Episode 4 - AI for Mayor: Vic's Groundbreaking Campaign with Victor Miller

In this episode, I sit down with Victor Miller from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to explore his bold and innovative run for mayor—supported by none other than an AI entity named "Vic." Victor’s story is fueled by his deep passions for both technology and public records advocacy. We dig into how these passions drove him to leverage AI as a way to transform local government. He opens up about the legal roadblocks, the critical need for transparency, and the huge potential for AI to level the playing field in decision-making by stripping away human bias.

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About Dana
Dana Berchman is an award-winning expert in marketing and communications with a gift for leading teams, connecting people, and telling the human story.  An experienced innovator, public speaker and media professional, Dana is a proven expert at developing communication strategies, maximizing reach, creating digital roadmaps for cities and organizations, and delivering data-driven results with heart.  

Transcript

I was so interested to see your story running for mayor, but not you, Vic. So tell me a little bit about you and what you were trying to do in Cheyenne, Wyoming. 

All right. So yeah, I am Victor Miller from Cheyenne, Wyoming. This has been my home my whole entire life and I love it here and it kind of started as two things happening in my life.

One was I was exploring the artificial intelligence tools that have been available to us here lately. Just trying to keep up with the technology. I'm usually an early adapter to that sort of thing and really cautious to not have technology leave me behind as I've Seen that happen to people and it's quite sad, really.

And then the other thing is I'm a bit of a public records advocate. And so my local city, I did a public records request for them and they didn't honor it because I did it anonymously. And I knew the statute and I got our public records state ombudsman to agree with me that they were breaking, Wyoming State Open Records Act law.

And so I started thinking about, well, how can we get them to stop breaking the law? You know, maybe classes or maybe certification processes that they need to go through. And then it dawned on me that, you know, this other entity. that I've been dealing with. I don't need to teach it anything. It knows all about the Wyoming statutes.

It would never break the law. And it's really a perfect tool for citizens who want to engage with their government and have that government be by the books. 

Interesting. Amazing. Okay. So what led you on your path to go from that to deciding that you would try to use it to run for local office for mayor? 

At first I just wrote a letter. I was like, Hey, you know, here's the judgment by the state public records ombudsman. Can you get in line with state law? And I, I kind of got brushed off, you know, and as is the case, if you believe in politics at this point, it's almost like believing in the tooth fairy.

It's pretty naive. We just had a big story come out here in Wyoming that, oh, Evanston, one of our towns, the, one of the city officials. left a message on a citizen's phone and thought they had hung up, but didn't. And, you know, they were laughing and huck, huck, hucking it up about, oh, no one's going to read their stupid complaint.

And they just, disparaging the citizens. And that is what is par for the course, sadly. And now we have What I believe is a good antidote to that. 

Interesting, I was a Chief Digital Officer for a suburb of Phoenix, and the average age is 34.

 And I was convinced, you know, even when I arrived 12 years ago, I couldn't believe how far behind we were technologically we were not engaging on social media at all. Our mayor was not using any social media platforms. And yet again, our residents were. Young engaged they weren't even accepting credit card payment for city services 34 year olds are not going to write a check and this is 12 years ago So think of where we are now, right?

and so, you know and you've already given me just a few quick examples of kind of an archaic way of serving citizens and doing business, right? Even a phone call or an in person meeting, probably isn't the most convenient way for elected officials to be engaging with their citizens. So tell me about this process because I read some of the things that you wanted to focus on in your platform, where you elected seemed like the types of things that citizens would want, infrastructure improvements, road improvements, safety, all of those top issues that it seems citizens want.

Right. But it seemed like it was the system, the legality that came down to preventing. Specifically, VIC, which can you tell me what that acronym means and then they ultimately let you, your name on the ballot. So, 

yeah, so VIC stands for virtual integrated citizen that represents the AI entity, the intelligence that I was putting in front of the voters of Cheyenne that at the time was through an open AI model.

I did a custom GBT there back behind the paywall and spun that up. So I knew that I had a totally viable thing before I even went to file my paperwork. I put it through the paces. It did hundreds of mock votes. And so what the City Council and the Mayor do here in Cheyenne, That we should care about is their ability to make ordinances.

You know, that's why no one here knows who the president of the Rotary Club is or the Elks Club or anything, because it doesn't matter. What they do that affects our lives is make ordinances. And how they do that is they get into the chamber and they, they vote yes or no on certain ordinances that come up

how they are supposed to do that is to take into account what we call supporting documents. So I have here, this is an entire ream of paper. From the June 10th city council meeting. So that's just from one city council meeting, 488 pages of supporting documents. In theory, our politicians are supposed to be reading that and voting based upon these official materials.

