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
84 episodes
84: A Brief History of the Afterlife Five The Vedic Religion
In the final installment (for now) of our afterlife miniseries, we are considering the ancient Vedic Religion, the ancestor of modern Hinduism which arose in northwestern India in the second millennium BCE. We talk about the idea of being reinc...
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Season 1
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Episode 84
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48:06
83: A Brief History of the Afterlife Four Ancient Egypt
Moving in a parallel direction to our last topic, we are going over the afterlife beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians this week, touching on mummification, the pyramid texts, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the elusive Field of Reeds. We compar...
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Season 1
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Episode 83
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50:00
82: A Brief History of the Afterlife Three
It's part three of our foray into the history of the afterlife, this time with a focus on Ancient Mesopotamia and the legendary Epic of Gilgamesh. We go over the conception of the afterlife presented in the poem, which is very egalitarian if no...
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Season 1
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Episode 82
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49:15
81: A Brief History of the Afterlife Two
In the second installment of our afterlife miniseries we delve into the prehistoric realms, discussing the earliest evidence we have for some kind of a belief in the afterlife in prehistoric, neolithic peoples. We also consider the Neanderthal ...
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Season 1
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Episode 81
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51:59
80: A Brief History of the Afterlife One
This week we are deviating from our normal subject matter slightly in covering Albert Brooks's wonderful 1991 film Defending Your Life as a way of introducing the miniseries we'll be running for the next month. The afterlife seems like...
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Season 1
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Episode 80
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53:24
79: I Still Dream of Orgonon
This week we are discussing right-wing paranoia about weather control and how it is being used as a comforting belief that enables one to evade accepting the reality of human influenced climate change. We go through the history of the "chemtrai...
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Season 1
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Episode 79
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47:56
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
