This week, Adam talks with political scientist and internet curmudgeon Dave Karpf about some really bad ideas about the future in two really bad books, why those books are bad, why Ezra Klein is too credulous about one of them, and whether Adam should organize an intervention for Dave to stop him from reading so many bad books in the first place.

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About the show:

Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

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This week's guest is the legendary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future, the Mars trilogy, and many other books. Adam asks him about the role of science fiction in shaping our ideas about the future, how his own ideas about the future have changed over the course of his long career, and what we should be hopeful about looking forward.

Messages:

• Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine

• Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram

• Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts!

About the show:

Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Adam talks with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, physicist and author of the new book The Edge of Spacetime, about their shared love of Star Trek and its vision of a hopeful future. They also talk about labor organizing, freaking out people at conventions, and how the real Star Trek is (literally, unironically) the friends we made along the way.

Messages:

• Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine

• Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram

• Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts!

About the show:

Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to our debut show! This week, Adam talks with Reo Eveleth, journalist and podcaster, about who gets to imagine the future, the power that comes with that role, and why certain visions of the future have endured in American culture. They also discuss problematic faves, radical almanacs, a hundred years of horrifying manifestos, and the virtues of being cheesy.

Messages:

• Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine

• Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram

• Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts!

About the show:

Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What would a good future look like? In this solo preview of the show, journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker explains his struggles with this question, and how that led him to start this podcast. Along the way, he talks about the psychic toll of writing about terrible people, George Orwell, and the power of touching grass.

Messages:

• Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine

• Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram

• Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts!

About the show:

Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What might a good future look like?

Explore ideas about how to envision better, realistic, equitable futures with astrophysicist and journalist Dr. Adam Becker. Each week, Adam and a new guest will try to find hope in the darkness of the current political moment through earnest (and entertaining!) conversations about what such a future might look like. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the public conversation about what our world can and should be.

Episodes will come out weekly starting April 14, 2026.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.