Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

23:28Alex Bores:And so they're not primarily concerned with what is honorable or what is true. They are concerned with causing pain. So 2022, you're elected to the New York State Assembly. In 2025, you passed the Rays Act, which gets us into the AI regulations you're alluding to. This is one of the first major pieces of AI legislation passed by any state in the country. Before we get into what does it do, what was the philosophy behind it? When you're working on that bill, and I know you had co-sponsors on it, what were you all seeing and what were you all trying to achieve? We were seeing AI develop extremely rapidly and industry themselves warning about what was coming.

24:14Alex Bores:You know, this is after the letter that was signed by so many executives saying that we should treat the risk of extinction from AI equal to global nuclear war and promoting perhaps a pause. Many of them had signed voluntary commitments with the Biden White House saying, you know, we are going to take certain safety precautions and this is the first step towards binding federal regulation. And then we saw no binding federal regulation come. And we'd also heard from companies themselves that they were OK with certain safety standards, but they're in a competitive marketplace and that if they see their competitors starting to skimp on safety and cut corners, they would be forced to as well.

24:56Alex Bores:So when you hear that call, you say, OK, you should establish some baseline that people can't go below so that there is some established safety standards that everyone is playing by. What's the baseline you tried to establish? There were a few provisions in there. One was that you had to have a safety plan that you made public and actually stuck to that largely followed best practices in the industry around how you were going to test the models for specific risks, how you're going to record those tests and what you would do with that information. That you had to report to the government critical safety incidents, which we specifically defined in the bill.

25:34Alex Bores:If it goes wrong in these sorts of ways, may not have harmed anyone yet, but could suggest something is coming. You have to let us know about it. And those provisions largely survived till the end. There were two others that were in the original that ended up getting cut out. One of them was that you can't release a model if it fails your own safety test, basically designed for the way the tobacco companies operated, where they were the first to know that cigarettes caused cancer, but denied it publicly and continue to release their products. or fossil fuel companies that knew oil caused climate change but denied it.

26:08Alex Bores:We're saying if you knew your model was particularly risky, you have to take action on that. And the last provision was third-party audits, was saying that you can put up whatever standard you want, you can assert that you're going to follow it, but someone else should check your work. Not the government, but just a different party should come in. The same way we have financial audits, the same way we have SOC 2 security audits, that another party needs to look at it and say, yes, you are following this. And presumably you're working on this bill, what, 2024, 2025, four passes? Yep. How have your views on AI, the risks it poses, the questions it raises, changed with the subsequent pace of model releases?

26:53Alex Bores:I think things have happened much faster than I thought they would. And I think our ability to pass legislation has moved much slower than I thought it would. And so that difference in speed between how AI is advancing and how government reacts is wider than I was expecting when I started on this process. Have you thought about the change in public opinion? Because it looks to me like we're seeing a pretty powerful AI backlash rising. You have polls showing now more Americans are worried about AI than are enthusiastic about it. there's a lot of counter data center energy playing out throughout the country.

27:36What have you made of how quickly the politics have sort of shifted beneath AI? That surprised me as well.

27:44Alex Bores:Both how many people have focused on it, but also how bipartisan it's remained. You, of all people, know about polarization and most issues end up polarized. And this one hasn't so far. And it has resisted that longer than I thought it would. That if you talk to voters, you see across Republicans, Democrats and independents pretty similar attitudes across state legislators, pretty similar attitudes. Even in Congress, there's more bipartisanship than you would think. I mean, surveys regularly show that about 10 % of people want to put AI, put the genie back in the bottle and pretend it never existed.

28:20Alex Bores:And I empathize, but I don't think that's the way forward. 10 % of people represented by the super PAC leading the future want to just let it rip. That's the super PAC that's attacking you. Yes. They want to just let it rip. They don't care how many people it hurts, just how fast it moves. And 80 % of Americans want to see some benefits, but see a lot of risk and think it's moving too fast and want to have some say in its development. The fact that it stayed so bipartisan has surprised me. And also the fact that it's risen up in people's minds so much. Has the pessimism around it surprised you?

28:55And we were talking earlier about the period when there was a lot of optimism about tech, about software, about the Internet. And I think you can really look from early computers, early Internet, all the way pretty late into the social media era. You know, probably around Trump, I think things begin to turn. Cambridge Analytica, algorithmic feeds. But that's a long time when these systems and technologies are present for people. And there's a fundamental optimism about them. AI, ShotGPT, I think is when this really bursts into public consciousness. It's 2023. We're here in 2026, and the polling has already turned negative.

29:37I mean, the week before we recorded this, Sam Altman was targeted in two separate violent attacks. There was a Molotov cocktail thrown into his home. Two other people shot at his door. I was a little shocked to see people celebrating these attacks online, saying, you know, where can we support the bail fund? Yeah. This has moved into fury and fear and pessimism really, really quickly. Yeah. Why do you think that is?

30:04Alex Bores:Well, there was a separate split in AI around capabilities. The debate used to be, is this real or is it stochastic parrots? But usually even before that, is it just, you know, slop that is never going to actually replace a human? Fancy autocomplete. Exactly, exactly. And so we had these debates on one dimension, which was like, is it good for people? Is it bad for people? And then there was this other dimension of like, how big an impact is it going to have? And I think that debate's been collapsed. People are not skeptical of its power anymore, or some are, but fewer and fewer each day. And so the intensity with which we're having that first debate has really ramped up.

30:48Alex Bores:But I think it's also been that we saw what happened with social media. We saw what happened with these previous revolutions that were supposed to change everything for the better. And we've seen platforms established with great promise. And then over time, once they get power, really turn on their users. And so people are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people. And you see this argument from some of the AI founders. They say, well, it'll create material abundance for everyone. There'll be no more poverty. Everyone will have everything.

31:27Alex Bores:And everyone's looking around and saying, of course, that's not what's going to happen. You're a private company. You're going to profit. You're going to keep it all for yourself. Like, how are we going to force it to, Sam Altman recently said, it'll be like a utility. It's like utilities are really highly regulated. And so people are just not willing to believe that spin anymore. And yet seeing really quickly changes in their lives. jasmine sun the ai writer just wrote this kind of interesting piece on ai populism and i thought the way she defined it was interesting and a little more subtle than you normally hear which is she wrote i define ai populism as a worldview in which ai is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted and what she's getting at there is ai populism i think and the ai backlash tends to include two dimensions one is that this technology is being overhyped.

