The End of the World with Michael and Stu

We're journeying back to 1998 to consider one of the greatest of all cinematic masterpieces, Michael Bay's Armageddon . Along the way we point out a few of the more...improbable...scientific elements of the film, while also noting the remarkable way such an apocalyptic event was depicted in the less politically charged environment of its era. This is a lighter episode, as there is not mu...

This week we're discussing Bertrand Bonello's 2023 film The Beast . Starring the brilliant Léa Seydoux and George MacKay, the movie is set in a not too distant future where AI rules human society and has deemed our petty, combustible emotions the enemy of productivity. Therefore, in order to advance in society, individuals must undergo a psycho-surgical procedure whereby they can be &quo...

This week we discuss the Democrats' strategy of calling their electoral opponents "weird" before plunging into a consideration of Alfonso Cuarón's 2006 dystopian masterpiece, Children of Men , paying particular attention to the analysis of Mark Fisher, as found in his landmark 2009 book, Capitalist Realism . Is this film, as Fisher suggests, an metaphor for the wasting effect o...

This week we are discussing Omar El Akkad's 2017 novel American War , which imagines a civil war in a future America driven by conflict over the continued use of fossil fuels. Charting the lives of the Chestnut family, the book paints a grim picture of the consequences of civil strife, reversing the polarity of past interventions by showing what it might look like if foreign empires began int...

This week we spend the first twenty minutes of the show discussing the ramifications of the attempted assassination of former President Trump before diving into a consideration of the apocalyptic 2012 Phenomenon, with special attention paid to the 2009 blockbuster, Roland Emmerich's 2012. At the episode's conclusion we adroitly knit the two halves of the conversation together by thinking...

We follow up on the state of contemporary politics as covered in our last episode before turning back the clock to discuss one of the genuinely apocalyptic periods of the past, namely the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Does the sudden dissolution of several ancient Mediterranean societies have anything to teach us about our current situation? Who were the Sea Peoples, and are they coming back? Should w...

Election fever has gripped the United States and we are here to break it down, specifically the June 27, 2024 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We discuss the debate itself briefly, but focus mostly on the aftermath, and what it bodes for the future of our republic. Topics covered include Donald Trump's (potentially disastrous) Project 2025, what (if anything) to expect from a second...

This week we're getting back into post-apocalyptic literature by considering a novel by legendary Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, namely 2003's Oryx and Crake . Set in a world...surprisingly similar to our own, where bioengineering has become the dominate mode of technological progress, the book tracks three main characters, Jimmy (aka Snowman) and the titular Oryx and Crake and the rol...

This week we're talking about Edgar Wright's 2013 film The World's End , a movie that explores the idea of severe arrested development in the context of a covert alien invasion. We also explore some unsettling news regarding a potential tsunami overwhelming the Pacific Northwest in the future, whether in two hundred hours or two hundred years, and what changes might need to be made...

We're examining the recent "trend" of so-called "Last Chance Tourism" in this episode, which is when travelers seek out places or sites that are likely to be destroyed or rendered utterly unrecognizable in coming years as global warming takes its toll. We explore the paradoxes of this phenomenon, which claims to raise awareness and thus increase "advocacy" while...

Plastic takes over the podcast! This week we go over some troubling news about the prevalence of microplastics in certain human organs before diving into a film about human organs that are able to digest plastics, namely David Cronenberg's 2022 movie Crimes of the Future . Is this dystopian depiction of human evolution relevant for changes we see currently happening in our society, or is it m...

This week we're discussing Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Sower , tracking how well this 1993 book predicted the world in which we now find ourselves. Is her vision of a violent, environmentally tormented, violence-ridden California really so far off? We also get into a couple of recent AI-related controversies regarding recent episode topic Her as well as the continuing decline o...

We're going into the marine depths of Yorgos Lanthimos's 2015 meditation on monogamy, The Lobster . What does this starkly delineated world of relationships have to say about our old more loosely defined world? Is our own society headed towards a similarly bleak status quo? We get into these questions and truly so much more! This episode contains spoilers for The Lobster . Send us Fan Ma...

