Breaking The Doom Scroll

Welcome back to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! In this episode, Matt gets real about how AI doomerism on social media got to him over the holidays and the mental reset that pulled him out of it. Kris offers some historical perspective: the "kids these days" argument is thousands of years old, and things aren't actually worse than before, we're just living through it now. They riff on why people think in absolutes (e.g. BEVs vs. cars, capitalism vs. socialism), and land on a thesis: most of society's problems aren't ideological, they're logistical. The conversation wraps with BASF's Verbund principle (turning byproducts into use inputs) and how Kris is applying that thinking to some "useless" SMR drives that might just become a file system project.

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Thanks for tuning in and happy listening!

Chapters:

• Prologue (00:00:00)
• Chapter 1: New Year's Resolution Recycling (00:01:05)
• Chapter 2: AI Doomerism & Mental Health (00:02:51)
• Chapter 3: Historical Perspective: It's Not Worse Than Before (00:05:43)
• Chapter 4: Comfortable Paths in Thinking (00:11:29)
• Chapter 5: The BEV Utopia Problem (00:12:41)
• Chapter 6: Public Transit & Absolutism (00:16:01)
• Chapter 7: Capitalism Isn't the Problem, Logistics Is (00:19:04)
• Chapter 8: The Verbund Principle (00:26:36)
• Chapter 9: SMR Drives & Building a File System (00:28:10)
• Epilogue (00:30:56)

Hosts

• Kris Brandow - Host
• Matthew Sanabria - Host

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