After Things Podcast

The episode opens with a long discussion of the Department of Energy report and other government assessments about COVID origins. The hosts say they do not know where COVID came from, but argue that lab-leak possibilities should not have been dismissed, and they criticize the shutdown of discussion on social media and within parts of the scientific community. The conversation widens into concerns about polarization, conflicts of interest, undisclosed funding, and the need for a serious investigation into how the origins question was handled. The show then moves through a set of lighter and more varied topics, including a Crew Dragon docking update, a conversation about SpaceX launch cadence, and a detailed discussion of Brightline rail fatalities and safety design in Florida. Later segments cover a story about video games for dogs, a creepy Reddit post about a house hidden inside an attic, and a Massachusetts school crawl space that may have concealed a crypto-mining setup. The episode ends with the usual pic

Rovio announced a surprising change to one of their flagship games: they’re trying to remove it! Value propositions and how difficult it is to change directions once your project is out. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” Picks: Justin: TV Funhouse – Disney Vault Brian: The Ur-Quan Masters Bryce: Schafpudel’s guide to Petz

The episode opens with a discussion of an Embraer patent application for an aircraft-seat system that scans passengers' faces, analyzes facial expressions, and may offer non-invasive transcranial stimulation. The hosts first frame it as a possible customer-satisfaction or unruly-passenger tool, then gradually settle on the idea that it could function as a passenger amenity for calming or helping people relax during flights, while also joking about the broader discomfort of air travel and the fantasy of skipping the flight entirely. A large middle section turns to AI-assisted communication. The hosts discuss Samsung's Bixby voice-cloning feature, then broaden into a near-future vision where calls, texts, voicemail, FaceTime, car play, and automated summaries all blur together. Later, they shift to media authenticity and trust, arguing that AI, image processing, and altered video will force society to rely on some kind of certification or verification system for human identity and evidence. Key topics AI-based

Adapting and adaptability. How do you balance quality and quantity while taking advantage of new spaces? Effort in a world where effort gets more and more efficient. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” Picks: Andrew: Super Mario Odyssey Brian: Cunk on Earth Bryce: Poker Face

The episode opens with Andrew talking about how his work at OpenAI makes him more cautious about commenting on outside stories, then moves into a run of stories about elaborate pranks and public misdirection. Andrew recounts two balloon-based stunts from his past: putting a motorcycle inside a balloon for an A&E segment and, earlier, faking a UFO over a Florida school field with a lit balloon, which drew curious bystanders, radio calls, and a sheriff's helicopter before they fled and hid. The conversation then shifts to the long-running Hollandale, Florida outhouse prank, with the hosts reading a news account about an outhouse dropped at the post office every Halloween for years, sometimes in a custom White House shape. From there they discuss what makes a prank feel like performance art, compare old high-effort deception to modern prank videos, and talk about travel as an experience, including a British Rail tavern car and United's former men-only Chicago Executive flight. Later the episode covers a World Wa

Health talk today! Apps we like and handling cravings. Diet and exercise stories from *not-professionals* about getting started and staying regular. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” Picks: Andrew: Apple Watch Ultra Bryce: JEFIT and Lose It!

The episode opens with a long discussion of Nothing Forever, the AI-generated Twitch stream that riffs on Seinfeld with continuous, blocky, machine-generated sitcom scenes. The hosts treat it as a proof-of-concept for generative entertainment, debating how Twitch, rough visual quality, and the novelty of endless content help the project work, while also speculating about future AI media that could be personalized, passive, or built for background viewing. Later, the conversation shifts to the Chinese surveillance balloon reported over Montana and the intelligence implications around it. The hosts argue it looked more like a spy platform than a weather balloon, then use that as a springboard into broader espionage talk: FBI/CIA mole cases, Robert Hanssen, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, Kevin Mallory, Chinese recruitment methods, Soviet influence operations, and the limits of counterintelligence in an open society. The episode closes with a discussion of mystery writing and recommendations for several movies and shows,

A simple way to add some color to any to-do workflow and the thorny(?) side of the emoji-emoticon war. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” Picks: Andrew: Slow Horses Brian: You Have the Right to Remain Innocent from James Duane Bryce: Things app

The episode opens with casual banter and then moves into a long discussion of robots, starting with Transformers versus GoBots, the history of the toy lines, and what made Transformers feel more iconic. The hosts connect that idea to broader robot history, including Gundam, Robotech, the golem, and the origin of the word robot, while also joking about childhood fantasies of building robot companions and robot girls. Later segments cover a shape-shifting magnetic robot demo from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with the hosts debating how much of the effect comes from external magnets, heating, and phase changes versus anything autonomous. The episode then shifts into a discussion of a VR e-reader form factor, followed by several recommendations: Wave Twisters, Poker Face, Midnight Suns, and Howard Mortman's C-SPAN-related podcast The Weekly. The closing stretch centers on transparency and whether C-SPAN should have more camera access in Congress, with the panel arguing strongly in favor of greater public

How moving can affect the creative process. Brian and Justin talk about the newly-revealed topic of World’s Greatest Con season 3 and how they’ve got an exclusive new look at the story that’s never been told before. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” PICKS: Andrew: Coffeezilla on YouTube Justin: The Last of Us Brian: Marvel Snap Bryce: The Last of Us

