JB Pritzker thinks AI could help us live to 100 — or threaten us like nukes

Introduction and show sponsors

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Political realignment and state negotiations

1:37Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy. If you've been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe unexpected political realignment. And with the midterms coming up next month, early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes for that realignment are pretty high right now. So I asked Governor Pritzker, who is currently running for re-election, about all of that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right into the weeds of what government is even for.

2:10You'll hear him say, and it's hard to disagree, that some problems are just collective action problems that require the government to do a lot of work. We can't solve all of these problems one at a time, or even one state at a time. It's a pretty deep conversation, and we got into it on a lot of issues. And of course, I had to ask him if the bears are going to stay in Illinois. Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Governor J.B. Pritzker, you're the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you. I am very excited to talk to you. We're in the heart of midterm season. You are running for re-election.

2:45I have to tell you, I have to be very honest with you, I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview. Not only because I'm speaking to a governor, but I went to school in Chicago. My sister still lives in Chicago. My wife grew up in Illinois. Her entire family is farmers in north central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I got to do a good job here. Well, we're claiming you now that I know all that. We're claiming you. You're an Illinoisan. I don't know about that. I grew up in Wisconsin. Here's my first question for you. I'm a diehard Packers fan. Are you going to let the Bears move to Indiana? That is not our intention. We are, in fact, in discussions with the Bears and the NFL about keeping the Bears either in Chicago or in Arlington Heights, but in Illinois.

3:23All right. I'm saying as a Packers fan, nothing funnier than the outcome of the Bears moving to Indiana. I just want to put that out there. Openly biased in this case. I am two shares of that stock, but I'm going to make the comparison here. And the reason I started there is not only because I think that's a funny outcome, although I do, but it feels like we are in the middle of a generational political realignment. I'm sure you feel that in this election campaign, the idea of big business and how that should interact with the government and how the government should be able to push back on big business and not give in to big business.

3:54All of that feels up for grabs. And the comparison I will make in this specific case is your fellow governor, Gavin Newsom, in California. They sued the Ellison family, Paramount, over the Warner Brothers merger. Paramount threatened to leave. Right. They made a lot of noise about Nashville or Texas or Miami or wherever you make noise about these days. And it feels like Newsom caved. It feels like he pressured his attorney general, Rob Bonta, to settle that lawsuit, keep them there. They settled the lawsuit. The next day, the Ellison family is like, we never were from California. We would never leave. I see a parallel here with the bears that is connected to that larger realignment, how government and business should interact.

4:32Do you see that parallel? Do you feel that realignment? Well, what I can tell you is we're pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois, and that's really what we're in the midst of now with the bears. But I understand your point about realignment. I mean, there is a generational change, and I think it's also an attitudinal change about protecting taxpayers, protecting people who, frankly, are among the most vulnerable to all the technology that's, you know, overtaking people's lives and invading people's homes.

5:06I do believe that government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just, you know, a collaborator with business on everything. And so I'm not, you know, I'm a businessman, as you know, before I became governor, but I also know that the people of Illinois anyway, you know, my job is to protect the working people of the state who often don't have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them.

5:38That's kind of the realignment that I see, and that generational shift, I agree with you. It's partly a Democratic Party generational shift. Generationally, we're a little more aggressive, and I'm, you know, I'm probably older than the next generation that's already, you know, possibly taking office this November. I'm 61 years old, but I think of myself anyway having come out of the tech world and as somebody who has been a fighter for progressive values that, yeah, we got to become more aggressive and make sure we're standing up for our people.

6:10There are two places where I see the realignment in particular. One is data centers. One is privacy, right? And you just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, right, which is antitrust broadly. It's weird. If you go into Silicon Valley, David Sachs lately is retweeting Lena Kahn from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to manage safety. And they both agree that these companies don't need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive.

6:41I'm, again, putting that in the context of regulating these companies, thinking about the dynamic between the government and the biggest companies in the world. I'll just ask the question, I guess, more directly. Do you think Newsom was right to give in to Paramount, or do you think he should have made them make good on that threat to leave? I can't speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer. And so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say, once again, that our orientation today, and I think about the big AI companies and the big social media companies as well, our orientation really has to be like, wait a minute, too much power in too few hands.

7:23And particularly when we talk about AI, where it's potentially existential, but certainly transformative is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we're going to have to get very engaged guardrails, of course, on both parts. But also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment in the United States. And, you know, I'm not somebody who necessarily is convinced that we have to see a whole bunch of job loss.

7:55But that does feel like that's the direction this is going. And so what I'm suggesting is we better be prepared and we better be protecting people who are going to lose their jobs, or at least it appears they're going to lose their jobs. And I'll just give you this thought. If these days 4% unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we're going to see is if that's sort of the level that we're going to hopefully aim for and stay at, the problem may be that in very short order, we can end up at 7% and have that be the baseline and maybe 10%.

8:37And if you think about what's happened, you know, the upheavals of economies and of governments, when you get to 10% unemployment in any country, we better be focused on how we're going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you're going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people. So we've got to wrestle with that and come to a conclusion.

