The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
Episodes
78 episodes
78: Islands in the Stream
This week we are discussing the recent furor over the Jeffrey Epstein case which has begun to surface divisions within the MAGA movement. We go over the actual history of the prosecutions of Epstein and Maxwell, look at the various ways Trump s...
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Season 1
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Episode 78
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52:40
77: How Many Ways To Get What You Want?
This week we are discussing the Biblical Antichrist. What does the New Testament have to say about this ominous figure? Why do some Christians maintain his return is a necessary precondition for the so-called "second coming" of Jesus Christ? Wh...
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Season 1
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Episode 77
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56:47
76: I Won't Forget to Put Roses on Your Grave
This week we are discussing Edgar Wright's zombie comedy about the mundanity of day to day life under late capitalism, Shaun of the Dead. Featuring star turns for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the movie examines the question of how t...
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Season 1
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Episode 76
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44:51
75: The Days Are Long And the Nights Will Throw You Away
For our 75th episode spectacular, we are discussing 28 Days Later, the 2002 film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland that reinvigorated the zombie movie for the 2000s and launched a franchise that has been back in ...
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Season 1
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Episode 75
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47:20
74: Mickey Mouse Has Grown Up A Cow
This week we are talking about billionaires and what makes them different than the rest of us. Why do they put so much stock into utopian fantasies of human salvation on Mars? Who do they believe Artificial General Intelligence will solve all o...
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Season 1
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Episode 74
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53:59
73: They're Programmed To Destroy Us
This week we are discussing the introductory miniseries of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica as a kind of "culmination" of our recent robot/AI-themed episodes. For once we both really like the show, and we dissect how it deals wit...
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Season 1
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Episode 73
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55:03
72: But Are "Friends" Electric?
This week we are continuing our suite of robot themed episodes by discussing the play that originated the word, R.U.R. by Karel Čapek which was first written in 1920. Derived from a Czech term meaning "serf" or "worker," these robots a...
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Season 1
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Episode 72
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56:30
71: We Are Programmed Just to Do Anything You Want Us To
This week we are talking about robots. Where did they come from? What are they? Are they really going to replace all human workers? We get into the history of these machines, while looking at the implications for them, should they be paired wit...
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Season 1
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Episode 71
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57:44
70: Bring Me A Dream
This week we are discussing E.T.A. Hoffman's short story, The Sandman, which presciently anticipates some potential psychological consequences of a too-deep dependence on artificial beings for companionship, while also pointing to...
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Season 1
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Episode 70
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1:01:08
69: In This Everlasting Twilight
This week we are talking about the growth of emotional dependency on AI as programs like ChatGPT become more ubiquitous and more sophisticated. We recognize that this has the potential to be, in a sense, a double apocalypse, as the rise of AI t...
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Season 1
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Episode 69
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52:58
68: Round and Round and Round We Spin
This week we are discussing Rian Johnson's 2012 film Looper, a time travel movie that (perhaps accurately) predicts a bleak future where class stratification and rampant criminality have flourished unchecked. Time travel has been ...
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Season 1
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Episode 68
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44:17
67: You Can Never Break the Chain
This week we are talking about global supply chains and how they might be stretched, perhaps to the breaking point, if the Trump tariffs are allowed to take effect. We revisit the moment when many of us were first introduced to the idea of a su...
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Season 1
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Episode 67
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46:31
66: I Cursed the Gloom that Set Upon Us
This week we are discussing Ridley Scott's 1982 classic sci-fi noir Blade Runner. While we praise the visual depiction of a post-nuclear-war American city, we both found the plot somewhat difficult to hook into, so to speak. While...
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Season 1
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Episode 66
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47:32
65: Across the Great Divide
This week we are discussing psychics, specifically psychic medium John Edward of Crossing Over with John Edward. This program which ran from 2001 to 2004 purported to connect living people to their dead relatives by means of Edwar...
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Season 1
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Episode 65
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54:40
64: A Cyclops Walks Across the Sky
This week we are discussing two recent albums by mainstays of 2000s era indie rock that deal directly and obliquely with climate change, namely Mount Eerie's 2024 release Night Palace and Dirty Projectors/David Longstreth/s t a r ...
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Season 1
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Episode 64
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1:07:10
63: Take My Advice You'd Be Better Off Dead
This week we are looking at Train to Busan, a 2016 film directed by Yeon Sang-ho. It's a zombie apocalypse movie set on a train moving from the South Korean capital of Seoul to the southern city of Busan. We get into the film's hi...
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Season 1
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Episode 63
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55:07
62: A Dry Voice Comes from a Stingy Heart
This week we're are discussing Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's recent book Abundance. This text offers a new vision of the future for the Democratic Party to center as it attempts to claw back power, ignoring for the most part the larg...
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Season 1
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Episode 62
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58:19
61: One Step from the Great Beyond
We're talking about the rise and fall of Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic this week, following up on our previous episode. We've got anecdotes about Caesar weeping before statues, his run in with pirates, his war against Vercinge...
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Season 1
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Episode 61
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1:05:34
60: We're Together Dead and Lonely
This week we're discussing the run up to the final collapse of the Roman Republic, charting such characters as Scipio Aemelianus, the Gracchi Brothers, Gaius Marius, and Sulla and attempting to map them and their historical circumstances onto s...
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Season 1
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Episode 60
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1:02:18
59: A Man of Wealth and Taste
This week we are diving into the weird world of Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., the newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services in the second Trump administration. We go over his history of environmental activism and chart how this morp...
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Season 1
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Episode 59
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1:10:03
58: Where Strangers are as Family and Loneliness Can't Hide
This week we are discussing Todd Haynes's film Safe (1995). We get into how the movie explores the creeping sense of meaning being sapped out of suburban life in the late 1980s, focusing on the ways this parallels dilemmas th...
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Season 1
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Episode 58
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59:56
57: A Stronger Loving World to Die In
This week we are tackling one of Stu's all-time favorite comics, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen. We go through the main characters and discuss the apocalyptic ramifications of this extremely well-wrought tale of a society ...
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Season 1
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Episode 57
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58:46
56: As Parasites Might in your Blood
This week we are discussing all things CANADA! Specifically, why does President Trump claim it is a "great contender" to become the 51st state? What is it about the US's northern neighbor that is so attractive to the would-be empire builder pre...
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Season 1
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Episode 56
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53:57
55: The Ocean at your Door
This week we are joined by comedian, actress and writer Maggie Crane to discuss Bo Burnham's divisive comedy special Inside from 2021. We get into some of the critiques of the special, while also noting the things about it which w...
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Season 1
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Episode 55
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56:25
54: The Birds of Leaving Call to Us
This week we're talking about the first season of the hit Apple TV+ show Severance. We examine the ways the show functions as a reflection of our current, corporation-dominated world, exploring questions of work/life balance as we...
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Season 1
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Episode 54
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1:03:04
