Alex Rivera on Sleep Dealer, AI & Why Silicon Valley Uses Sci-Fi as a Blueprint

Hosts Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito sit down with Alex Rivera, writer and director of the cult classic Sleep Dealer, professor at Arizona State University and co-founder of the Borderlands Cinematic Arts lab, to talk about sci-fi, the border and what it means to make Latino films in Hollywood. Alex traces his path to filmmaking, from meeting Pete Seeger as a teenager to a first short film about his Peruvian father and the potato that premiered at an open mic night in NYC and ended up at MoMA. He walks them through Sleep Dealer, a 2008 film set in a world of open internets and closed borders, where workers plug into machines that do their labor across the border while their bodies stay behind. Fidel shares what the borderlands looked like from South Texas, and Suzy and Fidel ask why the film feels more relevant every year, from delivery apps to AI. Then Alex tells the story of the tech CEO who told a filmmaker friend he got the idea for his company from Sleep Dealer, and they get into why Silicon Valley keeps treating cautionary tales as instruction manuals. Alex shares what he thinks AI should look like instead: a “patrimony of humanity” owned by the people it was built from, with farmworker guilds, platform co-ops and robots that pick the oranges. He also explains why he calls the border a time machine, and how a place with fewer rights becomes a laboratory for surveillance technology that gets rolled out to everyone else. Plus: what it took to get a film like Sleep Dealer made, and why Alex says Latinos are still only about 3% of writer-directors in Hollywood. And because this is De Los Podcast, they end with a plea: save the puppets. Produced by Los Angeles Times, L.A. Times Studios, and Sonoro. 🎙 De Los Podcast drops new episodes every week on YouTube and all major podcast platforms. Subscribe so you never miss a conversation. From the Los Angeles Times and Sonoro comes the De Los Podcast — a weekly conversation where music, pop culture and Latinidad collide. Hosted by De Los editors Fidel Martínez and Suzy Exposito, the show pulls back the curtain on the stories, people and cultural moments shaping the Latino experience in the U.S. and beyond. Every episode is a front-row seat to conversations with the artists, actors, filmmakers and thinkers who are moving the culture forward — not just talking about it. Guests include Leslie Grace, Sen Dog of Cypress Hill, Xolo Maridueña, Fabrizio Guido, producer and singer Empress Of, among others. Think of it as the cultural conversation that major American media rarely makes room for — a space where Latinos get to talk, unfiltered, about what they create and who they are. Produced by Los Angeles Times, L.A. Times Studios, and Sonoro. New episodes every week — available on YouTube and all major podcasts.