"The reason is leading the future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry in general or AI specifically in a way these funders don't like." - Ezra Klein [00:01:05]
"I think people are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people." - Alex Bores [00:30:31]
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"This is the first time someone's building a technology and stating that the goal is to replace all human labor. It is to be better than humans at everything." - Alex Bores [00:41:50]
"You can't just have a private company creating cyber super weapons and hope for the best... It is deeply uncomfortable because we are talking about such extreme power and it's a question of where that power lies." - Alex Bores [01:07:09]
"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." - Alex Bores [01:10:32]
"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I have used AI already is I put every statute in New York State through an LLM and asked it to identify laws that are out of date that require paper when we could do something digitally." - Alex Bores [01:16:04]
"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." - Alex Bores [01:27:04]
Speakers & Credentials
Ezra Klein: Host of The Ezra Klein Show, political analyst, and author. He critically examines the intersections of technology, power, and policy.
Alex Bores: Democratic Member of the New York State Assembly (representing the 12th Congressional District area), former Palantir engineer, author of the Raise Act (New York's foundational AI regulation), and current candidate for US Congress.
1. Executive Summary
A powerful super PAC named "Leading the Future," funded by elite AI and tech executives (including Joe Lonsdale and Greg Brockman), has initiated a multi-million dollar campaign to destroy Alex Bores' political career to set a chilling anti-regulatory precedent [01:27:04].
Bores successfully authored and passed the Raise Act, which establishes baseline safety standards, incident reporting, and mandatory testing for AI developers operating in New York [00:24:30].
The conversation documents a swift public transition from "tech optimism" to "AI populism," driven by concrete fears of rapid job displacement, unmonitored cyber-weapons capabilities, and aggressive corporate power [00:31:27].
Bores rejects Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solitary solution, advocating instead for an "AI Dividend" framework that leverages mechanisms like out-of-the-money warrants and token usage taxes to secure public equity in AI's upside [00:43:31].
The rapid deployment of autonomous infrastructure (e.g., Waymo) and high-density data centers represents a critical leverage point where government must force private capital to fund green grid upgrades before granting operational permits [00:38:30].
To govern effectively, government IT infrastructure must be aggressively modernized—shifting away from legacy Mainframes—to deploy state-managed models (like Empire AI) that solve public-sector bottlenecks rather than merely replacing human labor [01:22:32].
2. Chronological Table of Contents
[00:00:00] Introduction: The Super PAC Attack on Alex Bores
[00:26:40] The Rise of AI Populism & Public Skepticism
[00:35:46] Data Centers, Grid Leverage, and The Energy Buildout
[00:41:09] Job Displacement & The "AI Dividend" Concept
[00:48:23] The Waymo Dilemma: Speed vs. Dignity in Automation
[00:58:33] AI's Impact on Youth, Pedagogy, and Cognitive Skills
[01:04:04] The Government Capacity Crisis & Cyber Super Weapons
[01:11:02] A Positive AI Agenda: Drug Discovery & Empire AI
[01:23:02] The "Leading the Future" PAC & The Future of Democracy
3. Detailed Thematic Summary
The Origin Story: Labor Rights & Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns [00:03:38]
Alex Bores’ political worldview was forged at age 8 when his father, a broadcast technician for Monday Night Football, was locked out by Disney for 3 months during a healthcare dispute [00:04:08].
The union stepped in to pay for a colleague's chemotherapy, cementing Bores' foundational belief that isolated workers are easily crushed, but organized movements command systemic power [00:04:46].
While studying Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, Bores participated in a campaign against Nike after the corporation laid off 1,800 workers in Honduras without legally mandated severance [00:06:41].
The student coalition successfully forced Cornell to sever its athletic contracts, resulting in Nike executing a complete reversal within 3 weeks, paying back wages, and offering healthcare for a year [00:07:27].
In 2014, Bores joined Palantir during the Obama administration, drawn by CEO Alex Karp’s philosophy that fascism rises when government fails to provide for its citizens, requiring advanced civic technology to stabilize democracy [00:12:05].
During this period, Palantir explicitly viewed "AI" as a mere marketing layer, prioritizing structural "data integration" as the true source of analytical value for complex government operations [00:14:43].
As the lead for federal civilian projects, Bores utilized contractual clauses to explicitly refuse work on civil immigration projects for the Trump DOJ in 2017, focusing instead on opioid tracking and violent crime [00:16:38].
