Dreaming Against the Machine - April 08, 2026


Episode 0： Dreaming of a Better World

Topics
dreaming a better future
Trailer： Dreaming Against the Machine Episode 1： Futurists, with Reo Eveleth

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

159.49

Word count

2,054

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 I'm Adam Becker, and this is Dreaming Against the Machine.
00:00:06.780 This is a podcast where I'm going to host conversations about science, society, and
00:00:13.100 what a good future could look like.
00:00:15.380 And why I'm doing that has to do with a book that I wrote about some of the worst people
00:00:22.240 in the world.
00:00:23.300 That book is called More Everything Forever.
00:00:26.080 And it's about tech billionaires, the terrible ideas that they have for the future that they're
00:00:31.160 trying to shove down our throats and why those ideas don't work and the strange places that
00:00:36.080 those, you know, visions of the future come from.
00:00:39.740 And I wrote that book basically because I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for
00:00:47.760 too long and gone to too many parties where I heard too many people just sound off on
00:00:54.680 absolutely crazy ideas about the future that at first seemed, you know, crazy but harmless
00:00:59.440 but started creeping into our politics and our culture in ways that really freaked me
00:01:05.460 out, especially because I knew that these ideas couldn't work because before I became
00:01:10.640 an author and a journalist, I was a physicist.
00:01:14.060 I did a PhD in physics and learned a lot about, you know, the fundamental laws of the universe.
00:01:20.380 And while physicists have a tendency to believe that they know everything, and I like to think
00:01:27.120 that I know that I don't know everything, but it is true that physics will tell you
00:01:33.720 about some fundamental limits on what's possible in the world.
00:01:37.300 And usually those limits are not the reasons why you can't do things.
00:01:41.460 And if you run up against those limits, you've got a serious problem.
00:01:44.720 and many, many of these ideas about, you know, the glorious future of humanity in space with
00:01:52.600 a godlike AI, they end up running against limits in science. And many of those limits are in
00:01:57.860 physics. And that's the book that I wrote. But in writing that book, I realized a few things.
00:02:05.760 The first thing was that talking about these people and spending all of my time thinking
00:02:10.220 about these people was really, really draining for me. It was a difficult and at times exhausting,
00:02:21.620 scary, infuriating, uh, just really emotionally difficult experience. And I got through that,
00:02:34.300 you know, by talking with friends and spending a lot of time outside looking at trees, a lot of
00:02:40.560 time looking at trees. Actually, I ended up while I was writing the book, going and looking at the
00:02:47.060 tallest trees, the biggest trees and the oldest trees in the world, all of which are here in
00:02:53.180 California. But I realized that I needed to spend less time thinking about these people.
00:03:00.860 um you know in my heart the title of the book wasn't more everything forever it was these 0.99
00:03:07.020 fucking people and i can't spend all of my time thinking about these fucking people 0.98
00:03:11.400 but the other thing that happened and this was this was unexpected one of the wonderful 0.99
00:03:17.180 and strange things that happens when you write a book is you know at least when i do it i i sit
00:03:23.420 down and i have an outline that i write because i have this vision of how the book is going to be
00:03:27.780 in my head. And then, you know, sometimes I break up that outline into sub outlines, you know,
00:03:32.860 one for each chapter, each section of each chapter, and then I go through and, you know, do it and
00:03:38.180 write it. But the writing, of course, never completely sticks to the plan. It's like having
00:03:46.140 a map of a hiking trail, except the map is 50 years old and was created before they even first,
00:03:55.680 you know, blazed the trail in the first place. And when you get there, you find, oh, the actual
00:04:02.920 route of the trail is different from the map, and I lose it in some spots. And also there's been
00:04:09.380 maybe a giant snowstorm or two that has knocked over a large number of trees and caused a stream
00:04:16.880 to flood. And there's a lot of places where I just have to go and do something pretty different
00:04:22.760 from what I thought I had to do.
00:04:25.280 And there's no place where this is more important in a book
00:04:29.260 than at the very beginning and the very end.
00:04:32.380 And I thought that my book was going to have to end
00:04:37.200 with me giving a positive vision
00:04:40.420 of what I wanted the future to look like.
00:04:42.480 Because I spent the whole book
00:04:43.840 talking about these really unbelievable,
00:04:49.840 dystopian and utopian visions of the future
00:04:52.460 all of which are horribly broken, and even the utopias are really just utopias for a few and
00:04:58.500 dystopias for the rest of us. And that's a lot of what I wanted to get across to the readers in the
00:05:03.320 book, is that even if these ideas did work, which they don't, they aren't good ideas. They are bad
00:05:10.620 scientifically, politically, sociologically, philosophically, you name it. But as they say,
00:05:17.380 criticism is easy. Building something is harder, right? And I think that in a way, writing a book
00:05:23.080 is a form of building something. Even if that book is filled with criticism, I think we need
00:05:26.740 criticism. It's important. It's part of the job of journalism. And I am certainly a journalist.
00:05:33.340 But when it came time for me to write the end of the book, I had this big old blank space that said,
00:05:39.100 talk about what a good future would look like. And I tried to do that and it didn't work. And I
00:05:43.100 tried again and it didn't work. And it wasn't until I came across a quote from one of my favorite
00:05:51.240 authors, George Orwell, that I realized what was going wrong. And I went and talked with my editor
00:05:58.640 about it. And he said, yeah, just put that in the book. And what Orwell said was that most people
00:06:06.040 who imagine utopia are like someone who has a toothache, who thinks that happiness consists
00:06:17.360 in not having a toothache. They've confused something that was good because it was temporary
