Ramez Naam, a former Microsoft program manager turned science fiction novelist and clean energy specialist, and author of The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, talks with Pinchbeck about the American political situation. Naam says he has become effectively a single-issue activist for protecting democratic governance, on the grounds that climate action, civil rights and rational economic policy are all downstream of not becoming a dictatorship. He faults the tech right, naming Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, for backing Trump in exchange for lighter regulation, and traces part of that culture to the extropians and the Burning Man scene where he and Pinchbeck first met in 2000. He describes authoritarian rule-testing and referee capture, but reads Trump's falling approval as grounds for cautious hope.
Guest: Ramez Naam
In brief
- Naam argues that climate action, gay and trans rights, and rational economic policy are all downstream of preserving democratic governance, which he now treats as his single issue.
- He calls the present moment the greatest threat to the United States as a civil-rights-honoring constitutional republic since the Civil War.
- Naam holds prominent venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, responsible for helping install Trump in pursuit of lighter regulation on crypto and AI.
- He describes a standard authoritarian method of testing the ambiguities in every rule set and then capturing the referees who adjudicate them, and sees elements of it in the Supreme Court.
- Naam expects Democrats to retake the House in 2026 given Trump's declining popularity across issues, while calling that only a first step in a longer restoration.
- He says invoking the Insurrection Act would amount to crossing the Rubicon, and that avoiding it will require discipline on the left.
Full text
Everything is downstream of preserving our governance like everything. Like I'm basically a single issue voter now and a single issue activist which is protect democracy because climate action uh choice uh gay rights and trans rights uh all of this like a rational economic policy all of this is downstream of not becoming a dictatorship. So that's actually the highest order of it for me. Hey everybody. Uh, today I'm here with Rame Z Nam, an author and former Microsoft, what were we there? Project director. What was your title? Manager kind of. Yeah, program manager. Uh, I first met Rame Z the first time I went to Burning Man when I was writing about it for Rolling Stone.
And in a way, visiting your camp at that point changed my life a bit. I think that was probably back in 2000. 2000. Yeah. Was Yeah. I had um I was living in New York on the east coast in a sort of particular media environment and there was no idea around things like polyamory. I mean even like you know the knowledge of psychedelics was pretty rudimentary and I think particularly the open relating that I saw at your camp was like blew blew my mind and it stayed with me. It's like wow I really want to want to have that you know um in my life. Happy to have been of service.
Yeah. I don't I mean sometimes I wonder if that was you know in the end the right direction as it caused a lot of uh hassles also but um yeah but just um you know I interviewed you at that point and we stayed in touch and I know you wrote a number of books science fiction and you wrote a book about technology and innovation and and climate change and so on. What was the name of that one again? Infinite resource the power of ideas on a finite planet. Exactly. And then I've been noticing on Facebook uh you've been actively posting in a way that not that many people that I know have been around what's happening and trying to sort of you know bring your community's attention to um yeah how kind of like crazy and extreme the situation has become.
So I thought it would be great to check in with you. What did I leave out in your bio? Please fill in the pieces. That's me software guy. I work in climate and clean energy. Actually, that's been my my focus for the last 15 years. Sci-fi writer. Yeah. I I try to do good things if I possibly can. Yeah. So, um yeah, let's just um you know, talk about what's been happening. Like what have what have you what have you been seeing? What you know, I think that one of the things that I find very shocking is I feel there was an element of the Burning Man culture which contributed to um this meltdown in a way.
Yeah, there was like I mean I remember when I went there the first time there was already a whole thing about test and there was extropians. I don't know how actively you were involved in those communities or those ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I was certainly in Tropians uh long ago. I mean I think look at a meta level I think this is the biggest threat to America to American democracy or success as a civil rights honoring republic a constitutional republic that we've seen since the civil war. Uh maybe that's a very slight exaggeration but not by much. And I am disturbed by sort of the coalition that helped put Trump in power.
And I think futurist is part of it. I think I'm most disturbed uh by tech and the number of people on the tech right that supported Trump. And I think the the tech rank and file are still fairly liberal. But a lot of highprofile people certainly Elon but others as well. you know, Mark Andre and Ben Horowitz, who are two of the most prominent venture capitalists, others of their ilk, uh helped support uh Trump to get him in, I think, in large part because they felt overregulated and they wanted their crypto investments uh to go up uh and they wanted less regulation on AI and so on, but they they kind of sold out the country and the world in that respect.
And I'm not sure if even now they they fully realize that. So, I mean, that's how we got here. There's other aspects of it, too. I think workingclass people, the big Latino swing to Trump was very surprising to me. The way that young people who are typically very liberal swung hard to Trump, at least relative to their norms, was very surprising to me. If I look at where we are now, like Trump is testing the boundaries constantly, constantly pushing them. Um, we're a a government of rules, but no rule set is ever perfect. Every set of rules has ambiguities, has uh, you know, referees who judge whether something has broken the rule or not.
