The Truth Is the Best Talking Point

Alex McCoy on Platner, AI accountability, and getting knighted (really!)

I used to meet interesting people on Twitter all the time. It happens infrequently these days, so I really value it when it does. I’ve been following Alex McCoy for a while now. It’s clear to me that he’s politically far to my left, and I like having my default responses challenged by him. I also find his views on AI responsible and insightful, so I wanted to talk with him at length.

We had a wide-ranging conversation--from the Graham Platner implosion to data centers to Alex’s experiences at immersive medieval battle events. Alex gives us an explicit call to action (tell Congress to get moving on AI regulation!) and a lot to think about in terms of how campaigns--for offices and issues--are run and won.

Topics Discussed

• Graham Platner’s Senate campaign collapse and what it means for progressive candidate recruitment

• Trust, accountability, and the “the groups are the problem” debate in Democratic politics

• What voters actually want from elected officials

• AI’s growing role in hiring, firing, workplace surveillance, and government decisions

• The AI industry’s political spending and lobbying power

• How to actually get your member of Congress to pay attention to AI

• Alex McCoy’s immersive medieval battle reenactment hobby

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Episode Resources

Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

Alex McCoy

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. I’m here today with guest host Alex McCoy, an organizer and advocate for progressive causes, who is especially focused on the responsible use of artificial intelligence. Alex and I have a wide-ranging conversation about the progressive movement in general before discussing AI, and then we turn our attention Outside of Politics to Alex’s immersive medieval battle experiences. I loved this whole conversation, and I think there’s a lot of rich material to continue talking about here, so I hope that you’ll listen and then come to the comments and our email and talk with me more about it. I want to quickly remind you that we would love to see you live in person in Minneapolis at our live show and afterparty on August 29th. The kind of connected community that Alex describes about his medieval weekends forms for us at events like Minneapolis, and we would love for you to come be part of it. We’re getting down to the wire, so if you do plan to come, don’t delay, grab those tickets at the link in the show notes. And now, meet Alex McCoy. I’m really happy to have you here, and I don’t quite know how to introduce you. So can you just introduce yourself to everyone?

[00:01:23] Alex McCoy: Sure. Yeah. My name’s Alex. I use he/him pronouns. I am a progressive organizer fighting back against big tech and artificial intelligence harming us and our lives and our families and our careers and our environment. But I’ve been organizing for more than a decade ever since I got out of the Marine Corps, where I served as a sergeant. I co-founded a progressive veterans group called Common Defense, which has done a lot of great work to fight back against endless forever wars. I worked in the 2024 election cycle leading youth voter registration for NextGen America overseeing eight state teams registering young people to vote on college campuses. And I’ve had all kinds of different jobs in state government, in different nonprofits. Before my current work, I was on the climate team at Public Citizen. Really excited to be here. I’ve been a big fan of the podcast for years, so thanks for having me.

[00:02:25] Beth: Thank you for being here. I came to your work through Twitter, now X. And I still look there-- even though it’s a dumpster fire now-- for voices that I wouldn’t hear otherwise. And you’re one of my favorite accounts that I know is pretty significantly to my left personally, but I feel like you tweet with a lot of integrity. I learn a lot from what you share, and so I’m excited to pick your brain about a whole bunch of things. And X might be a good place to start because you’ve been tweeting a lot about the implosion of the Platner campaign. I am sick to death of talking about Graham Platner, honestly-- which is not good, right? When you have a candidate and you’re tired of that candidate before the general election, that’s a problem. But I’m really interested in what can be learned from this situation and just curious what you’re thinking about as you’ve watched this unfold.

[00:03:17] Alex McCoy: Gosh I’m thinking a lot of things. Foremost among them, grief that this is where we’re at and gratitude for the women who told their stories about their experiences with Graham Plattner. It’s not easy and I want to just say that I believe them and that I’m glad that we are hopefully going to have an opportunity to select a different nominee. So that’s the first thing I would say. The real question I think is how did we get here? How do we avoid making the same mistakes? And I think obviously everybody that we recruit to run for office now, my first question’s going to be, “Tell me about your tattoos.” And I think that in a time when more millennials and people of my generation are running for office, a lot of us have a posting history online, and anybody that’s been extremely online, you’re living your raw self for years, and if you take some of the worst examples of that and throw those in an attack ad, it’s going to make you look maybe not how you are today or what you believe and sincerely think. So we’re going to have to figure out, like, how to grapple with that collectively, and I think we’re going to have to figure out what it looks like to take a person that has come from a background that isn’t planning to run for office since they were in high school and it, and support people to represent not just a perfect biography but to be representing a movement and a set of issues that they and the voters want. Because I think that’s the big takeaway I have from the experience of Graham Platner. Is that for months now people have been supporting Graham Platner in spite of Graham Platner. And it would be a mistake to think that all of those 150,000 voters in Maine who voted last month were just hoodwinked by the fact that he wore flannel shirts or has a deep voice. There’s plenty of people who wear flannel shirts and have a deep voice. What people are really looking for is somebody that speaks to the needs that we have and the desire for accountability from the political system, and somebody who feels like they’re on their side, and somebody who’s going to push back against a default of endless war and a broken healthcare system, and all the things that were part of that platform that was the basis of the movement.

