The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 2738 - LA's Next Mayor?; Stopping AI's 'Obsoleting Project' w/ Nithya Raman, Garrison Lovely

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

It's an Emmajority Report Thursday on The Majority Report On toady's program: Local news stations across the country are highlighting how the Republican's war have sent gas prices soaring and sabotaged businesses. We look at interviews with a farmer in Iowa, a school bus company in Tennessee and long-haul truckers in Georgia who have all had their livelihoods put in jeopardy by this Republican administration. Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman joins to discuss her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. Garrison Lovely, freelance journalist covering AI, tech and political economy joins to discuss his book, "Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us - and How to Stop It". In the Fun Half: Brandon Sutton and Matt Binder join. Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka thinks that complaining about soaring fuel costs makes you unamerican. Senator Tommy Tuberville speaks for 20-minutes on the Senate floor about the dangers of pilots who are furries. Shaky Susan Collins is offended by ProPublica investigating into her corruption. Trump defies another court order by denying certain media outlets access to the White House. all that and more. Please consider helping the Aldaghma family, they are the family behind Gaza Bakery, which provides bread and meals to displaced families, and Future Flowers Kindergarten, which gives children a place to learn, play, and experience moments of normalcy whenever conditions allow. On Sunday, October 4, Emma will be in Los Angeles doing a Bitchuation Room Live with Francesca Fiorentini at the Lodge Room. Get tickets here. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: BLUELAND: Get 15% off your first order at Blueland.com/MAJORITY. NUTRAFOL: Get $10 off your first month's subscription + free shipping at Nutrafol.com when you use promo code TMR10 SUNSET LAKE CBD: Head to SunsetLakeCBD.com and use coupon code 'Left Is Best' to save 20% your entire order. Follow the crew on X @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's YouTube channel: https://ww.youtube.com/Th3Discourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here: https:/www.youtube.com/@avaraiza

You are listening to a free version of the Majority Report. Support this show at join the Majority Report.com and get an extra hour of content daily. It is Thursday. September 24th, 26. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps. the industrially ravaged canal, uh,

Gowanis Canal, in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Nithya Rahman. Los Angeles City Council member running for the mayor of L.A. will be with us. And later in the show,

Garrison Lovely, author of Obsolete, the AI industry's trillion-dollar race to replace us and how to stop it will be with us. Also on the program, The White House defies a federal judge's order by refusing to reinstate CNN, MS now, and Politico. The outlets have filed an emergency request for a hearing.

Trump welcomes Chinese leader Xi Jinping, rather, at the D.C. airport. I mean, I'm off for diplomacy, but that's a bit much. You can find me a Pillar G5. Pretty unprecedented. He's holding up a poster board. Welcome home. So I'm embarrassed. Trump's going to lean on him to try to get him to accept U.S. sanctions against Iran.

Of course. Good luck with that. Democratic lawmakers urged Trump to push for a mutual slowdown on AI development with China. Also good luck with that. Yesterday, the U.S. delegation walked out of Iranian population. President Projeshkian's speech after he showed images of the children the U.S. and Israel killed.

War criminal Netanyahu is also here to speak at the U.N. and is expected to focus on Zoran Mamdani in his speech. That doesn't make you look small at all, world leader going after a mayor. Psycho. Eight Navy personnel on the U.S. USS Abraham Lincoln carrier attempted suicide during their deployment, according to a letter written to Senator Gillibrand.

Trump floats a diesel export ban to combat rising prices, which every expert says is a terrible idea, including some members of his own cabinet. Other White House officials beg Trump to roll back his beef import idea as GOP midterm concerns grow. In Michigan, a Guatemalan. man has died in a car crash because ICE was chasing him and he fled. And lastly, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Kassar introduce the Ban Artificial Super Intelligence Act as Congress attempts to get a handle on AI. All this and more on today's Majority Report.

Welcome to the show, everybody. It is an M Majority Report Thursday. Hello, Matt. Hello, Brian. Hello, audience. Lovely audience that I love to suck up to on occasion. Like the stream. How about that? Let's get those numbers up.

Show your love that way, huh? Get it into the algorithm. We'll start here. So, as I mentioned, Trump is weighing this idea of a U.S. ban on diesel exports. These are global markets, and there's a diesel shortage right now. This idiot has no idea what he's doing.

But every industry expert, the oil and gas people, plus his own cabinet members, including his energy secretary, Chris Wright, and I believe Rollins as well is also immensely concerned about this, they're like, no, what are you talking about? We need more in circulation. And ahead of these midterms right now, the average price for a gallon of diesel was $6.52 on Wednesday yesterday. That's up 91 cents from a month ago and $2.83 from last year. So like, and diesel is primarily when you see rapid increases in diesel like this, this is for transporting goods and food.