And a classic authoritarian move is to test all those limits and then if you can take control of the referees to get them to rule on your side. And to some extent, we're seeing that with the Supreme Court. All of that having been said, I think the the positive thing that I see is that Trump is unpopular and getting less popular uh over time. Like maybe it's stabilized a bit, but his popularity on basically every issue has plunged since election day, even on things like immigration and crime, and certainly on things that Americans care about that affect their pocketbook, the economy, tariffs, so on. uh and the Epstein uh files thing.
So that gives me some degree of hope that provided we can we can stay the course and and nothing really crazy happens like a major terrorist attack or something between now and 2026 that my hope is and I think my expectation is the Democrats will take back the House. Uh but that's just a very very very first step in a process of of restoration of this country. Uh, and there's a whole lot more that has to be done beyond that. Yeah. I mean, um, many people, myself included, have a lot of concerns about the next elections, whether they'll actually be, you know, fair and free. um you know so for instance uh just on Friday uh Dominion which is the m major voting system sold to a uh Republican operative uh lidau or something I can't remember his last name.
Yeah. Who um yeah he he um you know obviously he's promising to keep elections free but we know that if you're a Trumpian which he would seem to be um they don't really value free and fair elections. I mean, that's not really they just think it's about winning at all costs. So, um you know, then also we're seeing the kind of um media consolidation on the on the on the on the side of the right. Ironically, they still tend to consider themselves the underdog. Uh but actually, if you look at the the statistics, they've already been holding the lion's share of media. Now Larry Ellison, who is a Trump uh friend, is not only buying Paramount, which includes CBS, which was once kind of like the flagship of like a sort of neutral or unbiased news in America, he's also apparently going to pick up Tik Tok and be the majority shareholder in Tik Tok.
So Andre Horowitz will be another co-owner of Tik Tok as well. So other Trump allies in there, right? Yeah. So um yeah, I'm curious. Um, you know, you said that you feel that the rank and file of the tech world remain liberal, although they probably feel a little bit constrained from speaking out at this point. Yeah. What what what are you seeing in in your your networks and your communities? I think the rank and file are uh primarily liberal, though maybe not as liberal as I thought. And honestly, a lot of tech leaders are liberal, too, but they are keeping their heads down. If you look, there was a, you know, video of the tech uh lunch or dinner that Trump had and you had, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg and and so on around him, but you had you the CEOs of Google and and Microsoft and and Bill Gates was there and you have to wonder like how many of those people if they thought they could get away with it would have slipped poison into Trump's drink.
And I think it's the majority. Like you know, you heard like Bill Gates was there. Why was he there? because he wants to get Trump to not keep screwing up foreign aid. Like he's he's trying to get something. The tech CEOs, you know, the Tim Cooks and and so on are there because Trump can just do awful things to their companies. So, they all feel an obligation to their companies to play ball in some way with the administration, which is very dangerous. like it's it's rational in a selfserving way for them and not just for their personal pocketbooks but for their company. Tim Cook doesn't want to see Apple destroyed by Donald Trump etc.
Um, but it's very dangerous when Trump can command uh so many titans of industry uh to cowtow. And I think there's a there's a level below that. Like I know plenty of tech CEOs and founders of of companies we could name but and that you'd know but that aren't as high-profile as Microsoft or Apple or Google. Uh and they just keep their mouths shut. Like it's obvious what their politics are. It's obvious that most of them are liberals. You see that in the other things that they support where they give their money and so on. Uh but the last thing they want to do is call attention to themselves.
So they're just trying to keep their heads down and hope that this all goes away in three and a quarter years and that the world gets better rather than than risking Trump's iron. Um that's the tech thing. I think the media thing that you brought up is actually really important. And I think you the consolidation of media power on the right is very disturbing. Tik Tok was the last media platform, the last social media platform that wasn't owned by someone on the right. You've got Twitter owned by Elon who's, you know, has a complicated relationship with Trump, but is definitely on the right. You have uh Zuck owning Facebook and Instagram and uh his politics of maybe we didn't know what they were.
They they're definitely fairly right now. Uh and now with uh Tik Tok where young people primarily get their news uh in the hands of the right. I think that's dangerous. But there's another aspect of this that goes beyond who the owners are, which is I think that the media landscape itself uh because of the the profit urge is just broken and just drives us apart. Every major media outlet, especially TV and social media, just have the incentive to spread rage and to spread the most extreme and outrageous stories from the other side. Uh because that monetizes the best. There's a classic saying like on TV, if it bleeds, it leads.
Because like we've got our amydala, we evolved when the rustling in the bushes could have been a tiger. So, we jump at a car crash hundreds of miles away that had no chance of of harming us or a gruesome story of a murder even as murder rates are going down. And that extends to politics. Uh I see this all the time. I'm very active on social media. I'm very active on Twitter. And one of the best ways to get a lot of retweets on Twitter is to take something stupid that somebody on the other side has said, and that person other side might have a hundred followers.
They might be a relative, you know, unknown. They're not a politician. They're not a a journalist. They're like just some random person. They might even be a bot. Let's assume they're a real person. But you take it, you quote tweet it, and you say, "Basically, look at this idiot or look at this asshole." And people on your side just applaud and retweet you. And it gives people on your side the impression that everyone on the other side thinks in this extreme way. We saw that really profoundly after Charlie Kirk's assassination, right? Basically, every mainstream Democrat politician came out with some statement of like political violence is not acceptable, yada yada yada.