State competition and business incentives

9:10And I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between particularly states and the big companies because that brinksmanship is real. The threat is we will leave. We just covered, I don't know, Kevin O'Leary in Utah talking about data centers. And the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin O'Leary building that data center. But his argument was, well, I'm just going to shop around, right? This is what states do. They compete with tax incentives and benefits, maybe for data centers, which will put everyone out of a job.

9:40They compete for land use rights. You've got a rural state with a lot of farms in it. How are you thinking about that dynamic, right? Do you feel like you're in competition with the other states? Or is this bipartisan realignment creating more of a level playing ground where these companies are going to have to actually give something? We are in competition. We just are. Because it isn't bipartisan, at least if you ask me. Unless there is a change in the government, I'll pick on Texas for a second. And there is a chance that you'll see a new governor in Texas as of November 3rd.

10:12In fact, a good chance. But if you look at Texas as it's run today by now a three-term, hoping to be a four-term Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of, you know, changing their alignment about incentives. In the state of Illinois, we don't want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously want to protect the revenue that we've got for the state to pay for the things we think are valuable to our people. But we also want to make sure that we're attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where, you know, South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida, you know, pick your poison.

10:51You know, Michigan may be slightly different just because it's got Democratic control. But these are our competitors. I mean, when I'm competing to have a company move to Illinois, you know, I've got to make sure, first of all, that I'm somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives because otherwise we don't even get considered. And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean, I want to give away less than more. And then I want to provide whatever other advantages I can that aren't financial so that I can protect the resources that we have.

11:23An example of that is, you know, we like to talk about kind of white glove service that we offer to companies. That is, if you're going to bring a factory here, let's say, just to give an example, we want to make sure that we've got somebody who's kind of a concierge for your company that's walking you through each of our departments where you need a permit. It doesn't mean we're lowering the standards. It just means a lot of times the bureaucracy eats up so much time, it makes it impossible for a company to actually do what they want to do in your state. We try to make sure that if we're going to attract a large company, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, you know,

11:58that we're at least making it a little easier for them to go through without having to give them massive tax incentives. So that's the way I think about it. We are in competition. There's just no doubt about it. Should we be? Maybe there's a lot of discussion about we shouldn't, and maybe at the federal level, we should do something about leveling the playing field. But this is the world we're living in right now. I want to ask those questions just to set the baseline. I really do think something is happening, right? A lot of young people are dissatisfied with the status quo. A lot of people in general are dissatisfied with what big tech companies are trying to do with AI, with the potential for job loss.

12:34And the relationship between the people, the government, and those companies seems more fraught than ever, especially as they're trying to expand their physical infrastructure with data centers, especially as they all become defense contractors, literally taking our tax dollars to sell weapons systems and collect data for the government. That's a big swirl.

Structuring the Illinois state government

12:56I wanted to start there. But I just want to take one second here and ask you the decoder questions because I personally think the operation of government is so opaque. It's very easy to go figure out how big companies are run. The CEOs won't shut up. They're on podcasts all day long. I think most people have no idea how your job works. So you were elected governor. How is your office set up and how have you structured the state government of Illinois? Just starting from where I sit and then, of course, we look at it from a customer service perspective. But starting just at the top, I actually did something that no governor of Illinois has ever done, which is I created not one deputy governor.

13:34We obviously have a lieutenant governor who's elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody getting appointed by me to serve under me to help manage the government with me. What I did was actually put four deputy governors in place, plus a general counsel and my chief of staff. Why is that important? Because what I've tried to do is to break down the silos of government and take all of the health and human services related departments. That's the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Health Care and Family Services.

14:11So that's like, you know, everything from health insurance or, you know, Medicaid to just public health like during the pandemic. And put it all under one deputy governor working directly for me, the idea is instead of my having, let's say, 26 direct reports, I've got four or five direct reports, plus my chief of staff, who each have, let's say, six or seven departments underneath them.

14:42So that's the way I, from my perspective, what I wanted to do was make sure that I'm breaking down the silos of government, making these departments that often they're basically building walls and they don't want to talk to one another because they're afraid they might lose jobs in one department to another department or lose control of a program if they're talking to one another. That's the way it used to be. Now we're like, you know, the deputy governor is there to either beat the heads together or at least bring them together so that they will be operating government more efficiently.

15:13OK, so that's, again, from the top, from the bottom, which is how do people who live in Illinois interact with state government? And obviously, technology is one of the, you know, the upgrades that that's occurred and made it easier. Illinois, Illinois, frankly, had not invested significantly before I became governor in those processes and, frankly, the the, you know, technology that was necessary. And I'll just give you one example of this.

15:44We created something called Beacon, which is designed to address the problem that parents have and families have with mental health for children. It turns out that there were like seven different ways in which people approached government to get help. And we weren't coordinating those and we weren't helping give all of the resources. I'm talking about outside resources. You know, how do you find a therapist? How do you find a psychiatrist?

