The End of the World with Michael and Stu

We're talking about the Iran War again, with a special focus on President Trump's incoherent statements regarding the war's status and aims.

We open the episode talking about the Oscars and the recent Clavicular "phenomenon." Finally, someone has dared to put Clavicular's "language making" in the context of British Romantic Poetry.  

The American Prospect on Renewable Energy as a National Secur...

This week we are talking about the first ten days of the Iran War. We go over some of the horrific consequences we've already seen unfold across the region and attempt to suss out what the more long term impacts of this catastrophic event might be. We also try to get into the heads of the people who are spearheading this endeavor in the hopes of imagining what they might hope to achieve. Doomsday scenarios, such as the deploym...

This week we are talking about the alleged plan on the part of Meta to enable profiles to remain active after death, powered by AI. Of course Meta says this is just a "hypothetical" patent they have filed that they have "no intention of implementing" but we suss out the implications nonetheless, just in case, just on the off chance that this comes to pass. We then transition into a discussion of the 2013 episode...

This week we are finally tackling Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan''s 2023 portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. We get into the dramaturgical choices made by Nolan in the film, we analyze the question of "theory vs practice," and we talk a little bit about the political implications of the Oppenheimer's actions. What happens when socialist leanings meet personal egotism? We a...

This week we are talking about Claude, the AI agent developed by Anthropic. Our window into this world is the recently published piece in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who spent a lot of time over the last few years talking to various folks at Anthropic. What we discover is, and this will come as a shock, a lot of discussion regarding AI's "power" and "reasoning" abilities, most of which can be dism...

This week we are talking about information glut, particularly in the case of the recently released Epstein Files. How are we to deal with such a massive tranche of completely disorganized information? How do we sort the real from the fake, the jokes from the serious crimes? It's overwhelming, and we consider some of the psychic damage this mass drop of documents has already done. 

We also discuss the Moltbook fiasco, which has ...

This week we are discussing 90s failed blockbuster sci-fi Alien meets Hellraiser movie Event Horizon, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. This is, I believe, our shortest episode to date, and we spend most of our discussion pointing out the absurdity of many aspects of the film, while also attempting to get to the bottom of just what it was about this picture that so terrified a teenage Stu, because...let's just say we were not ad...

This week we are considering Yorgos Lanthimos's 2025 film, Bugonia. This picture ties into several of our interests: environmental collapse, societal collapse, aliens, Atlantis, it really is a smorgasbord of topics near and dear to our hearts. We both like the way the movie ties together these disparate themes and pins itself on three great performances by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, and Aidan Delbis.

We open the episode by talk...

This week we are doing a roundup of the world's news; we touch on the ICE incursion in Minneapolis and the various ways that has been interpreted, before moving on to discuss Iran and the protest movement there. We then consider Donald Trump's play for Greenland, which now seems to have been undertaken in response to his being denied the Nobel Peace Prize, if his letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister is to be believed. B...

This week we are returning to Stanley Kubrick, tackling his late masterpiece, Eyes Wide Shut. We discuss its resonances with the ongoing (neverending?) Jeffrey Epstein scandal, while also getting into some of its Freudian themes. We discuss the film's relationship with its source material, Arthur Schnitzler's brilliant Traumnovelle, pointing out the specific sort of dream logic that animates the movie's action.

We ope...

This week we are discussing the United State's "action" in Venezuela which led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. We go over the implications of this for US foreign policy moving forward, what this means for the future of Venezuela, while also touching briefly on the long history of that nation. Does this action imply a shift in the future of US global strategy? Is the US stepping back from its engagements i...

This week we are talking about Stanley Kubrick's 1980 masterpiece, The Shining. We get into Kubrick's famous "beef" with Stephen King, the author of the novel upon which the film is based, while also discussing the several angles of interpretation that have emerged over the forty five years since the film first premiered. Is the movie about the end of the world? You might not think so at first, but with the help...

We did it. Somehow, we've made it to one hundred episodes. And this week we're going to celebrate by going over some of our favorite and least favorite movies from the first hundred, offering predictions on the future of American politics, and, most importantly, going through three of Michael's famed/hated hypotheticals. We even touch a bit on the afterlife. It's all here.

Thanks to everyone who has listened to a...

This week we are tackling 2007's I Am Legend, a film so bad not even Stu can pretend it is a "masterpiece." Much time is spent in pointing out the many problems with the main character's behaviors in the film (it stars Will Smith at the height of his powers), applying all we have learned from 99 episodes of examining end of the world scenarios. We also tear apart both equally terrible endings of the film.

We open...

This week we are revisiting a 2016 New Yorker profile of Sam Altman by Tad Friend for insight into how we got where we now are with regards to AI and its seeming inescapable ubiquity. The article is quite revelatory, as it shows us Altman in a more nascent moment in his rise to "tech superstardom." And what do we find? A monomaniacal sociopath with dreams of infinite growth and little regard for the consequences of his ac...

This week we are discussing the Heaven's Gate cult, which famously brought about its own end through mass suicide in March of 1997 as the Hale-Bopp Comet sailed past the Earth. We discuss the group's origins in the "cultic milieu" of the early 1970s and compare it to other new religious movements of the time including Peoples Temple, The Manson Family, and EST. The group's beliefs, an interesting fusion of ...

This week we are considering Sidney Lumet's 1976 classic Network. Written by acclaimed screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and featuring an all-star cast, the film examines the breakdown of the supposed objectivity of the news media in an age of hyper-capitalism. A prophecy of things that would come to fruition decades after it was first released, Network remains relevant today for its extremely cynical depiction of the corporate med...

This week we are tackling Kathryn Bigelow's 2025 film A House of Dynamite which deals with one of our "favorite" nightmare scenarios, namely, a nuclear missile of unknown origin being fired at a major American city. We analyze the film's three part/three perspective structure and also discuss its controversial ending. 

We open the episode by discussing some of the revelations in the latest tranche of Epstein emai...

This week we are charting some of the reactions (and overreactions) to last week's mayoral election in New York City wherein Zohran Mamdani emerged triumphant. Can Mamdani's campaign point the way for future Democratic Party successes, or is it an outlier that must be seen firmly in the context of deep blue New York City? We chart reactions from Third Way, Steve Bannon, Chuck Schumer, David Wallace-Wells, and more.

We open...