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After Things Podcast

Starlink Expansion, Plague Fears, And AI’s Physical Future

Oct 11, 2026

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About this episode

Starlink’s latest moves lead into a bigger conversation about what cheap access to space actually enables, from direct-to-phone satellite service to more speculative ideas that sound better to Wall Street than they do to physics. Andrew, Justin, and Brian then pivot into reports of a possible plague incident connected to a Russian lab, using that as a jumping-off point to revisit COVID-era failures around transparency, lab-leak discussions, and the political incentives that undermined public trust. The second half shifts toward AI’s accelerating impact on science and daily life, including machine-generated math proofs, the implications for cryptography, and how tools like Codex can already…