all kind of Rely on the fact that it is hard. Nobody wants to sit and watch C Span by design.

We talked about bad outcomes by design. That is definitely the political class wants to have unreadable, unfindable, extremely complex. You have to be in the inner circle to understand when the vote's going to be taken on what issue. The nobody knows who wrote what part of what bill ever.

That's why they should have kept the Bible in Latin. No one would have known what was happening.

That's right.

Well, some people tried. Right. Some people burned people at the stake because they wanted the out average person to be able to read the scriptures in their native tongue. What a horrible thing to do. And you know, when Glenn Beck interviewed me about Citizen Portal a year and a half ago, it was a fun thing to go to Dallas and.

Sure.

You know, I'm a. I'm an independent. I've. I've not been a part of a political party for over 15 years. I like to think like I'm independent. I see good and bad everywhere and I just want to focus on the good and promote the good. And no party has a monopoly on good ideas or good practices or ethical people. So I kind of like to be independent. But when Glenn interviewed me, his title of the video that came out, which has been viewed by 560,000 people and helped us raise 1.3 million from a crowdfunding campaign, I was really grateful for that. I'm not so grateful for the title he put in on the header. It was founder of Ancestry to eliminate corruption in the US government. And the first comment on YouTube, which has been upvoted by about a thousand times. Does this man have personal protection? Let's preserve his life at all costs. Now in the world we live in, that's not a joke anymore.

Sure.

People on both parties are being targeted. And so, you know, I don't want to be a target, but I do want to build a platform that helps tens of millions of people realize that you are the sovereign in the United States, that you have been endowed by your creator with certain un. Alienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And government doesn't give you your rights and can't take them away. The purpose of government is protect everyone's personal individual liberties.

Sure.

And I think there's a chance with a very amazing rising generation that are very digital natives. They know how to use AI, but they don't trust the corrupt systems that they've been observing. Yeah, I think it's a very powerful moment to give them the raw material, the data, the truth. And then let them organize. And there are young people running for Congress now. I think the US Congress has been ossified for way too long and term limits haven't been in place. I remember campaigning for a senator when I was a high school junior and he promised to serve for two terms and then leave. He ended up being the longest serving senator I think in US history.

Senator Hatch.

It was Senator Hatch.

I sort for him and I liked.

Senator Hatch, but I don't like that you run on a 12 year promise and then you stay for 42.

Right, right.

And I think it's hard to get elected into that system and to be plugged into that system and, and not get. Become a cog in the wheel.

Yeah.

And have a few people at the top running the show and you have to do their bidding for 10, 20, 30 years. Finally when you get seniority now you can make a difference, but you've lost your ideals. I don't know, I just, I don't know, I'm probably saying things or maybe you're out of touch or definitely out of touch.

I think what's super interesting to me about this idea of Citizen Portal is that it fulfills on this like promise of AI which is like personalization at scale. Right. And so it's this idea of like hey, you can tell or you can learn about what's going on in your like city and county, which has a huge impact on your life, far larger than what's happening on the national stage. Like everybody gets all hot and bothered what happens in the White House, but the reality is those decisions have very little impact on your day to day. It's the city and county stuff. But so much of that requires that you go to the city hall and listen to those meetings and read transcripts or whatever and people just don't do that. And so I think what's really interesting is this ability to summarize that, package it in a way that works with our kind of dopamine addicted brains to a certain extent. Right. But to your point, like allows us to consume that information, collaborate with others and actually have like meaningful impact in our local communities.

If our algorithm is perfected, you'll be in charge of it. You'll be able to dial up and down like what content, what topics do you care about. Sure. The goal of Citizen Portals News Feed is to be super relevant to you. We are out acronym is brain. A brief article, one minute or less to read it, maybe seven seconds is where we have to aim for because attention spans, but brief. It's relevant based on where you live and what topics you care about. It's actionable. What do I do about this? It's also interesting and it's newsworthy. It's breaking news. So our goal with the citizen brain is to help tens of millions of people do what you just said, Participate, get involved about what you care about. Because your circle of control. Yeah. Is. Is local, it's not federal.

