Breaking The Doom Scroll

Breaking The Doom Scroll

From Break by Fallthrough Media

January 10, 2026 · 32 min · Episode 23

About this episode

Matt and Kris discuss AI doomerism, societal issues, and the Verbund principle in this episode of Break.

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. Enjoying the aftershow? Let us know on social media! If you prefer to watch instead of just listen, head over to YouTube where you watch this episode of Break! 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…

People in this episode

Host: Matt

Guest: Kris

Topics covered

  • AI doomerism
  • mental health
  • historical perspective
  • societal problems
  • logistics
  • Verbund principle
  • file system project

Keywords

  • AI doomerism
  • mental health
  • historical perspective
  • societal problems
  • logistics
  • Verbund principle
  • file system

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BASF

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