16:15How do you and how do you pay for those things? Right. Medicaid, if you can't afford it on your own. But the point is there's one door to enter through Beacon that allows you to get access to all of those resources, even if they're in multiple departments. So that's just one example. We're trying to think of this as a customer service operation so that, again, you know, it's one thing to say this is how we're, you know, the org chart looks. And another thing to say, you know, this is how you access all the resources of government that you need.

16:47Because, you know, the thing that bothers me most, we provide programs that really matter to people. Like we have a birth equity initiative to reduce maternal mortality, particularly in black and brown communities. And so we provide for some families like, you know, free diapers for some people, free diapers. Right. The problem is people don't even know that program exists. And how would you ever figure out that the program exists if you're especially if you're a working person who's working like two minimum wage jobs?

17:21Right. You don't have any time and you don't have any money and you don't even know how to talk to government. And so we're trying to fix all of those problems of government with, you know, with the way that we interact with people. It's funny. It feels like that is one of the bigger opportunities when it comes to AI. Just letting the AI navigate a bureaucracy for you and communicate what resources are available. The flip side of that is that people hate AI. They truly dislike it. And it doesn't feel like that connection has been made that a lot of these tools can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you.

17:58Are you are you thinking that should be an investment that you make that that might be what turns the tide in terms of how people feel about these tools? Yes, but I'm not plunging headlong into it, you know, and I and I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it. I mean, the United States government rolled out their their AI chatbot to look at web pages across the government. Well, there you go. And I mean, I guess what I'm trying to do is make sure that I created something called the AI cabinet in my government.

18:30And that is, you know, to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government so that we're thinking about privacy. We're thinking about safety and we're thinking about efficiency. And those things have to be talked about together. You can't just say we're you know, we're going after efficiency and we don't really care about the other two, you know. So that's the idea, the AI cabinet.

19:02It's also that, honestly, there are things, as you know, about AI that are dangerous. And so we've got our emergency management agency on that AI cabinet. You know, we've got our state police on that AI cabinet. Remember, a lot of the people that work in those agencies aren't particularly proficient at AI or really understand the potential and the potential dangers. So that's why we brought in experts, for example, from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, you know, just as two examples of places where we're drawing expertise.

19:34So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be done. I would say we're trying to approach it carefully before we, you know, get our get out of get it out of control and to a point where, you know, we have no way to pull it back in.

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Decoder Sessions and cybersecurity

21:03Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of Decoder Sessions. This segment features Andrew Melnizak, Diverge's general manager, and Ivan Shefrin, the executive director for managed security services at Comcast Business. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

21:16Let's talk about artificial intelligence. I want to understand, how has AI, you know, changed the cybersecurity landscape for you and your team at the attack level? The reality is it has had a dramatic impact on everything we do. The bad guys leverage AI for malicious and bad purposes. So the only way to fight fire is with fire. And so we now use AI just as the attackers are using it to break in more quickly.

21:51We have to pivot and use it to defend more quickly at scale. Comcast Business specifically detected 25.4 billion phishing attempts and 21.9 billion drive-by compromise events over one year. Talk to me a little bit about that data. Phishing is so popular because it's so easy to do, and AI has accelerated that. Every business should have software in place to detect phishing attacks, to train their users.

22:24And also that now extends to collaboration software, not just email, such as Zoom, such as Slack, such as Teams, because that's becoming increasingly prevalent. Everybody expects to get breached now, and that is not the attitude we use at Comcast. We are protecting our customer data extremely seriously. Support for the show comes from Enjin.

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Decision making and pandemic response

24:04The other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job. You have some constraints in your decision-making process, right? There's a state legislature. There's a federal government. You have other agencies in your state. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? Well, I don't do it the way Donald Trump does. I should start with the, you know, because it's funny you say it that way.

24:34I mean, I start with the idea that we have a problem to solve and that decisions have to get made. Are those decisions ones that need to come to the governor? Because you're right. I only have so much bandwidth. And so the question is, you know, which are the most serious ones that can't be solved by other people or unlikely to get the outcomes that I would want by handing it over to other people? And then those automatically come to me. So what I'm making decisions about is kind of the first answer to your question.

25:07And then it's how do I actually make the decisions? For me, you know, I am not one of these people who thinks that I'm right 100% of the time. I mean, maybe a good way to describe it, and I'm joking a little bit when I say it, which is I'm 90% sure I'm right. But there's also a 10% chance that I'm dead wrong. I want to make sure that I'm getting input and a debate before I actually make the final decision. So I like to, you know, someone once told me that the best CEOs are ones that in their organization, they're a little bit below average in terms of their capability and intellect.

25:47That is, you're hiring so well. I'm not saying we want below average leaders. I'm just saying you're so good at hiring that you've got people in your organization who are really far better than you are at various things that you're not particularly good at. Maybe know what you don't know and be willing to ask for help is a philosophy that I have, you know, be willing to ask for help if it's something you really don't know. And I'll be honest, when you become governor of a state, there are a whole lot of topics, you know, within the purview of a governor.