32:18The other, as it's often put to me in emails, is it is being pushed down our throats, that it's not a thing people want. It is a thing being forced upon them. Now there's all this investment behind it, so the investment needs to be paid off, so the companies really have to do it. And that if you take the power seriously, you see it in a different way, that kind of almost like any version of having an economy is going to be just a way of paying off these huge investments that we're not we're not getting a technology we want we are having a new paradigm forced upon us

32:55Alex Bores:how do you think about that i think it's a beautiful description what i hear from my neighbors is very much the feeling that this is moving so quickly that we don't have control and the American people so far have not had a say in it. So I think the first part of that definition of the belief in its capabilities, that part is shrinking as part of the dialogue as we're seeing it do more and more. But the fact that it is being thrown at us and we currently don't have control, I think is what's motivated so many people to be thinking about AI. It has always struck me that if you listen to the founders and leaders of the AI companies, They are very specific on the harms and the gains are very general sounding.

33:43So, you know, you'll hear Dario Amadei talking about, you know, 50 percent of entry level white collar workers seeing their jobs automated away. There actually are Waymos on the streets now. You can see that those could take jobs from taxi drivers and Uber drivers. There has been all this talk about existential risk, the sense that you could build something smart enough to disempower human beings. There's a lot of specificity on replacing coders. And then you'll get these very vague, it's going to help with drug development. It's going to solve, you know, material scarcity. And I think if you're a normal person being offered this technology that might make sure your 13-year-old son has a, like, AI porn bot before he has a real girlfriend, and you might lose your job, and maybe there's some chance the human race doesn't maintain control over its own future.

34:37Why wouldn't you want to pause on that?

34:39Alex Bores:Absolutely. Absolutely. When you're seeing the harms day by day, whether it's your kid, you know, the pedagogy at schools hasn't been updated. And some people still think that assigning take-home essays teaches critical thinking. It doesn't anymore. And on top of that, you see chatbots and you see some of the truly horrific stories that have happened to teenagers. And maybe you go to your job and your company now has a hiring freeze. They're not laying people off yet, but they're not doing their usual hiring and you're worried about what's coming from that. Are you all going to be necessary in the future?

35:12Alex Bores:And then you see your utility bill go up and maybe a data center is built near you. Maybe it wasn't, but you're starting to think about what's causing that. And then on top of that, you see people saying, oh yeah, and it might kill everyone, right? These are the new stories that are coming in and you're maybe not seeing that benefit. And there are benefits, right? This is not a story of a technology that is just bad, but it's moving really, really quickly. And a few people are controlling the direction. And many people have lost confidence in government's ability to steer it. It becomes a question of if democratic institutions can govern this technology before it governs us.

35:54Alex Bores:I think pretty clearly, no. Well, I'm running a campaign to change that. I guess we'll talk about that. But I think being worried about how fast these systems are moving and having any awareness at all of how fast the U.S. government now moves should make one worried. Absolutely. And so one thing you do see is proposals emerging to try to slow AI down by functionally choking off some of the inputs. So there's a Bernie Sanders, AOC bill to just have a data center moratorium. There's some bipartisan interest in this. Ron DeSantis in Florida has a bill that would be very restrictive on data center construction.

36:34Yeah. What do you think about a data center moratorium?

36:37Alex Bores:The Bernie Sanders AOC proposal is a moratorium until we pass real regulation that protects people. I agree with that. I think we should pass real regulation today. Do you agree with the data center moratorium until we do? Well, I think what they are calling for is that we need the real regulation. They don't think that bill is going to pass in this split Congress. They are setting the terms of the debate, which says, why are we going forward with this until we've done the real work? And I think that's the right question to ask. Like, if you could, if I could wave a magic wand and pass any bill I'd want, it wouldn't be the moratorium.

37:10Alex Bores:It would be the regulations that the moratorium is calling for. But putting that as a negotiating tactic, I think, is meeting the moment in the scale. I mean, Bernie talks about the potential benefits of AI and also talks about the risks and the downside. I think he's been the clearest communicator on it. But you're right. It's a bipartisan issue. It is not one that is left right.

38:02Alex Bores:This podcast is supported by Nertek ODT Remedipant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nertek. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. NERTECH can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your health care provider if NERTECH is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to NERTECH ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use.

38:40Alex Bores:Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4NERDTECH or visit nerdtech.com. All right, back to your podcast. This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown, stir, drown, feel method for putting out campfires.

39:19Alex Bores:Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at SmokeyBear.com. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. In your framework for AI regulation, you have a somewhat different approach to data centers. You seem to see them as a kind of opportunity. An opportunity for what? They could be an opportunity. And this is, again, you need the regulation first. It's not, oh yeah, this will work in the future. And given the political power of these companies, I would be very skeptical of them doing it unless we pass regulation with teeth.

39:56Alex Bores:But the idea is that our electric grid is so outdated and so in need of updates throughout the country, but even here in New York. And it also slows down the renewable energy transition because if you want to have solar on homes, you need a grid that is more responsive to generation happening in a distributed manner. And it's not right now. And we've tried to upgrade the grids. We need funds to do it. And the only options on the table are the government pays for it, which is taxpayers, you and I, or it adds to our utility bills, which is ratepayers, again, you and I. And here comes an industry with, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited private capital that is really willing to pay for time.

40:42Alex Bores:They are desperate for speed in building these out. And so what I'm saying is you can set the incentives such that if you want to build a data center and you're doing X percentage renewable, should be very high percentage, and you will pay not just for the connection to the grid and all the infrastructure that's needed for that. But you'll also pay on top of that a fee to make the grid more resilient and help the upgrades elsewhere so that you can truly make the grid more green and more reliable. Well, then we'll move you to the front of the interconnection queue. And by doing that, we'll push your competitors to the back of the interconnection queue.

41:24Alex Bores:And you set up a incentive to actually build things in a way that benefit us. Is it possible to do, given the way our buildouts and infrastructure really work? And the reason I've developed some cynicism here is I remember being promised the smart grid of the future in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Yeah. And we didn't quite get that. No. I don't think anybody said at the end of that where our grid was now smart. And then we passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which between the two of them had a lot of thoughts about energy generation. And that and other things were meant to work on the grid.

