Earlier today (October 1, 2025) I talked with Richard (RJ) Eskow about how so-called “Artificial Intelligence” and the economics around it have very real impacts and extracts from everybody.
You’ll hear about things I won’t link to, but I will screenshot to — like OpenAI’s announcement of Sora 2. Amounting to, in my view, “yes we can imagine more than you can the harm this technology may do, and we are ready to profit from it anyway.”
The conversation scratches a lot of surfaces but there’s a few things while I was listening back that I wanted to make sure folks had direct links to.
Full disclosure, I produced both of these.
* On the data center based electronic frontier of so-called “AI,” we’re the cattle, and that’s nothing new. Check out this conversation with Yasha Levine back in July of 2018.
* And what’re the robber barons of the 21st century imagining to do with their hoards? Well, they’re pretty sure there’ll be a cataclysm and even then it seems their only concern is how to retain their hoard. (It is this author’s opinion very much that we all need to actually get on Team Human.)
Beyond all that, when push comes to shove it’s also hitting us all right where it hurts and we all are paying up whether any of it pans out or not. Just search “ai centers electricity” and let Google’s “AI” confess.
There’s a lot more in our “intelligent conversation” — so give it watch, listen, share — and let us know at the Blue Ridge Breakdown what you’d like to learn more about that we touched on or completely missed in this conversation, or other things.
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