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KB Kris Brandow Kris Brandow Works on Go tooling and hosts Fallthrough, a podcast for Go developers that picked up after Go Time ended.

“Anybody that investigates airline crashes for a living is going to have a distorted view of reality, where they think airplane crashes are much more frequent than they actually are… I think this is also what's happening to people working at these frontier labs.”

Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026

“Anybody that investigates airline crashes for a living is going to have a distorted view of reality, where they think airplane crashes are much more frequent than they actually are… I think this is also what's happening to people working at these frontier labs.” — Kris Brandow, Fallthrough

Context

Brandow and Dylan Bourque had been pulling apart claims like 'this percentage of our code was written by Claude' — statements they say put words on paper without saying anything. He extends the point to AI extinction predictions: people inside the labs marinate in this material daily, which warps how likely any of it feels. Earlier in the episode he argued that the people operating deployed models, not the researchers, are the ones worth listening to.

Transcript

Fallthrough Around 51:08 into the episode
Kris Brandow

Yeah. It's, it's a classic form of laundering one's argument where it's like

Dylan Bourque

that they all have a little, every statement has a little asterisk at the end with the small print down at the bottom that no one looks at.

Kris Brandow

Yeah, which is like, I think, you know, anybody that works at one of these labs has a kind of their mind warped a bit, has a distortion, a distorted view of reality because they are working in the middle of this thing. It's like, it's also coming up from like kind of one of the conversations I was having with ChatGPT, where it's like, if you're someone that investigates airline crashes, like airplane incidents crashes, like, and that's your job, you're going to have a distorted view of reality where you think that airline, like airplane crashes are much more frequent than they are, say, compared to, say, car crashes, which are by like, I think, two orders of magnitude like more likely to happen. Yeah. And so it's like, even if you know it's still like less likely, you still think it's more likely than it actually is because your localized experience is, you see this all the time. You see this every day because that's the environment you live in. And I think this is also what's happening to people that are working at these frontier labs. They…

Dylan Bourque

Yeah. The never-ending challenge of not attaching your personal wealth, your personal worth to the thing that you built.

Kris Brandow

Yeah. And I think that that's like there's people are really, there's a lot of fear out there now, especially with these stupid, again, really silly takes by people jumping into the consciousness of the rest of society without that right context, right? Even, and I will say, like, some of this is…

Dylan Bourque

On the on the journalist side, there's the dopamine loop. If I put it out there with a sensational headline and I get views and clicks and people react to it and now I'm popular and they're, it's, it's difficult for humans to force themselves out of that dopamine loop and be rational and say, hey…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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