42:05And I'm not saying there were no upgrades made to the grid anywhere. But I am saying that I keep getting promised gigantic grid overhauls. And then being told a couple of years later that somehow our grid is still this archaic mess where the biggest problem for getting new green energy online is we can't connect it.

42:25Alex Bores:Your cynicism is warranted 100%. Thank you. and I dare say you wrote a whole book on ways that we could make that easier to do. But maybe the difference here is you have private capital coming up to do it. And the whole proposal is being precise on ways that we can expedite and by expediting, shifting the ones that are dirty and not paying their way to the back of the line. So as I understand the theory underneath the data center approach, it's really that if all this money is going to flood into ai and ai is going to be at least in part built on the collective commons of the entire culture that came before it that we should benefit that is not just sam altman created some magic algorithm sam altman and open ai and anthropic and grok and so on inhaled the entire internet ate up my books and the books of everybody else around and trained, you know, these systems on them.

43:24You have an idea in there that I think tracks this theory more closely than other things I've seen, which is an AI dividend. Talk me through that.

43:33Alex Bores:The AI dividend starts from thinking about how we can give Americans a real stake in the AI economy. And it starts with humility that we don't know exactly how it's going to go. We don't know how disruptive it's going to be. But right now is the time to plan for the potential outcomes that could come. And there's always been this conversation, right, in my econ classes at ILR. It was that, oh, every technology revolution has always created more jobs than it's destroyed. Arguable, maybe. But this is the first time someone's building a technology and stating that the goal is to replace all human labor.

44:12Alex Bores:It is to be better than humans at everything. And the metric by which we understand how good the technology is getting is how much better it is in humans. It's functionally how well it is capable of mimicking different forms of human labor. Exactly right. And then exceeding them. Exactly right. I mean, you are creating a replacement for a human labor machine. Exactly. And it's the first time that has been tried. And it doesn't mean it will succeed, but it certainly means government needs to take it seriously. And so the idea of the AI dividend is, what if we end up in that world? Where all human labor is replaced or just a significant portion of it is displaced.

44:49Alex Bores:How do you have a society that is actually functioning then? And you have to start talking about universal basic income. And the idea is to make sure that we are setting up the structures now that would lead for Americans to be protected if we end up in that future. And I have a lot of things about how we can prevent that future changes, et cetera. But the A.I. Dividend is almost that insurance policy. And you could fund it via boring things like a wealth tax that have been talked about. You could fund it via a token tax. So putting a tax on the usage of AI may be limited to commercial opportunities where you're replacing human labor or not.

45:28Alex Bores:And that's a fine policy as long as investment in capital always leads to more jobs, which has been economic theory for hundreds of years. But maybe AI is shifting that. And so if it's shifting that, we need to shift our tax policy to be taxing AI and to be discounting hiring humans. And token tax starts to get at that. But then the other funding mechanism that I talk about for the AI dividend is actually taking warrants in these companies, large out-of-the-money warrants, where you say, you know, if the value of this, the AI companies were to go up an enormous amount, then the government would have the right to buy shares.

46:08Alex Bores:at a set price. They basically only pay off if one or multiple of the companies are wildly successful, basically if they are replacing all human labor. And if you institute that now, then VCs celebrate it and say you're participating in the upside. And if you try to implement it after one of them are successful, then you're seizing the means of production and seizing wealth. And so my idea is you go down all of these paths. You start to find ways to have the revenue to actually fund universal basic income or investments in job retraining or just a broader safety net, but do it in ways that automatically scale and adjust and kicked in at the speed of AI.

46:49Here's a concern I've always had about this set of policies or this set of answers to the problem of AI and job displacement. So I've been very, very near the universal basic income debate a long time. My wife, Annie Lowry, wrote a book on universal basic income called to give people money. I used to work closely with Dylan Matthews, who did a lot of writing on universal basic income. And the trick of universal basic income to me, which maybe you support on its own merits, right, which is fine, but is under any plausible scenario of AI job displacement, it is happening to some people and not all people.

47:24And I see you looking skeptically, but I don't see a world in which one day we wake up and everybody's jobs are gone. It's going to start with some people's jobs. It'll start with some people's jobs. So if I thought it was going to be everybody's job all at once, I wouldn't worry about it. Because then we would just figure out a policy to compensate everyone. But you imagine you're a teamster and you drive a truck and you're making$80 ,000,$120 ,000 a year. And the autonomous truck companies put you and your fellow teamsters out of work. And don't worry, we've actually passed universal basic income.

48:01Alex Bores:No, it's totally insufficient. You're now getting$37 ,000 from your universal basic income. 100%. And I'm getting$37 ,000 from the universal basic income. And I'm still here in my podcasting studio. You got screwed. I got a check. What worries me the most is I don't think we're going to a world of full automation. But even if you believed we were, is transition. And some people are going to really lose out and other people are going to be unaffected or gain. And I don't hear policy ideas that seem to know what to do with the people who are losing out along the way, right? The people who are actually getting displaced.

48:42Not the world of everybody is displaced, but the world is graduating with a marketing degree. You are three times more likely to be unemployed than you were before. Or coders are suddenly seeing a contraction in demand for their services. but some coders are making a ton of money. Like, how do you think about the differentials here?

49:02Alex Bores:Universal basic income by itself is insufficient. And I would love to understand why you think we're not headed to a world of full automation, because it's tough for me to see where that stops once we start on it, but we can come back to that. There will be a period of transition either way. I don't think it'll be all at once. So the idea is not just, oh yeah, we're all gonna have this basic income, because you're right, people will be screwed by that. The idea is to do a number of things simultaneously. simultaneously, which include changing the tax code so that we're actually charging for the use of AI and discounting the use of labor.

49:34Alex Bores:And that's a way to protect jobs and slow down the transition itself. It's investments not just in universal basic income, but in job retraining programs and in structures that help people go into new careers. Now, granted, they have a really bad track record. This is my concern. A really bad track record, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't still be investing in community colleges and finding ways to improve it as much as possible. But you're right to just say that, oh, we're just going to give a universal basic income is not enough. We have to think about other ways of adjusting that transition, which could include when you have people who have a permit or training or a license that takes a number of years to acquire.

