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
69 episodes
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
53: If I Could Turn Back Time
This week we are devoting a full episode to news, recapping the first week of Donald Trump's second term as president. We discuss the myriad executive orders the president has issued, ranging from his pardons, to his crackdown at the border, to...
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Season 1
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Episode 53
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47:34
52: A Duel of Personalities
This week we are discussing Coralie Fargeat's 2024 film The Substance, a movie that imagines what it might be like if you could recapture your youth. We get into the implications of the film for our culture, particularly as it relates ...
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Season 1
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Episode 52
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49:29
51: Tryin' to Run from the Destruction
This week we are discussing the "Y2K computer bug," the great potential apocalypse of the turn of the millennium that...did not live up to the hype. But rather than being another "when prophecy fails" situation, the reason this apocalypse was a...
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Season 1
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Episode 51
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49:33
Episode 50: Strewn with Time's Dead Flowers
This week we're discussing Robert Eggers' 2024 adaptation of FW Murnau's classic Nosferatu. Is it a poignant and disturbing meditation on the idea of forbidden love, recasting a classic story for our troubled times, or is it merely an ...
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Season 1
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Episode 50
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52:49
Episode 49: A World in White Gets Underway
It's our 2024 recap episode in which we go over all things apocalypse from the year we are concluding. Topics discussed include: the return of Trump, the continued disintegration of the Democratic party, the rise of a new oligarchy, the continu...
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Season 1
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Episode 49
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49:26
Episode 48: Five Golden Rings
It's Christmastime and in celebration we are covering a brilliant Christmas movie, namely The 12 Disasters of Christmas. This film is...a disaster. A Christian allegory mixed with a Mayan Apocalypse 2012 tale that is somehow also ...
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Season 1
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Episode 48
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49:44
Episode 47: There's a Madman Living in Waco
This week we're covering the siege of the Branch Davidian compound by federal authorities in 1993, paying particular attention to the group's leader, the enigmatical rock musician turned would-be messiah, David Koresh. We go through the history...
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Season 1
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Episode 47
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1:04:37
Episode 46: Shadow on the Things You Know
This week we are discussing avian flu and the possibility that it might be the next pandemic ahead of us, just over the horizon. We get into the history of influenza outbreaks originating in domesticated animals, such as, most famously, the so-...
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Season 1
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Episode 46
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54:56
Episode 45: It's a Godawful Small Affair
This week we are covering the 2005 Spielberg/Cruise film War of the Worlds. Made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the film attempts to make some kind of connection between the H.G. Wells's classic story of alien invas...
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Season 1
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Episode 45
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53:53