And then there were some like basically unknowns on the left, maybe real people, maybe not, but like not anybody very prominent who were saying, "Oh, kill the next one." You know, oh, like all the white men dealt with like this. There's always going to be crazies. But this was nobody in the mainstream. But right-wing channels on social media and elsewhere just picked those up and acted like it was the the dominant view of all Democrats or all liberals that we should line up all white men and and put bullets through through their necks or something, which just wasn't really the case. And and it happens in the other way around as well.
Like I think it does happen more on the right, but it happens on the left. I see this happen on the left. I see my friends and I feel the temptation. You I had a a tweet go viral the other day about um you know harboring illegal aliens maybe being the moral thing to do. And I got a lot of stupid stuff from accounts on the right and some of them are so dumb I just want to retweet them and say basically look at this idiot. But I I tried to hold myself back from doing it because it's not it's just giving a false impression to some extent.
There's some really interesting uh data that shows that while polarization in Congress has gone up a lot and it is mostly the right going further right, polarization among Americans as you know just general people hasn't really changed all that much. But the perception of Americans is that the other side has become more polarized. even if when you pull people on the issues, they really haven't moved apart all that much. And most people kind of generally agree on 75% of stuff. So the media landscape itself, I feel, is is tearing us apart. And I I'm a full believer in free speech and the first amendment means we probably can't force any of these networks to do anything differently.
And I I think that's probably good. It's dangerous for all the government to force anyone. And I'm also a capitalist. I know you and I differ on this a little bit. So I like I general I think the profit motive drives good stuff. But in this case the profit motive combined with like human primate you know hindb brain uh maybe reptilian brain psychology is just like it's preying on us for profit and making us as a nation insane. Yeah. I mean, um, you mentioned how the right has exacerbated these tiny little accounts where somebody says something, um, inflammatory and then they all jump on that with glee and that gets on Fox News and they have now created this whole kind of media ecosystem, echo chamber where they can amplify even something really small suddenly becomes massive whereas the the the progressive media doesn't doesn't really have that as much.
Um, have you paid attention though to some of the influential ideologues on the right who actually kind of have been calling for um organized violence against not just like far-lefts but even like liberals and progressives and democrats and so on. I mean there's there's what's that? No, you go ahead please. Uh, for instance, I mean, I got very um, you know, more involved what was happening politically before the election when I read a book by this guy Jack Pobiac uh, called Unhumans. Pobiac is part of JD Vance's entourage. He went with him to Munich. He spoke the other day about the during the Antifa talk about how Antifa was an organized thing that's existed since the Wimar Republic and it needs to be, you know, taken down, you know, in every way.
Um but in in Posobic's book on humans he actually says that um the term refers to his belief that leftists socialists even liberals and democrats are not fully human and they don't actually need to be treated as humans are treated fully and that what we need in the US is something like Franco or Pinoch and he actually goes so far as to praise Pinocha's helicopter killings where Pinoce took you know Pino also tortured and killed a lot of people and but he would take people up um into these helicopters and push them out, you know, just because they were dissident or had different views. Now, that would be a bad thing obviously, but what makes it I think more um concerning is that um you know, both JD Vance and Donald Trump blurbed his book and JD Vance actually said this is the right plan for America. So, it's kind of ironic that they're on the one hand making these um fake claims around, you know, organized leftist violence, yet it seems as if they're actually, you know, moving towards inexurably towards a plan to do something um along those lines here. I'm just curious what your reflections are on that. It I think it's crazy and I haven't I haven't tracked that guy.
I've heard the name, haven't heard his book, but I think um you know I think the calls for violence are insane. And you know the other day, yesterday I saw um Steve Bannon talking about uh Trump like finding a way to get Trump on the ballot for 2028 and how he would inevitably win if he was on the ballot. So I think things like that are crazy as well. And I do think um one asymmetry is that I think the left and the right have equal numbers of crazies or close enough. I don't really care if it's a factor of two. Like there's crazies on both sides, but on the left the crazies are usually not anywhere near the halls of power.
And on the right, the crazies are often very very approximate to the halls of power or the people that have huge followings. And that's very very disturbing to me. Right. But I mean I guess my analysis is that um I mean yeah there you know we only have these two political parties which in itself is a problem whereas other systems that are more parliamentary there many different parties um but you know the there was an organic more like leftist movement that was that was self-organizing in the 60s and early 70s and it was really targeted by the government in the mil military-industrial complex. So they, you know, assassinated leaders of the Black Panthers.
They put a lot of people in in jail. They they, you know, would create trumped up drug charges. So basically, they did everything they could to not allow there to be or an organic left. Yeah. Whereas the right has been very well supported. I mean if you read like Jane Meyer's book Dark Money about how the Koch brothers and their allies put together like a huge war chest starting back in the 60s they were real they recognized that it was going to be a you know multi- decadesl long effort to if they wanted to sort of bring the country back towards their vision uh which is the sort of white Christian nationalism vision libertarian and so on.