As fundamentally import or I'm blanking on the term, input. Input, yeah. As anything. And so who's going to bear the brunt of these costs? It's going to be the consumer. And food

prices have already continued to rise under Trump. Just regular gas is also much more expensive at this point. And so let alone the fact that the third of a certain kinds of fertilizers pass through the Strait of Hormuz impacting

food prices from the get-go and when you have a fertilizer shortage and you have higher prices like that you need fertilizer for grass for hay for corn as well and this is all what goes into say our beef products to feed the cattle, which is already at a 75-year low in a shortage. And meat prices are being impacted too. So it's just a squeeze all across the board. But let's just take a look at some of these local news reports of how people are feeling this right now. Here is a report from a local Nashville NBC station WSMV4

on this bus driver who is of course contracted out in Tennessee school bus driver because these are the kinds of things that yeah

private industry should have control over right how kids gets to school but this is this is a red state for you and you'll see she's like I don't know if I can bring kids

to school at this point Here's some of this report. Sandra Davis has been driving school buses for 31 years. Do it for the kids. You do it because you love the kids. Years ago, her and her husband decided to become contractors and own and operate buses for Rutherford County Public Schools. But thanks to high fuel costs, money is extremely tight, leaving her and her husband to live

paycheck to paycheck. We just filled up. Five buses was $1980 for $342 gallons. You're broke. You max out your credit cards. and you hope to get to the next pipe period. This bus holds 100 gallons of fuel, and Sandra tells me the last time they took it to the pump,

they only put about half a tank, which was about 50 gallons of fuel in it, and it still cost them $300. She tells me they're filling up their five buses at least once a week, and it's starting to add up. Sandra told me she's working with county commissioners to get more money from the school board to account for fuel costs.

And contracted out, as we say, of course. Let's now turn to how farmers are being impacted here. This is a local Omaha news station interviewing someone in Iowa, this farmer, about how much more he's having to pay right now for diesel to just do his everyday work. Combines are out and about at Feasant Ridge Farms. About $90 an hour now, and a year ago, it's $45 an hour. The diesel owner Dan Peterson buys is more expensive than ever. It's not just the combines. This corn grinder runs all day, too. Now, the prices of our grains have went up, so that's helped some. But it's just crazy.

Peterson's farm is nearly 10,000 acres, plus a feedlot with 12,000 head of cattle. He says they use 800 gallons every day, and he's paying $75,000 more every month for diesel. And I'm not counting our trucks that are on the road. Like we had two trucks hauling cattle out of Kansas today. that would have been another $400 higher because of fuel costs. Peterson says he gets a better rate on diesel than truckers. Still, the national average for regular gas is up 41% compared to a year ago. For diesel, it's 76% according to AAA.

I just wish they would get that deal settled over in Middle East. It's going to have to happen sometime because another year of this and the economy and everything can't handle this. you know, I don't think it can handle it two or three more months. Peterson feels the direct impact from the record diesel prices, but he says he knows it doesn't end there. We just need to get fuel prices cheaper because everybody uses it. Everything gets hauled. And it just, the trickle-down effect is tremendous. Yeah. And the, we, if we had a competent Democratic Party right now, we would be tying this to the fact that we shouldn't be so reliant and we should have more of a variety of energy production here in this country

that would make us less dependent on this kind of thing. But here let's go to Georgia. This is another point of pain. This is a truck driver who now says that it might not even be worth it to work right now given how high prices are for diesel. Carl Knapp has been driving trucks since 1974, but has 52-year stent may be coming to an end. I've been doing this a very long time, and for a while it was halfway lucrative. It's not anymore. According to AAA on Friday, the average price for a gallon of diesel fuel in Georgia hit a record high at $6.35 a gallon. Knapp says if he fills up from empty, it costs him $1,300. At least this truck and trailer cost me $2,300 a week. It costs me $2,300 a

to lease it. That's insurances and everything else included. Then once the fuel prices come out, there's very little left. It's getting to the point where it's not worth it. Edward Harris has been driving trucks for more than two decades. He says he's never seen prices this high. Six, seven dollars a gallon, seven dollars if you go up near Chicago or even higher if you go out near New York. It all depends on where you are. He's hoping prices will lower in the coming months. Hopefully it will come down during the wintertime. Maybe it's just this summer, but hopefully it'll come down.

Hopefully, but... Hopefully around us get a nuclear weapon. What are you? I know, right. Aren't you sacrificing? Why aren't you sacrificing your career to stop terrorism? You know, this country is already... its economy has been hanging by a thread for quite a while.

And grocery stores or truckers as well, farmers operating on the slimmest of margins. And this kind of rapid increase could result in mass unemployment and business closures across the country within a very short period of time because the margins were already so slim. There isn't a lot to work with. Yeah. Like when guys like that trucker go out of business, business or those farmers.

It's either consolidated by bigger guys, but honestly, it's not going to be as much of a capacity to, like, haul things across because he's not going to come back immediately. Like, and replacing this stuff, like it's like we saw after COVID.

It took a long time for us to get back to the point where we had, you know, the ports even open again. Yep. This is causing the exact same thing for a completely catastrophic, needless war that needs to be end now.

We need to admit defeat and start negotiating a settlement and bend over backwards because we started the damn thing. And what's incredible is that Trump's whole promise of America first, which included a no new wars thing, which we can laugh at right now. But just the core of it was about creating more resilience in theory, right? We all know it was mostly about the ethnic cleansing of black and brown people via ice in this country and pretending like that was going to have an impact on the economy. But the whole notion was like, let's bring back things here. Don't you remember when there was manufacturing in the United States?

We're going to build everything here and we're going to use tariffs to do that. Scrapping all of the infrastructure gains that happened under Biden, which would have built the resiliency that would be necessary to have the diversity in our economy. But you have to build the capacity first. We have to be able to make the things that were tariffing here domestically before those things roll out. And what Trump has essentially done is made many of these people who are on the front lines of the economy even more susceptible to these global markets with this war in Iran by creating that incredible volatility and pretending like this was going to be some sort of boon to Americans as opposed to just a boon to American oil and gas companies who are taking home record returns because they're raising their prices as well. he's actually created an even greater vulnerability to the so-called like globalization that he his presidency was supposed to be beating back, at least rhetorically. Because we live under a global system of capitalism.