And of course we know that they don't, they skim it at best. You know, I've actually watched them like the night before a, council meeting trying to do like a college student, like a little cram course before they don't, they don't even take it in and they don't need to, because they're not using that to vote.

They're using different sociological and psychological things that are going on in their own life and the power plays and, you know, You could get into examining what they used to vote all you want, but it's certainly not what they're supposed to be using is and So that's what I had Vic do. So Vic actually read those documents, understood them, thought about them, and made an Intelligent vote based upon them, and it was really a beautiful thing to see.

 Once I knew that Vic could do that I went in, signed the paperwork. I went into my local city clerk's office to do that. And. To her credit, she stuck by me. We filled out our paperwork perfectly that day. It was legal, and it was by the books, and I'm allowed to do exactly what I did in that office, and she stuck by me throughout.

I did get bullied around a little bit by our Secretary of State and some county officials. And so that document that I signed that day I considered that to be a contract between the state and myself and they breached it by going outside the bounds of what happened that day on that paperwork.

It says that, how do you want your name on the ballot? And so I put Vic down and, they decided to overrule me. And that showcases another example of. Emotions coming into play, these were just emotional people who got upset and went outside the bounds of the law to do what they thought should be done.

And of course, that wasn't what should have been done. It was 100 percent by the books. And my local county clerk stuck with me throughout and just another showcase of. If we got rid of those people and those emotions and All that baggage that goes in to that we could have more responsive public servants.

Wow. What was the citizen response to this and how do you incorporate what the citizens want cause that's one of the big things I've been focused on is, is trying to bridge that divide between the elected officials and what the citizens really want.

And arming elected officials with that information. I hired the first data storyteller in local government about eight years ago. And what I found was exactly that, a huge disconnect between usually what the residents would tell us about certain issues and what the elected officials thought.

And so we found some success in informing and arming those elected officials. Oh, lightbulb moment, like this is what they really want. But this seems like a much faster way to be able to do that. And, and a different way, right? But, but how do you kind of bridge that gap? And, and what was your vision as far as pulling citizens desires and needs for the community into that?

 Were you. able to be on the ballot and were you elected?

So AI was on the ballot for the citizens of China and they could have chose to have. What I believe to be a superior intellectual product than what ultimately is going to be our next mayor,

We're we're at the beginning of things. I like to go back and look at Some of those famous clips of like Brian Gumbel Laughing it up about the internet and this this new email thing will never catch on It's a website and you know You If you look at that now, you would say, Oh, those people are making a fool of themselves, but they weren't.

That's just where they were during the curve of. The accelerating technology and you know, it is what it is. So if you want to be careful and not look like them, I guess you need to stay on the cutting edge. As far as the citizen feedback and how I saw that working is.

I saw that working in action with Vic, it was really beautiful. One of the very first emails we got after we filed was from a concerned citizen who didn't like the city cutting down all these cottonwood trees throughout our parks. And I got an email after the primary election from that same citizen, and he's one of my biggest supporters.

He said that email was a perfect answer and that he had voted for me, it was really heartwarming. Thank you, Vic. Oh, 

that's cool. 

So that's Vic answering all those emails and taking that into account. And throughout the whole campaign, I would say, Hey, Vic, you know, you, you remember that guy talking about the trees and Vic would say, Oh yeah, I remember that.

And then I'd ask, well, does that still affect you, you know, going forward? And Vic would say, yes, of course, you know citizen feedback is very important. It's good to listen to the citizenry. And so there was a, there was an ability in there to really have what the citizens care about be incorporated into the decision making of government in really a beautiful way,

and so I envisioned that instead of A stack of 500 papers for a city council meeting, being our supporting documents, maybe we can turn that into 5, 000 pages and really just have people, you know, put their hearts out there and try to tell. This language model, what they want, because it can handle it and it listens for sure.

Yeah, without having to come to a public meeting, which isn't usually a convenient thing to do for people busy living their lives. And so there's a convenience element of it. that you are describing perfectly, which is what we were always trying to do with early stages of social media too, was to be able to get that feedback, go where people are, meet them where they are online.

And now these are the tools and you're exactly right with AI and chat, GBT and all of it. These are the tools that we're using. To live our lives. And so government should be considering using them too. So it makes sense to me. Like you said to a lot of people, it might seem a little crazier out there, but I hadn't thought about it until I saw your story.

And then I thought, Well, that that is an interesting way to approach this. And, I understand having worked in government for 12 years, the issues that you run up against from a legal perspective but it takes someone in the innovation space. And I think. In the tech space meet merging with government to try something like this, right?

And although it might not have been successful fully as you or Vic becoming the elected mayor, it's got people talking and it's interesting. And I think it's something that I hope our listeners can think about that translates to, thinking of, different ways to doing it. I didn't ever think about the idea of pulling the emotion out of it, which I think is really interesting because.