Bores planned his exit in 2019 after Palantir executives allowed Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) software to be utilized by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for deportations without adding necessary contractual guardrails [00:18:18].
Corporate blowback from Palantir executives later resulted in a misleading Bloomberg smear article, falsely suggesting Bores was disciplined for retelling a tissue-marketing anecdote, a claim Bores thoroughly debunked [00:20:29].
Elected to the NY Assembly in 2022, Bores authored the Raise Act, successfully implementing baseline safety plans and critical incident reporting for AI deployments in New York [00:24:30].
Two stringent provisions were successfully lobbied out of the final bill by tech interests: prohibiting the release of models failing internal safety tests, and mandatory third-party SOC2-style auditing [00:25:07].
Public sentiment has rapidly inverted regarding technology: roughly 80% of Americans demand oversight and caution, while an estimated 10% want to ban the technology outright, and a radical 10% (represented by elite tech PACs) demand a deregulated "let it rip" environment [00:27:49].
Citing writer Jasmine Sun, Klein notes that "AI Populism" dictates that AI is no longer viewed as standard technology, but as an elite political project being forced upon the public without democratic consent to ensure a return on massive venture capital investments [00:31:27].
The Data Center Moratorium & Energy Grid Leverage [00:35:46]
Addressing proposals by Bernie Sanders and AOC for a total data center moratorium, Bores argues it serves as an effective negotiating tactic but ultimately favors direct regulatory extraction over stagnation [00:36:16].
The AI industry possesses near-unlimited capital and a desperate need for speed. Bores proposes forcing AI firms to pay extensive fees beyond standard connection costs to intentionally overhaul the national grid toward renewables [00:38:30].
Companies funding broader green resilience would be pushed to the front of the interconnection queue, while dirty or non-compliant developers would be functionally bottlenecked at the back, aligning private greed with public infrastructure needs [00:38:57].
Bores notes that for the first time in economic history, a sector is expressly designing tools not to assist, but to replace 100% of human labor across all cognitive functions [00:41:50].
Klein illustrates the severe flaw of relying purely on UBI: if an $80,000–$120,000 teamster is replaced by autonomous trucking and given a $37,000 UBI check, they suffer massive wealth destruction, while unaffected white-collar workers (like podcast hosts) get a free windfall [00:45:25].
A century ago, the average American worked 60 hours a week; today, it is 40 hours. Bores posits that properly regulated AI could push this down to 20 or 10 hours a week, but only if workers maintain political power to demand it [00:57:52].
To prevent an asymmetric transition, Bores released a 43-point policy framework introducing an "AI Dividend," funded through a Token Tax (taxing automation usage to discount human hiring) and massive out-of-the-money government warrants to capture public equity in AI's upside [00:48:18].
The Crisis of Government Capacity & Empire AI [01:04:04]
State mechanisms are critically outdated; the New York Speaker of the Assembly still codes in Fortran to fix legacy 1970s mainframes, highlighting the severe technical talent gap in government [01:22:32].
To prove public utility, Bores utilized an LLM to scan all New York statutes, isolating redundant paper requirements and constructing a 60-page deregulation bill to remove "policy cruft" [01:16:31].
New York City spent $100 million on a benefits portal that structurally failed not due to UI, but due to antiquated backend laws preventing data-sharing between agencies [01:18:50].
Through "Empire AI," the state government acquired a massive GPU cluster, offering discounted compute for public universities to drive social-good research, such as drug discovery, circumventing private-sector chokeholds [01:12:41].
The Reference Vault
4. Data & Figures
Data Point
Value
Context
Timestamp
Displaced Workers
1,800
Garment workers in Honduras laid off by Nike without legal severance.
The AI Dividend: Instead of relying entirely on reactive UBI, this model proposes the government proactively acquire "out-of-the-money warrants" in foundational AI companies. If the models successfully replace human labor, the public inherently owns equity in the ensuing hyper-productivity [00:43:31].
AI Populism: Defined by Jasmine Sun, this is the socio-political shift viewing AI not as a benign utility but as an "elite political project" forced onto society to generate corporate returns on massive VC investments [00:31:27].
The Token Tax: A mechanism to artificially alter the cost/benefit analysis of automation by aggressively taxing AI token generation while heavily discounting payroll taxes for human hiring [00:43:25].
