The End of the World with Michael and Stu

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 his taking the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. What are the long term implications of these moves,...

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 to aging and finding meaning in an increasingly youth-centric, substance-less world. Making references to Oscar Wilde and Mary Shelley, we also take a look at...

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 averted was because of concerted and organized work across many different areas. Programmers worked for years in advance to remediate the...

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 empty reboot of well-loved IP for our empty and soulless era? The hosts are somewhat divided on the answer to this all-important question! We also co...

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 continued impotence of the media in the face of horrors at home and abroad, and the potential for AI to immiserate creative people the world over. It's a...

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 based on the popular Christmas carol, The 12 Days of Christmas ...it is...very, very bad. But our conversation about it? That is good...very, very good. We also dis...

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 of the Branch Davidians, tracing their roots back to the "Great Disappointment" of William Miller and the history of schismatic Adventi...

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-called "Spanish flu" of 1918 in order to calibrate how potentially worrying such an outbreak could be should it arise, particularly in the post-CO...

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 invasion and the events that had so recently shaken the foundations of America...and it fails to do so, at least in a manner that we found at all convincing or philosoph...

This week we are covering the COP29 climate conference which took place over the last two weeks in Baku, Azerbaijan. Have they solved the issue? Was this climate conference in actuality a "meet up" for lobbyists in the fossil fuel industry? What is the connection between climate change and social justice, and is this connection one of the reasons the conference has been largely ignored i...

This week we are discussing Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road . A bleak but simultaneously uplifting depiction of a journey through a world in which nature has been totally destroyed, the story offers glimmers of hope in spite of its incredibly grim setting. Themes of childhood, memory, dreaming, and perseverance even in the face of seemingly inevitable death mark this book, which is cons...

This week we are talking about 2013's The Purge , a low budget high concept home invasion thriller directed by James DeMonaco. We discuss the Aristotelian overtones of the notion that an annual night of violence might allow for a cathartic experience that would help society to be more peaceful the rest of the time, while also exploring a few historical examples of "purge-like" behav...

It's our election recap episode where we take accountability for our...mistaken belief that Harris would pull out a tight election, when, obviously...that did not happen. We discuss what went wrong for the Harris campaign, while analyzing what this outcome might bode for elections moving forward. Are we destined to just sink deeper and deeper into our algorithmically determined information bu...

It's our election day special where we go out on a limb and predict who we think will triumph in the 2024 US presidential election. Is the seeming late swing to Harris real, and if it is real, will it be enough? Has Kill Tony doomed the Trump campaign with his offensive "comedy"? Has Ann Selzer, with whom we were all VERY familiar before this past weekend, done it again? Why is Tuck...

We're back on our election beat, in this episode gaming out potential outcomes of the November 5th US presidential elections. What would happen if Trump wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college? What if Harris wins in a landslide? What if the electoral college comes out in a tie?  We go through all of these scenarios and also look at some recent comments made by the candidates in...

This week we are diving back into politics, looking at the platforms of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, paying particular attention to where each candidate stands on apocalypse-adjacent issues like climate change and military weaponry. The results of our investigation may surprise you! This episode is the first in a series we'll be doing as the 2024 US Presidential election draws ever ne...

In the second and final episode of our series on Atlantis we get into the modern vision of the mythical lost land, touching on such singular figures as Ignatius Donnelly, Madame Blavatsky, and Edgar Cayce. What was it about this ancient story from a minor Platonic dialogue that was so appealing to psychics, cranks, and charlatans of every variety, and why does it continue to inspire people to hunt...

At long last we are covering one of the greatest apocalyptic narratives of them all! That's right, it's the Atlantis episode! And for a subject so massive, so important, we had to make it a two parter. In this first episode we will cover Plato's vision of Atlantis as presented in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias . We also give a bit of background on the concept of "eschatology...

This week we are covering the 1995 Wolfgang Petersen blockbuster Outbreak. Having lived through a pandemic of our own, can we glean new wisdom by revisiting this terrifying tale of an even-deadlier-than-Ebola virus set loose on a small Northern California town? Perhaps not, but it is still fun to examine the politics of this essentially liberal post-Cold War picture, where the real enemy is the US...

This week we're talking about James Cameron's 1984 masterpiece The Terminator . How relevant is this movie to our current fears about a potential future AI dystopia? How was such a tight, well-written film executed on such a comparatively small budget? How moving is the love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese? The answer to these questions and so much more can be found in this epi...

This week we are discussing the highs and lows of the September 10, 2024 Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. We get into where they stand on the issues, the depths to which the immigration debate has now plunged, and the utterly short shrift given to the question of climate change and the environment. Off the top, we also cover the second foiled assassination plot to target...

This week we are discussing Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest , a magical realist look at the realities of corporate exploitation in the developing world. By turns comedic and tragic, the book weaves together the lives of a number of characters in the manner of a Brazilian novela (akin to an American soap opera). It's a great, underappreciated book, and we rea...

We're turning back the clock to 2009 to discuss an epochal turning point in our society, namely, the Balloon Boy incident. While perhaps not as "earth shattering" as some of the other topics we've covered, we make the argument that this incident does mark an important turning point in the nature of media, in that it was one the last "crises" to occur before the 24-hou...

This week we're covering the recently concluded DNC, noting the ways in which, despite the theme of "not going back," in many ways it feels as if the Democratic party has, in fact, gone back to previous eras of its strength, the Obama Era, the Clinton Era, and so forth. What does this nostalgic reversion bode for the potentially world ending phenomenon looming just over the horizon?...

This episode is about the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius which buried and preserved the Roman city of Pompeii as an example of a real world apocalyptic event. We go over the mechanics of what happened, relying on the account of Pliny the Younger. We also discuss what the most recent science has to say about the events as they unfolded before pivoting to a brief discussion of Paul W.S. Anderson&a...