26:17And making decisions about all those topics, maybe, you know, a human being who has superintelligence might be able to do it. But most people don't start out knowing everything there is to know about public health and everything there is to know about public safety and everything there is to know about, you know, education. And so you start out with what you know and then try to add expertise to it and then make decisions based upon the best experts debating one another in front of you.

26:48At least that's how I like to do it. Give me an example. Governor Kathy Hochul from New York was on the show. She said in her first week she needed to declare a state of emergency because of a hurricane and she just didn't know how, which was very humanizing in its way. Give me an example of when you became governor and there was something where you just didn't know. COVID. Sure. I mean, honestly, you know, no one runs for governor thinking there's going to be a global pandemic, right? You think you're going to, like, solve education problems for people or put more money in people's pockets by raising the minimum wage or whatever.

27:20But COVID comes along and I have to admit, you know, the level of expertise of I don't think any governor, maybe Josh Green, the doctor who is the governor of Hawaii, maybe he had a lot to start with. But for the rest of us humans, you know, I really, that was one where, you know, I, we were learning on the job. We were working 18 hours a day. My entire team was all in. And we had to do things like procurement, emergency procurement of ventilators and masks.

27:58And, and, and we had to go outside the box. It's not like we could just, you know, put it through our, you know, our central management services, you know, look for a contract or whatever. This was like, I need masks in three days, you know? And, and I need, you know, I'll tell you a quick story if you're interested about my interaction with Donald Trump at the time, because I think it's interesting anyway. But, you know, I, I, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump in case you didn't know. I was at one year into office when the COVID pandemic hit and I had not, I mean, I'd talked to his administration, but not talked to him directly.

28:36I picked up the phone and called him and I said, Mr. President, by the way, I wrote a script for myself because I know he likes to be flattered. So, and I'm not somebody who normally likes to flatter him, but I wrote a script for myself. I saved it for even, I have it today. And I said, Mr. President, you know, you're a great businessman, but you can understand that paying, you know, $8 for a, an N95 mask that should cost us $75.

29:07It is, we're in a national emergency. We need to be able to get these things and afford them. And I'm competing against all the other states, you know, we need to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to make sure that we're making enough masks in the United States. That's what I told him. And then I said, but I need masks right now. What can you do for me? I said, I need 2 million N95 masks and I need 4,000 ventilators. He never delivered, just so you know, even though he promised that he would deliver. You know, the challenges in COVID were mighty.

29:40And the organization that we had to create around it, I had morning meetings every morning just on this topic, right? Figuring out, okay, how many hospital beds? We didn't have a system that would tell us statewide how many hospital beds are available in each region. You know, what happens if you have an outbreak, you know, and it really is overtaking some region. What do we do? These were all the things we had to learn on the fly. And all I can tell you is, once again, back to the hire great people to have around you, I really felt like I proved out that I had done a good job of hiring because the people around me were tremendous.

30:20One of whom, by the way, is now running as my lieutenant governor partner in this election.

Privacy, surveillance, and government intrusion

30:28It's interesting you brought up COVID in the context of our conversation about generational political realignment. I would actually point to COVID as the beginning of a particular realignment around what the government should measure, how much control the government should have over people. And all of that has led, I think, directly into the bipartisan pushback against Flock cameras. The very notion of privacy is not, in my mind, left-right anymore. The CEO of Flock got himself in all kinds of trouble because he kept saying all the people wanted to ban Flock camera criminals.

30:59And he would, like, go on MAGA Media and say this. And I think that position was just rejected. We can see in states around the country there's pushback against Flock cameras. And I would point to COVID as the beginning of that, right? The idea that the government could be too intrusive and, in particular, the government should not be able to measure things, right? Like, if you don't test, there won't be COVID just became an idea. And the idea that we shouldn't measure things or we should tear down our systems of measurement, it's a big part of the second Trump administration.

31:29But I see that privacy connection very clearly to COVID. In one world, the government coming together to protect its citizens and build a bunch of systems could have gone a very different way. In the one we live in, there's ferocious pushback to that, on the left and the right in some ways. How do you feel about privacy right now? I know Illinois kind of leads the nation. You've got the Biometric Identification Protection Act. Every time I fly to Chicago, I've got to push the button at the airport to say that it's okay to look at my face. That's one way of going about it.

32:00But then you do have, I think there are hundreds of flat cameras in Cook County alone. People have metaglasses with cameras in them. There's something happening with privacy that is running right into the aftershocks of COVID and how people feel about government intrusion. How are you finding a way through that balance? Well, and don't forget AI, as you're suggesting. I mean, talk about a collision. This focus on privacy is warranted. And long overdue, to be honest with you.

32:32I understand what you're describing about COVID. But I think something that came out of COVID got accelerated, and that was conspiracy theories. Yes. And I'm not suggesting that everything you hear now about the pushback around privacy is a conspiracy theory. But it is easy for these things to spread, and people have misinformation that's informing them about how these things are used. Having said that, I guess what I think is that we are having to solve multiple problems at the same time.