The episode centers on Andrew Mayne explaining his role at OpenAI and the sudden breakout of ChatGPT. He says he works on the communications team helping explain the company’s technology, and the panel discusses how ChatGPT started as a research preview, gained huge adoption quickly, and changed AI from a theoretical or magical idea into a practical tool people can try for themselves (L25, L69, L73, L81, L97, L125). A substantial portion of the conversation is technical and reflective: they cover prompt writing, hallucinations, safety warnings, fine-tuning, context windows, and how larger models may enable more personalized or useful applications. Later, the show moves to broader questions about training data, AI agency and motivation, human meaning in art, and how technology shifts create new creative and business opportunities; the episode then closes with picks for Avatar 2, The Last of Us, Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!, and Wednesday (L61, L125, L169, L237, L255, L337, L357, L377, L389, L429, L445). Key to

Bryce opens with a short update episode covering a science story about male wasps: researchers at Kobe University found that males of a specific species can use spikes near their genitalia to defend themselves, even though they do not have stingers like female wasps. He compares survival rates in predator tests and notes that male wasps with removed genitalia did not survive, while pond frogs ate all wasps tested. The episode also features Refusion, a machine-learning music system that generates audio from spectrograms paired with text labels, and explains that the system warps the spectrogram in real time to avoid static looping. Bryce then plays Martian audio, highlighting the first recorded sound of a dust devil on Mars from Perseverance’s SuperCam microphone, and briefly revisits earlier Mars recordings such as wind, rover driving, the Ingenuity helicopter, and laser zaps. Key topics Male wasp defensive anatomy: Bryce describes a study in which male wasps of a specific species use spikes near their genita

A new app has been making waves in the image generation space with “magic avatars.” We talk about the experience of a pay AI art bot and what we think it could do to impact human artists and art. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.”

The episode opens with a joke-heavy run of stories, including Bryce recounting a TikTok about Waffle House grill cooks earning shirts for hitting profit milestones, then a segment about Steve Jobs' pre-worn Birkenstock sandals selling at auction for about $218,750. The hosts riff on the sandals' smell, rarity, and the value of Steve Jobs memorabilia, and briefly detour into jokes about Steve Wozniak, Segway scooters, and what kinds of Jobs-related items might command higher prices. The middle of the episode covers a ChatGPT test on the AP Computer Science A exam, where Bryce explains that the model scored 32 out of 36 and missed some visual or poorly worded elements. That leads into a broader discussion of AI's growing capabilities, followed by a long segment on Disney research's face-aging/de-aging neural network and speculative uses for film, TV, and even recasting or upcycling older media. The latter half of the episode shifts into word-of-the-year chatter, with the hosts debating 'gaslighting,' 'metaverse

We’re in holiday mode as we talk about roosters, the etymology of adages, and where we think the future of social networks will go. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.”

The episode opens with a long discussion of the Artemis launch. The hosts joke about the mission's cost, but also credit the engineers and acknowledge that the rocket successfully reached space. They criticize the program as a politically shaped, expensive system, while still treating the launch as an accomplishment for the people who built it. A major portion of the episode is devoted to Twitter and the current wave of people leaving the platform. The panel debates whether the departures are political or simply a reaction to the site becoming chaotic, and they compare Twitter with alternatives such as RSS, Reddit, and Discord. The conversation emphasizes Twitter's role as a unique real-time community and news source, even as the hosts discuss its flaws and the likelihood that other platforms will eventually fill some of its role. Key topics NASA bureaucracy versus engineering execution: The hosts separate the quality of the Artemis engineers from the political and bureaucratic decision-making that shaped the

The Modern Rogue and Scam Nation short-form video experiment continues on and to rousing success. What lessons have we learned from over a month of making Tiktoks and YouTube Shorts? Alphabet basically owns the internet, but is it being a good steward? Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.” Picks: Brian: Twitter Bryce: Things app

The episode opens with a long discussion of the FTX collapse and broader crypto trust issues. The hosts talk about insolvency, Alameda/FTX entanglements, money disappearing overnight, regulation, and whether crypto behaves like a frontier market where scams and boom-bust cycles are common. They also compare crypto to other speculative or trust-based ecosystems and note the difficulty of evaluating it with limited long-term data. The conversation then moves through several science-and-technology topics, including a speculative fusion propulsion startup tied to Alan Stern, a History Channel Bermuda Triangle special that found Space Shuttle Challenger debris, and a wider reflection on how new ideas and discoveries are often dismissed at first. Later segments cover lab-grown blood, Tesla as a market-subsidizing EV pioneer, risky early eye surgery and the path from RK to LASIK, and then end with media recommendations and fandom chatter about Dark Side of the Ring and Andor. Key topics FTX collapse and crypto trust

A (final?) update on Structured and the benefits of hitting the hay punctually. Send your project questions/ideas to neshcom@gmail.com, subject line “After Things.”

The episode opens with Halloween talk: Bryce asks why roads in Wyandotte, Michigan were closed for trick-or-treating, and the hosts riff on teenagers cleaning out the candy. Justin explains his neighborhood plan to give out full-size bars, both to get the candy out of the house and to build a good reputation where they live (L21-L23, L41-L45, L49-L53, L59-L69, L83-L85, L95-L97). From there the conversation moves through a Wyandotte cockroach-infested vacant house that led to three city blocks being closed, plus a long pest-comedy tangent about roaches, recycling jokes, and an improvised hypothetical about helping a friend who is being wrongfully evicted. That turns into a ghost/knight distraction bit and then into a real news item about a Massachusetts woman accused of using bees against deputies during an eviction, before the episode shifts to science stories about NASA's Lucy spacecraft photographing Earth and the Moon, an aye-aye lemur apparently picking its nose with its long finger, and a Mars impact cra