00:06:24.120 with something that should be a permanent state of affairs. That's not a direct quote,
00:06:28.340 but it's close. It's pretty much what Orwell said. And then he goes on to say that we can't
00:06:35.320 really come up with a utopia. The best we can do is say, well, the future should proceed along
00:06:39.680 certain lines. We have certain goals in mind, but we can't picture what an entire good future
00:06:47.600 looks like in every detail. It's not possible. And I think he's right. And I use that to change
00:06:55.380 the ending of my book to talk about one specific problem and specific solution to that problem,
00:07:00.520 rather than coming up with a whole fantastical vision
00:07:04.180 of a fully realized utopia.
00:07:06.560 But at the end of the day,
00:07:09.060 when I was done with the book, it was off to the editor.
00:07:11.800 A few days after the final edits was the 2024 election
00:07:16.720 and Trump won and I was devastated 0.99
00:07:19.620 because he's a monster and a fascist 1.00
00:07:21.960 and he's making the world the worst place 1.00
00:07:24.000 for everyone on it, including himself, I think,
00:07:26.380 but maybe that's a separate conversation.
00:07:28.280 but I started thinking about hope and started thinking about where can I find hope and
00:07:37.640 when the book came out the following April and I went around and started giving talks about it
00:07:43.900 I just kept meeting people who were filled with despair you know doge was in full swing something
00:07:49.280 that I had actually written about in the book before it happened because they had these people 0.98
00:07:55.340 these fucking people had said that that was what they wanted to do. Uh, and then they went off and 0.98
00:08:01.600 did it. And it was even more horrible than we all thought it was going to be. And people kept
00:08:09.060 asking me, you know, they've won. What can we do? Where is the hope? And I'd like to think that now
00:08:16.480 more than a year after that, or about a year after that, there's more obvious grounds for hope.
00:08:22.060 we have seen a rising tide of backlash against the tech oligarchs, against the flood of AI slop
00:08:36.140 that has taken over the internet. And we've also seen some political developments here in the US
00:08:41.280 that, you know, against the horrifying background of the destruction and incompetence of this
00:08:47.760 administration, there's still some reason for hope and the elections that we've had have gone
00:08:52.960 pretty well. But I think that part of the reason I wasn't able to come up with a utopia is not just
00:09:01.880 what Orwell said. It's also what a friend of mine, Shazita, who's going to be on this podcast at some
00:09:08.780 point, she said to me, coming up with good ideas about the future is something that we have to do
00:09:14.460 in community. And I realized that she was right because what makes a future good, what makes a
00:09:19.740 future good is it's a place where all of us can live. And so all of us have to build it together.
00:09:25.900 And so it can't just be me sitting in a room in purely alone, writing a book, because there is
00:09:33.380 nothing in this world that is more isolating as a profession, I think, than writing a book,
00:09:40.700 except maybe like lighthouse keeper or something like that. Um, but it can't just be me up here
00:09:48.620 alone coming up with what a future looks like. It has to be a conversation. It has to be a series
00:09:53.980 of conversations with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things and thinking about things.
00:09:58.660 Because one of the other things that I wrote about in the book and that I really sort of came away 0.99
00:10:05.060 with deeply after writing it was that these fucking people believe that they know everything, 0.99
00:10:15.000 that they are the smartest people who've ever lived. And I'm no longer sure I even understand 0.99
00:10:18.820 the meaning of the word intelligence. I think that maybe, you know, that's a word that definitely
00:10:24.080 has a long history of racism and eugenics behind it. And I also think that maybe we use it in ways
00:10:30.440 that don't make much sense.
00:10:32.380 But what I know for sure is that I don't know everything
00:10:35.360 and that there are a lot of really important things
00:10:38.900 that I have no expertise in.
00:10:41.480 But one of the things I do think I'm pretty good at
00:10:45.160 is having conversations with people
00:10:47.300 and making the people I'm talking with feel comfortable
00:10:49.440 and finding interesting people
00:10:52.480 and asking them interesting questions
00:10:54.560 about what they think the world could look like.
00:10:58.180 and with my training as a scientist that I carry with me everywhere, whether I want to or not,
00:11:05.720 that brings me a different perspective. And my hope for this show is that with these conversations,
00:11:14.960 with all of these different people, we, you, the listener, me and my guests and the wonderful team
00:11:22.940 I have working with me
00:11:23.900 on this podcast
00:11:24.600 that we can all start
00:11:27.400 dreaming of a better future,
00:11:30.300 one that doesn't involve
00:11:32.780 this gigantic inhuman force
00:11:35.080 that I have perhaps
00:11:37.040 grandiosely dubbed the machine.
00:11:40.500 I don't want to rage
00:11:42.000 against the machine.
00:11:43.680 When I was brainstorming
00:11:45.680 titles for this podcast,
00:11:47.280 I wrote down
00:11:48.200 Rage Against the Machine
00:11:48.980 and then I put in parentheses
00:11:49.980 after that name already in use.
00:11:52.940 But, uh, I don't want to rage against the machine because I don't want to be angry.
00:12:00.700 I want to be hopeful.
00:12:03.140 I want to think of a better future.
00:12:06.620 I think a better future is possible.
00:12:09.040 And I, you know, if you have read my work, if you've heard me talk on other podcasts,
00:12:15.920 you probably know that I am a huge, completely sincere, cringingly sincere fan of Ursula K.
00:12:24.760 Le Guin. And in one of her most famous pieces of work, a speech that she gave toward the end of
00:12:31.320 her life, she said that we are going to need dreamers of a larger reality. And that is what
00:12:39.980 I want to help make happen with this podcast. And I want you to do that with me here on Dreaming
00:12:48.120 Against the Machine. And I look forward to seeing what we can dream of together.