33:08And AI is coming. Let's just go to AI for a second. It's here. I mean, I say it's coming. It's here. It's not going to stop. We're not going to become Luddites, and there's not going to be any AI. So the question is, like, in the context of privacy, what guardrails are we putting on AI? And how are we managing it? This idea that, you know, the president has and David Sachs, you know, where they got all the companies together and said, hey, how about you guys self-police?

33:39You know, that's not going to work, at least not for protecting people's privacy. And frankly, it's not going to provide any safety either because everybody's going to operate in their own self-interest. It's one of the reasons why you need government, in my view. I'm not suggesting government is any smarter than these companies, but one of the reasons you have any kind of collective action of government is because separately, you know, as you know, people operate because they operate in their own self-interest.

34:10I mean, you could have, like, a Hobbesian world where people are killing each other and there are no rules about it. So I think we've got to use government as a tool and also be smart within government. And that's where the generational change, I think, is hugely important. Use government as a smarter, you know, less bureaucratic and smarter collection of people devoted to protecting the privacy of everyone and making sure that we're addressing all the other challenges that come from AI.

34:45I guess I'll just say, I don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be, but I will say, if we don't have a federal government, I've got a lot of, I'm very proud of the things that we've done here in Illinois around the, you know, the AI Safety Measures Act, which is the toughest in the country, the Children's Social Media Safety Act, and so on. And I think I'm proud of the work we've done, but state by state, this is not the way to do this. We're doing the best we can with the absence of a federal government that is addressing these.

35:18And when I say federal government, I'm not just pointing at Trump. I'm pointing at the Congress. No action on their part means that we're going at it alone. And right now, I don't know how many AI Safety Measures-type acts have been passed, but it looks like three to me. I mean, you know, it's New York, California, and Illinois. Maybe you could name a couple others. But, you know, we were the first. And, I mean, we three. And yet, well, we got 47 other states. So this worries me a great deal.

35:51You're raising issues. I'd love to tell you I have all the answers to it. I can tell you what we're trying to think about is that we are the – you know, people sometimes say the states are laboratories of democracy. They're actually laboratories of policy, at least in Illinois. We're trying to use ourselves as a laboratory policy while not disadvantaging ourselves. That's a very challenging thing to do and why we need to change what's happening at the federal government. I'm going to just say focus on privacy for one second. And I understand what you're saying about AI.

36:22I think part of the privacy debate around flat cameras, for example, is, well, sure, you can have one license plate reader in one intersection. And if the cops had to go there and pull the SD card out of it and drive it back to headquarters and upload it to their Apple IIe and look at it manually, maybe people would feel one way about it. But those cameras are all networked. They don't have any access controls really. There's infinite reports of local police chiefs tracking their girlfriends across state lines with these cameras. You add in a system like Palantir, which can synthesize multiple databases and do all kinds of tracking across all kinds of systems.

36:59People see that, right? That is the turn that is being made is that you can connect a lot of databases of information together and search them without a warrant and track people across the entire country. You could ban that state by state, you could regulate it city by city, which we're seeing happen with Flock, and you could maybe have some federal controls around privacy there. None of it's really happening, but on the ground, people are ferociously pushing back. And that's the connection I'm making to COVID and conspiracy theories and how much power should the government have to surveil you and look at you.

37:30Something happened in there where people's attitudes about that really shifted. And, you know, I would say one of my core beliefs is that Americans do not like being told what to do. Party politics aside, Americans don't like being told what to do. And something about that flipped and connected to we have a network of license plate reading cameras and we're going to tear them down when we see them because there's something about that that offends us as Americans. Illinois does have privacy laws. I think the last update to the biometric law you did in 2024, it's changed again.

38:03It's gotten more vociferously opposed to tracking and surveillance in this country. Do you think you need another update to that privacy law? I think we should every year be looking at that question. I'll give you an example of it. We passed it. And again, I'm back to AI because I think what you're describing, I thought was a perfect way to say it. You know, if it was an SD card in the, you know, that they had to go grab and then analyze, you know, back at the station, it'd be a different thing. But it's AI that's operating these things and that's allowing this stuff to move instantaneously and track people.

38:38You know, look, that should we be addressing? Yeah, every year. I mean, it's like the issue of ethics in government. You know, what I mean is the minute you put an ethics law in place, there's somebody who's trying to get around it every year. It's like every law, this is probably true across, you know, all of capitalism maybe, you know, it's like there are always people trying to find a way around the law, put a tax law in place.

39:09Someone's trying to figure out how to get around it. And I think that this, the point you're making is that that's why you need to have proactively government like less bureaucratically and more, you know, and more aggressively trying to address these. Are we going to be able to keep up with it? I'll be honest. I don't think so. And I also don't think you can say, well, we're just going to shut it all down because there are things you're missing out on. And it's sort of like, and again, I keep going back to AI, but I think a lot about it.