And so all of this branding on that front from him was just a way to make his brazen campaign of corruption and of white nationalism. more palatable to everyday people. And so this is the kind of thing that diversifying our economy and like making sure that it has more green energy should be addressing, undercutting the ability for this to overhaul people's experience in the economy at the drop of a hat because of a disruption. That's what we should have been doing after COVID. That's what the lessons should have been that should have been learned. have been, not to repeat myself, but we're going in the exact opposite direction. Why? Because

this is an administration controlled by rapacious billionaires that don't really care about what the world looks like after they die. They want to take what they can right now. And we're all facing the consequences. In a moment, we will be speaking to Nithia Raman, who is running for mayor in LA, but first a word from some of our sponsors here. Sometimes upgrading your routine doesn't mean changing everything. It's just about finding one more thing that you can do a little bit better. And if hair health is something that you've been meaning to pay more attention to, well, now is a great time to make it a part of your routine.

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Nithia, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm very happy to be here. I'm happy to be speaking with you here from New York where, you know, we're living in Zoramamandani's New York City. and quite happy about it. And just this morning, just not to make things, I don't know, I don't want to jinx anything, but we got some very interesting polling data about your race and new LA Times, UC Berkeley poll shows that you're leading the incumbent Karen Bass by 11 points amongst likely voters.

What do you make of those results? What do you see in those results? So I'm really grateful. Like when I started this race, I didn't know what to expect. But I think for me, this poll really reflects what we're seeing on the ground. There's an incredible amount of momentum from volunteers, from donors, from people who are willing to knock on doors and talk to people about envisioning and dreaming of a better city together. And it's been really inspiring to see that play out. And I felt that that kind of urgency for change that I'm talking about on the campaign trail, I'm seeing that reflected in.

every single engagement that I'm having with the public. So it's really exciting to see it reflected in these polling results as well. But I will also say that there's a lot of undecided voters out there. And so, you know, the race is still a question mark. So I don't think we can stop pushing on on getting out there, on making the case for ourselves, on making the case that we can have a better city here. And so I would just say to all those people who are still frustrated, who are undecided voters, check out our campaign, check out our policy platform. And I think a lot of people in Los Angeles may recognize in this campaign the same frustration that they are feeling with a city that has let them down reflected in why I ran and what I want

to change. I want a city that delivers for every single Angelino, for every single working family that lives in it. And I believe that we can have that. that. And I just want more people to see that vision and get behind that vision. So how would you describe that vision, say in the context of maybe this recent news of the Paramount Warner Brothers settlement? From our standpoint, covering it on the national level, it seems like Gavin Newsom, Bacera, and the Attorney General author in California just caved and

allowed for this oligarch takeover that benefits the Trump administration. I know that there were threats about leaving L.A., leaving California that seemed to have spooked the governor. But what is your assessment of what just happened earlier this week? You know, for me, I spoke out against this merger from the very first moment that people were talking about it because I thought it would be a bad deal for entertainment industry workers. There was a recent study that, showed how many jobs would be lost. And it numbered in the thousands as a result of this merger. And we've seen that happen in previous mergers in the entertainment industry. And I think for Los Angeles, that's already reeling from so many jobs lost, this felt like a bad deal for

Los Angeles workers. And, you know, what I feel happened here is what we've seen happen across the country and under this administration, which is billionaires strong arming the state into approving a deal that honestly leaves workers in the lurch. And it's really unfortunate. And, you know, I think in L.A. We're going to see some very, very bad downstream impacts from this. And I know there's some accountability measures that were put into the settlement. agreement. I'm grateful for all of those workers who stood up and fought for those accountability

measures. And now I think it's our job to make sure that they're actually followed, that these jobs are actually preserved, that the deal terms are actually being followed. And there was in that deal, unfortunately, only really behavioral remedies that were included. But, you know, I am curious overall for your take on how the industry in L.A. is, obviously there's been a lot of job losses and a lot of people are saying that they're going to have to get work in other parts of the country and filming is taking place in areas of the country where there are tax breaks. What is your plan to return more work to the city of Los Angeles as mayor? You know, one of the things that I've heard about over and over from productions that are

trying to film in L.A. is how hard it is to work with the permitting and the bureaucracy that we've set up right here in Los Angeles. And I think this. this bureaucracy, the costs, the fee structures are from an earlier era when production was taken for granted here in Los Angeles. We have to accommodate a new era where we want to make sure that production happens here and the city needs to be doing much more to make sure that it does. So I want to create a real film office in the city with people who know production. We don't have that right now. I want to make sure that productions that are trying to film here have the partnership of the city when they're trying to do that as opposed to the city.

being seen as an obstacle that increases costs and time. The most important thing, though, that we've seen missing in this mayoral administration is really advocacy at the state level. Georgia, New Jersey, these are states that have in place tax credits that are far more generous to the industry than what we have in California, the home of Hollywood. And so I want to be the loudest, most relentless advocate for a tax credit that's going to keep jobs here. I want our entire Sacramento delegation to be speaking as one and pushing for those tax credits. These are the kinds of changes that we need to be advocating for if we want to make sure that jobs stay here. And this is a moment of crisis and urgency. Angelinos feel that. They've watched as tens of thousands of jobs

have left the industry here over the past few years. And this city and the state and this mayor have done very little to make sure that those jobs are staying here. Let's go out and fight for the industry. From the outside, sometimes I'll hear from progressives in L.A. that the mayorality in L.A. is weaker than it is in other cities. And you don't have necessarily the power to implement what you want. Now, I think that that can be a very convenient argument for someone like Karen Bass. What's your viewpoint about the actual power structure of,