Red Teaming Safe Harbors: A legislative paradox where researchers probing models for forbidden output (like CSAM) technically violate federal law. Fixing safe harbor provisions is required to legally crowdsource defensive model checking [01:25:07].
Empire AI: A state-level framework where the government purchases its own compute (GPU clusters) and grants access to public universities to direct AI research toward social goods (like drug discovery) rather than pure profit [01:12:41].
The Alignment Problem: The critical, unsolved technical and philosophical challenge of ensuring super-intelligent AI systems inherently share and act upon human values without deviation [01:10:09].
6. Anecdotes
The Disney Lockout: When Bores was eight, Disney locked out his father's broadcasting union and severed healthcare. Experiencing the picket line formed Bores' foundational belief in collective bargaining over isolated individualism [00:04:08].
The Nike Reversal: During a Cornell anti-sweatshop campaign, students staged a loud 80s-music "workout for workers" protest. The resulting pressure led Cornell to drop Nike, immediately forcing the corporation to backpay 1,800 Honduran workers [00:07:02].
The Tissue Retaliation: To mask the reality of his departure over ICE contracts, Palantir executives leaked a story to Bloomberg falsely suggesting Bores was reprimanded by HR for retelling an innocuous story regarding the marketing of paper tissues [00:20:29].
Waymo in the Rain: During his first Waymo ride in Los Angeles, the vehicle drove 20 feet, detected light rain, immediately pulled over, and froze for 12 minutes while dialing a timed-out support line alongside every other Waymo in the city [00:52:12].
The Cover Letter Collapse: Ezra Klein notes that evaluating candidates has become disorienting because generative AI has completely destroyed the utility of cover letters as a metric for assessing a candidate's unique thinking and writing skills [01:01:47].
The Albany High School Poll: Bores routinely asks visiting high school students in Albany if they have used ChatGPT to write an essay. The moment the teacher leaves the room, every single hand goes up, proving current pedagogy is obsolete [01:01:15].
The Fortran Mainframes: Bores highlights the severe lack of technical parity in government by revealing the Speaker of the NY Assembly still codes in Fortran to maintain the state's archaic 1970s mainframe databases [01:22:32].
Scale or Die: Discussing the destructive incentives of Venture Capital, Bores notes he watched his wife, a Y Combinator founder, build a business that could have survived independently but was forced into a "scale or die" posture due to VC backing [01:31:18].
7. References & Recommendations
Literature:A Theory of Justice by John Rawls - Recommended by Bores as the foundational text for establishing a broad framework of human rights and understanding justified inequalities [01:30:15].
Literature:Worldeaters by Catherine Bracy - Recommended as a nuanced, insider critique of Venture Capital's "growth-at-all-costs" incentives, highly relevant to current AI development [01:30:57].
Literature:Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - Recommended as a guide to the art of writing, especially crucial now as generative AI threatens to degrade human writing and thinking skills [01:31:40].
Concepts & Theories: AlphaFold - Mentioned as the prime example of AI's potential for public good by accelerating protein folding and drug discovery [01:13:42].
Entities: Palantir, OpenAI, Anthropic, Waymo, Leading the Future PAC, Empire AI, Y Combinator.
Individuals: Joe Lonsdale, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, recently targeted by anti-AI violence), Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jasmine Sun (Writer defining "AI Populism"), Zohran Mamdani (NY Assembly member involved in the Waymo debate), Ron DeSantis (Florida Governor proposing data center restrictions), Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic predicting 50% displacement of entry-level workers).
8. The Bottomline (by AI)
The hyper-financialization of the AI industry is actively weaponizing private capital to permanently deter state and federal legislators from establishing technological guardrails. If governments fail to immediately modernize their infrastructural capacity and enforce "AI Dividend" mechanisms like token taxes and out-of-the-money warrants, the public will absorb the totality of socioeconomic disruption while tech monopolies capture all asymmetric upside. Watch closely for the outcome of heavily funded proxy races (like Bores' congressional bid), as the result will dictate whether Congress regulates the algorithmic frontier or surrenders to Silicon Valley's regulatory capture.
Jul 16, 2026
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Moderate AI Skepticism
80%
Percentage of Americans seeing benefits but demanding heavy safety regulations.