So they then set out to do that in a very uh tactical way. Um and um yeah, I mean on the other hand, yeah, the right has definitely had more infrastructure. The Koch brothers are actually interesting. Uh like I don't I try to be a little subtle about them because they've also been very pro-immigration more than either party and very pro- free speech. So I think the right is not quite as monolithic as we think it is. And I think people on the right perceive the left as being very monolithic, right? They're like, "Oh, the left always act, you know, in concert. They don't like have disarray and we on the right are always messing up by having disarray." And then the left, we perceive the right as being very monolithic and very well organized and they're never in disarray.
But I think the story is actually more complicated than that. And you see that I mean I think that the the coke all their libertarian uh tendencies did you know really optimize for the economic topics which is why they supported the right instead of the left. Um and so I think that it is a problem that we have this binary world. We rather support one or the other. Um I think the thing that's that's most parallel to that most concerning right now is when Trump is talking about Antifa as a terrorist organization and talking about you know he talks about funding sources. He's talking about act blue.
He's talking about just a platform that you use to make uh you know $100 donation to your congressperson as being funding infrastructure for terrorists. So they are you know trying to at least put the rhetorical flourishes in place to try to justify using the power of the state to attack and dismantle their political opposition. Like I don't think we're going to see the Republicans or the military resorting to like shooting people in the streets or tossing people out of helicopters. Alleinish because that's a that would be very very unpopular with Americans and b like it's not clear that they have to do anything like that. What they are doing is talking about judges who rule against Trump as insurrectionists, talking about liberal organizations as terrorist funding networks because they plan to try to use legal powers to uh you know take control and seize control as people you know talk about.
I hate to use the Holocaust as an example but everything Hitler did was legal, right? He he seized control. Now the the Weimar constitution was way weaker than the US Constitution. It was actually riddled with flaws that our constitution doesn't have, but every constitution has flaws. This is actually, you know, one of the key things that comes out of how democracies die, which I thought was a great book, if not very cheerful, that every system of rules and laws has holes in it, has loopholes, has things open to interpretation. And often what's held would be authoritarians and dictators back has been either a system of norms that the people really care about or people in their own party that have pushed back against them.
And the sense of norms has changed dramatically in America. And some of that I think has been by the ability of like leaders to go direct to the people and the base on TV uh social media and some I don't even understand. So what um uh yeah I'm curious I mean in all this blizzard of what's happening you know you said you're focused on climate that also is obviously something that has taken a big hit uh with Trump who's sort of rolling back uh climate progress and uh kind of wiping out Biden's inflation reduction act which was going to create a new renewable energy infrastructure in the US. So where where are you putting your focus of attention and how you know what are you trying to accomplish in this kind of new scenario? Well, first I say everything is downstream of preserving our governance.
Like everything like I'm basically a single issue voter now and a single issue activist which is protect democracy because climate action uh choice uh gay rights and trans rights uh all of this like a rational economic policy all of this is downstream of not becoming a dictatorship. So that's actually the highest order bit for me when I look at climate and clean energy overall. Look, Trump's actions are a setback, but as I've been saying for almost 15 years now, we're going to reach a point and we're reaching that point now where just the economics of clean energy are so good that it's going to take off. So the US is now, you know, maybe 20% of all new energy investment around the world and the rest of the world is just powering forward. Uh more than half of all cars sold in China now have a plug.
And that's true not just in China, it's true in Vietnam, it's true in Nepal, uh and a bunch of other countries in Southeast Asia. And it's rising in Europe and even in the US. It's going to keep rising. About 90% of new power generation capacity getting built around the world is solar, batteries, or wind. There's about twice as much money going into clean energy as fossil fuel energy globally per year. Now, that crossover was like 2022, 2023, and it's just gone up. Solar gets more dollars allocated to it for like new capital buildout than oil. So, we're we're hitting these inflection points. The question is really speed.
Uh we want to be going faster. We are getting into into dangerous waters. So the the question is no longer like will we transition though it kind of varies by sector but electricity will transition ground vehicles will transition that stuff is like mostly inevitable. Maybe electricity will transition 70% to clean with the current technologies with a lot of new stuff in the pipeline. The question is can we get it done fast enough to avoid dangerous tipping points? And so, you know, we're in this uh this sector. My friend, I'm going to curse. My friend uh Jesse Jenkins, who's a professor, uh talks about the progress we've made, right?
So, in 2010, uh I wrote my book, The Infinite Resource. I was writing it about then, 2011, we thought that the world might warm as much as 6 degrees Celsius by 2100. Now, we're thinking like two and a half might be the center point. Some climate scientists would say on current models 2.7. So my friend Jesse says, "Look, because of that progress, which is really driven by things like solar and batteries getting a lot cheaper on climate, we're no longer totally but we're not unfucked either because we're not we're going to miss 1.5c. Uh, so we're we're at this point where every tenth of a degree matters and we're in the fight and we got to keep fighting harder, faster, smarter, and we'll keep doing that despite Trump's actions.