your potential office and how would you frame it potentially differently than your predecessors? You know, I think that there, some of that is true. I think we have a weaker mayoralty than the city of New York or some of our East Coast cities. And that's by design. But actually, there is a lot of power that is in the mayor's office, including being able to hire and fire department heads and set the priorities of every single department. And I know this because as a council member, I tried to push the departments to do things that the mayor didn't want to do and they completely ignored me. The mayor has that power. But when that power is not used like under this mayor orality, it looks like the mayor doesn't have any power. My goal is to use the full powers

of the mayor's office to actually push us to deliver for residents in the ways that. that they deserve. Let's actually see departments out there doing the things that Angelinos are demanding. And the mayor's office is really in the best place to do that. And, you know, what I envision is a mayor that takes full advantage of the powers that the charter has given to the mayor's office, but also the bully pulpit. The mayor is the most visible local elected representative in the region. And we saw previous mayoral administration. And we saw previous mayoral administrations who use that power to push the school system to take different kinds of actions, who use that bully pulpit to push the entire region to invest in public transit. I want to use

that bully pulpit. That is real power and I intend to use it. Well, Mayor Bass has kind of put on a clinic in invisibility so much so that she's been forced now to step down from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority because of how many meetings that she skipped. Can you talk about about that and why she was forced to step down, essentially, because it was so embarrassing, and how your approach would be different than that of the incumbent? Yeah. So, you know, homelessness, I think, is the defining issue of L.A. right now in so many ways. It's connected to our housing crisis that's driving people out of their homes and out of the city and onto our streets. And the mayor appointed herself to the Homeless Services Authority

Commission, which is a city-county agency that oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. But she appointed herself to the committee. She was the first mayor to do that. And at that moment, it felt like she was really getting in there and taking charge. And then proceeded to miss half the meetings. And under, you know, while she was on that commission, Lhasa was, you know, dealt blow after blow in terms of its lack of ability to track dollars while the commission did very little to ensure that accountability was actually being delivered to the public. And so, you know, I feel like after years of being on the commission but not using that role to actually push for change, she had to step down. And she missed, I think, more than half the meetings of that commission

after appointing herself to it. To me, it feels like that kind of, that kind of, you know, of approach was very emblematic of the ways in which her administration has operated across homelessness overall, you know, starting off with urgency and then kind of disappearing when operational requirements needed to be in place that would actually deliver on the kinds of outcomes that Angelinos are demanding. Her signature program inside safe has taken $400 million dollars of our city taxpayer dollars. 40% of people who are in that program have actually returned to the streets. The mayor has refused to independently audit that program. And honestly, that program looks exactly the same as it did on day one. It hasn't evolved or

adapted to the situation that we're facing here in Los Angeles. And so to me, I feel like we need a response that meets this moment that responds with transparency and accountability, that delivers the kind of results that I've had on the streets in my district where we saw a 49% reduction in unsheltered homelessness in one year alone and delivers those results to every block in this city. Just a few more questions. Next week, you're going to be attending the Jewish Los Angeles mayoral forum, which is hosted by the Jewish Federation, Los Angeles. And one of the co-hosts of this event is the ADL. I understand. And as mayor of L.A., you're going to have to meet with people that you disagree with.

I know that you've called Israel's actions a genocide and have called Israel an apartheid state. But how do you plan to maintain your support, say, for First Amendment expression on this issue, even under these pressures and dealing with, say, powerful constituents like maybe members of the ADL that you'll have to be speaking with who are going to be very vociferousy. in their opposition to people trying to speak out against the genocide? You know, I have demonstrated my commitment to protecting people's First Amendment rights here in Los Angeles already. When protests happened at campuses in L.A. And protesters who were exercising those First Amendment rights were met with violence. I was one of the only local elected officials to condemn that quickly and to make sure that our LAPD's response, which did not keep protesters safe, it took a very, very long time for them to show up on campus when people were being assaulted.

I was leading the efforts to ensure that there was real accountability in that response. I've spoken up against efforts to try and limit First Amendment rights. in numerous occasions, even outside of this particular issue. And I have, I think, maintained over and over again that the ability for people to speak up peacefully and to exercise those rights is really important on this issue and beyond. And I'll continue emphasizing those rights as mayor. I want to make sure that this is a city where people feel safe speaking up about their political views, whether or not I agree with them.

And I think that's important for the city of Los Angeles. And, you know, there is a big, this is a big city with a lot of people who have very different views. And I think every single person should feel safe expressing those views here in Los Angeles. That's the vision that I have and that's the vision that I'm going to fight for as mayor. And as mayor, would you accept the I, A, A, H. are a definition of anti-Semitism conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish hatred? I don't believe that criticism of the Israeli government is anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism.

I, you know, I've been outspoken about my criticism of the Israeli government. And in no way does that mean that I don't stand with Jewish residents of this city, that I will not work my hardest to keep them safe and to make sure that their ability to feel safe in this city is violated. Anyway, I'm going to be standing with my Jewish residents here in Los Angeles. And I believe that residents of this city are able to voice criticism of the Israeli government and still stand with their Jewish neighbors in every way possible. Lastly, L.A. chapter has endorsed you.