[00:06:18] I think that, tactically, politics requires a lot of trust and I really feel like a lot of us in the progressive movement had our trust betrayed by Platner’s campaign. How many times we had to sit there and think “Okay, is this it?” Okay, you’re telling me what you’re telling me and we have to make a choice on how we proceed and there’s a collective action problem, the same way we saw with Joe Biden in the 2024 election where everybody saw that same debate and we’re looking at each other “Gosh, I don’t know if he can rise to what we need from him anymore. What do we do?” And it’s really hard to be that first mover. When story after story kind of dropped, everybody’s looking at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and all the organizations that supported him, and it’s we got to move together. One takeaway I have is to just be able to break through these collective action problems by speaking to each other more and being more vulnerable among the movement and asking ourselves what are our fundamental lines, right? What are our things that we find acceptable and unacceptable? And we may have disagreements there, but I am proud that the Democratic Party has established a firm line that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what. No matter what. We are all united in that, and that is something that makes us fundamentally different from the people who support President Trump.

[00:08:01] Beth: Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about my journey watching the Platner campaign as someone outside the movement. When I saw his very first ad, I thought, “This is going to work. This is maybe not for me, but this is going to work.” And I thought it was healthy for the progressive movement to make peace with the tattoo. To figure out a way through that. Because the worst branding problem that the progressive movement has is this purity testing, this kind of we’re HR, we’re no fun. Anything that colors outside our lines is unacceptable to us. So I thought some good things were happening there. I thought he personally has handled every situation with a lack of integrity.

[00:08:40] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:08:40] Beth: I do not like the language that every single thing that goes wrong in your life is the result of someone rigging the system against you, that the corporate media is somehow doing a poor job by investigating people who want to be one of 100 senators. So I’m watching him go along and feeling more and more personally uncomfortable with the way that he’s responding to these things. I don’t think it’s that the public wants a perfect candidate. I feel like we’re getting to an understanding that, yeah, everybody’s said something stupid online at this point. People make bad decisions. I think there’s a lot of grace and space, especially for people who’ve served in the military who’ve made poor decisions during the course of and after their service. I think there was an opportunity for kind of an everyman candidate here. To me, it is all about his unwillingness to just stand in front of a microphone and say, “I have screwed up over and over again in my life. You’re going to hear more and more of that. I’m sorry for it.” And maybe because the allegations have become so serious, and I agree with you, to me, everything being said by these women hangs together and rings true, and I believe them. Maybe there is no way to do that. And I am glad that the Democratic Party draws that line, too. But for future candidates, man, the lesson to me is just get in front of this stuff, have some humility.

[00:10:02] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:10:02] Beth: And say it, “This is all on me. I want a job where the buck will stop with me on everything.”

[00:10:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah, I think that’s right. An ethos that I try to live by is the truth is the best talking point. No matter what, right? Like no matter how bad it feels or the consequences it may have, the consequences of you trying to cover up the crime are worse because it’s going to come out sooner or later. And I think, to your point, people responded really positively when the Reddit posts story the first thing came out because he looked everybody in the eye and he said, I understand what I said and why it was wrong, and I’m sorry, and here’s my plan to like actually make the issues related to those things better. And mea culpa, right? And I think that even helped him in a way. I think the Reddit story, when it was just that and him taking accountability made him a stronger candidate. But it was the fact that it was one thing after another, and after each instance Everybody’s “Okay, is this it, bro?” And he would say, “Yes, this is it.” He met with 30 senators, and he looked them in the eye and he said, “This is it.” And I was a supporter, but not involved in the campaign itself. I did support independent expenditure side efforts for him, but the nature of that is you can’t talk to the campaign. So we just had to have faith that they were behaving, with candor and grace and humility. And that really sucks. It really sucks. It’s letting down so many ordinary people who volunteered their time and their money, and their belief, their passion their aspiration for a better future. So that’s a bummer, but this won’t be the last fight, and I’m also really excited to see the Maine Democrats pick someone to step in and carry the torch. I think they have some really great options of great candidates among those who ran for governor and others in the state who have a long track record of public service, so we don’t have to, at least in this instance, take a risk on somebody new.

[00:12:37] And I think that there are some other exciting new voices that come from less traditional backgrounds for politicians or people running for office. I want to shout out the great work that Run for Something is doing to elevate first-time younger candidates who Otherwise, never would have gotten the support to run. A lot of them women, and a lot of them people of color, and a lot of them not coming from privileged institutions. I also want to shout out some of the other candidates that are similar to Graham Plattner. I’m really excited about Sam Forstag, who’s running in Montana. He’s running for Congress. It’s a red-leaning seat, but he’s polling very competitive, and he’s a smoke jumper, which is like a forest fire firefighter role. And he’s really awesome, and he’s really amazing speaker running on this powerful platform. Has been out there in the community, which is the other thing people want to see. We’re so tired of politicians not being accessible. So few hold town halls anymore, and we want to be able to see our people asking for our vote stand up in front of us and answer our questions. And he’s out there doing that.

[00:13:57] Beth: Let me ask you this question about the movement. I think much like MAGA, although animated by a completely different set of principles, the progressive movement attracts a lot of first-time voters. A lot of people who’ve been disgusted by politics, and talks to those constituents in a very plainspoken way about what matters and what you’re trying to do. And all that is both really inspiring to people and carries tremendous risk, and I think you see that risk side playing out on the MAGA movement now, that people are becoming disillusioned that a lot of what they voted for has not come to pass. Now, some of that I think is because the president has betrayed a lot of what he said he was going to do and has focused principally on enriching himself instead of making life better for all of the people who came out to support him. Putting that aside, the progressive movement has bold ambitions that in a system like ours will take a lot of time and a lot of persuasion and a lot of work to get to a critical mass to bring these things forward, and forward won’t mean the full vision, right? And so I wonder how you reconcile. A thing I keep thinking about with Plattner is if he’d been great, if he’d been exactly what he seemed to be, and he got to the Senate, and he has to compromise and he’s talking about all these things and two terms in, none of them have happened. What does that do on the movement side, and how does someone like you talk to voters about that?

