𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆

This week on The AI Readiness Project, hosts Anne Murphy and Kyle Shannon talk with Daisy Thomas, Director of Advocacy and Policy Development at AI Salon. Fresh from a state policy fly-in in Tallahassee, Daisy brings a grounded, up-close look at how AI governance is unfolding—not just in theory, but in town halls, statehouses, and community centers.

We explore how public infrastructure, not just private innovation, shapes the AI future—and what that means for leaders outside the usual tech and policy circles.

𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗥𝗼𝗮𝗱𝗺𝗮𝗽

1. What everyday people are asking for in AI policy—and why it matters
2. How civic infrastructure, not just software, prepares us for AI
3. The quiet power of cultural spaces in shaping responsible tech

𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁

Daisy Thomas is Director of Advocacy and Policy Development at AI Salon. She helps founders, policymakers, and communities turn abstract AI principles into governance that builds public trust. Her work spans policy, civic infrastructure, and culture. Learn more at thesalon.ai/advocacy.

𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲, 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗯𝗲

Catch a new episode of The AI Readiness Project every Wednesday at 3pm (PST), co-hosted by Anne Murphy of She Leads AI and Kyle Shannon of The AI Salon. Want to meet others navigating this new terrain with humor and humanity? Visit The AI Salon or She Leads AI to find your people.

From Principles to Practice_ Daisy Thomas on the Politics of AI Readiness

Growing smarter and leading with what makes us human.

Anne Murphy: It's our

Kyle Shannon: bop. There we are. It's our bop. What's happening? Good to see you.

Anne Murphy: Good to see you too. I am still scratching.

Kyle Shannon: Are you really?

Anne Murphy: Nine days. Yeah. It's just going and

Kyle Shannon: that's so

awesome.

Anne Murphy: Going and going. But you,

Kyle Shannon: you got some color coordination going on, so I think you

Anne Murphy: Okay.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Fashion forward.

Kyle Shannon: Oh, that's good. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Got it. Everywhere

Kyle Shannon: to bring the, uh, the pallets

Anne Murphy: and to make to alive. And then I have my new Oh, you cherry,

Kyle Shannon: yeah.

Anne Murphy: Addiction candy thing. Um. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think I'll live to tell about it.

Kyle Shannon: Everybody.

Anne Murphy: Don't worry. I

Kyle Shannon: think you will. I, I think you will,

Anne Murphy: but I have learnings from it. But you tell me how you are, because you've had some big doings, some big doings.

Kyle Shannon: I've had some big doings. So, so a couple of things are, I've just been doing just a lot of work on myself personally. I've been doing work with the Daily Practice, you know, with the AI Salon Mastermind practice.

Daisy Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: And I just so happened to have an introduction or an invite, um, from, from a guy John Michael Horse down in Colorado Springs, Hey, I want you to come speak at our thing.

And so I thought, well, here's a good opportunity to to roll this thing out.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. Why not? First

Kyle Shannon: pancake? First pancake.

Anne Murphy: The first pancake over with.

Kyle Shannon: And so I spent four days this past week make building a keynote that's really beautiful. I took a lot of the images from the video I made about great repurpose and just made a really beautiful deck.

And I sort of get the deck finished and, and I realize I. This is kind of a bummer of a talk. Mm.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And so, um, ultimately the talk is, is a really, um. I think uplifting. Like it, we, we, we, we go through the hero's journey, right? We go in the depths and we come the other side. Um, but I got some really good advice to maybe let them know they're about to go through that. And so I started the thing, I started the thing off yesterday.

I said, I said, I'm really excited to be here. I'm really excited what we're gonna talk about.

Anne Murphy: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: And I said, you know, in, in a, in a, in a moment, but not right now. I'm gonna take you on a journey. And we're gonna come out the other side and it's gonna be amazing, but it's, it may not feel like that when we start.

And like one guy showed up and he goes, is this the vibe coding meetup?

Anne Murphy: Oh, I love

Kyle Shannon: that. And I was like, well, it's a meetup. Well,

Anne Murphy: what vibes used to me,

Kyle Shannon: you know, we're gonna be talking about the, the actual vibe. Yes, exactly. And so he stayed. And then, um, it was really good. I've never, um, before in my career, um, I've done lots of talking.

Um, I like it. I think I'm good at it. I have never. Done a guided meditation on stage before. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: That's

Kyle Shannon: pretty

Anne Murphy: awesome.