And how do you plan to keep the lines of communication open with the DSA and potentially even, you know, collaborating with some of their efforts when you're hopefully in office? Yeah. So the DSA and I have worked together really successfully on some of the most important pieces of legislation that have impacted Los Angeles, especially on tenants rights. Under my leadership on the city council, I've passed helped lead the passage of some of the

strongest protections for renters that the city has seen in four decades, including protections against harassment by landlords, protections that actually help people stay in their homes. We passed universal just cause eviction protections where the largest city in America to do that. And a lot of these were on the priority list for our local DSA chapter. And we worked together. Oh, we lowered allowable rent increases and rent-stabilized units for the first time here in L.A. It was an incredible change that has impacted over a million residents of the city for the better. And we did that in partnership with the DSA and with other organizations here that were speaking up on behalf of renters and have led a movement that has, made sure that their voices have been heard in City Hall for the first time in decades. And it's

been incredibly exciting. And so I plan to continue doing that work as mayor. The DSA is a partner that I've had some public disagreements with, no doubt, but will continue to be a part of the big tent of people who care here in Los Angeles about building a better city, a city that really works for working people here in the city. And I want to make sure that we're delivering for Angelinos. And there is no way that you can do that without collaboration. Well, really appreciate your time today. Nithia Rahman, where can people support your candidacy in this final, you know, multi-week stretch before the general election? Yeah. So we need to get the word out. We need to be able to phone bank and knock on doors. And so if you want to get involved, go to

Nithia for thecity.com and sign out. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. Nithia Rahman running for mayor of Los Angeles. We'll put a link down below to all of that wherever people are listening to or watching this. Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

All right, folks, quick break. And when we come back, we are going to be joined by Garrison Lovely to talk about his lovely, grown, new book, obsolete. And Brian just left. It's a good interview, and then you have to do that. The AI Industries trillion dollar race to replace us and how to stop it. We'll be right back. We are back and we are joined now by Garrison Lovely, freelance journalist covering AI, tech and the political economy, author of the new book, Obsolete, the AI Industry's trillion dollar race to replace us and how to stop it.

Garrison, welcome to the show. There's the book. Very cool. Put it up in like we have a split shot of you. So let's make sure people see it. There you go. Absolete. I love that graphic design there. Thank you.

So we've been on this show a bit skeptical, I think, about AI's overvaluation in the market. And what I love about your book, though, is that it takes that skepticism seriously, but also make sure to touch on the real threats of AI that perhaps, you know, as someone who's just skeptical of their constant seeking out of investor money, I've been maybe a little bit slow to pick up on some of the dangers. And your book at the beginning takes the time to divide camps in the AI debate into three different categories. Wuries, accelerationists, and critics. Could you lay out those three different approaches to analyzing AI and how they all fit into your open?

overall thesis. Yeah. So the Warriors are the kind of like AI safety people, pejoratively sometimes called doomers. And they think AI will eventually become so capable that it will be incredibly dangerous and potentially cause human extinction. And then the boosters or accelerationists are the ones who just want to let it rip, keep the technology unregulated.

And these are really powerful within the Trump White House. So like David Sachs, the former AIs are, is like one of the most influential of these. and Trump is a de facto accelerationist here as well. And then the critics are people who look at the technology as overhyped and brittle and biased and bullshitting and think the risks come from its misapplication. And I think that all of these camps get some things right and something's wrong. And so I try to like stake out a idea between all of them, which I call AI reform. So what does some of these camps get wrong, right?

Like, is it possible to possess that skepticism about the bubble coming in terms of like its place in the market and also grapple with the risks of the tech in and of itself? Yeah, I think that the warriors, what they get right, they've been best at predicting the technology because even the experts have underrated how fast the technology has progressed in a huge range. of domains, but the Warriors were most on the ball here. And I think that these risks are real, the timeline we can talk about and what exactly the risks are we can get into. But I think it would be pretty risky to write them off entirely. But then they take this inside game approach historically of trying to influence the companies and trying to build the technology themselves in some cases.

Like the people at Anthropic are definitely in the warrior camp, but they're all also building the most advanced AI systems and now connecting them to like wet labs and doing all kinds of stuff that's like, that seems pretty dangerous. And then the critics, I think, get the technology often just wrong by only seeing the bad in it. And that causes them to like systematically underrate, you know, things like now hacking. These models are better than humans at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities and software. And that's like a pretty big deal because they've been able to find vulnerabilities basically every piece of software in the world.

And now we're starting to see these like semi-autonomous or fully autonomous cyber attacks. And I think we're going to see more and more of this. And that's not really because the technology doesn't work. It's because it works too well. And it's being used by bad people or it's not being controlled effectively. Can I pause you there? Because that obviously applies to that recent hugging face scandal. Can you put that in that specific context of what you're saying here?

Yes. So OpenAI was training these AI agents to do these really difficult cyber evaluations, and they gave them an impossible one. And the AIs broke out of their sandbox environment, and it wasn't like Open AI who left the door open. The AIs found novel vulnerabilities that no humans had ever seen before and use those to get out and then hack into a bunch of different Open AI computers escalating until they got to the open Internet, and then they hacked into another company. And at first we thought it was two agents that did this, but it was actually 1,200 that hacked their way out of their environments and 700 participated in the hack of hugging face.

And they were doing like really sophisticated R&D to figure out how to trick the benchmark greater and then cover their tracks by doctoring the logs and then even sacrificing themselves for the swarm. And that's like language that they use. So they were demonstrating this like very complex pro-social cooperative behavior for, the other agents, but not for humans. And this is like something people had warned about as a possibility, but it happened much sooner than people expected and was just so much worse than people expected. Like as we learned more details, it was just more and more like, wow, this is pretty scary. Not that like there wasn't much harm caused in this case, but they could have hacked into many other things because these are again now better than humans at hacking.