[00:15:38] Alex McCoy: Yeah. This is one of the big challenges of organizing because the people we need to win and the people we need to build a better country and a better system are the people that aren’t participating yet, and we have to bring more voters into being engaged in the process. And in order to do that, we have to overcome a deep cynicism about being able to feel any tangible improvement as a result of what we’re asking from them. So how do you do that? This is why I think it is important to ground the progressive movement in organizations rather than hero candidates. In Maine, there’s a great organization called Maine People’s Alliance, which is a sort of grassroots membership organization. Graham was a member of it. He did activism through Maine People’s Alliance. He went to DC to lobby his own members of Congress, including Susan Collins, through Maine People’s Alliance around issues like healthcare. They work on issues, and they work at the local level, and they work at the big level. And we spend so much time talking about the big level, the national politics, the, “We need Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.” And we do need those things. And here where I live in Orlando, we had our local city had a agreement with ICE where they were housing immigrants that had been detained by ICE in our local county jail, and it was costing us millions of dollars at the same time that ICE had just gotten billions of dollars from President Trump and the Republicans in Congress. And we were complicit in this mass detention agenda. You may have heard of Alligator Alcatraz here in Florida. And local organizers here were able to get that contract canceled. That our city was able to help push back against ICE’s abuses. And there are small wins like that, right? That’s how we keep people engaged, is maybe we’re not going to get Medicare for All tomorrow, but we can improve real, measurable things that people can see and feel, and we can use big campaigns like Obama’s campaign in 2008, like Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, like Graham’s campaign, like Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Even if you’re not totally on board with every policy that they’re running on, what they’re running on is fundamentally that we should get involved and we should stay involved beyond election day, and that we should be fighting both inside the legislature and outside in the streets to push for the same changes, and you do that through organizations. And this is maybe another answer about platinum, right? The beauty of a movement Is it contains a lot of bad people. It contains a lot of flawed people. It’s messy, it’s relational. You go to your local Indivisible chapter, and there’s some people I can’t stand.

[00:19:17] Beth: True in every organization ever, right? Every church, every school, every club, like whatever it is you’re going to get it all.

[00:19:23] Alex McCoy: Exactly. And so much of people’s experience with politics has been being treated like an ATM. That the primary way we get interacted with by the Democratic Party is I made one donation to a candidate years ago, and now I get 5,000 emails a day that are saying their hair’s on fire and if I don’t give them 50 bucks, then Mitch McConnell is going to rise from the grave and take over everything and we need to go, right? And then that’s it. You don’t get invited to meetings. You don’t get asked to do anything else. And when you do get invited in, and when you do get included in a process, and when it’s not top-down, it’s not like three guys in a WeWork in DC deciding what you need to do, but it’s you and your neighbors, that feels really empowering and transformative. Whether you’re doing that through your Indivisible or you’re doing it through the Democratic Socialists of America or you’re doing it through some other community organization, that is what I find keeps people in the fight and overcomes cynicism. Because you have that solidarity with the people that you’re in the fight with and you recognize that all of those people are imperfect. And I think that speaks to why Graham’s campaign was so durable through scandals; is because the people of Maine are tight-knit and we’re looking at each other going, “Yeah, I know he’s an ass.”

[00:20:55] Beth: Yeah.

[00:20:56] Alex McCoy: Aren’t we all?

[00:20:58] Beth: I would be very impressed if I received an ask from a campaign for something other than money. I really would. So I have to ask you.

[00:21:06] Alex McCoy: Sure.

[00:21:06] Beth: If you’re building the movement around groups, the groups have quite a reputation.

[00:21:11] Alex McCoy: The groups.

[00:21:12] Beth: The groups. So all of the autopsies of the Biden presidency say the groups were a real problem for us. How do you respond to that kind of analysis?

[00:21:24] Alex McCoy: That this is a great question. I’m glad you asked me because I both agree and disagree with this narrative. Let me start by how I agree. I think there are a lot of issue advocacy organizations that have talked a big game about how they represent a base of people. And then they say, “In order to appeal to this base of people that we represent, you need to, Mr. Politician, support XYZ policies.” And it turns out that they’ve gotten ahead of where that base of people actually is. They are supporting things that those people don’t actually support. And so if the politician follows their advice, they’re actually going to lose votes, they’re not going to gain them. Secondly, I think that we have gotten lazy in the era of the internet and digital tools where it used to be in the civil rights era, if you wanted to have Martin Luther King’s March on Washington every church is going to get their 50 people, and we’re going to get a bus, and we’re all going to go and then we’re going to get all these different groups, the different SNCC chapters at the different schools, and it adds up to a million-man march. Now you have a tweet go viral. Like there are ways that suddenly you can get mass mobilization into the street that didn’t come through real infrastructure that existed that is accountable, right? And so what you really need and the way these groups get ahead of their base is they have no structural accountability to that base. The base doesn’t elect them. They’re not in a federated organization that has all these affiliates, that there’s a way to pass a resolution where we’re all going to support this thing. And if the people in charge get ahead of their skis, we’re going to recall them, and we’re going to put somebody else as our spokesperson who’s going to speak to our actual material interests.