We talk a lot about what are your skills? What do you, you know, the hard skills. They call 'em hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills are the ones you make money on, right? Like, you know this, Anne, like HR departments love talking about soft skills when the budget's there. Yeah. And then the minute the budget's gone, they don't talk about that anymore, right?

So, so what the great repurpose is, is understanding that AI is about to strip away the tasks, the stuff that on the surface is where our value is. Mm-hmm. Where our value really is, is how we show up to work and who we are. Um, but the guided meditation was, was walking people through that.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: Just, you know, it's a, it's a normal Tuesday morning and you sit down at your desks and you know, close your eyes and I want you to think about what are all the things that you do and the emails that you send and the PowerPoints that you take, the images you edit, and the meetings you have and the phone calls you take.

And then this one guy who was a cabinet maker just was like this very sort of soft, deep thing. He said, useless.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: He was like, oh.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: I was like that, that, that is what? A lot of people are gonna be forced into confronting, right?

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: Whatever their version of that is. And so, and then, and then, you know, where, where the talk ends up going is we start, you know, we, we sort of come through it and we talk about once you decouple those, you have the opportunity now to really look at who am I, what do I value?

The the stuff that we think is important and talked about politics, and we're about to bring up Daisy Thomas who's gonna talk about advocacy and all that stuff. So I talked about that and that actually got some interest in the room, which was kind of cool. And, uh. It was really good. It was really good by the end, I think.

Anne Murphy: Awesome.

Kyle Shannon: I had a room full of people that had insights and you know, they, they didn't, they didn't sign up for it necessarily, but

Anne Murphy: yeah,

Kyle Shannon: just like ai, we didn't sign up for it, but it's not going away. So the only way forward is through, was one of the lines from my presentation last night.

Anne Murphy: Mm, nice. Nice.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Mm. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: You know? Yeah. Because people, I mean, as we've discussed, like this bookcase is literally full of this content because I've been, 'cause I studied this and I am so excited and I've been just. Uh, so fretting over where we are right now and where we're going, and people's like overall disconnection and yeah.

My thing of the year is what do you stand for? This is the year you have to figure it, the F out 'cause

Kyle Shannon: yeah, this,

Anne Murphy: this is it. Like this is

Kyle Shannon: the

Anne Murphy: moment you don't get to wait.

Kyle Shannon: And that doesn't have to be big either. Like, one of the things that's been striking me is like, you gotta like pick, pick something, right.

Anne Murphy: Mm. What do you want more of? Yeah,

Kyle Shannon: yeah. One of the, one of the, um. At, at one point I sort of got to the end of the thing and there were just kind of some long faces in the room and I said.

I said, I, it looks like some of you may be feeling this, but like, this is an ego death. Like what, what we just explored is an ego death, and like mm-hmm. Head started nodding and like, there was this one older guy who was sitting off to the side. I didn't think he was paying attention to anything I had, I had no reactions to them the whole time.

And the minute I said, this is an ego death and, and this is gonna be, this is gonna be sad and people are gonna be in mourning. He started nodding. He's like,

Anne Murphy: oh yeah.

Kyle Shannon: You know, so like, so they, they were there. Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we need, and it's, we need all the therapists to have their own relationship with AI and their own point of view on AI and, and the

Kyle Shannon: coaches and,

Kyle Shannon: yep.

Anne Murphy: The social workers, all the helpers, the teachers. This is why, this is my main reason why people need to be using ai. Is because the, the early, you know, the, the fast action taker, whatever types, there's a lot of helpers in our mm-hmm. People and yeah. We need to be prepared and I mean, yeah. So

Kyle Shannon: one of the, one of the, one of the insights I had, thank you.

One of the insights I had this past week was, um.

Back in the, in the worldwide web days, getting an early meant you had an advantage, right?

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

What hit me was. Being here early doesn't actually give any of us an advantage from a, from an opportunity and job and standpoint. I mean, we, we know a bit more, but like things are gonna change so dramatically. But what struck me particularly, it hit me last night, those of us that were here early. Know what's coming and we've either gone through this ego death already, or we know it's coming.

Mm-hmm. So that when this thing really hits hard, it's not that we are gonna teach people how to use ai, it's just that because we've been doing this, we know, we know the few, there's like these two tracks and we know there's a bunch of people on this track, and that one's headed for, not for, for an abrupt stop.

Anne Murphy: yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Is that, is that We've got some rafts. We've each got a raft right now.

Anne Murphy: Yep.