Tech will keep getting better and cheaper around the world and at some point the US hopefully will have a a rational government again and we'll keep deploying it again. I'm curious um how you've charted kind of like um how we ended up you know in this disaster. to some extent it felt like um you know one contributing factor was a lot of Burning Man type people you know including people that I know and probably you know who you know the the COVID vaccine thing kind of stuck in their brains and they felt some kind of association with RFK Jr. Um and um they shifted over into kind of um maha into kind of like uh preferring kind of like spiritual impulse or um kind of yeah impulsive you know intuitive guesswork rather than you know evidence-based science. I'm curious if you've experienced that in your in your communities and what what you think happened there and is there any way to to bring those people back into some kind of balance.
I think that's if I look at it I think there were like three issues really that led to where we are. I think one is the COVID lockdowns. It's not even that they drove people towards Maha though they did that some. It's that they were perceived as tyranny. It's people who uh like the schools shut down. It just messed with people's lives. people not being able to go out to bars or told they can't go to church or so on just felt oppressed by the government. And we liberals, you know, we're the party of freedom, right? And so we think about how do we have a government that protects our freedoms.
People on the right were felt like their freedoms were being trod upon. So that was a big motivator. I think number two is just pure economics. Um the Biden team chose to respond to COVID with a stimulus and that stimulus worked in one you know key way. It kept the economy from dropping into like massive massive unemployment and the US bounced back faster than any other economy around the world but it had the side effect of inflation and prices going up and people just feel inflation. So I think that was also a major impact. And then three is immigration. And I am morally I'm close to just a total open borders person, right?
Like morally mean I was born in Egypt. My folks came to the US when I was three. I was lucky to grow up here. And so I see there's a birth lottery. If you're born on one side of a border, one side of a river, uh you're the same human, right? But your life changes so radically. And so I think like society ought to be working to improve that situation. But as a practical matter, the influx of immigrants into the US just created xenophobia and fear. And it's it's easy to exploit. Humans are more susceptible to fear-based messaging than compassion-based or hopebased messaging. Humans don't understand positive some situations.
Donald Trump certainly doesn't. But you're trying to tell someone, "Hey, all the economic studies show that more immigration is actually good for the economy and raises the wages of uh, you know, native born Americans and creates more jobs." Uh, they'll look at you like, "What are you talking about?" In their view, it's a fixed-sized pie and new people coming in are stealing their jobs, stealing their wealth, whatnot. So, those three issues created a a massive swing and that's that's how we got here right now. Now, I will say I'm going to tangent a little bit terms like how do we get out of this? So, that's actually the most important thing to me.
You know, we're I have idol fantasies of, you know, like revolution, right? I dispel those instantly. They are not viable. The reality is that between the government and uh conservative citizens, the right has all the guns in this country. There is no scenario where a violent revolution has any positive outcome that I can possibly see. So to me, and this is like the the least satisfying answer to a lot of my friends, it really is all about public perception, public opinion, and winning elections. Um, and that has lessons for how we go about things. I think I made a Facebook post about this about, you know, protest and what's effective and and how we win violent protest.
What happened in LA a few months ago when they set Whimos on fire and and whatnot and there were images of smoke and people throwing rocks and so on. That is terrible. I understand the rage. I understand what drives people to be out there. I feel that America is headed in a wrong direction. I am angry when I see videos of ice abducting a tamalei vendor or a cook or somebody building a roof on somebody's house. I'm like, "What the hell?" Like, I think a lot stronger than that. Actually, I'm angry. But displaying that anger is uh destructive to the odds of winning politically. It just pushes people who are lowinformation voters who don't watch this stuff incessantly.
It creates, you know, short videos that you can show of chaos and and vehicles burning and shop windows broken that just push them more to the right because when you see violence, you become more conservative typically. And so I I think there's a lot to learn, right? So do you think it's also possible that some of the violence is caused by agent provocators like right-wing instigators? It's quite possible. Up in black block clothes messy. It's totally possible. Uh or opportunists who actually don't really care about the issues but just want to like come express their rage and up, right? And so, pardon me. Sorry about that beeping.
Um so to me, the lesson is to study what Portland's been doing. like the the frog costumes and the the music playing in the streets and all of that stuff is the approach that diffuses this that sends the the message and the images to people uh who are in the middle who are like not all that politically engaged that ICE is ridiculous that the protesters on the left are funny and kind of adorable. Uh, and that's the message you need. Like Americans are negative on Trump on immigration. That's kind of crazy. They're more negative on Trump on specifically uh ICE abductions of people who are not violent criminals.
So, we have to keep that salient and in the news without letting Trump demonize the left as, you know, violent hoodlums who are uh burning stuff down and so on. And if we do that, I think, you know, there are certainly concerns about will 2026 be fair and there will be there's some unfairness with gerrymandering and so on, but we've got an excellent chance of winning back the House in 2026 if we make sure we keep the spotlight on the abuses and incompetence of the Trump administration. Yeah. Well, I think we encountered this years ago when we spoke. You're you're you're a little bit more on the optimistic side than I am.