This week we're getting into the many absurdities of 2013's Spike Jonze directed AI romcom, Her . We discuss the technical problems with the film's depiction of AI, plus Stu educates Michael on the particulars of the non-vol-cel community, which he has, for some reason, researched extensively. We also spend a few minutes off the top riffing on Jerry Seinfeld, our greatest living com...

We're talking about Amazon Prime's new smash hit series Fallout . Along the way we touch on such subjects as Ridley Scott, 50's Nostalgia, Plato's Cave, Jerry Seinfeld's scintillating and brilliant new movie about snacks, as well as JRR Tolkien's alleged antipathy for Shakespeare. We also get into why this is such a successful adaptation of a video game property, look...

We're promoting Stu's new book, Fernsehturm Berlin , a mix of memoir, historical imagination, and chaotic rumination this week while also discussing the dreaded Cuban Missile Crisis, the moment in the Cold War that perhaps brought us closest to nuclear armageddon.  Was Curtis LeMay correct in his estimation that the resolution of this conflict was "the greatest defeat in the history...

We're back in the Alex Garland space, confronted, once again, by one of his ideology-free films. Civil War asks us to imagine an America that is UNDER SIEGE from internal forces...but does it, in any way, explain what is motivating those forces? Does the movie offer answers as to what might heal a similarly divided nation? Is the moral of the film simply: objective journalism is good and VERY...

Is the AI apocalypse coming soon? Will our large language model chat bots soon...take over the world? Has artificial general intelligence come to bury us and not to praise us? This week we're discussing Alex Garland's 2014 AI-Frankenstein-gothic-horror-sci-fi, Ex Machina , in the hopes of getting to the bottom of the above questions and oh so much more. This conversation contains spoiler...

We discuss the recent NYC EARTHQUAKE and the vertiginous thrills and community-building possibilities implicit in moments of seeming crisis before diving deep into Netflix's new television program, 3 Body Problem . Have the team of Weiss and Benioff redeemed themselves after the legendarily poor reception of the final season of Game of Thrones ? Are the actors who carry over into this new ser...

This week the pod is looking at a television program we love,  the first season of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers . We get into themes of religion, madness, and bureaucracy and how they manifest in response to the rapture-like event depicted in the series. Is the "sudden departure" more similar to perennial pod topics 9/11 or the pandemic? Does the show engage in &q...

It's Dune season and the pod is talking all things Arrakis. Covering both parts of Denis Villeneuve's epic adaptation, this episode explores various themes: resource management, intelligence agency witchcraft, the dangers of messianism, Frank Herbert's complicated politics, ecology, the rivalry of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, the despicableness of Sting, and so much more. This podc...

In this episode the pod plunges into the depths of Adam McKay's 2021 satire Don't Look Up . Is it the contemporary equivalent to the keen and biting satire of Dr. Strangelove ? Does its central analogy between a comet strike and climate change make any sense at all? Is this the most annoying movie ever made? Plus we get into the (potential) end of a different kind of world, namely the wo...

Michael and Stu discuss Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb . Are the concerns of this film relevant to a contemporary audience? Have we left the frightening world of nuclear apocalypse behind? Were our childhoods shaped, in various ways, by the terrifying vision of this film? Do we still love the bomb? The answers to these...

Michael and Stu discuss apocalyptic themes in Mary Shelley's genre-inventing science fiction classic, Frankenstein . Are we, as a society, on the verge of being overrun by monsters of our own making? Can we see Victor Frankenstein's creation as a metaphor for any of our current predicaments? Is Frankenstein's Monster the first emo kid? The answers to these questions and so much more...

In this episode we explore Kevin Costner's two 1990's post-apocalyptic outings, WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN. Are they any good? No. Do they have an important message? Also no. But do they reveal something about what the apocalypse meant to mass culture in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War? You'll have to listen to find out! Spoiler warning for WATERWORLD and THE...