Kyle Shannon: And I think in our communities it's like, okay, how are you gonna get people across the river?

How are you gonna get people across, across the river? I think the power of community in that case is we all know what's going on. We've all got a raft. We can each only do so much. My friend Townsend Wardlaw described it as, it's like having a broom in a tsunami. Like, like, like just being an individual is just, but the more people that are thoughtful about this.

Anne Murphy: Have you heard my incredibly macabre thing about tsunami preparedness?

Kyle Shannon: No.

Kyle Shannon: right?

Anne Murphy: If you are on the beach and you are running and you'll die if you stop for anyone, that's why.

That kind of stuff for us to be able to get out in front and be like, here's the thing, this is too high stake. Or,

Kyle Shannon: well, it, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it is a macabre metaphor, but it's like, it's a metaphor on a lot of levels. Like it's been three years, right? Chat, GPT came out just over three years ago. It's been three years.

And what happens at the beginning of a tsunami? Are they loud? Are they No. The water retreats.

Anne Murphy: Yep.

Kyle Shannon: And like people are like, oh, cool, look, we can get farther out than we used to be able to. Like you have no idea what's coming. Right. And I, I feel like that's like AI has sort of done that kind of retreat thing and it's starting to come back in and it's like, by the time you see it, I.

Announcer: mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: But even that's probably not safe, right? This is big. This is bigger than we, than we maybe know. And yeah, the, the speed, you know, open Claw has been out for three weeks now. Mm-hmm. Two weeks not that long.

Anne Murphy: Yeah. I feel like two.

Kyle Shannon: Um. I, I learned something interesting about the guy that that wrote it. He sold his, his first software company for a hundred million dollars. So he, he is a, an accomplished developer. Um, since selling his company, he's, he's developed 42 different apps. Open Claw was the 43rd. So everyone's like, wait, where'd this guy come from?

He just came outta nowhere. No, he's been working and working and working. Just

Anne Murphy: like everything that,

Kyle Shannon: just like everything. The overnight success. Mm-hmm. So he now works, he works for Open ai. So one of the things that he said is his goal is that he wants that level of power to be available to his mother.

And they just go do that stuff and they think on their own and they coordinate with one another. And, and so he now works for open ai. So what that probably looks like is within six months maybe.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: That capability is gonna be available not just to techie, geeky people, but to all of us. And it is just a fundamentally different skill.

Anne Murphy: Yep.

Kyle Shannon: And I

Anne Murphy: have

Kyle Shannon: really understand, just really understand your own value.

Like why am I here? What's my purpose? What am I trying to do? Like all, all that stuff feels like the most important thing. 'cause all the other stuff's gonna change and blow, blow bias.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm. For. Many, many, many, many, many, many of us, this is our golden and potentially, you know, going forward only opportunity to really, really influence.

Future to really, really be, um, on, I believe what we'll look back on as the good side of history.

Announcer: Mm-hmm.

Where we could have done better, done more, yeah. Et cetera, given more, et cetera. But here we are. It's right in front of us. And, and for those of us who are Gen X, like we have so many advantages that we're bringing to the table.

Announcer: Mm-hmm. And

Anne Murphy: so I feel like we've put ourselves in a position where we can listen.

And it's also a very big privilege that we can listen to the signals in a way that other people who are currently overwhelmed by the technology can't, might not be able to hear or pay attention to or settle into. Like

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: Some of the things like, like to the existential stuff, and this is actually how she leads AI started was when we were hosting.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Anne Murphy: And you know, there're two hours long and it's on a Saturday, so you're like, yeah, I mean, you know, we'll have some pass, some cameos, people come in and out.

But no average, average watch time was like. 121 minutes.

Kyle Shannon: Right?

Anne Murphy: And then what would happen was, I can't exactly say how it started, but. The guys would leave and the women would stay, and that's like when it started for us.

Kyle Shannon: That's a, yeah. Yeah. That when

Anne Murphy: the meeting

Kyle Shannon: started. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing.

Announcer: Mm-hmm.

Anne Murphy: You know, co uh, Cory Sandler, like, you know, an an artist is ai. Can it ever be art? Am I an artist?

Now you've went through your art. Am I an artist thing? So anyw who I feel like it's good. I think it's a, I think we're both at a really appropriate stage and the communities around us. Like literally also right there.

Kyle Shannon: Well, even in the room last night, like there were a lot of technologists in the room, which in my mind I've got technologists as, you know, they're not necessarily paying attention to mm-hmm.