Uh yes, I hope that we do win the House, but um I find it um I mean I think when they've you know they've gone against this many laws um they're not going to seed power easily and they're trying to you know get control. I mean, you know, Pritsker and Newsome have suggested that the military in the streets is also discourage voting or set up a template for ways to discourage voting and obviously the gerrymandering and obviously now the Dominion voting system and obviously the uh you know kind of like consolidation of media. Um uh but I hope you're right, you know, and obviously if there's a huge sense of the popular will is um on the side of one, you know, the the opposition in this case, uh perhaps that does make a difference. Um where do you think things will be? Uh well, okay, let me ask you another question.
What do you think about the impact of AI on democracy? And have you been tracking what's happening with AI and where that's going and when? Yeah, I think about that a I mean, I'm a former computer scientist. I've written sci-fi about AI. Uh, and the impact of AI on democracy. What would you say in your sci-fi? What was kind of your what what what role did your AI have there? You know, in the sci-fi, I actually I started off in one direction and maybe AI was sort of a villain. Uh, but I actually changed gears and I I wrote the story where the AI had been tormented by humans.
uh and you know the AI was behaving in ways that were not good any for any stretch of the imagination but was a result of its basically torture and torment by humans. Uh I I actually think humans are more of the problem like AI is a tool. I'm not worried about sentient AI. I am worried about AI being used as a toolkit for manipulation and control. And in particular I think um you know as I said like I think social media is tearing us apart. I think social media has helped break uh American democracy. I think it's actually like a a really really big problem. And I see research with AI showing that AI chat bots can be more persuasive than humans.
There's a study done on Reddit. There's a subreddit called change my view. People go up and post, hey, I believe um I believe we should genetically engineer trees to resist blight and release them. Change my view. Then you give points. you upvote the people that are most persuasive. So these researchers from somewhere in Europe, I don't recall, let AI chat bots loose on this channel. They gave them like basic demographic information about the poster and they could show that the AI chatbots got voted up more than humans. They were just better. Now maybe the average Reddit commenter is not a high bar. Uh but the AIS are as the worst now they're ever going to be.
And really, they could have done much more. They could have like, "Daniel, we could, you know, train an an LLM on everything that you've ever said publicly." And there's a lot of that. It could read all your books. It could watch your podcast and so on. And then we could just start to inject them in spaces that you're in, right? Like in groups or whatever. Uh someone that you don't know yet, but start saying interesting things whose whole goal is to persuade you of something. And sure, like you've got an audience. You're a good target. But at what point is it going to be cheap enough that we can spin up 10 AI influencers for every American voter?
Like that's not that far in the future. So that scenario worries me and there's some basic things I think we could do about that. The flip side is right now I actually think AI might be as as a practical matter slightly positive for democracy, believe it or not. And the reason I say that is, you know, I use Twitter a lot and Twitter is, you know, sort of a a a den of scum and villain because I think uh Obi-Wan said about the cantina and Star Wars. Um, but they did this interesting stuff. When you see a tweet, you can reply to it and say at Grock, you know, Grock is XAI, Elon's chatbot.
Uh, is this true what this person is saying? Uh, you can also just hit a Grock button next to any tweet. And Grock, despite Elon's best efforts to make it like anti-woke, is actually like fairly fact-based. And when you do this, like people do this to Elon all the time. Elon will post something inflammatory. The left is the party of political violence. You know, all political violence comes from the left. Some reply to Elon's tweet and say, "At Grock, you know, what fraction of political violence comes from the left versus the right." And Grock will just say the honest truth, which is over history is predominantly the right.
And so I find that interesting. Now, I don't know how much people actually care about facts, and that might be the bigger problem, but if you want to get the facts, right now, AIs are like the best fact checkers we have. And so, I I'm still very concerned about the use of AI for manipulation. And I think we should be funding AI for anti-manipulation, AI defenses against AI. Uh, it's the only way out, I think. Uh, but, you know, I could be wrong. There might be ways that this technology actually if it gets employed well uh can help us preserve our democracy. Nice. Um cool. What you know what what do you sort of um so you're in Seattle still?
I'm in Seattle. Yeah. Are you still polyamorous or no? I'm single at the moment. But honestly I've I've fallen out of interest in polyamory over time. I think I realize that I've always been emotionally monogamous. Yeah. Uh maybe as I get older, like I'm more interested in having like the right partner than anything else. Everything else is negotiable. Got it. Yeah. When I first met you, you had a little bit of a of a cult leader vibe. I think there was the Church of Me. You know, I had a fake cult. I was the mascot of a cult, but it was it was most definitively not an actual cult.
Everybody knew that it was a joke. Everybody in it. Everybody in in the group knew that it was a joke. Occasionally, somebody came by who didn't realize it was a joke, and that was always a little odd. Ah, well, there was that nice sort of uh, you know, humor um, kind of like layer in Birdie Man back then, which I think has sort of gotten lost. It's become a little bit kind of flat, but remember like the Messiah of the Year contest. Yeah. You know, all these little things like that, you know. Um, do you still go to Burning Man or other festivals? You I was I was at Burning Man in 2022.