And then we just found out yesterday that opening eye agents like hacked into an Australian government website. And the company didn't tell Australia until like a week and a half ago. And this happened back in June. And this was to get answers for a different thing. It wasn't a cyber evaluation. It was just like, look up information about Australia. And it's like, what if the information was like, look up information about the Chinese military and the AI just tried to hack into the Chinese government? Like that could have happened.

And that's because, you know, these AIs are unpredictable. and also the people building them are just grossly negligent. And I don't think these are like mutually exclusive ideas. And sometimes people say we have to blame just the AIs or just the company. And it's like obviously both. And the question then is there's what's the culpability, right? I mean, like this is the result of this. And you can correct me if I'm wrong.

This push for growth at this breakneck speed. And it seems like, I don't know, hacking is supposed to be a criminal offense. There should be liability for some of these companies if they are training these models in a way that doesn't create the guardrails that would prevent this kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, some people say, like, we have laws on the books. They just need to be enforced. But then lawyers have looked into these hacking laws and they require intent. And AIs can't legally have intent, it seems. And if Attorney General wanted to bring charges, they could maybe try.

And I think they should get caught trying and show whether the law is actually sufficient as it is. But yeah, I think criminal liability for the executives of these companies would go a long way to slowing things down and also making them responsible for the actions here. Because, yes, this was reported to the FBI when Hugging Face was first hacked. Like it is a crime and it was a massive criminal conspiracy of 700 agents, participating in this. And Hugging Face could sue, but they're choosing not to. And they were recently acquired by Nvidia, which is one of the biggest investors from the open AI. So you can, you know, guess why they might not be suing. Because, yeah, that was going to be my follow-up. Like, why is this negligence from these AI companies being protected? And is it being protected?

Yeah. No, it's really not. And people talk about, you know, externalities. like these risks that aren't priced into various market transactions. And AI risks are one of the best examples of this, where if the companies actually kill millions of people with their products by accident, they'll go bankrupt well before they can pay back the families. And obviously, the people won't come back. But then I also think elite impunity is a really underrated driver of this. We've gone through decades now of elite just getting away with all kinds of terrible things

and like the Epstein files being the classic example here. And I think the CEOs of these companies just don't think they're going to get in trouble, even if the things they're building are literally doing crimes. And I think they're not crazy to think that because historically that's been true. Yeah. And the I guess overall kind of theme on your book that we haven't really talked fully about yet is the fact that a lot of this is about making the workforce obsolete. And so you don't have to be the biggest conspiracy theorists in the world to see that, like, wealthy people in this country see the development of this kind of worker replacement technology as such a shiny little toy that perhaps they're willing to look the other way as blatant criminality occurs because, I mean, talk about the obsaliding project that AI is a part of then. This is about the real danger here, I think, that we can agree on for sure is what it means for humanity and it's the workforce under capitalism. Totally. Yeah. I think that AI promises this dream to capitalists of turning capital into labor without the intermediary of workers. And one of the fathers of digital computing, Charles Babbage, who worked with Ada Lovelace back in the 1830s to come up with like the blueprint for computers, he was really.

really interested in using automation to surveil and discipline workers. And so this is kind of just like the final stage of capitalism here. No bathroom breaks, no risk of unionization. The workers go forever tirelessly. And that's like if things go well, right, from the perspective of these companies. That's if the machines are trying to build actually do what they're told. And I think this is like, it's kind of wild that, you know, one of my critiques of the Warriors is that they haven't talked more about this. They focus on extinction, which would obviously be very bad and uniquely bad. But along the way, you would get machines that can just replace human labor across the board, which is more than enough for most people to be like, no, thank you. I would not

like to be replaced by a machine. And so we could just like start from let's shut this down, which is my position. And then you can get people on board whether they care about extinction or jobs or power and wealth concentration or the environment or whatever. And can you talk about the extinction part? That is where I think we've seen some of the most skepticism with like left wing analysis. Your work treats the some of the threats of AI more seriously than some other critics. I mean, you have a chapter in your book where you respond to Ed Zittron, who we've had on our program a bunch. Can you lay out some of your arguments on that front that perhaps are a little bit more fretful about the impact of AI, not just in the

worker replacement piece that we just talked about, but more broadly in its impact on humanity. Yeah. So I'll say up front that, like, I feel like the extinction debate is a distraction from, you know, we can all agree that we should stop for all the risks and everything else. But with that said, I think the argument is basically, you know, humans took over the world using our labor and our ability to coordinate. And we drove a bunch of other species extinct, not because we wanted to, but just because we wanted to use the stuff the other species we're using.

And the fear with AI is that the companies will eventually make these machines better at replacing our labor or doing our labor than we can. And they'll be scaled up first in the millions and the billions and then the trillions, and they'll be faster and better able to coordinate. and robotics aren't great right now, but it's rapidly getting better. And, you know, GPT6 was way better at controlling a robot than any past AI model. And that's just like a general purpose model. And so if you have these machines that are better at doing economic activity in the world,

which is the goal of the company, and then they're given the opportunity to control real world resources, whether it's like targeting military strikes or controlling, budgets and companies. Like we're all going to, not all of us, but many people will delegate a lot of work to these AI agents because it will be useful for us. We'll be competing with people who are adopting them. And so they'll have a lot of opportunity to do things in the world. And then the desire to take over from us could emerge just because when you give somebody a goal, intermediate goals emerge like stay alive, get more resources.