To, you know, heart centered stuff. They may be, um, that's a, a gross generalization, but, but you know, they're interested in the tech, they're excited about the tech, they're excited about the tools. They're technologists, right? That's, they geek out on that. I love that stuff too. Not a single person left.

Anne Murphy: Yep.

Kyle Shannon: And walk you up to the edge of an ego death. Have fun with that. And everyone did it. So I think there's, I, this is, and I, I've seen. Three posts in the past two days that are some version of a big article, much like the, the great Repurpose where people are confronting, there's something bigger going on here than just job loss.

That this is about meaning, oh God, this is a crisis of meaning. Yeah. So this is, I think this is here and it's, you know, it's, it's like anything in life when you have an idea and say it out loud, you know, it's time has come, that'll show up everywhere. So

Anne Murphy: it's time has come and it'll show up everywhere. Um.

Recently retired to very retired.

Announcer: Yep.

Anne Murphy: And so I see a lot of people go through this. Go through this transition, this milestone. And what happens is they realize once they're not working anymore, that they literally, they're fall like off a cliff. Don't know who they are.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: And one of the biggest problems is that they may have thought like, we're really, really bad at figuring out what future self wants to do.

Kyle Shannon: Right.

Anne Murphy: Like, why are here all the time? That's,

Kyle Shannon: and think

Anne Murphy: about that. You're here or in Carlton, that's it,

Kyle Shannon: right? But think about that retirement. You've got 30 years to prepare for it. You know, you know, un unless something you know happens at the, at the job, the company goes outta business or whatever, downsizes.

But you know, you've got at least 10 years to think about that. What we're about to enter is it's gonna happen in three years. And for, for people that are not aware of what's happening, it's gonna happen instantly. Right. And if you lose a job in a category where the category's wiped out

Anne Murphy: mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: There's nowhere else to go.

Right. And so,

Anne Murphy: yeah.

Kyle Shannon: So there's a lot of people need be forced into entrepreneurship, retirement, things like that. Martin fio is here. Look, he retired and Unretired. There you go. I

Anne Murphy: retired.

Legendary decades. He's legendary, legendary. Welcome, Marty. Um, hi Marty. Why don't you do this? Why don't you tell

Anne Murphy: the

Kyle Shannon: people about, I have,

Anne Murphy: I have two things. I still have two things.

Kyle Shannon: Oh, go ahead.

Anne Murphy: Okay. Um, one is that on my link tree, which we'll put somewhere and I, and I could drop it into the chat, um, in my link tree, which is like attached to my TikTok in my, in my LinkedIn, I have a gem that helps you look at.

All of the things you've done in your life, your lived experience, right, your work experience, you can add your LinkedIn, you can add whatever you want. Beautiful. And it will like re-index that for like what the next economy looks like.

Kyle Shannon: Oh, that's great.

People pass the imposter syndrome where they just literally won't let their imagination go there. So it's like, right, no, actually this thing that you've been doing for 15 years Yeah. Perfectly prepared you for X, Y, z for this other thing.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah,

Anne Murphy: this other thing. And then that's awesome. It talks to you about, uh, like, oh, okay, what about this?

What about that? What about that? Like, what do you like? What do you want? And it suggests a path forward. And la la la then it helps you, you know, talk about it and stuff like that. So, um, if people are interested in kinda like that nudge, that help, um, it's called like AI authority builder and it's a gem and it's on my social media things.

Kyle Shannon: Okay, great.

Anne Murphy: And the other thing I can talk about when I talk about she's ai.

Kyle Shannon: Okay, cool. Well let's do that now. Why don't we have you talk about she leads.

Anne Murphy: Oh,

Kyle Shannon: cool. And then I'll talk quickly about the salon and then we will bring up Ms. Deza Thomas.

We have a couple of different pillars that that advance our mission, which is to unite accomplished women to advance AI for global prosperity. But one of the things that's really emerging as incredibly important and that roles up to that mission is for women to accumulate wealth because of the way we spend, in part because of the way that we spend money.

Being so different and being so supportive of our econom, our local economies. It's very important, especially 'cause we have this thing called the Great Transfer of Wealth coming up in the next. Seven to eight to nine years, any who, we now have these three pillars that are AI education. So we teach, we have an a, a certified AI educator program.

