It's here. It's not going to stop. We're not going to become lites and there's not going to be any AI. This idea that, you know, the president has and and David Sax, you know, where they got all the companies together and said, 'Hey, how about you guys self police?' You know, that's not going to work for at least not for protecting people's privacy.
Do you think data centers and the push back on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation?
I don't. I I think it's an effective route toward data center regulation.
Will you convince me? I'm 46. I'm I'm announcing my run for president here with you, Governor.
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.
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor and chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Illinois Governor JB Pritsker, 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 and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes for that realignment are pretty high right now. So, I asked Governor Pritskar, 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. You'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 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 Dakota on YouTube where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Governor JB Pritsker, you're the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Dakota.
Thanks, Neil. 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 reelection. I have to tell you, I have to be very honest with you. I I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview. Not only because I'm 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 in North Central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I 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 Illinois.
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.
I mean, I'm saying as a Packers fan, nothing funnier than the outcome of the Bears moving to Indiana. I just want to put put that out there. Openly biased in this case. I own two shares of that stock. But I'm gonna make the comparison here. And 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, all of that feels up for grabs. And the comparison I will make in this specific case is uh your fellow governor Gavin Newsome 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 Newsome caved. It feels like he pressured his attorney general, Rob Bont, to settle that lawsuit, keep them there. They settled the lawsuit. The next day, the family is like, 'We'd never from California. We would never leave.' I see a parallel here with the bears that is connected to that larger realignment about how government and business should interact. Do you see do 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 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 uh and and invading people's homes. I do believe that government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just uh you know a collaborator with business on everything. And so I I'm not, you know, I'm a businessman, as you know, before I became governor, but I also know that uh the people of Illinois anyway, you know, my job is to protect the the working people of this state uh who often don't have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them. That's kind of the realignment that I see. And 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 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 a 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.
There there are two places where I see the realignment in particular. Uh, one is data centers, one is privacy, right? And you you can just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, right, which is antitrust broadly. It's it's weird if you go into Silicon Valley, David Saxs lately is retweeting Lena Khan from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to to manage safety. And they both agree that these companies don't need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive. I'm again putting that in the context of regulating these companies. Thinking about the dynamic between the the government and the and the biggest companies in the world. I'll just ask a question I guess more directly. Do you think Nuome 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 to give you an answer. I and I so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say once again that our you know the our orientation today and I think about the a the big AI companies um 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 and 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 um that we're going to have to get very engaged. guard rails of course uh on both parts but also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment uh 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 um but that does feel like that's the direction this is going and uh 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. If these days 4% unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, um 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 could end up at 7% and have that be the baseline and maybe 10%. And if you think about what's happened, you know, the upheavals of economies and of uh governments when you get to 10% unemployment in an 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.
And I I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between particularly states and the big companies because that bringsmanship is real. The threat is we will leave. We just covered I don't know Kevin Olirri in Utah talking about data centers and the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin Olri building a 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 they 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 do you feel like you're in competition with the other states or is this bipartisan realignment and 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. U in 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 um 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 that 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, uh, South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida, you know, pick pick your poison. I'll, you 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, uh, 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 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. Uh an 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, a thousand, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, you know, that that 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 we are in competition. There's just no doubt about it. Should we be? 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 I I really do think something is happening, right? A lot of young people are 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. And 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 to buy to sell weapon systems and collect data for the government. That's a big swirl. I 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 podcast 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 we obviously have a lieutenant governor who's elected also but but a deputy governor is somebody get get appointed by me to serve under me to help manage the government with me what I did was actually put four deputy governors is in place uh plus a a general counsel uh and my chief of staff. Why is that important? Because what I've tried to do is to break down the silos of government um 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 uh health care and family services. So that's like you know everything from health insurance or you know Medicaid uh to uh 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 uh or seven departments underneath them. So 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.
Okay, 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 that's occurred and made it easier. Um Illinois frankly had not invested significantly before I became governor in those processes and frankly the the um you know technology that was necessary. Um and I'll just give you one example of this. We 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 uh uh 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? How 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. Um so that again I 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 because you know the thing that bothers me most we provide programs that really matter to people like we have a birth equity initiative uh to reduce maternal mortality particularly in black and brown communities and um and so we provide for some families like you know free diapers for some people. Free diapers, right? Um the 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, right? 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 uh problems of government with the, you know, with the way that we interact with people.
It's funny, I 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 they truly dislike it. And I I it doesn't feel like that connection has been made that a lot of these tools can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you. Are 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 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.
And I I I mean, I guess what I'm trying to do is make sure that I created something that called the AI cabinet uh in my government. And that is, you know, to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay uh agencies of state government. Uh so that we're 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. Um, so that's the idea, the AI uh cabinet. It'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 and the potential dangers. So that's why we've 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. So 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.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of Decoder Sessions. This segment features Andrew Melnisc, the Verge's general manager, and Ivan Sheffron, the executive director for managed security services at Comcast Business. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. I want to understand how has AI um you know changed the cyber security 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 uh leverage uh leverage AI to for malicious and bad purposes. So the only way to uh uh fight fire is with fire and we so we now use AI just as the attackers are using it to break in more quickly. We have to pivot and use it to defend more quickly at scale.
Comcast business specifically detected 25.4 4 billion fishing attempts and 21.9 billion driveby compromise events over one year. Uh talk to me a little bit about that data.
Fishing is so popular because it's so easy to do and AI has accelerated that. Every business should have uh software in place to detect fishing attacks uh to train their users and also that now extends to collaboration software not just email such as zoom such as slack such as teams um because that's becoming increasingly prevalent. Everybody expects to get breached now and that is not the attitude we use at Comcast. We we are take protecting our customer data extremely seriously.
The other decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job. You have some constraints in your decision-m process, right? You 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?