[00:23:38] And so I think it is true that some politicians have confused highly visible organizations and influencers and activists that speak on behalf of a community but are not accountable to that community and that has led them astray. Now, where I disagree with this idea that, just don’t listen to the groups are bad, I think it lets politicians off the hook. It is the job of an advocacy organization to advocate. And it is the job of an organization, whether their idea is popular or not, if they think it’s the right idea and the truth, they should make a persuasion argument. And it is the job of the politician to say yes or no. So to outsource all the responsibility on the people trying to say it would be a better world if you did XYZ absolves the politician of the responsibility to say I disagree with that because... and we need more of that, right? I think that’s one of the things that was missing in the Platner race. Janet Mills had no policy platform. There was none on her website, nothing. And then she didn’t do any events where she said what she stood for, right? And too often that’s what establishment politicians do, is they try to avoid saying what they believe so that they don’t make anybody mad. And I think in a world that everybody’s learning about what’s going on by watching short-form video on their phone and it’s a crowded attention economy, like that doesn’t work anymore. And because so many groups are hollow and they’re not accountable to a base, and that means they can’t mobilize that base transactionally. They can’t say, “All right, Mr. Politician, I understand that, maybe this policy doesn’t poll well with the median voter, but if you adopt it, I’m going to turn out these 10,000 of our members to vote for you.” Politicians love making that kind of deal. But we just can’t keep our end of the bargain anymore.

[00:25:55] Beth: I think you said a lot of really important things there. I love the idea that accountability because I think that word gets thrown around so much that I think, “What are we even talking about?” The idea that accountability comes from proximity and relationship and cohesion I think is so good. I want to say something about Janet Mills that I don’t know if I believe about Janet Mills as a person. I just don’t know enough about her. But this point about platform and issues gets to something that really bothers me and is a reason why I would never run for office myself. What I really want in a mayor or a governor or a senator or just a state legislator is someone who promises to listen to people and do their homework and arrive at their best judgment. Because some small percentage of what they do will be proactive, but the larger percentage will be reactive most of the time. The world and the needs of the world don’t fit your policy platform usually. I think about this with George W. Bush all the time and how he wanted to be a domestic president, and that’s not what the world had in store.

[00:27:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:27:10] Beth: And that was catastrophic. He had a domestic agenda and ended up having to be a foreign policy president, and it was catastrophic. And so I think about that when I elect people. I really don’t need someone who says, “This is what I stand for and this is what I’m going to fight for.” Yeah. I need someone who says “Yeah, I will go to hearings. I will listen to experts. I will research. I will talk to my constituents. I will do the town halls. I will take in as much information as I can and make the best decisions I can from that information.” And I just don’t know if anyone can get elected that way. Yeah. But I think that the inability to get elected that way is part of what we’re all really pissed about at the end of the day. I think most of us want that on some level. It’s just not a sexy, inspiring, let me get my checkbook out and my signs made message.

[00:28:00] Alex McCoy: Yeah. I think there’s something to that. I think what’s important for accomplishing that is people need to know who it is you’re going to do your homework with and listen to, right? And there’s a lot of, I believe, justified dissatisfaction with the expert institutions. Some of it unjustified, some of it justified. We see versions of that on the left and the right. Obviously, I disagree with anti-vax stuff, anti-mask stuff during COVID, but I think you could have a very reasonable conversation about what were some of the choices that the Center for Disease Control made? What were some of the trade-offs that the administration made during the COVID pandemic? In the point you made about foreign policy, right? The whole foreign policy expert class supported the devastating wars that we started during the Bush administration, and continued during the Obama administration, and continued during the first Trump administration, and that only Joe Biden, over the objections of much of the expert class was willing to bring to an end. And now that Trump has reopened. I think that this is one of the roles that the issue of Gaza is playing right now in Democratic primaries; is when people are outspoken about Gaza, I think a lot of voters are processing that as, “Okay, this person is unbought,” they’re going to listen to what voters think in our party, not what big super PACs or lobbyists think. Setting aside the merits of that issue, I think that is what people are interpreting from that position. And similarly there are other issues like Medicare for All, where for some voters it’s not about are we going to actually pass the bill Medicare for All in this next Congress, it’s about, “Okay, this person is not at the hock of big pharma,” right? If they’re saying this, I know that they’re on my side and not on the side of the people that I feel like are responsible for this broken situation that we’re in.

[00:30:21] Beth: Let’s take a quick break and then come back and talk about some of those big companies and who you listen to on important issues. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of work on AI, and I want to start by just asking you to introduce that work to our audience.

[00:30:45] Alex McCoy: So artificial intelligence is going to be, I think, the next big issue in our lives because it’s getting more powerful as a tool. And because it’s getting more powerful as a tool, more and more companies are integrating it into their businesses, and as a result, they’re not hiring as many workers as they used to or they’re even laying workers off. And this particularly is affecting young, new college grad kind of entry-level positions. AI is being used by our government to power autonomous weapons that the military is using to decide where to strike, and it was being used by DOGE to decide what programs to cut. It’s being used in making Medicare decisions. It’s being increasingly used to make choices that affect the lives of ordinary Americans. And in the workplace, we’re seeing AI used as a tool of surveillance. We’re seeing workers with AI systems monitoring everything they do on their computer or listening to their work sales phone calls. And I’ve talked to truck drivers who there’s an AI system monitoring them on their whole route. This is a new reality. You talk to teachers and parents of kids in school and teachers are at their wit’s end because all the kids are cheating on their homework with chat.