That's my most recent year. And I go to some other festivals, uh, you know, less than I did in my 20s, I would say. Uh, but they're still like they can be fonts of creativity and places to bond with with really cool people. I think the fact that things like Bernie man usually require you to do a lot of work and work together in a harsh environment is actually one of their most important points. It gets you to know people, know a side of people that you might not get to know otherwise. What uh what kind of ideas do you have for people who are feeling a little bit like they they are feeling overwhelmed, they're feeling lost, they're feeling depressed about what's happening and they don't really know what to do.
That's that's helpful. Yeah. First like take care of your emotional health. Like go outside. It's actually sunny in Seattle right now. Like I'm going to go for a walk. Spend time with friends and family. Like that is actually essential. We can't survive this fight if we don't take care of ourselves. Um, two is use your voice and try to spread things that are both concerning and things that you see as reasons for optimism. It actually it really matters that we keep spirits up. This is going to be a bit of a marathon, not a sprint. We're, you know, Trump's in office, till he's not, and 2028 is is uh still more than three years away.
Uh, three is get involved locally because so much like you're talking about the the Koch brothers network, they really started with state legislators and with school boards and with state attorney generals and solicitors generals. That stuff is how they actually built up uh political power over time. And I think often we're so glued to national politics that we don't think about what's happening at the local level or don't get nearly as involved as we as we could and should be. Uh and then three, like use humor. Like dictators hate being laughed at. And so, you know, we can go to a protest and yell and shout about ICE and so on and that's fine.
Um, but I think it's actually more successful to like make fun of them, to mock them, uh, and to share stories and videos and so on of their abuses and maybe finally like find someone who's not a full-blown MAGA supporter, but maybe flipped, maybe didn't vote last time or uh, voted for Trump once and then not again, and get to know them. get to understand them. It turns out that telling people uh about something isn't really what changes their mind. What makes it possible to change someone's mind is when they feel understood by you. And so the first step if you want to persuade people, which we have to do, is to understand like what motivates them.
Like what's going on? Like what's important to them right now? Not even like what led to you supporting Trump, but like what's important to you? What's going on in your life? Like what are you optimistic about? What are you worried about? Like and so on. And once you understand them, it gives you a language and a framework to talk to them and to start sharing stories and ideas and so on because ultimately like I I hear your skepticism on the 2026 and 2028 elections and I think that's warranted. I think we should be concerned. Uh but there's no other way out that I see. And so it might not be a perfect shot, but it's the shot we have.
And to get there uh we need to motivate people and and specifically on undecideds you know there's a map that goes around any of your your uh your listeners and viewers can find this just search for on Google for like map of if undecided was a candidate or if undecided was a voter what states undecided would have won like 43 states right like didn't vote would have won 43 states so that's the lowest hanging fruit is who are the people that didn't vote I'm actually shocked Yeah, by how so many people that I know are still just dissociated or or detached or not. Um I think it became very popular. I mean I know a lot of people in the sort of you know post spirituality world with like you know sound healing with psychedelics and so on or um yoga. It's like I don't know there's something about all those people where they they just uh they don't think it's they kind of think I think they kind of think they're above it. They think that somehow this is just happening on one plane of consciousness.
It's like a lower plane and therefore since they've reached this higher plane they don't really have to get involved with the Mishagos or or or the sort of the Merc, you know, because it really is like through Merc and they make it, you know, trumpet people make it so incredibly ugly to even open the door. You know, it's like you the horrible racist things with saros and all these these sort of horrible things that he's saying. people just don't want to feel like they're doing that intentionally on many levels, but but yeah, it sort of pushes a lot of people away from even being able to to look at it, you know. Yeah. Um, what what gives you hope or what advice do you have for people?
What do you think are things we can do to try to take the country back? Yeah. Well, I mean, I you know, I know what I would love to see happen. I just don't know how to make it happen. Personally, I'm interested in starting another like media platform years. I've always started magazines. I had a magazine called Reality Sandwich years ago and before that had a literary magazine. I think there could be kind of an answer to the free press uh which could actually just start pretty simply as a substack. So, I've been looking for some funding for that because I feel like there needs to be I you know there needs to be sort of like yeah kind of somewhat different vision than what the Democratic Party is putting out.
Um um and then also I think that what would be very useful be people to coming together in face toface meetups. Um I saw now there's this a couple people on my You Tube who are talking about purple revolution. You know a lot of red people are now recognizing they were betrayed by Trump when it comes to like Epstein and they didn't like vote for the immigrants and the farmers who are you know going bankrupt and so on. So that I think is a great is a great uh it's sort of like amnesty for anybody who backs off and shifts their mind. Not any no reason to mock them or attack them.
Just be like great like that's cool that you had this kind of awakening. Uh one of my big concerns is um the military. I don't know how much you follow Curtis Arvin some more than I'd like to. He actually, you know, basically said that look ultimately it all comes down to the military. If you have control of the military, you can do whatever you want. and we just saw this big meet up uh where they brought all the generals and so on. So, you know, some have said that they were using AI, facial technology, scan technology to then figure out who wasn't, you know, was totally against their program and they're going to weed those people out.