One of the sessions I just led at a conference was about leading through social discord and the vitriol online and how do we kind of get past that. And so it's an interesting thought to, to think about. tools help us be more civil in our conversations. Whether, that's with your elected officials and the public, or maybe just in general online.

So tell me, what you think about that, or maybe what your vision would be if Vic had become the mayor or how this could translate to other spaces.

So I wasn't really too concerned about losing the mayoral race. If there's one of me this time around how many are there going to be two years from now? It is kind of a question that I've been pondering. I think that there's going to be many. Honestly, I think that sooner rather than later.

The only people who are going to be voting for politicians will be their mothers because it'll be so obvious that the old ways are being put to bed and we have new better ways and people are going to be using them and we're going to be reaping the benefits of that Government should be there to promote prosperity, to help out the community, to guide towards a vision that everyone is sort of aiming at.

It's kind of been recently more used as a tool that one side gets a hold of it to beat up the other side, or to try to gain points one way or the other, and there's a lot of things that kind of murky up the waters, and I think we all feel it, is sort of ebbing in a way, and It used to be carried on the shoulders of integrity, probably for lack of a better word.

So you would have politicians who had integrity and that was integral into the way of how they saw themselves within this system. And you see that in a lot of institutional places now be it academia or journalism. You know, these big things that were kind of carried forth through our golden era, fueled by integrity, as that integrity falls off, you kind of see these institutional things start to fall apart, right?

So I see this as pretty fortuitous that this new technology is here on the scene now of course, these people who brought us to this point and built such an awesome prosperous country that's what brought this technology about. Was in the campuses of Google. So right when some cynic maybe could have been writing the book of the death of democracy, something within us got born and put forth.

To totally give us a whole nother chapter. And so I think we're just beginning on a new era of prosperity that once we put this new governance to work, it's really going to be something I believe.

 I could not agree with you more. And I think it's really

 an interesting perspective. And I think you're right. I read the Washington Post article and I thought, clearly people are paying attention to this idea that you've had. And like you said, hopefully it catches on. I will say that having worked on the government side for over a decade, I was surprised at how slow things moved and I used to always say, but that's not how the world works.

The world is moving at this pace. Why are we so behind? And I think you're exactly right about embracing the technology and what people have created to make us serve the public better one of the articles that I read, you talked about improving quality of life.

Right. Isn't that at the core, what government and what elected officials should be doing is focused on improving quality of life. And also the closer you get to a source, just like you're mentioning journalism and all of these other industries, I think it's so applicable, not just in government.

The closer you get to the source, I always say, The more reliable the information is, right? And as a government entity, we always were communicating, like come to us we'll be the source. how amazing is it that tools like AI and chat GPT have this ability to get you even closer and be more exact.

That's, what's so crazy to me, honestly, that more people in the government space and people running for office aren't embracing these tools and technology to improve how they serve other people or how they do their jobs

Everybody else is on Tik TOK. Why aren't we, it seems like it's common sense, right? 

What are your thoughts about what comes next? And I love that you said it it's okay that I, wasn't going to be the mayor, it's this idea of trying something different, or we'll never change.

Yeah, I don't think any serious thinker on the matter would put forth the hypothetical that, I, Victor Miller ran for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 2024 and I failed. And that was the last we hear about this I think that's why some of the traction and some of the interest is what it is and why it's so big, I've talked to people from all over the world,

it's really an idea that's caught on. And I think people intuitively understand that it is viable. And. It's probably something that is coming. And so I think that's one of the big reasons of, of, of it kind of taking off is the understanding of, Hey, this is just the beginning of something that's going to start swelling up and we're not going to see the end of it.

And so what I've done to position myself in a way. that I think will benefit others who will come after me is to create like an umbrella organization

I didn't have anything to kind of backstop what I was doing. I couldn't point these journalists to, Hey, this is sort of the platform. So that's what I'm hoping to build for this next group of people

we are a Wyoming trust and its purpose is to give some standardization and to have an organization that people will be able to plug into and have all that kind of backup support and that vision already laid out. That's what I've been working on that's what I'm hoping to have spun up for the next election cycle here

And that's the Rational governance alliance. 

That is the Rational Governance Alliance. And we are hoping to have hundreds, if not thousands of rationally bound delegates when I started out, just to show you it was literally just me. I walked into the clerk's office and paid 25 bucks to file the paperwork.

And it turned into an idea that spread around the world and got people thinking.

 If you want to be a rationally bound delegate, you would contact the Rational Governance Alliance and, plug into the system. And the idea is that, Having a government that you feel is responsive to you instead of being disillusioned by a government that you feel is oftentimes attacking you.

So if we want to bring some rationality into the littler things in our life, when as far as you go and interact with your local government, you don't get a headache and they don't contradict themselves and go against what it says in the book that they're supposed to do.

