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KH Kathy Hochul Kathy Hochul Kathy Hochul is the Democratic governor of New York, in office since 2021.

“My view is more hands-off. Innovate, do good things, sell your product. Great. This is called capitalism in America. But when they go too far or they don't self-regulate using data that they know internally and ignore it and think they can get away with it, that's where we are today.”

Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · August 2026

“My view is more hands-off. Innovate, do good things, sell your product. Great. This is called capitalism in America. But when they go too far or they don't self-regulate using data that they know internally and ignore it and think they can get away with it, that's where we are today.” — Kathy Hochul, Decoder with Nilay Patel

Context

Hochul, on Decoder, defends New York's restrictions on how tech companies treat minors and on 3D-printed guns, saying regulation is not her first position. Host Nilay Patel had pressed her on whether the rules amount to government monitoring of what people do on their computers.

Transcript

Decoder with Nilay Patel Around 21:56 into the episode
Kathy Hochul

I understand the anxiety around this. I truly do.

Nilay Patel

But you see how it's all the same, right?

Kathy Hochul

But there's, I'm not looking at, I'm not having complete regulation of someone's use of their computer. I mean, that's an overstatement. It just is. We have a very narrow, specific purpose and a government objective to protect young people because the companies have gone too far. If they had put these controls in place, when the data was starting to show them that this is harmful to kids and they stopped letting their own kids use this, but let everybody else be subjected to this, knowing the harms, that's when government has to step in and regulate business. We don't do it as a first position. My view is more hands-off. Innovate, do good things, sell your product. Great. This is called capitalism in America. But when you go too far, or a 3D printer that I said, those are great, until I find out they're making guns that can kill people from them or bail to thwart, convert a Glock. Maybe it's a legal Glock that you have registered to you. That's great. But you can get this little piece of plastic that's the size of a Lego and insert that, and all of a sudden it…

Nilay Patel

Sure. I'm just connecting the dot between I want to use my printer in some way and there's a connection to the government that says yes or no and how people feel about technology like Flock, where I want to drive my car too fast in the highway and an automated license plate reader is going to track…

Kathy Hochul

abused, that has to stop. Sure.

Nilay Patel

The CEO of Flock, he recently said to a lot of people, including The Verge, that he was wrong to assume that the regulatory process would provide protections for civil liberties. He assumed that state and local governments would provide controls for Flock to prevent things like cops oversearching…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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