50:17Alex Bores:Maybe you still require that for the transition for five years or 10 years so people can turn that training into equity. And that's another way that they have a stake in the AI economy. We're going to need a lot of policy solutions. That's why the framework I put out has 43 different ideas in it. But let's get very specific on this. And I want to come back to the question of full automation. But New York City is facing a near-term question here, which is Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company, they have had permits to do the sort of mapping and testing here, needed to eventually roll out Waymo in New York City the way it's been rolled out in San Francisco and Phoenix and other places.

50:55And that set of permits have expired. And, you know, Mayor Mamdani has been, I would say, very noncommittal about whether or not he wants to extend them. He said, if a company like Waymo finds itself in New York City, what they will also find is a city government that is committed to delivering for the workers who keep the city running. Those workers also include our taxi drivers. So here you have this very near question, right? Waymo is a technological advance. They are nice to ride in. They are safer from all the data we have. They also will, if you roll them out en masse in the coming years, displace taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Lyft drivers.

51:34How do you balance that?

51:36Alex Bores:It's a tough and ongoing question that the speed of the transition only makes worse. There are ways of, again, maybe you require a medallion for Waymos for a set amount of time, and that's what enables some bit of transition. But then you're only protecting the medallion owners and not the drivers, right? But that's maybe a piece of what that transition looks like, especially for those that have gone into a huge amount of debt to buy that medallion. You think about job retraining and other places that can go in. you think about a broader safety net, but we don't have a full policy solution for any sort of disruption that happens this quickly.

52:13Alex Bores:It just hasn't been developed. And we need people in government that are willing to take that problem seriously and look for solutions that aren't just stop or go because this technology is coming. But so what's your version of that solution for Waymo? Because Waymo is interesting to me, or autonomous vehicles, right? You can think of many different companies trying to do this. Even more so than I think at least the public conversation around generative AI, where I think the gains, which we can talk about, it has been sometimes hard to see what they are in the way people talk about it. Driverless cars really do have gains.

52:51A world of driverless cars is safer. There are a lot of people who have mobility issues right now or discrimination issues and getting picked up and all kinds of things where they could really be helped. They are just kind of fascinating technology. You know, you're not going to have people falling asleep and then hitting somebody on the road. Slowing them down has a cost, a cost in just the convenience people might experience, but also cost in safety, a cost potentially in lives saved. And speeding them up has a cost in displacement. So you said we need politicians willing to take this seriously.

53:26You're a politician. You're looking to take this seriously. Yeah. What do you do?

53:30Alex Bores:Well, I've said a few different options and things that we can do together, which is the medallions. But should the Waymo keep going? That's the answer. You'll charge Waymo for medallions and the money goes into the coffer. Who gets that money? I think you can specifically be focused on job retraining and on people who are displaced. And you can try to share the benefits in that way is a portion of that answer that we have to go to. But the real question is, should we be investing in Waymos or in public transit? Like we have a great system to move people around. and we actually need an investment in improving that.

54:04Alex Bores:So I took a Waymo for the first time in LA and it was a light rain for New York City standards, but I think a thunderstorm for LA standards. And I got in the Waymo and it went 20 feet and it pulled over to the side of the road and just said, dialing support. Didn't say what, know why it was calling, et cetera. And I found out later, It turns out almost every Waymo in the city had done it at the same time because it couldn't handle rain. And so support timed out. And I was sitting there for 12 minutes. My first Waymo I ever had. And I went to call an Uber or Lyft or something. And finally support came through.

54:46Alex Bores:And the person was like, oh, yeah, seems like you're stuck. Like, I'll drive you out of there. And so I have questions about how they function in the rain in New York City. And I have questions about when the backup is human drivers. It seems like it's another form of outsourcing as well. So yes, in the long term theoretical, will autonomous vehicles be safer than humans? In most cases, yes. But to say that we are definitely there right now. I wouldn't say we're there necessarily right now. It's only the conditions in which they're willing to do that, which are quite limited. Like you can't take a Waymo from San Francisco to Phoenix.

55:22Can I take one inside San Francisco or Phoenix?

55:24Alex Bores:So all that is to say, I think it's a this hypothetical of they're ready to go and be safer right now is not is not right. But I think they're safer in the place they drive. And the reason I'm pushing on this is not because I'm pro Waymo or anti Waymo. It's that there is a question that public officials are facing right now about how quickly to move forward into that world. And, you know, Zoran Mamdani could extend the permits and accelerate Waymo coming to New York City, or he could drag his feet and keep it out of New York City. And then there are some ideas in the middle about maybe you could have Waymo paying high prices.

56:02But even to the extent you're doing that, what you're doing is pulling Waymo in. I think people sometimes don't quite want to face up to that there is a yes or no question on some of these issues. And, you know, in the long run, do you want to protect the jobs of taxi drivers or do you want to have autonomous vehicles operating inside of your city is a kind of yes or no question.

56:26Alex Bores:I think, as Cain says, in the long run, we're all dead. There's a question of speed, not yes or no. And I think most people here are from zero to 100, somewhere between 40 and 60, and we're being described as yes or no. I think it's not ready right now for the environment of New York City. It will be ready sometime in the future. And like with a lot of AI, we need to be thoughtful on that transition on how it benefits people and how it hurts them. I think it is almost easier to imagine ways of handling the financial consequences of AI for people, even though I don't actually think we figured that out.

57:04Then the consequences for their dignity, for their purpose, people train for jobs, that job is part of their identity. And then all of a sudden it's getting taken from them and you're going to say, you know, hey, taxi worker over here at the community college, you can retrained to be a home healthcare aid, that there's something here that we're going to have to balance, you know, the economic efficiencies or pushes forward with the basic deal we offer people in this country and in this economy, which is that, you know, you study for something, you learn how to do a job, you apprentice, and that we value you for doing that.

57:45And then we're supposed to treat that as having value. I feel like we don't talk about this dignity dimension enough. So I'm curious how you think about it.

57:54Alex Bores:I think it, for so long, humans have been defined by their job. And that's become a piece of the dignity that you, in this worldview, have purpose, have value because of the thing that you do. And that's been ingrained in people for a while. And if we keep that mindset, then UBI is an extremely disappointing answer to it. And I think for lots of reasons, it's not the full solution. The world that is painted by the AI optimists is we're going to get to this post-working area where people no longer derive their purpose from work. I'm skeptical. We'll be like the British gentry. Yeah, I'm skeptical.

58:52I'm skeptical. But you believe in full automation. So then you think we're going to dystopia?