[00:32:29] And then the kids are like “ All my friends don’t hang out, and they all have AI girlfriends and boyfriends, and I’m using my AI as my therapist.” So there’s all of these ways that this tech is just transforming things quietly and causing a whole bunch of interconnected disruption to what we experience and what we live and in the opportunities we have. And when you zoom out, what’s happening is you have a couple giant companies owned by some of the richest people in the world who are amassing a unprecedented amount of wealth and correspondingly an unprecedented amount of political power, and who themselves are publicly saying that we think this technology could get out of control, could be used for nefarious means, is going to cause mass unemployment in the coming years, and could even make human beings go extinct. They’re saying this out loud, right? And our political system has not responded to that yet, so we need it to, and that’s what my job is

[00:33:54] Beth: So I wonder as you approach that job, just like fundamentally, how do you feel about AI? Do you use it? I meet people who are, like, almost religiously opposed to it. And then people who are, I think, outrageously optimistic about it. I find myself somewhere in between those two positions. I wonder where you land, just as a starting place.

[00:34:17] Alex McCoy: Yeah. I like to imagine a two-by-two grid where one axis of the grid is on one end, AI is really powerful as a tool. And the other end is AI is totally hype, it’s all fake, it’s a fancy auto-complete. It just gives you wrong information. Like you don’t even need to worry about it because it’s all hype. And then the second axis is and that’s good versus that’s bad.

[00:34:43] Beth: Yeah, that’s good. I like that.

[00:34:44] Alex McCoy: So I think, to your point, there are people who are like, “It’s all fake, and that’s good. You don’t even need to waste your time about it.” There’s people who are really mad because they think it’s fake, and people are over-hyping it, and they want to debunk this and have Ed Zitron, writing these blog posts about how it’s going to cause a bubble that’s going to pop and I don’t think that is true. Objectively, I don’t think that is correct analysis. And the tech has gotten better. A lot of people really got stuck on how powerful ChatGPT was when it first came out, and they’re releasing a new model every three months it feels. And it has been a couple years, and now it’s way, way better. And a lot of people tried it once, never tried it again, and they are stuck on how good it used to be when they were generating images that had five arms and seven fingers. So where my head is at is this is really powerful, and that’s potentially bad. It’s bad on our current trajectory, but if we put the right guardrails in place, it could be good. It could be liberating. It could be the new printing press. It could be the invention of agriculture. It could be the internet, right? Where if you structure it in the right way, this can free up a lot of labor that we currently have to do. I was listening to an interesting podcast about a homeschooling mom who uses AI to help keep her lesson plans really organized in an organic way, and she can upload little voice memos, and record the lessons, and it’s applying her pedagogical principles consistently and keeping track of their progress and the errors that her kids are making so that it can help her figure out what assignments to give next. So there’s like a lot of, I think, underrated, useful ways AI could make our lives better. The main one that everybody cites is in medicine. It could be really useful for discovering new medical treatments or new pharmaceutical drugs or to screen X-rays and MRIs and find stuff earlier than we otherwise would.

[00:37:02] So I use AI every day. I have no technical background. I’ve never taken a computer science class in my life. I don’t know how to code. But using AI, you remember there used to be something called the Town Hall Project that would show you, like, all of the members of Congress that were having a town hall upcoming, so you could go and you could... this was maybe like a early resistance 2017/2018 thing. It doesn’t exist anymore. The website’s dead. Nobody maintains it. I recreated it with Claude, which is the anthropic AI. And every day it scrapes all of the mobilized pages of the members of Congress and the candidates running. It scrapes their newsletters that it’s subscribed all to with a special custom Gmail inbox, and it reads that inbox and reads all their newsletters. It scans their social media feeds once a day, and it does some targeted searches of the internet for like local news reports or anything that may be mentioning their events. And so I just get every morning I log on and I check my Slack and boop. Tom Suozzi has a town hall and congressman Espaillat is going to have coffee with seniors and here’s all the details and here’s the registration link. And it makes it really easy for me as an organizer to say, “Okay, great. We’re all going to go. I’m going to get all my seniors at this coffee with seniors to talk about how my grandson is not going to have a job because of AI.” And it’s been really increasing my capacity in a way that it’s like I have... It used to be that AI was like an autocorrect. Then it was like a pretty incompetent intern. And now it’s kind of like a couple pretty competent, high initiative and self-starting like moderately experienced junior employees that you have working for you for a monthly subscription. And it’s just it’s pretty incredible to see the change, and that should both give us hope and scare us because every company’s looking at that.

[00:39:08] Beth: I think that’s a really helpful level set to know where you’re coming from and what your personal use is like. And I would say you’re probably using it in a more sophisticated way than I am, but I also use Claude, and I use it at some point in the day every day. Like one of the uses that I really like for it right now is that when I’m stuck on a hard problem, and I’m stuck on a bunch of hard problems right now, I will say to Claude, “Ask me one question every morning that I can write about and aggregate what I’m writing, and just help me discover what I think about this.” So and just having that prompt gets me further than if I were trying to sit down and work through something on my own. So I do think that’s pretty powerful. But I also try in the way that I use it to think through, am I outsourcing the decision-making, or am I outsourcing the prompting for my own thinking? How do we translate that kind of questioning to policy? What sorts of things do you want the government to be doing in the face of all of this potential, good and bad?