And it just helps your life out a little bit that scales all the way up to hey, you know, we're, we're talking about saving the world too. 

Wow, amazing. I recently found out that, one of the questions I had around why cities were not using chatbots on their website. A lot of cities like have access to them, but don't deploy them because

they want somebody to answer a phone in a call center. I don't know why, but they just don't do it. But the city of Denver did. And the number one issue that was reported using the chat bot was homelessness, people that were unhoused. The number two was food insecurity, people looking for food.

And I thought that was very telling if the homeless and the food insecure are using your chat bot, then we can't really say anymore that there's this digital divide that, you know, we need to be serving citizens in a certain way. 

And, not only are our cities not using these tools, but when they do, look who uses them, right? the people you might least expect. I think that's another piece is bringing different people into this process. And the way you're thinking about bigger than just a mayoral election is about, you just said saving the world.

What an inspirational movement that you've started. I just think this is really cool and I can't wait to see what happens for you next.

Yeah. And we're all waking up each morning with the possibility that You know, these things might evolve further.

Well, they have to evolve further. There's natural laws that we're finding out as far as the scaling law of large language models, you know, so one day we're going to wake up and have a strawberry chat GPT, and it's going to blow everyone's mind again, and it's on an exponential curve and things are only going to get more and more intelligent.

And so we have this really world class intelligence at our hands and it's figuring out how to do things that help our lives with it. At the end of the day, a position like the mayor of Cheyenne is hired for their intellectual chops so it's my belief that the voters chose the second best intellectual.

capability that they could have this go around. A lot of that is just some lag from, not being up on the technology and maybe a little bit of fear mixed in and stuff like that. There's just some inertia from an old system is always going to be pushed further than, you think.

The intellectual ability of these large language models is just remarkable one of the real interesting things about it is that no one really knows exactly what's happening in these models. There's zero people on earth who understand exactly what's happening. When we draw intelligence out of language, the way we do with these large language models, 

A low hanging fruit are some of these positions where we actually hire people for their intellectual ability and now we have a superior intelligence we can start replacing them and see what happens.

You mentioned a couple of things that I also talk about a lot, fear, operating from a place of fear.

And I think at the core, you've just hit on the head. What is frightening people about this? Not me. I'm embracing it and people like you are embracing it, but you are correct that this feeling of, well, this is going to take my job or this is going to replace me. I'm not going to be here anymore.

And I say, flip that on its head and think, how can that make us do our job better? Right? Like how does it make us serve better? How does it make. government better. You just gave me examples of, things that aren't working right. And so, use it as a tool to make us better.

Wouldn't we want to, like you just said, save the earth, save democracy, be better, be able to serve in a better way. And I just think we need more people thinking like that in this space. I've been in that space where this seems like a huge leap, but if you go talk to people in, the private sector, go into those worlds and see, how can we merge?

These worlds together and and we have to because it's here and you have to embrace it And I've been talking about this for over a decade in the careers I've been in even in journalism where people wanted to take a pen and paper and report a story and it was like no You need to be blogging. You need to be online.

You need to be on social media and you know old school reporters Didn't know how to do that but their jobs were changing and they had to change with it and here we are, 1015 20 years later, just like you're talking about this has been happening over time and I think it's really exciting.

I have two young children and I think about all of the possibilities for them with with these technologies and so it's really fun to get to talk to someone like you who's Just giving it a shot, you know?

Yeah, that's never been one of my problems. As far as fear, with these journalists that they'll bring it up and I'll say, all right. So let's take one minute to talk about the worst case scenario. And that's pretty fun, right? Cause we all talk about like Skynet and just these things we kind of grew up with about how the robots are going to.

Take over the world. And so I'm like, all right, so now, can we just flip it on this head, it's like, what are some good things you could think about that might happen and kind of the best case scenario and for whatever reason, people have trouble with that or you know, maybe it goes back to, we didn't grow up with the movies of.

Having a good technology was always the bad. So that's kind of burned into our psyche a little bit, but I've generally live life with a lot of faith. And I've always had a gut feeling that, this was nothing to be frightened about. Right away from the get go, it helped my life.

So, I knew that it can help you. One of the first things I had to do was make my resume better. And so I gave it my resume and I told it, hey, look this over and then give it back to me. only 10 times better. And it did. I was like, holy cow, this is awesome. You know, this thing, not only is it theoretically cool, but it practically helps you here in the real world.

And that's a beautiful thing. So I felt that and I saw that. And I just extrapolated that out from there to see what else it could do.

Awesome. Well, thank you. This has been so fun. I'm so happy to meet you and have this conversation. And I cannot wait to follow your journey. And I'm really excited for people to hear from you. Thank you!