58:58Alex Bores:On our current path. Yeah. But I think we have the chance to change it. When you throw the ball down the field mentally, if you're skeptical, what is the good outcome here? What is the good outcome of we have automated away, which you seem to think is very possible, Yeah. At least very large percentage of the economy's jobs. And yet what we have is something better than at least where we've been or where we are. It would have to be at the point where it's not just your basic material needs are met, but the standard of living is higher than it is now, where you can go about your day and be in a better place than you are right now.

59:37Alex Bores:And this isn't a perfect analogy. AI is different in all kinds of ways. But if you look 100 years ago, the average American worked 60 hours a week and had a much lower standard of living. Now the average American works 40 hours a week as a higher one. We could get to one where we work 20 hours or 10 hours and have a higher one yet, but we were able to do that transition because workers had power, because Americans had political power, because we were able to shape that technology to work for us either directly through legislation or by organizing unions and doing it indirectly at the workplace.

1:00:16Alex Bores:If this transition happens too quickly and we lose that political power, it doesn't just happen. So I want to talk about something where we already are seeing the effects of it. And you talk about this as very early in your plan, which is kids. And one of my theories of legislating, having covered a lot of this, is sometimes a crucial thing in building legislative capacity is to just find places where there's enough consensus to legislate a bit. So people learn about the issue and learn how to legislate on it. You know, there's all kinds of experiments consenting adults can run on themselves. I am pretty worried about the situation with AIs and kids, and we really don't know what it's going to mean for kids to have relationships with AIs and to grow up where they've got AI friends and so on.

1:01:02What is your approach to kids and generative AI?

1:01:06Alex Bores:I agree with you. I think kids in some ways need more protection, and we don't know a lot of the impacts that AI will have. That doesn't mean we don't look at places where it can benefit kids. I mean, I can imagine a world where having a personalized tutor at exactly your level in each subject and able to communicate with you in exactly the way you like to learn as a supplement to what you're getting from teachers in the classroom and your parents is a helpful thing. But teachers and parents need a view into all of the interactions and we need strong data protection. And I think broadly, a lot of these projects, even when you think if some teenagers should be allowed on or not, need to be thoughtful on the mental health impacts.

1:01:58Alex Bores:This is a really scary period. And we've seen the big stories about chatbots, but then we've also seen like chat GPT integrated into teddy bears and things that just feel really unnecessary. So what's in your plan on this? What do you actually want to do? So age verification for certain aspects of these interactions, the mental health checking, as I said, engaging in updating pedagogy, making sure that teachers and parents have a view into any interaction that goes with AI, broad protection on training of kids' data and data privacy aspects as well. And yes, we need to prepare kids for the jobs of the future.

1:02:38Alex Bores:I don't think you should shut off access to AI. People should be exposed to these tools as they are in high school and college and getting there. But being really thoughtful about what those interactions are. When you say updating pedagogy, how do you want to update it? Well, so you can still assign essays, but if you just do a take-home essay, people are just putting it into ChatGPT. And everyone knows this, but I've done a few things where high school students come up to Albany and when the teacher leaves the room, I say, how many have used ChatGPT to write an essay? And every hand goes up. So should we be requiring essays written by hand?

1:03:13Alex Bores:Should we require them written in Google Docs or a program like it so you can actually watch keystrokes being entered, right? Just updating for the tools that are up there and making sure the old way of teaching is still teaching. You know, I'm hiring for something right now. And it has really disoriented me that cover letters are now completely useless. You know, I've been involved in hiring for hundreds of positions now, given my time at Vox. And cover letters were always quite important to me as a way of sussing out. Maybe somebody whose qualifications were less obvious for the role. But you could see in the way they wrote an unusual mind at work.

1:03:56And now, I'm not saying that's completely impossible, right? You can still write a great cover letter, although increasingly it's getting a little. But it is getting harder and harder to know what you're looking at. Like, are you looking at somebody who is, you know, a great mind at work? Are you looking at somebody who's cyborging it with an AI system? And should maybe that's fine because that's the world and somebody who's very, you know, facile at using them is actually showing they have a skill that others don't. But on the other hand, I actually want to know how the person thinks, not how good they are at prompting.

1:04:29To completely knock out our ability to evaluate somebody's writing skills.

1:04:35Alex Bores:Can I ask, not any of your current employees, obviously, but people you've interviewed. Have you noticed the loss of just skill in writing? I haven't noticed it yet, but I would say I have not hired since AI got good enough. I've definitely noticed it. And I think people underestimate this because they're used to the quirks of poorly prompted chat GPT writing. And it is incredibly, incredibly easy to spot. But if you know how to use the systems and you're better at it and you're using, you know, more advanced forms of chat GPT or Cloud or Gemini, you can't tell. But I think when you ask people to write things, it's just not, I think there's been a few years now where that skill is not being taught.

1:05:18Alex Bores:And you have pointed out that writing is how many people strengthen their ideas, that the work that goes into that is part of the work of thinking. And I have noticed as people have, again, not speaking to anyone I've hired, but people have applied or others that I think there has been a decrease in people's ability to write well and express their thoughts clearly and do the editing work. So one thing in your AI framework that I thought was interesting was that you want to expand the government's capacity on AI. What does that mean? It means making sure that we have the expertise within government to understand this technology and help contribute in a positive way to its development.

1:06:07Alex Bores:And this has been horribly underinvested. And so we're not taking this technology as seriously as we need to. This is the first major technology that is developed basically without any government progress, any government work in it, right? Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but DARPA did develop the intranet that became the internet. And even the space race was obviously primarily government led. AI was completely developed in the private sector. I mean, some grants on research, but it was done outside the structures of government. We need to be hiring in the expertise within government if we are going to help to govern and lead to good outcomes here.

1:06:51Can we do that with the way government hires? I've run into this question before, talking to people inside the federal government, inside state governments. Government hiring, for very good reasons, has structured pay scales and worries about horizontal equity and a million things that make sense when you're very worried about corruption and patronage and favoritism. The market for top AI talent is insane, right? What Meta will pay you, what Google Alphabet will pay you, what OpenAI, what Anthropic will pay you, what they can pay you. I don't think any of them are going to pay me, but yeah. Yeah, not you specifically, but one.