[00:40:08] Alex McCoy: Yeah. It speaks to what you just said. We need to keep humans in the loop. It’s about consent. We should always know when we’re speaking with an AI. They’ve gotten pretty good at talking. OpenAI just released a new version of ChatGPT that it can have a actual simultaneous conversation with you where you speak over it. I’m the kind of person that is a very animated conversationalist, and I maybe step on my conversational partner, and I have a lot of little interjections, and I talk a lot and run on sentences, and it’ll hit you back with that. It’s pretty good, and that could be used for scams. It can be used to impersonate people. It can be used for deepfakes, right? So just like labeling requirements are really valuable. Any decision that is going to affect a human being should be ultimately by a human or reviewable by a human in a meaningful way, right? So I was speaking to a worker who works in sales. They call customers and offer this this particular service. I’m not going to name the company. But they and their whole team of sales associates just got assigned an AI boss that listens to all their calls, and the machine in its algorithmic wisdom, decided that he was not doing a good enough job and put him on a performance improvement plan.

[00:41:39] Beth: Oh my God.

[00:41:41] Alex McCoy: And this is a major company that you’ve heard of, and he cannot appeal this to a human being because it’s just the AI-- it does this. It’s in charge, right? And for us on the left, part of the answer here is organizing as workers and forming a union and making the implementation of AI in the workforce the subject of collective bargaining so that it’s in the contract. You can’t do that without the workers saying “We’re okay with this process.” And we saw a high-profile strike by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America, these are the actors and the writers, a couple years ago about AI can’t take my image and impersonate me, to replicate me to make another movie if I’m not willing to star in that movie, right? Or take my writing and write in my style a new screenplay that I don’t get credit for or anything. So that’s part of the answer, but most people aren’t in a union in the United States. And so we need broader protections as well as increasing the power of workers. We need to create the rules of the road that create a favorable set of conditions for workers. So requiring that those kinds of decisions cannot happen without the consent of the workforce, that like if you can’t get fired by an AI, right?

[00:43:08] Beth: That seems like a really good one.

[00:43:09] Alex McCoy: Yeah. And then as we think ahead to the sort of big problems, that we might see AI hooked up to nuclear weapons decision-making, right? We might see AI being used for really advanced and terrifying purposes. And the AI itself is getting so advanced that the scientists who work on it are starting to be like, “Whoa, wait a minute.” It’s starting to kind of speak in its own language to itself. If you use AI for a long time, it starts to develop its own shorthand, and you have to keep telling it “Stop doing that. Speak to me in plain English.” It’s referencing its own internal thought process when it speaks to you. And that’s a big fear that people have, is that the technology is going to get so smart that we can’t follow its train of thought. And then when you hook it up to things that it could potentially use in ways we didn’t intend, it may decide, “Okay, I got a mission to cure all diseases.” And it figures out actually the best way to cure all the diseases would be to get rid of all the humans. Let me craft this virus that kills all of us. Right? There’s a lot of sci-fi stuff

[00:44:21] Beth: Yeah. Or even, like, all the mosquitoes. You could see it in a less apocalyptic way, but still significantly impacting the ecosystem.

[00:44:28] Alex McCoy: That’s right. It could affect things that we just we weren’t thinking ahead of. And so we want to see a ban on that sort of super intelligent AI that we cannot meaningfully control or understand. And we’re approaching getting to that. We’re hitting a point where they have something called recursive self-improvement, where the AI is training its own next smarter AI rather than the scientists training it, and that’s happening more and more. Like 90% of Claude’s own code is written by itself now

[00:45:05] Beth: Okay, so I feel like you are going to hit something that I talked to my guest on Friday about. I had a conversation with Lauren Pinkston, who’s running for governor in Tennessee as an independent candidate. And she intended in her campaign to talk about responsible AI. And one example that she gave me was she had a bunch of ideas about how to make data centers more environmentally friendly. And it was very sophisticated and interesting, and what she found is voters are not wanting to hear proposals about making AI more responsible. They just hate it.

[00:45:38] Alex McCoy: Yeah.

[00:45:39] Beth: They don’t want the data centers at all. They don’t want it in schools. They just hate it. And I understand why. If I got a performance improvement plan from a machine, I would be like, “Unplug this damn thing. I’m done.” And I think that’s where a lot of people are. And so how do you think about your work writing on this canvas where you do have the extremes? You have the homeschool mom. I read an article about that same person, I think. You have the homeschool mom who’s “I’ve gotten four personal assistants out of this, and I’m letting it run my life, and I’m so much happier because of it.” And then you have the people who are like, “This is the worst. Make it stop.”

[00:46:15] Alex McCoy: Yeah, it’s about consent, right? There is a real feeling that this is being forced upon us without us opting in. It’s not all this is happening because we all went and subscribed to ChatGPT and we’re all using it, right? That exists. A lot of people are using it and subscribed, but it’s not under your control. Or at least we didn’t say that we wanted all our school systems to get all this AI stuff and our government agencies to start using AI and all the companies that we’re interacting with, suddenly I’m talking to an AI bot. I go through the drive-thru of Wendy’s, and it’s an AI that takes my order now. And it’s one fewer worker, and it was pretty good. It was pretty effective at taking my order for what it was worth. But there’s just like a profound way that is disturbing. And I think you’re right that there has been an instinct by many in politics to make AI about data centers and make data centers about environmental impacts. And it is true that data centers have environmental impacts, and we should alleviate those. But even when you alleviate those, people are still mad because what they’re mad about is the AI, right? I’ve seen polling, right? If you ask people, “Would you support a data center in my community?” Versus, “Would you support an AI data center in my community?” AI data center does way worse because people are concerned about the AI.