Kyle Shannon: Oh, that's

Anne Murphy: awesome. A three month incubator for women to come together and like level up with each other around the case studies they've been part of, or the research that they've done, et cetera, et cetera. And we had so many women, um, apply for it and be like, just hella qualified that we are gonna have like three or four groups.

So that's

Kyle Shannon: amazing.

Anne Murphy: That's free, uh, for our ai, you know, our, uh, she leads AI Society members. Yeah. I'm so super excited about the, about the communities of practice.

Kyle Shannon: So amazing. Yeah. I love it. Beautiful.

Kyle Shannon: Beautiful. Awesome. Um, so AI Salon, um. Similar ethos. It's, I like, I, I, I always marvel when we come onto these calls, 'cause we don't get to talk, you know, throughout the week a lot of times. And we come on here and it's like, we're, we're at the very, you know, very, these very similar places. Um, so, so, you know, we're bringing Daisy up in a second here.

She heads up our, our advocacy and policy for the AI salon. We've got a lot of that stuff going on. Um. We've got the AI Salon Mastermind practice and we, the Practice Lab is this weekly place where we get to come together and do that. We're now gonna take the great repurpose and this idea of, you know, um.

So if you're not part of the AI salon, please Wow. Please jump in and go see it. Yeah, I'm really excited

Anne Murphy: about it. I'm part of it. People should join it.

Kyle Shannon: They're, they, should it be

Anne Murphy: silly not to. They

Kyle Shannon: should. Well, well, speaking of the, the AI salon and, and remarkable, remarkable people, let's bring up Ms. Daisy Thomas.

Hello, Daisy Thomas.

Daisy Thomas: Hello. Hello. How are you guys doing?

Kyle Shannon: Welcome, welcome, welcome. So my dogs

Anne Murphy: are going bananas. So I'm gonna go on mute, but

Kyle Shannon: Okay.

Anne Murphy: Perfect. Eventually the Amazon person will go away and, and people will be restored.

Kyle Shannon: That's awesome. Um, so, so Daisy, you and I saw each other last in Washington DC It was our third, the AI salon's third fly in where we brought in startups from all over the country, uh, to go share stories and, um.

Daisy Thomas: Ooh, I am excited about advocacy and policy.

That is literally what I spend most of my days focusing on. And um, I know that sounds ludicrous to most people, but it's really important 'cause AI is everywhere, it's in every sector, and if we don't get it right, it's going to be a massive challenge to undo. So what we do with the salon specifically is we work to bring voices who don't normally get a seat at the table.

To meet with legislators, policymakers, staffers, so that they can hear different use cases from around the country. So, you know, we work in different states. We just, like Kyle mentioned, we were just in, uh, DC in January for our third fly-in where we brought up a number of, I think it was 14 different companies.

Everywhere. And there's not just the typical cases that you would think, like when we were in DC we had two of the founders who were with us were using AI specifically in agriculture mm-hmm. In ways that we weren't really expecting. Um, it had to do with like soil maintenance and being able to assess like the quality of the produce.

A clear front runner of what they need to do, and we need to be that, that leader as well. The tech companies are located in America, so we should have the, the best policies. Right. Um, and so it's, it's difficult because right now it is a 50 state patchwork. Um, every state has their own foibles of how they're working with it.

Um.

Kyle Shannon: And understanding of it.

M often where we, we have a timeframe where we have a say in how we can do things. Yeah. This early in the game, and I know AI is out of the bottle, right? We know it's [00:32:00] there. But how can

Kyle Shannon: we actually, we're we're, we're so early, we're, we're so early, but it's moving faster than, than I think anyone knows. It's, it's moving really fast.

Daisy Thomas: Absolutely. But just like with tech, how do you legislate a, a, a technology that does move so fast? Mm-hmm. You have to really think about the frameworks and how it's, how it's actually being applied rather than like, very specific, um, issues. So, I don't know. I think that if you. Have any sort of interest in having your voice heard on any of these AI issues, whether it's your data privacy or chatbots or anything like, this is now the time.

This is now the time to start talking to your legislators in your state. It's time to talk to your municipal leaders. That's an incredibly important resource too, because that's where you have the most influence. So, you know, start making those connections. But if, if we want to make sure that our voices are heard, then we have to keep getting louder.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Shannon: Get in one of our communities or, or get in both. Right. If, if that's appropriate. Right. Because, um, we'll teach you how to do it. Like I was not. I did not ever do this in my life before two years ago. I've, I, you know, I've never done this before and now I'm, you know, leading cohorts in Washington, DC It's absolute insanity.

