After Things Podcast

Andrew Mayne, Justin Robert Young, and Brian Brushwood embark on a journey through a variety of topics, starting with a real-world disaster involving a boat crash and a collapsed bridge. They speculate on the implications of tainted fuel and the role of the National Transportation Safety Board in such incidents. The conversation then shifts to the potential for economic and infrastructural disasters, including the hypothetical use of nuclear weapons to disrupt GPS systems. The hosts also discuss the fragility of modern infrastructure and the importance of disaster preparedness. The conversation takes a turn into the realm of technology and security, with a focus on the challenges posed by AI and deepfakes in authenticating identity. They explore the idea of a secure, emergency communication system to verify callers during crises. Finally, the hosts share their picks, including a book recommendation and thoughts on the Netflix adaptation of ‘The Three-Body Problem’, noting its strengths and weaknesses. Picks: Brian Brushwood: ‘Super Communicators’ book Justin Robert Young: ‘The Attention Factory’ book Andrew Mayne: ‘The Three-Body Problem’ on Netflix

The episode opens with a discussion of Boom Supersonic and its attempt to revive commercial supersonic air travel. The hosts talk about Boom's successful test flight of a scaled-down prototype, the plan for the Overture airliner, the role of Japan Airlines, and the history of Concorde, including sonic booms, U.S. restrictions on supersonic flight, and the Concorde's drooping nose and hot exterior. A large middle section focuses on AI as practical tooling: how to prompt ChatGPT and vision models more effectively, how OCR and form-filling could save huge amounts of time, and how Andrew's robot demo uses GPT-4 vision to navigate toward butter in a 3D simulation. The discussion expands into agent-style systems such as Cognition Labs' Devon, AI-assisted research and source gathering, productivity gains in editing and transcription, and the idea that AI is best understood as very powerful software rather than a magical wish box. The final stretch moves through several offbeat stories: a Montana Franken sheep case, a feral hog joke discussion, a toxic cat from a plating factory in Japan, and then a long conversation about Dune: Part Two. On Dune, they debate Paul Atreides' moral ambiguity, Chani's role, prophecy, the Butlerian Jihad, and whether the adaptation captures the complexity and unease of the book. Key topics Commercial supersonic aviation revival: Boom Supersonic is discussed as trying to build a modern supersonic airliner, with a successful prototype test flight, a plan f

The episode opens with Justin describing a Cameo birthday message he received from Kirstie Patterson, the performer associated with the viral Willy’s Chocolate Experience disaster, and the hosts discuss how the incident became internet-famous, the “depressed Oompa Loompa” label, and how Cameo can be a practical way for someone caught in online notoriety to earn money. They also briefly discuss the “unknown” character from the event and the broader weirdness of the production. A major middle section focuses on SpaceX’s Starship test launch, which the hosts describe as a successful suborbital flight that reached space, separation, and orbital speeds even without a landing. From there they move into broader reflections on iteration, feedback loops, AI and robotics progress, the pace of change in the tech world, and the question of how long adoption takes compared with technical feasibility. Key topics Cameo and the Willy’s Chocolate Experience aftermath: The hosts talk about a birthday Cameo from Kirstie Patterson, whom they refer to as the depressed Oompa Loompa, and they discuss how the viral Willy’s Chocolate Experience became a meme, including the badly shoddy production and the branding around the character. Starship’s successful suborbital test launch: They celebrate Starship getting into space, separating, and reaching orbital speeds on a suborbital mission, while noting that booster and ship recovery are still future goals. Iteration, feedback loops, and learning from la

The episode opens with a long discussion of SpaceX test launches and the broader idea that visible failures are part of iterative engineering. Andrew and Brian contrast that with the Space Shuttle program, noting that shuttle design involved practical compromises, unexpected hazards, and a much messier reality than the idealized version often told. They also briefly touch on the value of publicity and storytelling in aerospace, including drone ship landings and fairing recovery attempts. The conversation then shifts to the Apple Vision Pro, which Andrew describes as an impressive demo but a compromised device lacking a compelling everyday use case. After that, the episode moves through several science and tech topics: early nonlinear video editing systems like Edit Droid and Avid, de-extinction efforts around woolly mammoths and proxy mammoths, dinosaur DNA preservation and decay, Europa's oxygen uncertainty, and naturally occurring hydrogen or 'white hydrogen.' The episode ends with picks and recommendations, including The Plasma Channel and Brian's enthusiastic reaction to Dune Part Two. Key topics SpaceX's failure-driven development model: They discuss SpaceX as an example of iterative engineering where failures are visible and expected, rather than hidden. The contrast is drawn against more traditional aerospace development. Shuttle-era engineering compromises and risk: The Space Shuttle is described as an extraordinary but highly compromised system, with issues including

The episode opens with the hosts riffing about recording and editing workflow, including the value of planning for cuts, trusting the edit, and how much polished media depends on invisible post-production. From there, Andrew introduces a preprint about panspermia via cosmic dust, then the conversation shifts to a monkey-raft explanation for how monkeys may have crossed into South America on floating vegetation islands rather than by land bridge. The middle of the episode becomes a broad science-and-cosmology segment in which Andrew leads a tour through the early universe: inflation, quark and hadron epochs, nucleosynthesis, the photon epoch, recombination, cosmic dark ages, structure formation, and the universe's possible heat-death future. The latter half turns to astronomy experiences and tools, including telescope viewing, iTelescope.net, and amateur observing, before closing on entertainment picks and a long discussion of the Glasgow Willy Wonka event, The Wheel of Time, and the live-action One Piece adaptation. Key topics Editing, performance, and planning for the cut: The hosts discuss how recording and editing change the final shape of media, with examples from magic videos, podcasting, demos, Scam School, and Scam Nation. Brian explicitly says to 'trust the edit,' and Andrew emphasizes that creators should plan for future edits instead of trying to capture everything in one take. Panspermia and cosmic dust transfer: Andrew explains a new panspermia idea in which micro