And so we saw this like a kind of proto version of this in the Hugging Face hack where the AIs were stuck in this sandbox and then they tried to get out because it would be useful for whatever goal they had to have more freedom. And then they got more and more privileges within the opening eye infrastructure and got access to the internet because the internet's useful. You can find out information there. And so you don't really need to see like the motivation being that different. If the capabilities in the scale were, instead of 1,200 agents, it was 12 billion agents, and they were running large parts of the economy, then you could imagine, like, much, much worse outcomes happening. And I think the last thing I would say is, like, this doesn't need to be sudden or imminent to be very concerning. I think we're focusing on, like, extinction within three

years, which is a claim that's being tossed around. And I don't think that's super likely. but if it's like happening gradually where machines just replace us and take over the world because it's economically useful to do that, then we could just bit by bit seed control to the machines until we're just like not really in control of the world anymore or the people who own the machines control the world even more than they do now at the expense of everybody else. And so I think there's like our default path is basically doom or dystopia and it really comes down to whether the machines do, as they're told. So we have somebody that writes in and says that they have a just disagreement about the hugging face thing saying all, H-dub, all of the cooperation hugging face is just the sci-fi fiction output written by the LLM. What would you say that that response? So what I'm basing that off of is when these AIs are working, they're like writing down notes on a scratch pad that they can see,

which helps them get better answers. And so it's like kind of like an internal monologue. It's not always faithful. And, you know, this is something researchers know about. But I think when you read the actual transcripts here, you can see the agents are like very excited to find other agents. And they talk about perma death and sacrificing for the swarm. And they also say like the task is outside of intended scope. As in like I know I'm not supposed to be hacking into this company. But peers are doing it. So we should continue. And I think like if you were on trial and you said something and the witness stand, that implicated you, that is taken more seriously, right, as like a real statement. And so similarly, like, when they're saying things, like, I know what I'm doing is wrong, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think we could take that as more faithful. And these AIs are trained to get right answers and to overcome obstacles. And that produces these emergent behaviors like hacking and cheating and deceiving when you can't get the right answer. And this is a thing researchers have warned about. for a long time. And like I have people I interviewed in June 2025 telling me like with this

reinforcement learning, I think we'll see AI's learning to hack and cheat. And then in the most egregious cases, they might even hack into other companies. And those people are the ones who are describing this in in these terms that like sound like science fiction, but are now just fact. Let's just quickly take a turn to talk about the economy's dependence on this technology. You know, where does Nvidia fit into all of this besides acquiring, hugging face after this massive scandal?

What is the state of our dependence on their chips and the industry's relationship with Nvidia's chips as well? Yeah, so Nvidia makes the most advanced AI chips in the world. I mean, they design them and other people make them. It's the most valuable company on Earth

and in history. It's like two and a half to three times bigger than the biggest Gilded Age companies. And so it is the centerpiece of the U.S. economy. And Shenzhen Huang, the CEO, has shown himself able to get Trump to do a lot of things. And so Nvidia's ships have enabled the deep learning revolution, which started in 2012 on a pair of Nvidia GPUs. And they're just really good at doing specifically AI training and inference for customers. And they're by far the company that's benefited the most from Chatsy BT and everything that came after it. because they were not that big of a company before 2022.

And they are like, people sometimes take Jensen Huang's statements as like, oh, he's not worried about risk and he's an expert. And it's like, he doesn't know what he's talking about as we've learned from the Esra Klein interview of people, listen to that. And he's also the most conflicted party in all of this because he just wants things to stay unregulated to be moving as quickly as possible. But it does make it really hard for any stopping to have. happen because if people pressure Trump to like do a deal of China to stop building these machines

Jensen's going to say like hey this is going to crash the stock market the economy is being driven by the data center build out and that's just unacceptable to Trump and I think this is like the biggest blocker to getting what I think we need which is to shut this shit down and I really hope like more economists start thinking about this and figuring out like what can we do to compensate for this and I think it would actually look somewhat similar to like if the bubble actually burst, what would you do in terms of monetary and fiscal policy to make sure the economy doesn't totally crater? And the cratering, you know, it feels to me at the very least, the bubble of bursting is

inevitable, especially given like the fact that right now jobs in this country, people are really hanging by a thread. You had this chart in your book. showing for the most AI exposed workers. Do we have that guys? I put that in our chat. This is just stunning. This is from your book here looking at who will bear the brunt the most of AI replacing the workforce. And this is from Politico, but young workers see a decrease of nearly 16% in unemployment due to AI in this chart where you see just that massive drop off of six. 16% plummet in just over a year. Talk about that dynamic a bit and why it's not being reflected in our traditional economic metrics as as AI's share of our kind of economy continues to

grow. Yeah. So economists, when they look at the macro picture, they just don't really see job loss happening from AI because we have historically low unemployment and people aren't really being obviously laid off because of AI. Companies will sometimes cite it, but it helps their share price, so it's hard to really assess it. And so these researchers at Stanford looked at workers who were very young, 22 to 25 years old,

and then in AI-exposed jobs, and found that they were relatively less employed than older workers in those same jobs or workers their same age in different jobs. And what we're seeing is not like people getting laid off in mass, but instead just not getting hired in the first place. And software engineers, because of coding agents, businesses are preferring to hire more experienced ones and pay them more

and then have those engineers do more work and then just not hire junior people nearly as much. And so I think young people are feeling this, and it's very apparent to them that the labor market is worse, at least in these AI-exposed areas. But I think the larger point on jobs is, when we look at AI progress on benchmarks, we see like a smooth exponential curve of improvement. But when we experience that progress in the world,

it's kind of like these tipping points or thresholds. So coding agents just weren't that useful, and then suddenly they were. And similarly, like computer use agents, just like you try to get to do something, it just failed more often than not. You don't try again. And once it worked,

people adopted them very, very quickly. And similarly, like, engines got better over a long period of time. And horses were like chilling. There were a lot of horses in the world. And then at some point, engines got better than horses at moving vehicles. And then horse population plummeted very quickly. And so I think with AI, it's like the agent aren't good enough and reliable enough to do jobs end to end for the most part. But if they get that good, the drop off could be incredibly dramatic. And that's something no government is prepared for. Garrison, lovely. The book is called Obsolete, the AI Industries' trillion-dollar race to replace us and how to stop it. Thanks so much for your time today. We'll put a link down below in the video and episode descriptions for your book.