39:41My children are 21 and 24. They're going to live to 100 or 110 years old because AI is going to solve a whole bunch of medical challenges and already is. And, you know, there's a cure now for sickle cell anemia. And, you know, and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are going to live full lives. This is going to happen across the board and cancer and everything else. So there's all good in there, right?

40:11And then there's the bad. And so I know what you're saying. I guess all I can tell you is I'm a believer that we can progressively, I don't mean that in a political fashion, we can progressively address these challenges. Like in Illinois, we passed a law that, you know, that disallows AI, the use of AI in therapy for people. Because we think too much information gets collected, not enough humanity in the process.

40:43And we think that, you know, it should have humanity in it. And so I'm not, again, we're not like trying to shut it down across the board, but there are, we're going to have to see how it gets used and where it's improper. You know, and I know that sounds imperfect because the technology is moving so fast that the idea that we're going to be able to keep up with all the ways in which someone's privacy could be breached seems, you know, very difficult. But I don't know any other way to do it.

41:16I mean, that's why you have government. And maybe in the end, we're going to have this competing use of things like AI where AI is monitoring AI and, you know, AI that's kind of privacy friendly or focused on privacy is going to be monitoring the AI that's not. But again, I know you don't mean to just, you don't want to just talk about AI. I am concerned. I think that, I mean, this issue of privacy has been around for a long time. We've been, you know, you've been talking about, I'm sure I've been talking about since before AI, right?

41:49This is like everybody giving over their personal information in exchange for access to something. And that was happening for a while. And then, you know, we're all getting like ads that are personalized to us based upon stuff that essentially we've given up privacy for.

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Data centers and energy infrastructure

45:08No, it's funny. I mean, people believe whether or not—we can write as many stories as we want about what your iPhone is not actually listening to you. But the ad tracking is so good that everyone believes their iPhones are listening to them. The next turn is that it is now technologically feasible for these systems to listen to you all the time. And I can't fall back on—you know, it's cheaper for them to do the ad tracking when you hit I accept than to listen to you all the time, which was, you know, for a decade the right answer. Like, the economically correct answer was the ad tracking was cheaper than listening to you all the time.

45:38That might be very different in the future. There are already devices that we cover here at The Verge that purport to listen to you all the time and turn that into some actual data. And it feels to me like the tech industry is trying to drive a truck through our privacy law, through our lack of AI regulations, through an entire system of governance that is designed for the pre-AI era. Right? The notion that you don't have privacy in public really worked well when everyone didn't have a cell phone that could connect to the cloud and instantly search every photo all at once, all the time, and do facial recognition.

46:15We live in that world now. I would say, like, the public sentiment towards the idea that you don't have privacy in public places has turned. Right? They don't like the meta glasses. They call them pervert glasses for a reason. And somewhere in there is, well, the federal government should pass a privacy law. It is a failure of imagination in the United States. We don't have a federal privacy law. And then somewhere in there is the notion that the states are laboratories of democracy and policy. It is amazing, by the way, how often on this tech and business show Thomas Hobbes comes up and the very notion that the government is there to serve as an extension of us solving collective action problems.

46:49It comes up over and over again because I think the tech industry does not want to respect that dynamic. This is why I started with that relationship between government and business and the pushback in the negotiation. Because here it feels like the tech industry is in a bubble of its own making, truly in a media bubble of its own making. And then all of the polling is, well, we hate AI. In particular, young people hate AI. And then all of the action is around data centers where NIMBYism, the most American of policy lovers, is being pulled to keep these data centers out of communities.

47:21And that's one way to stop AI. There are – you just pulled back on data center tax incentives in July. You're pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees on reforms for new constructions. Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation? I don't. I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation. I mean, I know that people have conflated and put together their opposition to data centers with their opposition to AI.

47:55And a lot of people can't describe why they're opposed to one or the other because they're conflated with one another. But I can say that – I mean, at least our aim is focused on the idea. And people really feel this, right? I mean, and there's real data to back this up, that the data centers themselves put aside what they're doing inside a data center. The data centers, you know, and what's happening, are eating up the available electricity. And that's causing your electric bill to go up.

48:27At least that's how everybody feels. There are a lot of things that we should have been doing in many years gone by to get to a point where electricity bills shouldn't have to go up now. And, you know, that has to do with building out the grid, which, you know, it's a world where regulation and, you know, cross-border challenges have made it near impossible for a lot of the grid to get built the way that it should have. We produce a lot more electricity in the United States than we use.

48:59But we just don't transport it well enough. And we would have a lot more available if we transported it better. Okay, but even if you think that can't happen efficiently, we need to build more on the grid, that is, more capacity on the grid. My only point is the opposition to data centers is in part a result of the economic situation that's happening right now in the country where electric bills, gas, everything at rent, you know, everything has gone up.

49:30And your electric bill shows up every month and it continues to go up and people kind of scratch their heads and say, why am I paying? Who am I paying for? This is happening. And this particular to Illinois, very, we're not going to have a whole discussion about energy policy, but I could just say this. We produce more nuclear power in the state of Illinois than any other state. Fifty-three or four percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power.