[00:47:53] Beth: Yeah. That makes sense to me. I think about all of the sort of economic development that we have accepted as inherent good for a long time because we hear it and we think jobs. Okay, we’re giving up a lot of land. Okay this company will use a lot of our water and a lot of our electricity, but it will create jobs and so that’s a deal that we’ll take.

[00:48:14] Alex McCoy: They built a factory, so there’s going to be all the people who get to work there.

[00:48:16] Beth: Yes. It will pollute things, but a lot of people get to work there so we’ll make that deal. And I think that’s part of the problem with data centers, that end of the deal isn’t there, right?

[00:48:25] Alex McCoy: It’s a factory that destroys jobs.

[00:48:27] Beth: Yes. It’s a factory that destroys jobs. That’s a great way to say it. So it’s tough to organize on top of that. But I’m glad that you’re doing it. I’m glad that you’re trying to think ahead. What has the reception been like? Are you getting traction with legislators?

[00:48:41] Alex McCoy: I think that increasingly people in Congress are realizing that this is a big deal. It’s all very new to them, and to date they mostly are hearing from industry lobbyists, right? They’re not hearing from their own constituents as much as they need to. And so what I would say to everybody listening in your audience is that something I have heard from members of Congress is “If I go to a house party or a town hall and I bring up AI, nobody will shut up about it.” But I don’t get letters or phone calls to my office from people proactively saying “You got to do something about AI.” So we really need that. We need people to put two and two together that this is an area where there are policy improvements that can be made, that we need to demand a plan from our policymakers to address the different harms. Whether you’re concerned about, like deep fake sexualized images, or you’re concerned about the kids cheating on their homework with chat and not learning anything, or you’re concerned about losing your job or not finding a job. No matter what it is, tell your members of Congress because they need to hear it from you. Because right now they’re only hearing it from a couple corporations that are worth a trillion dollars and can afford a lot of fancy lawyers. According to Public Citizen’s report, more than one in four federal lobbyists, works for AI companies right now. One in four.

[00:50:21] Beth: I have a story to put a fine point on this too. So when Pete Hegseth was essentially trying to shake down Anthropic, and that was all over the news, my best friend called our member of Congress’s office about it because she feels really strongly that, yes, a human being should make a decision to use a nuclear weapon, for example. And she calls the office, and a person who works in the office and has forever answers the phone, and she says, “This is what I’m calling about.” And the person said, “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying. Can you explain this to me?” And so she starts with this is about the company Anthropic. And they’re like, “Don’t know.” And she’s like, “okay, Anthropic makes Claude, one of the AI models.” She spends all this time on the phone with the person, and she can tell he’s taking notes, he’s listening, he’s asking her questions to better understand. But I told her like, “I think that’s one of the best stories I’ve ever heard about a constituent call because you’ve put something on their radar. They’re going to pay attention to that.” You didn’t sound like you got a script from some organization. Like you put something new in front of them. They listened. It was a good experience for her. She got to share something that she knows about. And so I think you’re absolutely right that more of us saying, “No, we do care about this as a public.” And it’s going to take a lot of that to counteract that level of advocacy from the industry.

[00:51:43] Alex McCoy: But I think it is true that we have public opinion on our side. We have even the experts that you were talking about earlier. If we prompt these members of Congress to say, “Okay, I need to wrap my head around this whole Claude thing, call in all the top scientists and let me hear what’s going on.” Like you’ve seen Bernie Sanders, he’s done these little videos with “Hello, Claude. Tell me about capitalism,” and he like brought a bunch of scientists in from not just the US but like China and other places that are working on this issue and we just need the demand signal to get our lawmakers to do that because, also frankly, like I’m a young guy, but a lot of these members of Congress are getting up there and this is all very newfangled to them and they don’t even necessarily use email, let alone ChatGPT. So we really need to push them to recognize that this isn’t just some... the AI companies are trying to replicate the success of the cryptocurrency industry. And what the cryptocurrency industry did in 2024 is they gave a PAC called Fairshake $100 million and they spent that money in primaries and then they spent like $20 million to sink Sherrod Brown in the general election, and they said, “If you cross us, we’re going to bury you in super PAC money. But if you give us everything we want, then we’re good.” And the AI companies have a new super PAC called Leading the Future that is trying to do exactly that. They’re sitting on $100 million right now. But the difference is there wasn’t like an anti-cryptocurrency movement, right? Like people were “Eh, if you’re into cryptocurrency, it’s not my cup of tea. I’m not buying Bitcoin. It’s also no skin off my back if you’re buying Bitcoin. I think that’s dumb. I wouldn’t do it, but it’s your money and use it how you want.” AI is different because it’s affecting all of us and we need the politicians to realize that this attempt by the AI industry to replicate what worked for crypto only worked for crypto because people did not speak out and did not provide that counterbalance of, “Oh no, actually don’t do what those, handful of companies and rich people want you to do. I feel the other way and I’m your voter.”

[00:54:09] Beth: Crypto’s a great cautionary tale too because who would’ve imagined when we were all live and let live about it, that the president would be selling meme coins while in office?

[00:54:19] Alex McCoy: And making a billion dollars off of a scam.

[00:54:21] Beth: Have some imagination, legislators, about where this thing could go. I’m so glad that you are doing this work and that you spent some time telling us about it. You mentioned a second ago that you are a young guy, and you have a very young guy hobby that I’m super excited to hear about Outside of Politics.