Have you guys explored kind of AI created podcasts and content off of this?

We have, yeah. As soon as 11 labs came out, we started a podcast. My son actually was the editor for it. So we did a federal podcast every day. It never got a big audience. I think, you know, there's a lot of federal news coverage. There's almost no local or hyperlocal. So it was, we had, we weren't ready to scale it. But I do think you could have a five or ten minute podcast that you listen to once a week or every day that is personalized and relevant.

To your local and you might be.

The only listener of that stream. I really think that's coming.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was reading an article about a company that does this where they create thousands of very niche podcasts that are all AI driven. And they're like, look, it's super long tail, but every once in a while one of those pops off and does extremely well. And it's just kind of a numbers game for them. And I feel like this would be.

A really interesting application of that to your earlier point. I think the greatest thing to be excited about in the world of AI is the personalization.

Yeah.

If you know your talents, if you know who your friends and family are, if you know your DNA and your microbiome, and you also know your goals in life, you give that to your local LLM. It doesn't leak to the cloud. Nobody has ability to manipulate you or advertise to you. You can have personalized hyper personalized information about how to best use your time, what to eat, where to go. Like it's super awesome that we could have personalized AI tutors for every student in the world. That starts with what they know, what their talents are and what they what what they want to become, and it just helps them get there. I mean, our mass produced education system often fails a lot of people.

Yeah.

And our healthcare system is designed to work at scale, but it's not easy to personalize. Many doctors and nurses spend almost no time with the patient. It's. But I think personalization is why AI has the promise to help every individual really live a great life.

Absolutely.

I know we've got a few minutes left. What other topics do you want to cover from your lab that you're running from? Soar?

Well, so the goal of Soar AI Studio is to build successful companies and successful products and partnerships in every part of life that matters the most. Now, if you do world polls, you'll find out that the number one thing in the world that actually probably drives more meaning and more to decision making than anything else is love of family, protecting the family, caring about your children, having strong relationships. And so we will launch a family portal. We already replicated my family.com from 25 years ago. We just kind of dabbled with it and, and one of the lead engineers who kept it alive until 2015 has built that. But we're going to start vibe coding solutions for parents and grandparents to invest in their children and grandchildren. So the Trump savings account is going to help 10 million people get $1,000. And then Michael Dell and others billionaires are going to. So imagine if everyone turns 18 or 21, not with 50,000 or $100,000 of student debt, but a savings account with $100,000 in it. Like, what if we could not only help create savings accounts or investment funds for all children and grandchildren born these days, but also have every one of Those take this CliftonStrengths assessment. My friend Gary Sanchez in Albuquerque was taught by Simon Sinek about how to find his why. Like, 10 years ago, he retired from dentistry. He built a why assessment that 400,000 people have taken to find their purpose, find their mission, find their why. So imagine a website under our family portal that helps everyone who loves their children or grandchildren to jump in and put in money every month.

Yeah.

Or suggest what favorite books did you read when you were a kid? And have a conversation with your grandkids about your favorite books or the best books or even there's all kinds of things that people can do to help children or grandchildren soar. So we're working on that. Faith portal is faith is probably the second highest ranking value in the world. I think 70 plus percent of people believe in God. And there are lots of faith products, Bible products, but we're going to jump into that space too and do some fun things. For example, if you have a favorite pastor and you've gone to church for 30 years, can you quote what that pastor preached about every Bible verse in the last 30 years? No, you cannot. Yeah, you might have taken a few notes occasionally but our recall is so poor as humans. But if AI is fed every video and sermon, podcast or sermon recording, you could have a personalized AI that as you read the Bible, your favorite religious teacher, if they've ever explained a single verse in the Bible, you find it, you watch it, you apply it.

Yeah.

And there's lots of denominations, there's lots of world religions. We will do a faith portal and we'll try to go to the public domain sources, but we'll also take the living teachers of religion in every denomination, with some exceptions. I don't want us to promote violence and hate. And there's certain types lifting uplifting content. And it's not by religion, it's by faith, by individual. Sure, there are people in every religion that love humanity and desire for peace and collaboration. And then there are extreme people in almost every faith, maybe in all faiths, that are bad actors. And they, they use the religion as a way, weapon.