Um, and, and a lot of that's, thanks to you. Would, would you do me a favor and just give people a little bit about your background and like, you know, some of, some of the, you know, where you came from, maybe where, where your passion for, for this kinda stuff came from. Some of the things you've done and just, you know, where are you now?

Um. That sort of kicked it off. You know, I was Asian student political director when I was in college. Mm-hmm. I, I kind of just stayed in that, uh, community organizing sort of mind space forever because like I always knew I had a voice, but I also knew from an incredibly young age that you can say a lot of things and you're not always going to be heard.

Mm-hmm. And you can be heard and not listened to, so. Mm-hmm. It became sort of a lifelong mission that if I had the ability to be a voice for someone else who couldn't speak up for themselves, that was my responsibility. And you know, I do. That's amazing. Well, I have, I also have four children, and so I think it's incredibly important that we understand that, you know, not only are we.

Um, and coming at it from a fear-based mindset.

Kyle Shannon: Amazing. Amazing. And can you talk more about, you know, why you put the, the, um, the governance, uh, group together and, and just open up a dialogue around that with, with Daisy?

Anne Murphy: I think, um,

Yeah. So. I think that, you know, there's an element of, we all know, you know, we all know that this process is probably gonna be two steps forward and one step back, right? Mm-hmm. We're gonna, or maybe it's the other way around, like one step forward with policies that work. Mm-hmm. And policies that can be trusted and all of the powers that be right.

Kyle Shannon: Hmm. Wild.

Anne Murphy: If, if you wanna go all the way to the bottom, that's what I, that's what I think.

Love it. Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Daisy, jump, jump in. What are your thoughts?

Anne Murphy: What are your thoughts?

Daisy Thomas: I, uh, love being a mother. So, um, I, I agree. I think that there is a, a, a really positive potential, especially for, for women. Um. I've noticed, I know Anne mentioned earlier that there is a number of women getting into this space of advocacy and governance, specifically within ai.

Um. Keeping, like how many women juggle a billion hats, right? So like,

Anne Murphy: yeah, no, a hundred percent

Daisy Thomas: AI and generative AI can alleviate so much of that and then just help all of the different projects they would wanna get done, that they tend to put on the back burner because they're doing everything for everyone else.

And so now you have freed up time and like I, I've mentioned this before, but you know, AI has only. It saves me time, but now I've just filled all that time with extra projects and so I have so many more things that everybody Yeah. Ever have. Right. But it's so exciting and it's so interesting because I'm able to do so much more because it helps me alleviate some of the redundancies that will take me forever to get through.

Daisy Thomas: Sure I was, uh, completely politically burned out. Um, I worked very heavily in politics, um, and, but it got, uh, like very public between 2016 and 2020. Um. Obviously that was a very contentious time period, and I swore off all of it. I was just done, I was burned out and I, I, I felt like I shattered like my entire self understanding because I had spent so much of my entire life when I was 12 years old.

I ended up doing the other things that would've led me down that path anyway, and it's, yeah, it was so incredibly important to me because it didn't matter where I came from it with the fact that I was an American citizen and I, I had this opportunity to do that. And then I got involved in, got involved in politics and I saw how much of it's backroom dealings and how much of it is so corrupt, and it's so unethical that it.

Again, it shattered me. And so we got the ability to build custom GPTs and I thought, okay, well I'm a big fan of Alexander Hamilton. I love the musical. Let me build one based on all of the public information that's available for him. Um, I did, and I would have these. These political conversations, almost like therapy, but just like politics wise.

Kyle Shannon: Politics therapy with, with Mr.

Daisy Thomas: Hamilton, really it was, it was a lot of fun.

Kyle Shannon: Good.

Like do like how are we ever gonna do this without publicly funded elections and all of the, just the money in politics, corruption that has just ruined America, honestly. Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Yep.

Daisy Thomas: So I would have these conversations and at one point there were. Responses that to me were like, oh, wait a second. That's, that's a ray of hope.

There's something there. Let me, let me go deeper into this. And that sunshine that started pouring through in these, you know, generated conversations, made my brain click back over and say, no, you're not done yet. Now you, wow, that's amazing. Learned all of the lessons. Now you have to get back into it and you know what to do in a different way.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. And to Marty's point here, do you, do you see a path forward?

I mean,

Daisy Thomas: do I think that the country, um, regardless of what topic you're talking, is eager for some sort of consensus. Someone to take us forward, someone to have some moral backbone and like stand up and say, okay, here is how we're actually gonna work together. Let's stop this nonsense and move forward together as a nation.