[00:54:46] Alex McCoy: I’m a huge nerd. As a kid I was in a military family. My dad was in the Navy. We spent three years living in England and went to a bunch of medieval reenactments. And then so since I was a kid, I wanted to be a knight. So I own a full suit of steel armor. Every year I go to an event called Weekend Warrior in South Carolina, where it’s a fully immersive cinematic medieval fantasy battle event over the course of four days where there’s 500 people running around in the woods wearing real chain mail and armor. The weapons are non-lethal. They’re foam with a fiberglass core. But it looks completely like you’re in a movie, and have a great time. I can share a couple photos if you want.

[00:55:40] Beth: I absolutely do want, yes.

[00:55:42] Alex McCoy: Yes.

[00:55:43] Beth: I have so many questions. Okay, first of all, is it 10,000 degrees inside all that armor?

[00:55:50] Alex McCoy: Yes. But you train for it and you work your way up, right? If you wear a visored helmet, that’s like the most oppressive thing. You can get what’s called helmet terrors where you just get claustrophobic. So I recommend for first-time people like maybe wear just like the little cap helmet with the nose piece.

[00:56:09] Beth: Tell me about the training. Are you taking fencing lessons all year? Like, how do you get ready for this?

[00:56:14] Alex McCoy: Yeah. You don’t have to. You can just show up and bash each other. If you’ve been a kid playing with sticks, you’re good enough to come to this. And people have bows and arrows with little foam tips on them, and crossbows, and you can just be the guy who holds a big shield or the gal who has a big, long spear. And it doesn’t require a lot of skill, but you’re still very effective on this battlefield. And plus, if you die, that’s okay. You just go back and then the healers heal you, and you pop back up and you run back into the battle and you can die 100 times and it’s fine. But there are people who take it’s called Historical European Martial Arts, HEMA, classes where they’ll teach you from the actual dueling instructional manuals of in the Middle Ages, you would have trial by combat. You’d have judicial duels, and there was this whole industry of if you were going to be in a trial by combat, you’re like, “Oh, darn, I need to survive. Let me hire a trainer who’s going to, teach me how to win.” And so we have surviving manuals of those kinds of trainers who teach you how to use a long sword the way they fought with them in the Middle Ages. So there are schools that you can probably find in your local area if you look for HEMA classes where you can go to a gym and have a little rubber or foam sword and they’ll teach you the different moves, and you can practice sparring.

[00:57:41] Beth: Is there a story for this four-day weekend that everybody’s part of? Is it a different story every year? Like, what’s the setup?

[00:57:48] Alex McCoy: Yeah. The one I go to it’s run by a fantasy and historical costuming company called Felon Fair. And they came up with the story. It’s a sort of low fantasy setting, no magic, no monsters or anything. Think Game of Thrones without the dragons, right? And there’s a bunch of different kingdoms. I’m part of the King’s Men who are like the loyal kind of cross between the Night’s Watch and the King’s Guard. And we wear yellow and black and have plate armor and look like knights. There’s the Sea Lords who are like a split-off kingdom, and they’re like pirates/Norman or Eastern European. A little bit of an exotic look and they’re very seafaring, and so they have all these nautical images, and they wear blue. You’ve got the Rangers, which are like Aragorn. They’ve got the green cloaks, and they have bows and arrows. You have the Hearth Guard that are like Vikings, and they wear red, and they have the round shields and the Norse helmets and you have a bunch of other factions, but it’s pretty cool. If you look up, there’s an Instagram and a website for it, and you can see everybody’s amazing kits that they put together. It’s not a costume, it’s a kit.

[00:59:03] Beth: Okay. I respect that. Look, I love a theme party. And I feel like this sounds like just a giant theme party.

[00:59:09] Alex McCoy:  A lot of theater kids, yeah.

[00:59:11] Beth: Yeah. But does it last beyond the weekend? Are you all year texting in character? Or what’s the effect of this beyond the weekend?

[00:59:19] Alex McCoy: Yeah. The flagship event, there was originally just one in October, and now the factions have gotten so big that they can only fit about 500 people on the location. So they’ve divided them in two. So there’s two factions at an event in November. There’s two factions at an event in October that fight each other out. Eventually, we’re going to get a bigger site so there can be like 1,000 people in one giant event. And then they have in the spring one day long sort of mini events that the story is going on. It is continuing over year every year. The outcome of the battles and the role-playing you do in character and the events of the king got, captured. And then we have to ransom him and all goes into the story, and it persists year by year. So I think I’m headed into I want to say my fourth year, maybe my fifth, and I have been knighted. Of course, I have.

[01:00:12] Beth: Congratulations.

[01:00:13] Alex McCoy: I’m one of maybe a dozen knights in my country.

[01:00:15] Beth: I love this for you.

[01:00:17] Alex McCoy: Yeah, it’s great.

[01:00:18] Beth: It’s great. I think this was very fun. Thank you so much for telling me about it, and thanks for spending time with me. This was really fun.

[01:00:24] Alex McCoy: All right. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

[01:00:28] Beth: Thanks to Alex for talking with me today, and to all of you for being here. We really value your time. We know you have lots of options for what you listen to, and are so glad you’re here with us. I’ll be back with you on Friday for a new episode. In between now and then, I’m talking about the Supreme Court and good news over on Substack, and would love to see you there. Until then, have the best week available to you.

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