Would President Pritzker Shut Down A.I.?

Peter Hamby (0:05)

Welcome to The Making of a President. I'm Peter Hamby. Today's guest, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, one Democrat very likely to run for president in 2028 Pritzker is positioning himself as a big blue state governor, who has stood up to Donald Trump on ICE raids, the expansion of federal power, and cuts to the social safety net. Pritzker has called Trump a wannabe dictator. But of course, before he can run against Donald Trump, he's got to get through a crowded Democratic primary. And I wanted to have Pritzker on today to talk about a topic of growing concern for Democratic primary voters, AI.

Along with New York Governor Kathy Hochul and his possible presidential rival, Gavin Newsom in California, Pritzker is selling himself as governor guardrails when it comes to AI. He's paused data center expansion in his state. He's enacted consumer protections and transparency rules. He's even established an AI cabinet in the state of Illinois. I talked to Pritzker about all that and much more, and his thoughts on Kalshi. Let's get into it.

Welcome everybody to the making of a president. My guest today, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. He might be running for president. He might not. He's not going to tell us today, probably, but we're going to talk about the politics of AI. Governor, you've got a re-election bid yourself. Thank you for joining us from your campaign office in Chicago. Thank you so much for being here.

JB Pritzker (1:32)

Great to see you. Busy on the campaign trail here.

Peter Hamby (1:34)

Are you getting time to watch the Bears and White Sox when you're out there or not?

JB Pritzker (1:39)

Well, I have to say, it's hard to find time to do it. But of course, nobody is out doing anything else when the White Sox are playing in particular. So I got to say, I'm stopping getting a chance to watch myself.

Peter Hamby (1:53)

Well, I know you're a Cubs fan and the Pope is rooting for the White Sox. It's good to have an American Poe from Chicago, but you must have been a little upset when it was announced that he's a White Sox fan.

JB Pritzker (2:04)

Well, he's praying for all Chicago teams.

Peter Hamby (2:08)

Hey, Governor, I want to start with, there's so many different angles to AI. A lot of them get reduced to soundbites and headline and panic. I want to try to talk about as many angles to the topic as possible. You look at polls, everyone is worried about AI. It cuts across party ID.

Democrats more worried, at least according to an AP poll that came out late last week. But speaking of poll numbers, let's start with data centers.

So our polling partners at Echelon kind of message tested just the term data center. And they ran a poll and asked likely voters, if a data center was planned to be built in your community, would you support or oppose? Echelon found only 25% would support a data center being built. 65% were opposed. But if it was defined as a server farm, which it kind of more or less is, that opposition dropped 15 points, only 50% opposed. And so I guess I want to ask how much of the data center anxiety out there in the world, and you've got plenty in Illinois, is panic, is finding sort of useful cudgel out there, and how much of it do you think is justified?

JB Pritzker (3:20)

Well, there's deep concern about data centers for reasons that have little to do with what's inside the data center, the server farm is here describing, and much to do with the fact that frankly, people's electric bills all over the country have skyrocketed. And I think they're seeing that their water bills are also affected by just the environment that we're living in, the inflation that's happening.

And then the final part is just as they're online and they're on social media, they're seeing that there are people in communities who feel like, wait a minute, there's a data center coming? That's not something that I want in my neighborhood, because I heard that it's loud, I heard that it's going to affect my electricity or water bill. And so I'm going to the town hall, I want people to know, I don't want my electric bill, my water bill to go up and I want to have my say. So I think that's what's happening around data centers. And it's real, I mean, it's a real feeling. And there are a lot of communities who don't want a big, especially because sorry, data centers come in various types, as you probably know. They're the multi-million square feet hyperscale data centers that really are, I mean, they are trying to encompass, let's say an entire nuclear power plant. And in Illinois, we've saved our nuclear power plants. I've made sure that we kept them online with a bill that we passed called the Climate Inequitable Jobs Act. We would have lost two of our nuclear power plants.