I don't know if that's true or not, but in essence, um I think that's where it's going to come down because if if the military I mean, these guys are have have already broken so many laws that there's no way they're willingly going to let go of power. That would be my perspective. And if the military goes along with that, um, then I think it's time to just get out of the country. I don't I don't think there's anything else you're going to I mean, you know, we they're already talking about giving ICE, um, and then in the next budget. I was like 50 billion. ICE becomes like the ninth largest military in the world.
And these are I'm very upset actually with the Democrats who I think it's right that they shut down the government. They're talking about healthcare, but I don't understand why they just as don't also say this is so everything about this is so unconstitutional and so unamerican to have these masked men picking people up without any ID. Um, you know, holding them. I just saw, you know, Don Lemon did a thing about 66-year-old American citizen, a black man who was like taken out of his home, zip tied, taken to a detention center, didn't know if he was going to get out or, you know, 60 people sharing one toilet. Then finally, mysteriously they just let him go.
So it's like we really don't know what's happening right now. And I I can't believe that the Democratic establishment is not also saying that some kind of limitations on ICE have to be a precondition for ending the government shutdown. Um yeah, I was surprised by that. I think they on the government shutdown tactically they they tried to pick a topic that they thought they could win on with broad support from the voters but it seems so like healthcare is obviously very important but it's all downstream of democracy as if you're really going to shut down the government do it over like the fundamental issues is is my attitude that said they seem to be winning politically so you know what do I know as a strategist I do think you know that week that Trump um had the the talk to the military I think he suffered two important losses and I think that's really important. The Jimmy Kimmel thing was a massive loss for Trump.
It made him look terrible and it made him look weak and it's going to inspire more private sector actors to push back. Uh it also like you know he could have ridden a wave of anger at liberals over Charlie Kirk's killing for you know quite a while but by using it to try to force Kimmel off the air he just like he ruined it. He like it was not a very smart move at all. And I think things like that might be why we saw like uh yesterday, the day before, MIT rejected an offer from Trump to like give them more money if they did a whole bunch of things to suppress speech basically. And so I think the more that private sector actors and before that Harvard had like really pushed back on Trump and sued him.
The more that private sector actors push back, the more the emperor has no close. Uh the second thing is that military briefing I think was a massive L for Trump and for Hexath. I think on the ranking files is my impression uh the in the enlisteds I do think that Trump is quite popular but those officers were not moved. I I got a chance at the end of that week I uh met a recently retired army general and so we had a long conversation about this. I think everyone is asking him now that he's retired, what does he think about this? And his viewpoint was uh that event with the the generals went just as badly as the press portrayed it.
Uh that the military will follow all legal orders and what's legal is a matter of interpretation by the courts. Uh but even though Trump has fired the JAGs, the the judge advocate generals, uh that the military is amply stocked with lawyers and that every senior commander turns to those lawyers and every senior commander and every senior lawyer has thought about a range of scenarios of Trump giving orders and none of them want to follow any legal order. So if you know one of the things I said in my Facebook post was we cannot create an excuse for Trump to validly invoke the insurrection act. And the insurrection act has you know that's the act that allows the military or federalized national guard to be used to put down rebellions and to uh be used as law enforcement. Short of that, at least with what the courts have ruled so far, national guard that are federalized can like protect federal properties and they can provide logistics, but they can't detain people, they can't question people, they can't make arrests, uh they can't do checkpoints, yada yada yada.
Um the insurrection act can be invoked if there's a rebellion, if there's an invasion or and but then what's happening now is not rise that or if the president cannot through ordinary uh courses of law enforcement and so on enforce federal laws. So I think it's actually really key that when we protest that we not use violence that we unfortunately, you know, we can inconvenience ICE. We should photograph them nonstop. We should passively we should build crowds around them in a passive manner, but don't throw rocks. Don't like put hands on them. Nothing like that. Because the last thing we want to do is give Trump an excuse that might work in the courts to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Um, and if we avoid that, like I'm obviously anytime that you're talking about using the military in any domestically in any country, that's like you've crossed the Rubicon. Uh, I'm cautiously optimistic that we can avoid that. But it's going to require some discipline on the left. I mean most of the um journalists I follow who follow that particular stream closely. Uh once again this is slightly pessimistic optimistic um you know distinction are pretty convinced at this point that he is going to do that at some point because of the way he's been talking about it which is the way he always talks about things over time before he actually does them.
Uh like the persecution of his enemies which he's finally getting on to. Yeah. We will see. But I'm really happy to have a discussion with you and catch up and um see you're thriving and doing well supporting. Great to see you. What what are you working on uh you know both you know you mentioned you mentioned you're involved with climate stuff. What about creatively writing another book or um I'm working on an AI short story that deals a bit with totalitarianism. I think the intersection of authoritarian politics and AI is a very scary one. Uh so hopefully that'll be out sometime soon. Uh, how do people find out more about your work if they want to learn more?
Uh, follow me on Twitter, Romez, or go to my website, ro ramzenom. com. Cool. And of course, I forgot to say this as I always do in the beginning, but if you made it to this point, please like, please subscribe to the You Tube channel. And yeah, let's stay in touch. Let's uh hope hopefully we'll um find some collaborative moment uh in the near future. Thanks for having me, Daniel. Good to chat.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.