1:07:27There's a question of not cutting funding for the parts of government trying to do this, but there's also the question of how do you just make sure the government has the staffing talent to keep up in a market this hot.

1:07:39Alex Bores:We absolutely should make it easier for government to hire experts and to pay more in order to compete in that way. I mean, we've found a way to let states directly fund more hiring. It's usually the football coach in any state. I'd rather it be a real AI expert that's working to make this future actually work for Americans. I want to get you to expand on this a bit because I think it, I think as we're hearing a lot of reports of Anthropics Mythos, which I have not had access to it, so I don't know how good it is really at hacking every computer system on the planet, but they are saying it is very capable of that.

1:08:17And I think you really quickly, if we're going to have AI companies creating what are functionally cyber superweapons, the ability of the government to actually oversee these systems becomes pretty paramount very quickly. I think Anthropic is an interesting place and is posing a lot of governance challenges in opposite directions at the same time. On the one hand, you can't just have a private company creating cyber superweapons and, you know, hope for the best. On the other hand, we just watched with the Anthropic and, you know, Department of Defense, Department of War controversy. When you're dealing with the Trump administration, do you really want this kind of quasi-nationalization of labs.

1:08:59I think we're seeing simultaneously that it is uncomfortable having these systems as private as they are. It is uncomfortable recognizing that if the government gets its hands on them, they could be used for whatever a particular government's purposes might be. And so it's left a lot of us, I think, who care about regulation and care about governance in an awkward spot.

1:09:25Alex Bores:It is deeply uncomfortable because we are talking about such extreme power. And it's a question of where that power lies. If you take as a given that there will be a super intelligence developed, which I don't see any reason why there won't be at this point, then of course it's an uncomfortable question about where that sits because you're talking about something that is smarter than any human ever. That is a real power question. And this is a real question that needs to be settled by policy, that needs to be settled by law, that if you're just leaving it up to the whims of an executive branch where there's no restrictions on them or private companies where there's no law, both of those feel deeply uncomfortable.

1:10:15Alex Bores:This is why we need Congress to step up to the plate and actually decide how this division should happen. So in the answers you've given me, two things that have kind of come clear in the background of the way you think about this is one, you seem to believe we're going to go to full automation, not necessarily tomorrow, but you reacted with a lot of skepticism when I said, I didn't think we would get there. I think there's a significant likelihood and we should take it seriously. And that superintelligence is also a real possibility that we're not necessarily going to stop at human level or even like a bit beyond your average worker, that we could be soon dealing with something.

1:10:51I think for a lot of people, they would hear that and say, so why not stop it? Why do we want a superintelligence, the machine god that will put us all out of work, that we have no guarantee we will know how to control, right? If this is your set of views, why move forward as opposed to, you know, trying to throw your body on the train tracks?

1:11:18Alex Bores:Well, I don't think right now metaphorically throwing your body on the train tracks will make a strong difference. I do think we should slow down the development until we've made a lot more progress on the alignment problem. I do think we're getting into really risky territory. What you need, and one of the sections of the plan, is about diplomacy. It's about international action. We should be engaging with other countries. We should be engaging with China. We should be building universal verification systems on what is happening both at the chip level, where you can look at the geography and how it's being used, and in the models themselves.

1:12:00Alex Bores:we should be trying to lower the temperature on their being in arms race. So, yeah, I am worried. If I had a magic wand, I would slow things down until we had better guarantees about what we were stepping into and where we were going.

1:12:38Alex Bores:This podcast is supported by Nertek ODT Remedipant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nertek. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nertek can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your health care provider if Nertek is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nertek ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use.

1:13:15Alex Bores:Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4NERDTECH or visit nerdtech.com. All right, back to your podcast. This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown, stir, drown, feel method for putting out campfires.

1:13:55Alex Bores:Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at SmokeyBear.com. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. So now I want to flip the valence of this conversation. We've been talking, as I think most of the AI conversation does, about what I would call AI harm reduction. If this technology is moving forward, how do we make sure it causes as little harm as possible? But I think for people to want this technology to move forward, for it to actually even be conceptually a good idea for this technology to move forward, I think the case has to be better than that.

1:14:37And we were talking earlier about many ways like the absence of a positive vision for AI. These companies have to make back, you know, in the coming years, a lot of investment. And as best I can tell, the business model they've come up with is replacing white-collar workers and to some degree subscription fees for people asking Chachapita looking a mole. What I have been wondering about for some time is all these promises of AI for drug development, AI for energy innovations. What would it look like to have a public agenda that actually tried to make that real, that actually tried to make it such that there was more AI development that went in those directions and that we got more out of it?

1:15:23So, I mean, I've heard you talk before about your interest in AI drug development. I want to hear your thinking, even if it's not a full policy agenda, on what it would mean to have a positive agenda for AI where the public sector is shaping this towards social good as opposed to simply private profit.

1:15:43Alex Bores:We would build out an initiative that we've done in New York called Empire AI, which was that the state government bought a large cluster of GPUs and committed to continuing to build that out and gave our public universities access to it so they could run experiments at a much cheaper rate. and made a public investment on a research front to go after lots of things, including AI alignment and AI safety. But we could be directing grants to that specific research, and we could be building the infrastructure in the government to make that cheaper. I absolutely believe we should be trying to use AI for good.

1:16:31Alex Bores:And New York was the first state to do this. Others are following. But the federal government has the resources to really do a deep investment here. And yeah, for a while, AI benefits have been riding on the story of alpha fold and solving protein folding, which was an incredible advance and has sped up drug discovery. But there could be more like that out there. There are definitely more like that out If there's not, then we've been sold a bill of goods here. And I think the government should be making use of this technology for good and directing research in that way. That doesn't, by the way, solve alignment problems.

1:17:13Alex Bores:It could be that you want it to do really good things. And then actually, in pursuing that, it goes off in a whole other different direction. But yes, that is a good use of public investment. So let's focus in on drug development for a minute, because I think it's in some ways like the clearest case. I mean, GLP-1s, for instance, are a revolution right now, but they're actually a quite old drug, been around for decades. And all of a sudden, we have all of these new candidates either to develop or to test. Let's say you imagine what certainly seems possible, which is that in the next, call it three to five years, AI systems begin generating a pace of molecules worthy of investigation, either new molecules or existing molecules that the AI systems scour the data and realize they might have other uses.