50:00And we're a net electricity exporter. So we have an excess in Illinois. But our bills are going up in Illinois. And that's because of, you know, the methodology of the regional transmission organizations. Again, not to get into all the detail of it, but essentially if Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected. And that's, you know, that's shocking to people who live in Illinois. But what they know is they don't want their bill to go up, so they don't want another data center nearby, even though the one in Ohio is actually causing the problem, even if you choose to oppose data centers.

50:44So this is a challenge. I mean, I think there's a lot of information that needs to be spread. But most of all, we just need a whole lot more capacity and a whole lot more grid that will, I think, subside some of the concern about data centers. But to your point, I mean, privacy is, I think, more related to AI, obviously, than, like, you know, data centers. It's not just AI, but the way AI is used. So we're going to have a lot of opposition. You're pointing – I mean, you make an excellent point.

51:14I think this feeling of being out of control, you are not in control of your environments anymore, that's the thing that is causing anxiety.

Leadership, age, and social media laws

51:26I want to go back to something really important that I was saying earlier. We need better people running for public office. We need smarter policy development in government. And part of that is a generational shift that's needed and a better understanding. We have people that are, like, serving in the United States Senate who have no idea. Like, what was it, the Secretary of Education, Trump's Secretary of Education, who called it A1. We've got old, you know, older people who don't have any exposure who are making policy theoretically on these things.

52:02And it's – I mean, it should disturb us all. It's one of the reasons we've got to advance the cause of better people and better systems in government. We are on the cusp of an election. There might be a new Congress. There might be new leadership in Congress. There are a bunch of old Democrats too. In fact, I could probably point directly to Joe Biden's age in the last election is the reason that he lost. Do you think that you need a wholesale change of leadership of the older Democrats as well? You said, do we need a wholesale change? I mean, I can tell you that I don't think we should –

52:34I live in New York. I'll just ask you. Do you think Chuck Schumer should be the Senate majority leader if the Democrats take the Senate? That's a decision people in the Senate are going to make. I have no influence over it. I can tell you this. I am opposed to term limits because I think that you should have all the choices. You're a voter. If you want to vote for the 75-year-old, I mean, go ahead. I'm just suggesting that a great case could be made for the 45-year-old who's just as smart as the 75-year-old was when he was 45 or whatever or maybe is now,

53:07but has a modern look at the issues around AI privacy and everything else we're discussing and has a more aggressive view of how we ought to be reining in big corporations in their invasion of our lives. But I think people ought to make their own choices. I mean, for us to say, well, we should have an age limit. You know, you're 70. That's it. You know, you're out. But I really – I think that belies who we are as a democracy.

53:39Well, you convinced me. I'm 46. I'm announcing my run for president here with you, Governor. It was a rousing speech. Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump. A low bar, but I'm glad I crossed it. Let me tie two ideas together at the end. We've talked a lot about AI regulation. You mentioned social media regulation a little bit earlier in this conversation. I know that Illinois has a social media law. You have a bell-to-bell ban on phones in schools for kids. I'm just going to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. It's easy to pick on Mark Zuckerberg.

54:09If you look at how he talks about social media regulation, he basically describes the tragedy of the commons, right? He signed the landmark settlement with him. I think Illinois is due to get $750 million, $760 million out of that settlement. And a big part of it is TikTok and YouTube have to agree to the same terms and then Meta will pay the rest of the money. And Zuckerberg very clearly has said that's because if Instagram falls back on engagement bait and TikTok doesn't, the kids will just use TikTok. And so the government has to get everyone to agree. I will tell you that Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, does not agree.

54:41He's not going to sign on to this. That's one whole fight. But you look at how Mark Zuckerberg talks about AI regulation, there's none of that dynamic at all. He's like, it should be a free-for-all. We'll all compete. If it's not safe, the market will tell us we'll be fine. And in my mind, these ideas are at total odds with each other, right? In the market where he makes all the money, the government has to step in and stop Tim from hurting kids because apparently there's no market demand for safe social media. And in the market where the AI CEOs are telling us they might kill us all if we don't stop them, it's a free-for-all.

55:15And the market will tell us if they accidentally kill everybody. How do you reconcile those things? Are you just happy that you got the social media case done after a decade of failing to regulate social media? Or do you think you can solve AI with regulation this time instead of letting it just cook? Look, I'm an optimist at heart, so I'm not going to suggest to you that I know absolutely that we can solve all the problems that we're now facing. But I don't know what else that we can do, you know, other than to, again, progressively make sure that we're trying to address each of these things, trying to anticipate them to the extent we can.

55:57Can we be faster than the AI is developing? I don't know. We can't stop trying. I know that. And I would suggest to you that my optimism is founded because I think the vast majority of people want what you're describing, which is reining it in. And again, without destroying companies, that's not – I don't think we're all trying to do that. What we're trying to do is, you know, stop the invasion into our homes, stop the invasion into our children's lives.

