
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.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
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 of Earth's problems if we just allow for it to be born (with as few regulations in place as possible)? Why do they seem to care so little about other people? Our guide on this episode is a recent article in Rolling Stone by Alex Morris that gets at some of the psychological underpinnings of these questions while also pointing out how truly ridiculous some of these ambitions are.
We open the episode by discussing the recent US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites and what this bodes for the future.
Alex Morris's What You Suspect Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us in Rolling Stone
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