1:18:01But if you know anything about drug development, you have choke points all across that process. There's what the FDA can do. There's getting, you know, everything from rats to monkeys to humans for trials. That a world in which we suddenly had more good candidates would be a world where the choke points became something very different. This gets a little bit more towards the way you were thinking, I think, about the grid, which is if AI is going to create, If we imagine AI will create all this pressure for investment and it'll create all this like demand for something, how do you use that pressure to open up parts of the system that have been clogged, that have fallen somewhat into disrepair, right?

1:18:46Like, how would you make it possible for your economy to actually benefit from AI, which requires operating not just in the world of, you know, probabilistic predictions, but actually in the world of things, of steel, of cement, of, you know, human beings who are willing to sign up for a drug trial?

1:19:07Alex Bores:Well, that's why there's more to my platform than just the AI piece. I'm giving you a good opportunity to talk about it here. But we have to cut red tape and cut regulations. One of the ways that I have used AI already is I put every statute in New York State through an LLM and asked it to identify laws that are out of date, that require paper when we could do something digitally, a bunch of ways of checking that we have requirements that are just getting in the way of getting things done. what Jen Polka might call the policy cruft that develops over time and put together now a 60-page bill for this session of just pulling out a bunch of these old requirements that are getting in the way of doing things.

1:19:50Alex Bores:We can do the similar thing with regulations, not just with statutes, but where have we developed practices that are now in the way of moving forward in drug discovery or broadly? yeah, we need to change policies that stop government from getting things done. And sometimes that's in technology doing the thing more efficiently. Sometimes that's in using the technology or not, but finding ways to identify choke points and find ways to alleviate them. Or we're talking it's tax week. A lot of us who waited until the end of paid our taxes this week. And it was already possible for the IRS to pre-fill a tax form for most Americans who have pretty straightforward taxes.

1:20:37And lobbying has made that very hard and the Trump administration has made that harder. But it would be fundamentally, as a technical matter, trivial for there to be, through the IRS, a tax preparation AI system that every American had access to, where they uploaded their forms, it was cross-checked with IRS data, and it did their taxes for them in seconds, saving people a lot of time and energy. Like the capacity to actually have give every American an AI accountant under the auspices of the IRS. If we don't do it, it's not because we can't. You know, there's a real question of whether or not the lobbyists allow people to do that.

1:21:27But the relationship between people in the state could really be transformed if government chose to transform it. A hundred percent.

1:21:33Alex Bores:And I think we need to make that a priority. So I have a bill that I've been pushing for for a few years to make it easier for different agencies within New York City to share data that you give to them for the purpose of signing you up for benefits. so that if they sign you up for one benefit, you can automatically be assigned for another one. That right now is restricted and we should change that. Obviously, New York City invested like$100 million on building a portal, but actually what we need are changes on the back end of laws that make it easier to share that data. I'll go a step forward, which was I was speaking with the tax department in New York State and advocating for, okay, free file, it makes it easy for you, you don't need another software, but why can't we just do it for New Yorkers?

1:22:20Alex Bores:We have a lot of the information as the New York State Department. And the answer I got back is that so much of the information we have is actually wrong. They had this need to just improve the data internally first. And I said, OK, why don't you just find companies that are wrong or build systems to help them? And they were like, we're working on that, but give us five years. That's where we want to get so that we can automate it. So maybe it does come back around to data integration and just having the data correct. and it might not be any more that the technical aspects of how to do your taxes is the limitation, but just as the underlying data that we're feeding accurate enough for it.

1:22:59I guess the principle I'm trying to get at here is to the extent you don't believe we're going to pause. I'm not saying you don't, but one doesn't, right? That we are going to move forward at some pace here, which seems likely. I think actually benefiting from AI as a public is a harder challenge than people have given it credit for. I don't think just because the systems get better, there is necessarily a public benefit. There could be individual benefits, individual harms. But if we want drug discovery to accelerate, we need to open up the systems that would allow drug discovery to move faster.

1:23:39You know, if we want the relationship between people in the state to get cleaner, we need to actually create the conditions for it and overhaul very, very, very difficult and archaic and multi-layered and error-filled, you know, government databases. And it's interesting because I do think right now throughout the private sector, you see companies, you know, with greater and lesser degrees of success trying to figure out, like, what does it mean to rebuild ourself to use AI? Everything from how teams are structured to how our data works. The government, you know, because it doesn't get competed out of business by new governments, you know, is working on much older systems and it's very, very hard to build them.

1:24:23But I don't know, I think for AI to be worth it, you're going to need a lot more of this kind of investment at a much higher level of ambition. And like right now, I'm not saying, we don't even seem to be able to legislate on the harms very effectively. So I'm not confused as to why we are focusing there. But I do worry a bit about it Because there's a world where we've done some reasonable harm reduction legislation and done very little benefit from it. And that's a world where we've kind of pushed AI towards being a worker replacement machine, as opposed to having like a public vision for what we want from it.

1:24:58Alex Bores:I 100 % agree. And this is the hard work of governing. I don't think these are maybe the easy places where we can build the legislative muscle. I would hope so. I think that's probably around kids. But I think these are parts of the places where we have to work together to change that. And part of it will be on AI and setting up incentives. And part of it will be building the infrastructure that allows that to happen. We're talking a lot about pretty high concepts here. One of my first bills in the state legislature was to help the state get on cloud computing because it mostly uses mainframes.

1:25:34Alex Bores:And the Speaker of the Assembly - Most uses mainframes in 2023. Yes. Yes. The Speaker of the Assembly codes in Fortran. And I always joke that his retirement plan is going to be fixing all the state systems because they still run on Fortran. There's just work that needs to be done on modernizing to allow us to take advantage of the benefits. And that will require both direct investments and a lot of legislating to encourage that direction. So one of the reasons I want to have this conversation with you is you've ended up, whether you wanted to or not, a bit of a test case for how all this is going to work.

1:26:10So you're running for Congress. And there is, as I mentioned before, the super PAC that's funded by co-founders of Palantir, OpenAI, and Andreessen Horowitz. They spent a million dollars opposing your campaign so far, suggested they spend... Two and a half so far. Oh, two and a half. And suggested they might spend up to$10 million. You know, at the same time, I've looked at some of their statements. Greg Brockman, who's one of the OpenAI founders and is a major donor of this pack, he has said, being pro-AI does not mean being anti-regulation. It means being thoughtful, crafting policies to secure AI's transformative benefits while mitigating risks and preserving flexibility as the technology continues to evolve rapidly.

