Are We Actually Doomed? A Reno Perspective on Data Centers and the AI Panic Cycle Via A Podcast

There's a new podcast making the rounds that I think deserves your attention — especially if you live here in northern Nevada, where the debates about data centers and artificial intelligence aren't just abstract think-pieces. They're Reno City Council meetings. They're water rights discussions. They're conversations happening at the bar, the coffee shop, and the neighborhood association. They're rally participants carrying signs about data centers and water at the proposed CENTRA Keystone Data Center, here in Reno, Nevada.

Are We Doomed? is a new weekly series created and hosted by award-winning journalist Ben Bradford — the same person behind the acclaimed podcast Landslide — and it takes on a deceptively simple question: are we, in fact, doomed?

The answer, it turns out, is more interesting than either "yes" or "no."

Each episode investigates a different existential threat, helping listeners separate genuine dangers from wildly over-hyped fears — covering everything from nuclear escalation to what bananas, of all things, can teach us about survival. Upcoming episodes will tackle whether we're repeating the fall of Rome, explore AI as an existential risk, and — perhaps most usefully — look at major catastrophes that were confidently predicted and simply never happened. That last one feels especially relevant right now.

I've Heard This Before

I'm, ahem!, old enough to remember when the internet was going to destroy civil society. When email would kill human connection. When e-commerce would hollow out every community in America. Some of those fears had real merit — the hollowing out of main streets is genuine, and the attention economy has done real damage. But civilization? Still here. Humans still mostly muddle through.

Now the warnings have shifted to AI and data centers. And living in Reno, we're not watching this from a distance. We're in it. The warehouse-scale computing facilities that have sprouted up in the area represent both potential economic opportunity and legitimate questions about energy, water, and what kind of community we want to be. The AI conversation isn't hypothetical here — everywhere you look or listen right now.

So when a podcast comes along that's willing to sit with the complexity rather than hand you a tidy verdict, I pay attention.

The Antidote to Tribal Shouting

What Are We Doomed? does well — and what I think we badly need right now — is restore some historical perspective and context to these conversations. The show combines narrative storytelling with interviews from scientists, historians, journalists, and others, and features recurring segments like "The Doom Meter," which ranks each threat's actual severity, and "Are We Doomed Solves It," where guests attempt to eliminate a global risk in a single conversation.

That framing matters. Not because the threats aren't real — some of them really are — but because our ability to respond to them depends entirely on whether we can think clearly about them. And right now, on topics like AI, we're not doing a great job of that. The conversation has collapsed into two camps: the techno-utopians who think AI will solve everything, and the doomsayers who think it will end everything. Both camps are loud. Both are mostly talking past each other. They're allowing emotionally charged responses to frame their thinking.

Bradford himself puts it plainly: "There are real threats facing our species. I'm fascinated by how we as individuals, a nation, and as a species prioritize them — and how we've made it this far." That last clause is the key one. We have made it this far. That's not naivety — it's data.

What This Means for Reno

The data center and AI debates unfolding here aren't unique to us, but we're living them in a particularly concentrated way. And the temptation — on all sides — is to stake out a position and dig in. Point fingers. Either the economic development is an unqualified win, or it's an environmental disaster. Either AI is going to transform education and healthcare for the better, or it's going to eliminate jobs and surveil us into submission. The more honest answer is: probably some of both, in ways we can't fully predict, just like every major technological shift before it.

What Are We Doomed? invites us to do is take a breath before we retreat to our corners. To ask what the historical record actually shows. To notice that humanity has a surprisingly decent track record of navigating its own worst inventions — not perfectly, not without real casualties, but better than the doomsayers usually predict.

That's not complacency. That's the precondition for getting together, having face to face conversations and actually doing something useful.

Give It a Listen

If you're engaged in any of the conversations happening in this community right now — about development, technology, the economy, the environment — I think Are We Doomed? is worth your time. Not because it'll tell you what to think, but because it models how to think: carefully, historically, and with a little more curiosity than fear. To understand that context can be crucial. And if nothing else, you'll come away with a genuinely interesting story about bananas.

Are We Doomed? is available wherever you get your podcasts.