After Things Podcast

The episode opens with banter about meme culture and shared cultural shorthand, then moves into Andrew's discussion of the Soviet Venus probe and the space race. The hosts connect early space ambitions to Cold War ideology, Soviet engineering strengths, and why some technologies and missions were dismissed before they worked. A long middle section focuses on speculative transport ideas and then COVID strategy, including herd immunity, excess-death comparisons, and differing roles for public-health officials versus scientific consensus. The latter half turns to Andrew Mayne's OpenAI discussion of Codex, embeddings, large language model limitations and safety, and creative uses like code generation, story completion, and custom training. The episode closes with the hosts' media picks and reactions to Our Flag Means Death, Severance, Frequency, and Legion. Key topics Memes as shared cultural shorthand: The opening conversation compares meme culture to a Star Trek metaphor-speaking alien and notes how people now