1:26:49So what's their problem with you?

1:26:53Alex Bores:If they really truly believed in having one national framework that regulates AI and balances the benefits and risks, they'd be supporting me. I think it's a difference between what they say for marketing purposes and what they actually believe and their actions portray that. So OpenAI last week released a policy document that mirrors a lot of my policies. The emphases are different. I wouldn't say that. Parts of it. Parts of it. Yeah, they're like, we believe in a 32-hour work week. Yeah, yeah. But they did say they wanted third-party audits. But sometime in the future, I think we're already there.

1:27:33Alex Bores:And there was much more of an emphasis on society dealing with the problems after the in fact, as opposed to restrictions on the developers, right? I'm not saying it's a match, but they put forward some policies there. And they also put later in the week policies specifically around kids out that included safe harbor provisions, included testing, encouraging red teaming of models. So when you red team a model or red team any software, you get people to try to intentionally break it and to do something it's not supposed to do. And you might want to red team it around producing child sexual abuse material to make sure that it can't out in the world.

1:28:16Alex Bores:And right now in every state in the country, red teaming it and producing that material would be illegal. We have a no tolerance policy on the production of the material. And obviously no DA is going to go after you for that. But one of the things they talk about there is they want to extend safe harbor provisions so that you can actually encourage red teaming. Yeah, I mean, this is my concern, and I've heard this from people on the Hill, like people in the Senate. Alyssa Slotkin said a version of this to me on the record that at the exact moment that AI is becoming so powerful that it would be irresponsible for Congress to not be starting to construct regulations, legislative structures, transparency, kids.

1:29:04that the AI industry now has so much money that much as crypto did before it, it's able to create a kind of super pack of, you know, that has like a Death Star-like capability. Now it's weird because Anthropic is, you know, one of the funders of another pack that is sort of more pro-regulation and is supporting you. So you have players on both sides. But a world where AI will have this much money and the political system is this permeable to money is a world where in order to regulate AI, you're going to need to have to sign up your own AI patron to support you. And so I feel like there is some bigger question of political economy and power here that has ended up getting a bit of a test case in this race, which is, I think, quite worrisome.

1:30:00I just think we could very, very quickly end up in a scenario where politicians are terrified of the issue.

1:30:06Alex Bores:And that's the goal of leading the future. The goal, as they've stated, is to extract so much pain in this race and to beat me up so badly that when the idea of AI regulation is proposed in the future, politicians run in the other direction. I mean, they have said publicly that they want to make an example out of me. Think about what that means. Not that, oh, we have a different view. We want to make an example out of Alex Boris. And they want to do that, not because I have ideas that are outside the mainstream or, you know, when I proposed my framework, I got praise from those on the left. I also, the chief futurist of OpenAI retweeted it.

1:30:50Alex Bores:They're coming after me because I successfully passed the bill. frameworks. There's lots of frameworks. Those are cheap. Who's going to put political capital forward and get something actually done? And they tried to prevent any states from moving forward by putting this preemption language in legislation that failed. So they instead got this executive order from Donald Trump to target states that want to regulate AI and try to extract punishment. They would cut off funding that they would sue the states. And it targeted the Rays Act, along with a few other bills throughout the country. So why are they coming after me?

1:31:28Alex Bores:Because I might actually get a bill passed. What, this goes back a little bit in our conversation, but what actually in the RACE Act do they fight? Because as somebody who cares about AI regulation, and I think it's a good start, what actually got enacted there is a pretty soft bill. It is the strongest AI safety bill in the country, and I'm embarrassed by that fact. When they come after it, when they're trying to get it changed, what are they so upset about? It's that there's any regulation whatsoever. That really is the challenge. And that there is any regulation that they have to play by any rules is such an anathema to them.

1:32:09Alex Bores:And they don't have to win forever. They only have to push this off for an election cycle or two. The speed with which AI is developing, the amount of political power, let alone capital that they will have to deploy in the future, will be unbounded. We already have elected officials who are terrified to take up this cause, despite how popular it is, because they see all the money on the other side, and they're risk averse. I'm running for Congress. I talk to every member of Congress I can, And I hear from them in quiet conversations, yeah, we're watching this race. We want to see if this is a issue that you can win on standing with people or if the money just swamps everything.

1:32:54Alex Bores:And the lesson that will be learned by members of Congress if the super PAC wins is run the other way, is don't actually touch. Maybe you can say a speech on it. Maybe you can go on a podcast about it, but don't try to pass the bill because they will end your career. I think that's the place to end. Also, final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first is my favorite book of all time. And I know you have thoughts on this book, but it's A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I think it does the best job of setting up a broad framework of rights of humans while also understanding when inequalities could be justified.

1:33:30Alex Bores:And I think it's the best place to start for political philosophy. And I know you've tried it a few times. I will point out that in the intro, he says, you know, this is a third of the book that you have to read to get the basics of it. And here's the half of the book you have to read to really deeply understand it. And the rest is, you know, for the academics. And so I'd encourage you to give it another try. So A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. The second one is World Eaters by Catherine Bracey, which is marketed as this like deeply anti-VC book, but I actually think is written by a tech insider and a much more nuanced approach to the incentives that venture capital sets up.

1:34:13Alex Bores:And that is always for growth, growth, growth, and don't think about the social consequences. and I'll add that since VC is always pushing for a company that will scale no matter what, I saw this happen to my wife who's a YC founder and built a business that probably could have been fine on its own but had had the venture investment and it was scale or die. And so a lot of the negative externalities that have come from that, I think it's a really timely look as we are building out AI. And the last one's I think a little more whimsical but It goes back to our conversation about the skill of writing.

1:34:47Alex Bores:And it's Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which is just a delightful read and is a good reminder for any procrastinators to just break down your work and do it bird by bird. That's where the title comes from. But it's such a well-written leads by example and in the instructions on the art of writing. And I encourage, especially when our skill of writing is being degraded, for people to be intentional in that practice and to read that book. Alex Morris, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

1:35:29This episode of This Reclench is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Laurie Siegel. Our recording engineer is Amin Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose-Strosser.

1:36:14Alex Bores:This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown-stir-drown-feel method for putting out campfires. Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at SmokeyBear.com. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.