Like, I think that that's what most people want at this point. I know, I certainly do, and I, I'm just an average person, so I would think that that's. Uh, from what I'm hearing when I talk to people here, uh, like I'm in, in Florida, that's what people want. They want someone who's willing to just get it done.

Anne Murphy: Can I say something to Marty's point?

Kyle Shannon: Yeah.

Anne Murphy: So there I bel Okay. I, I, first of all, same, I, I also am very, like glass is half empty on the whole powers that be coming together.

Don't like, and also here are a couple of things. Here's like, I don't know if this is like complete manifestation talk or what, but. A couple of things. We're about to see some pretty big cracks in our society when the full Trump Epstein files come out. Okay. Donald Trump was mentioned more times than Jesus was mentioned in the Bible.

Announcer: Hmm.

Anne Murphy: And when you add that to like the cataclysmic event of generative ai, like there's stuff impenetrable, immovable forces are, are moving right now.

Kyle Shannon: Right?

Anne Murphy: So for everybody saw here in this, in this space, man.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. We also saw, I mean this may not feel, feel directly related, but I kind of feel like in a weird way, COVID was a practice run for us because it, you know, just everything changed overnight. Just we decided one day, yeah, okay, we're globally not gonna go to work anymore.

Daisy Thomas: Um, I think that there's a lot of anger. It's not being addressed. Um

Kyle Shannon: mm-hmm.

Daisy Thomas: And it, the anger is going to be pointed at whatever's the nearest thing to put that anger on.

So you're going to see more violence, you're going to see, you know, more. Diseases and deaths of despair. That just, I mean, that's just going to increase. That is why it is so important for people to be getting involved in their community, for having these kind of conversations, to have options of like educating on, here are po potentials, here are things you can do.

Yep. Bring it back to in-person meetings so that you can train all of those people as well because they, they. Are just waiting for someone to talk to them like they're a human being and that they can have an option too. That's it. That's it's on them to then take it or not, right? But if we can just make that effort, put ourselves out there to do that, and just offer a lifeline to someone you don't know, the kind of effect you could actually have on someone's life.

That's

But one of the things that you've done for the salon for the past two years, two and a half, it's been a while. You've been active for a while Sure. Than longer. You're an og, you're an og irregular. Um, but as these state. Bills are coming up and coming up and coming up. You actually read them and you actually have a point of view on them, and we, we take, you know, stands on them based on our, our framework for how we, how we think about what's sensible AI legislation.

Can you just talk about what's going on right now? What are the big themes you're seeing in the legislation? Where are legislators getting it right? Because I'm a fan of saying, Hey, they, you know, have their heads up their butts and, you know, they, they overly broadly define things and there's all this mess, but, but most of the time I feel like the legislators at least have good intentions.

Daisy Thomas: I do think that they have, well, they're all well intentioned, EV no one wants to get it wrong. They do wanna make sure that they're getting it right. They also wanna make sure that they're not, you know, messing anything up.

Mm-hmm. That's why it's so important they are hearing from a wide variety of people so that they, they are more informed as well. Like, it's, it's a travesty, but, you know, whoever gets in the room is who's going to, who's. Gonna have the last say, and so it really matters. Um, what I've been noticing, there's a lot of focus on, uh, data privacy and education.

Um, AI and education. It seems to be a top theme throughout the nation for most states. Um, how

Kyle Shannon: and what's the, what's Education's really broad. What, what are they trying to, are they trying to legislate AI out of the classroom

Daisy Thomas: through 12? Yeah, it's K through 12. How it's being used within the classrooms.

And education children, uh, chatbots. That one is a big one. Um mm-hmm. That's trying to be addressed in several states. Um, and that's pros and cons, right? Like there's mm-hmm. Big reasons why we don't want kids to be anywhere near that stuff. But there's also some really good solid proof why it's a really accessible tool for a lot of kids who otherwise would never be able to have that kind of education or researchers or space to reach out to someone who they, they would not be able to otherwise.

Um

mm-hmm.

Daisy Thomas: But that's just my personal opinion. I, I, I don't think that there's enough understanding from the general public on how their data is being used, how much of their information is. So readily available and it, it is, you know, the onus is on us as a society to, to, you know, start understanding that.