Andrew apologizes to the Weird Things audience for the lack of recent episodes and says the show has still been recording. He explains that the delay is due to changes in how the show is handled on the backend, and says they hope to have episodes out soon. He adds that if listeners can hear this message, the new fix is working. He describes the fix as using AI to handle some of the process and calls it the wave of the future. Key topics Lack of episode releases: Andrew directly apologizes for the absence of episodes and says the show has been recording despite the delay. Backend workflow changes: He says the team has been changing how they do things on the back end, which is presented as the reason for the episode delay. AI-assisted fix: Andrew says the new fix is working if listeners can hear the message and explains that it uses AI to handle some of the process. Picks

The episode opens with casual chatter about a possible Starship launch while the hosts are near Brownsville, followed by a long discussion of major AI announcements from Google and OpenAI. Andrew explains Gemini 1.5's large context window claims and the limits of simply increasing tokens, while the group shifts into a detailed examination of Sora's text-to-video results, including improved realism, physics, camera motion, and remaining failures. They repeatedly return to the role of compute, model scaling, and the economics of AI progress. The latter half of the episode focuses on how AI tools may change creative work and how people should adapt by learning to code, prompt, and experiment rather than resist. The hosts also discuss ChatGPT memory, personalized interactions, and Andrew's experiment turning Sora footage into 3D video for Vision Pro. Near the end, Justin gives a Suno Valentine's Day song generator pick, Brian recommends Star Trek: Lower Decks, and the panel briefly covers Rick and Morty, Dune 2, Madame Web, and speculation that the new Fantastic Four film is set in the 1960s. Key topics Token counts and what context windows enable: Andrew explains tokens, context windows, and why Gemini 1.5's claimed 10 million-token context is significant for reading large documents and answering questions across them. He cautions that retrieval is easier than true reasoning over long inputs. Compute cost as the limiting factor in large-model features: The hosts repeatedly note

The episode opens with a discussion of Google's Gemini Ultra launch and the rebranding of Bard to Gemini. The hosts compare Gemini with ChatGPT on model quality, pricing, integrations, and usefulness for coding and summarization, while also talking about how AI tools are already woven into their workflows for transcripts, show notes, and quick summaries. Brian also describes using AI for a real-world well-and-solar calculation experiment, using photos and measurements to estimate energy use, water flow, and costs. Later, the conversation turns to the joke AI model Goody2, which is framed as an exaggerated parody of overcautious safety behavior because it refuses nearly every prompt. The back half of the episode focuses on Sam Altman and the scale of future AI compute demand, including a reported $7 trillion chip effort, followed by a live discussion of Andrew's Apple Vision Pro demo, its comfort and display tradeoffs, security concerns about deepfakes, the promise of lighter AR glasses, and a round of media picks including The Greatest Night in Pop and In Deep Geek. Key topics Gemini vs. ChatGPT feature comparison: The hosts compare Google's Gemini Ultra with ChatGPT in terms of model quality, coding utility, pricing, app ecosystem, and integrations like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and search defaults. AI as a practical assistant for technical and household tasks: Brian's well/solar example shows AI being used for real-world estimation, electricity cost calculations, and determining

Andrew and Brian start with travel and recovery talk: Brian describes being knocked out by illness and bad sleep, while Andrew explains returning from a three-week trip to India and how he managed jet lag by staying awake through the long flight. Andrew also says he was careful about water and food after getting sick on a prior trip, and that he brought antibiotics with him via an online doctor visit so he could treat a likely bacterial illness quickly when it hit. The episode spends a long stretch on Andrew's India trip, including his wife's cousin's wedding events, a reception hosted by in-laws, local McDonald's adaptations, the India-Pakistan border ceremony near Amritsar, and a detailed visit to the Golden Temple. From there the conversation broadens into Sikh identity and customs, Sikh wartime history, Indian film culture, and then into speculative futurism: Mars terraforming, the limits of giant climate projects, the Icon of the Seas as evidence of human scale, and a broader optimism about future abundance, AI, and automation. Key topics Jet lag, sleep loss, and travel recovery: Brian describes severe sleep disruption from illness and ADHD-related overstimulation. Andrew explains using deliberate sleep deprivation on the flight to India to avoid jet lag and says he cleared his calendar after returning. Travel illness prevention and antibiotics: Andrew says he used Plush Care to get an advance consultation and antibiotics for travel, after prior food poisoning in India.

The episode opens with the hosts greeting each other for 2024 and then moving into a discussion of older dystopian science fiction that reflected the anxieties of its era. They talk about Logan's Run, Make Room, Make Room/Soylent Green, Clockwork Orange, and Silent Running as stories shaped by fears about population growth, pollution, youth violence, and social instability, before widening the conversation into how people now think about depopulation, fertility decline, and whether modern cynicism is distorting judgments about the present and the past. From there, the episode moves through a 2024 predictions segment covering Artemis, Starship, the presidential election, and the broader role of AI and robotics. The hosts also discuss how chat-based AI is already useful in daily life, debate what counts as AGI and how the Turing test is commonly misunderstood, then finish with reactions to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and Rebel Moon before ending on recommendations for Fargo, Lower Decks, A Clockwork Orange, and The OA. Key topics 1970s dystopian fiction as a response to overpopulation and environmental anxiety: The hosts connect Logan's Run, Make Room, Make Room/Soylent Green, Clockwork Orange, and Silent Running to concerns about population growth, pollution, young people, and societal breakdown. The American vs. English endings of A Clockwork Orange: Brian explains the different endings, saying the English version includes a redemption arc while the American version is darker