John and Steve ask: Why do pessimists always sound smart but optimists make money? How did one chemical process (Haber-Bosch) enable half of humanity to exist? Why is playing whack-a-mole with progress actually a good sign?

Topics:

• Solutionism: William Crooks, Paul Ehrlich & the false dichotomy of optimism vs. pessimism
• The Haber-Bosch process: Why a third of humanity owes their existence to ammonia synthesis
• France's nuclear triumph: When electricity prices dropped to zero and civilizational capacity pays off
• AI coding reality check: Hundreds of hours of vibe coding, the bug whack-a-mole problem, and what actually works in finance
• Safety as progress: From Underwriters Laboratories to the FDA, why solutions create new problems
• Why doesn't this exist yet: Colic research, liquid biopsies, and the false positive cascade in cancer screening

Subscribe for more deep dives into technology and human progress.

(0:00): Opening

(2:30): What happened this week

(2:30): GPT 5.2

(7:20): Specialisation of AI Models

(12:30): AI Enterprise Use Cases

(20:50): Maximising LLM value

(24:00): Free Energy in France

(31:00): Crawford's Techno-Humanist Manifesto - Solutionism, Part 1

(55:00): Solutionism, Part 2

(1:12:00): Why doesn't this exist yet?