But we still need people to. To have those conversations so people can understand it. We can't just expect, people just know things, right? Yeah. You just, you wake up and like, oh, I suddenly know how to do kung fu. Like it's not the matrix for real. Like we have to actually teach people, we have to have conversations.

Kyle Shannon: Hmm. That's good. That's really good.

Daisy Thomas: Yeah.

Kyle Shannon: Um, you know, I'm curious, I,

have you seen any bills that. It, it's clear to you that the people that put it together actually know what's going on with ai actually, you know, understand what's happening. I felt like in DC when we talked to the Department of Commerce, that was the first of those kind of meetings I was in where. The, the, the agencies within the government are doing a lot of work on ai and the guy that we met with actually had a clue what was going on in the legislative rooms.

Daisy Thomas: It's still kind of early on, it's not, I haven't noticed anything specific like that.

I know that when we were in the, the round table with Representative Ulti, I mean, he has a tech background very specifically, so mm-hmm. He is able to speak to it in a way that most people can't, most legislators will never be able to, um, they're not, they won't even be able to understand it in the way that he can.

Um, so I think that he's an incredible asset to have, um, for that. But I don't know that there's not that many, um, policy makers that tend to have a tech background. A lot of them are more, you know, at least in state legislatures tend to be like developers, land developer, realtors, um, attorneys. It's just pretty standard.

Yeah. So that is a great resource. We have some wonderful, wonderful AI salon members, so it's, it's great to be able to bring 'em up to different legislators.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah, that's, that's really good. I'm, I'm, um, I, I wanna reiterate something you said about the importance of, of being in the room and telling the stories.

You know, the, with the exception of that guy of commerce, our legislators are being bombarded with. AI's evil AI's gonna kill us. AI stole all of our stuff. AI's gonna take all of our jobs. And I've experienced personally when you share a very simple story where someone did something and transformed their business or did something and made a difference for a student or something like that.

Daisy Thomas: Sure. I, I've always taken a much more human approach to talking to policymakers. I think that, um, too often people talk to them as if they're some sort of, uh, holier than thou person. Mm-hmm. And instead, like you're having a conversation with someone who likely is representing you. And so tell your story.

Just share what you're doing. They need to hear it. They wanna hear it. These people have campaigned for years. They know how to have conversations with people so they're not big back, scary boogeymen. They're there to listen to you. That's literally their job. So, and as well with their staffers, their staffers are there to take notes, make sure they're asking you questions.

Kyle Shannon: right.

Daisy Thomas: They might have a million other conversations. They might have just got off the phone and been yelled at for 10 minutes about some other thing, and so you might get someone who's very, you know, ordinary with you.

It's okay because you guess what? You move on to the next conversation and you keep telling your story because your story matters. Yeah. Your voice matters. What you do in the world matters, and you need to be telling people what you do.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it, it, the government feels so big, it feels counterintuitive that small stories do, but like I've, I've witnessed, you know, just faces change and people sit up and start taking notes on the most simple thing.

So, um, thank you for that. So what we're gonna do, I wanna switch gears. So we, we ask all of our guests the same question every week, and we're gonna ask it of you too. Um, and there's no wrong answer. So I know we didn't ask you to prepare for this, so if you get it wrong, you know, and, and might make fun of you, but I definitely won't.

Daisy Thomas: AI readiness means you are. Open-minded. You're willing to try something new. You're willing to play first. Right? And that's something I have to make a confession. I know it's Ash Wednesday. I have not spent enough time playing first.

Lately I have been so focused on the work and being inundated with it that this the Claude Code stuff. No idea. Yeah. I keep hearing it pop up. I have no idea how I am. It works. How am I supposed to do a good job if I don't know how these tools work anymore? So I have to make sure that I'm carving out enough time in my work week that I am playing first.

And that's just a really important, but, um,

Kyle Shannon: beautiful.

Daisy Thomas: Yeah.

Daisy Thomas: Absolutely

Anne Murphy: always. Yeah.

Daisy Thomas: Well I appreciate you both having me on. It's wonderful to getting to talk about advocacy all the time. I love it.

Anne Murphy: Mm-hmm. Thank you for everything that you do. Yeah,

Daisy Thomas: absolutely.

Kyle Shannon: Yeah. Thanks Daisy. This has been awesome. Thanks so much for everything and uh, we'll see you in the salon and have a fantastic time in Tallahassee.

Daisy Thomas: Thank you very much.

Kyle Shannon: Alright,

Anne Murphy: bye. Bye

Kyle Shannon: everybody.