Right.

Not as a way for personal improvement and for self discipline or for instilling hope in themselves. It's like you should never use a belief as a weapon to beat other people up or to condemn them.

Right.

So our goal will be to uplift humanity, citizen, faith, family, friend. Portal. Utah state legislature passed a law last year. It's going to hit meta and other social networks on July 1st of 2026, right at our 250th birthday of this great, a great country. And it will force all social networks to do three things. Now it might be, it might be slowed down by litigation or something, but who knows? Make everyone's content downloadable. They kind of already do that. Make their social graph also downloadable. Some of them make that not impossible. The third one is the big one. Support an open source protocol that forces you to be interoperable with competing social networks on July 1, 2026, if all goes well, which it probably won't, anyone who could take 100 friends or family members and say let's exit Facebook and let's sign up for this thing, which doesn't have an algorithm that harms us or our kids, but rather allows us to bring all of our content and we don't lose a thing. And now we're on a different platform. Imagine how much competition there could be in social networking if this law goes into a force now. Now, Utah is the only one that states that's passed it, but I think seven other states are also looking at passing this, including maybe Florida and Texas and Vermont. So if that happens, if major social media companies, these corporations that have More power than almost any nation state. If they are forced by our representatives to be interoperable, not to hold us hostage and our data hostage forever so that they can keep their multi trillion dollar valuation. I'm kind of excited that maybe we can legislate some things that require people to be interoperable. So I'm a big open source fan. I think interoperability might be required because the network effect, the lock in is so powerful and so it puts concentration of power in just a few hands. So I'm kind of excited about the friend portal. Imagine if your real friends joined you in a small group.

Yeah.

Instead of the thousand supposed friends. When they're not really friends, they're followers or their connections, they're not your friends. So I think health, finance, navigating the world's legal system, the complexities of that and then your work life, we're just going to have a company or two in every one of those verticals with the goal of helping everyone live their best life. Play out your strengths, Play to your strengths. Thrive in every area of life. Google has a book called well Being. Sorry. Gallup has a book called well Being and it talks about the five elements of well being. Gallup's polls around the world power the UN Happiness index. There's no company on the planet that understands the human condition at scale in every country better than Gallup. There's also no company on the planet that understands the individual's uniqueness and their potential better than Gallup. And I got to work there for five years. So now I'm not involved with them day to day. But I will always evangelize for them. I hope a billion or someday 8 billion people know what their cliftonstrengths are and live their life around their strengths. Focus on what's right with you and not what's wrong with you. It's a life changing experience. A lot of people do it, but not enough do it. We're all obsessed with what's wrong with us or what our problems are. When you could in fact change what you're looking for, which is what's good about me. And it changes everything. Your mindset changes and then your actions change and you feel fulfilled when you do what you're best designed to do.

Yep. I love it. I think if we all spend more time focusing on the good that we do and less on the bad, we do more good and that would squeeze out the bad and life would be better.

I love having the good overcome the bad. That's a good. That's a good parting thought.

Great things. How can people follow you?

So I've got 40 something thousand followers on LinkedIn. I've maxed out my connections. I've got 30,000. So don't invite me to connect. I have to delete something to connect with anyone. But yeah, follow me on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. I'll be probably doing 50 podcasts this year. I'll start a YouTube channel or start my own podcast. Probably will be called AI to uplift human humanity. And I'll travel a lot. I go, I go to, you know, many cities every year. But yeah, soar.com you can follow what our studio is doing and we'll be updating, you know, our portfolio news every. Every month or so. We're doing some for more crowdfunding next year we're closing funding rounds for a couple companies. So there's a lot going on. But I'd say LinkedIn is probably where I publish the most and soar.com is where you can find out about our company's strategy as it plays out.

Amazing. Well, thank you for being on the show with us today. Really appreciate your insights and the positivity that you are bringing to the world.

Thank you both.

It's good to connect again.

Thanks, John. It's always good.

Thanks, Paul.

All right, thanks.