56:28I do think we can do that. But that's because we've solved a whole lot of huge problems. You know, that's kind of like my answer to the, is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes. And can we solve it? I don't know. You know, nuclear weapons – I mean, just to give something of an analogy to something else. I mean, nuclear weapons, they're still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. So far, anyway, we've managed not to blow up the world.

57:03I don't know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me. We as a country can figure out how we want to rein it in here, that we as a country can work with our allies to figure out how we want to collectively try to rein it in. And then we have enemies in the world and, you know, competitors in the world, and we've got to figure out how we're going to – maybe it's mutually assured destruction like it was with nuclear weapons. You know, these are all things we're going to have to work on and work on fast, and it's scary because someone analogized this to – I mean, think about the, you know, the early 1950s when every kid had to learn, you know, that if there was a, you know, a nuclear blast, you know, atomic bomb, you know, get under your desk.

57:52I mean, that wouldn't have been very effective, but the point is people lived with the idea that, like, terrible holocaust could occur, you know, with a nuclear, you know, explosion that could happen. And so I think we're heading into that world again with AI. So, you know, that's – I hope I didn't stray too much from your question.

Artificial intelligence and consciousness

58:15Well, let me ask you this.

Artificial intelligence and consciousness

58:16It's kind of – it's a little bit of a wild card at the end. We cover this industry so closely here. And, you know, the big difference with nuclear weapons is there weren't five companies building bleeding-edge nuclear weapons in private capacity led by five guys who all hated each other. But that's the dynamic of the AI industry. They all truly hate each other. They're all trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can. And then some of them think the AI is alive, right? If you ask Anthropic, and we've done this, is Claude alive?

58:47They don't say no, right? They will argue with you about the definition of alive and suggest that to them alive means having a biological component. And Claude doesn't have that, but it might be conscious, right? There's a race to build AGI in the industry. Some people truly believe they're building alien minds that have a different kind of consciousness. I'm not sure any government at any level has ever had to regulate that, has ever come up against an industry that is religious about the fact that it might be building the next kind of intelligence.

59:19Where do you stand? Do you think that they're building a next kind of consciousness that stands along humans, or do you think that this is normal technology as some others do? Boy, that is really another podcast for us. But I'll just say this one thing. I just want to disagree with you for a second. Nobody ever could imagine a nuclear weapon either. Right, but the government built nuclear weapons. I understand. I'm not suggesting it's the same. I'm suggesting it's so new, right, at the time that, you know, figuring out how you're going to, like, rein it in.

59:52Because remember, it's not just one government. And the same thing with AI. It's not just those five guys either, right? I mean, it's like there's somebody in China, you know, maybe five of those. I don't know. And somebody in Europe or whatever. I mean, you could say we're ahead or they're ahead. I don't know. But all I'm saying is, yeah, this is a proliferated situation, and it's not government-controlled. 100 percent, you're right. It's not like nuclear weapons in that sense. But it is like nuclear weapons in the sense of nobody's ever seen it before.

1:00:24It's a complete mystery to start with. How are we going to rein it in? I mean, nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb, and they got it. We've figured out somehow how to deal with it. Again, you've got to be an optimist to believe we can end up with the right solution here. I don't know, you know, that we have the answer to how do we rein it in. I will say, though, if we had the power to create it, we have the power, in my view, to rein it in. Is it conscious? You're asking a deep question.

1:00:58I mean, do you think it's conscious? Because, I mean, I understand why people think it might have consciousness or it's going to be conscious. But I think that's why the ethicists need to be involved, and it's why I think technologists need to be involved. And especially, in my view, government's got to be involved because how else are you going to rein in the five guys and the companies that have developed this? I – there is no other way.

1:01:28I will tell you, I don't think it's conscious. And every now and again, you have an experience where it's blindingly clear why other people believe that. When you watch a reasoning model take 90 steps over an hour and arrive at a conclusion, it's impressive. And you can see why people believe that. I do not. And I have a lot of reasons for that. It just occurs to me that if you were to set out to regulate a technology like this, if you believe one thing, you would maybe go down one path.

1:02:01And if you believe that you were building a consciousness, you might go down another. And I don't – again, the whole industry itself does not agree on this. Jensen Wang and Dario Amode do not agree on whether it's alive. Jensen just wants to sell a bunch of chips. And he will happily tell you it's just technology and you can control it. And I think Dario thinks he's building AGI. And that's a different – there's a whole reason he proposes different kinds of regulatory structures there. I'm just asking you. Have you felt the AGI? Do you think it's one path or the other? Yeah, I'm not going to give you a satisfactory yes or no.

1:02:32Yeah, I'm curious. I mean I haven't felt it. I guess that's what I'm – my basic answer is I haven't felt it. Governor Prescott, this was very fun. Thank you for indulging this last existential loop of a question.

Credits and final announcements

1:02:42You're going to have to come back to Decoder soon. I would like to do that. Thanks, Neelah. Thank you so much.

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