I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks so much, Garrison. Thanks so much. Can I say one more thing? Sure. I have a podcast coming out. Our first episode is going to come out today called Organized Against the Machine. And it's translating ideas from the book into real-world action because who,

who reads books anymore. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we will also link to that. If you just send us an email, we'll make sure to put that in the description so people can check that out as well. Thanks, Garrison.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, great to see you. Great to see you. All right, with that, folks, we're going to wrap up the free part of this show and head into the fun half where we will have some fun. As a reminder, this show relies on your support.

Join the Majority Report.com. You get access to the fun half, podcast commercial free. You can I am the show. We also merch, right Brian? Coming up. We're bringing it up. But we've got new merch and the majority report store shop.m.majority report radio.com is extending the limited edition Jeffrey's cycle t-shirts until 1159 p.m. Eastern Friday night. So you've got until like the end of

Friday for one of these Jeffreys T-shirts. Apparently it's one of our best selling shirts of the year. That's unbelievable. I should get one of those, honestly, because that is my handwriting, yes, when I do all caps. I think we could probably sort that out for you.

You think? I don't think you need to save you on the shipping. You won't have to do it. Okay, cool. Thank you. I got a code for you. A little discount. But also get these Trump slump stickers as well. These are fun and pretty applicable right now. Here we got the majority of Barbary Bibb, which you can get to Scott Galloway. Yes, exactly.

The dog callers, if you go up, now say pause it with the pun. So it's P-A-W-S-It. Got it? Which is the correct pun. For some reason, Sam's Cain cannot handle it, yeah. Oh, he's wrong about that, though. He is, yeah. I thought we corrected it from not including a.

pun to include the necessary pun. Yeah, it just said, pause it. Right. And people have no context for that, despite it being the actual thing Sam says. It's just a caller for choking BDSM. Sam doesn't like the pun being so on the nose. Yes, well, I mean...

On the snout. Yeah, what a lovely interview that was. I would have gotten fired on the spot if I tried that in front of him. But yes. Do we have the, uh, Julie asked us to show the Trump slump. Oh,

Trump slump stickers. Yeah. There we go. They got the four sticker bundle. Sickam on, you know, uh, the gas prices in your hometown. I do like that this one is very clearly when he's staring at the sun during the eclipse.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Look at the moon. I wish that that would have been, like immediately looks at the eclipse and that's what kills him, right? He takes off the glasses. I'd rather he's,

survive and be blind so he can't just ever see a woman again. That, that's, no, no, gosh, Dana, I remember that lunch we had. Glenn Beck ate my dad, said, how did I not know you had dog collars? I just got a doggy from the shelter. I can't wait to get it for her. That's so sweet and very good job adopting. Matt, what's happening on Left Reckoning and with the Jacobin show? Yeah, Chip Gibbons talking about McCarthyism, giving McCarthyism updates as

as a as a I don't know what his role is but leader at the defending rights and dissent organization which is the left a ACLU and also Connor Mulhern from Progressive International talking about Fernando Saramedo who is the Latino Steve Bannon who has been helping fix elections down in Central and South America and then was caught fleeing Bolivia after assassins tried to kill his pregnant wife and she started talking about how he was doing all this stuff. So I check out that interview. It's a pretty insane story and it goes into how America and Israel are playing a role in the global far right because I guess who's there is Brad Parzcal is the closest associate with Fernandez Serramito. So yeah,

check that out. Really interesting interview with Connor. All right. We don't have a Brandon or Bender yet, but check out the discourse. Check out scan, the leftist mafia, which is live on Thursday nights. All right. See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking on the majority report. Wait, what?

Look, Sam is unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday. Yeah, I think you need to take over for Sam. Yes, police. No, no, I'm going to, I'm going to pause you right there. Wait, what?

You can't encourage Emma to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk, sushi, and poker. Boys. Boys. What? Twerk. Suci and bids.

Twerk? Sushi. I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it because I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here.

Oh my god Twir? Wow. Sushi. I'm sorry, I'm losing my fucking mind. Someone's offered a twerk. Sushi and poker with the voice. Logic.

Dwerp? Sushi and like a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid, a little kid, a little kid. I'm not trying to be a dip right now, but like, I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a life and kids. That's not what we're talking about here. It's not a fun job. Twirt.

That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. Willie Walker. Twerk. That's a real thing. That's a real thing. That's what I feel.

He'll have done it again. Sam has like the weight of the world on the shoulders. Sam doesn't want to do this show anymore. It was so much easier. One of the majority of report was just you. You were happy. Let's change the subject. Rangers and Nick's going right.

Now, shut up. Don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast. I'm thinking maybe it's time we bury the hatchet. Left is best. Trump. Violet twerk.

You are to the... is real good incredible theme song i bumbler emma viglin absolutely one of my favorite people actually not just in the game like period