Infinite Loops

Chelsea Follett joins Infinite Loops to explain why the "good old days" were far darker than most people imagine — and why progress should never be taken for granted.
Chelsea is the managing editor of Human Progress and author of Centers of Progress and the forthcoming The Grim Old Days. We discuss why humans are so drawn to nostalgia, what life was really like in the preindustrial past, why doomsday predictions keep failing, and how freedom, innovation, and open inquiry helped create the modern world.

Important Links:
Learn More about Chelsea's upcoming book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Grim-Old-Days
Read more of Chelsea's Human Progress work here: https://humanprogress.org/authors/chelsea-follett

Mykhailo Marynenko joins Infinite Loops for for a fascinating conversation about the future of AI, creative tools, privacy, and data ownership. 
From growing up in his father's phone repair shop in Ukraine to building experimental AI systems today, Mykhailo has spent his life taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and rebuilding them in unexpected ways. 
We explore how AI can help creators without replacing them, why privacy and data ownership matter, and what it means to design tools that give people more control over complex information.

Important Links

More about Misha: https://linktr.ee/0x77dev?utm_medium=mykhailo.link

On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden's world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after.

Two years and three months later, Danielle joins Infinite Loops to discuss her luminous memoir, Dispatches from Grief, which unflinchingly traces the strange afterlife of grief with precision, restraint, and unexpected humor.

This conversation explores what grief really feels like. With extraordinary honesty and grace, Danielle shares the physical pain, the loneliness of loss, and the slow work of carrying her daughter's memory forward. 

Dispatches from Grief is out now: Infinite Books | Amazon

Danielle's Substack: The Femsplainers With Danielle Crittenden

Saloni Dattani, author of the Scientific Discovery Substack and founding editor of Works in Progress magazine, joins Infinite Loops to discuss why medical innovation is often much slower than it needs to be.

We explore why so much research still begins in animal models, how poor data distorts our understanding of disease, why clinical trials are one of the biggest bottlenecks in medicine, and how better systems could help promising treatments reach patients faster.

Important Links:

Read more from Saloni here: https://worksinprogress.co/our-authors/saloni-dattani

And here: https://substack.com/@salonium

And listen to Saloni's podcast "Hard Drugs" here: https://harddrugs.worksinprogress.co/

Why has America become so bad at building housing, infrastructure, and major projects?

Brian Potter, author of The Origins of Efficiency and writer of Construction Physics, explains why prefab housing keeps failing and why there are no easy fixes to America's building problem. We discuss Katerra, California's anti-growth turn, and the deeper logic behind local opposition to growth: concentrated harms and diffuse benefits.

Important Links:

Read Brian's newsletter Construction Physics here: https://www.construction-physics.com/

Read Brian's book The Origins of Efficiency here: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency

Learn more about Brian here: https://ifp.org/author/brian-potter