The End of the World with Michael and Stu

In the final installment (for now) of our afterlife miniseries, we are considering the ancient Vedic Religion, the ancestor of modern Hinduism which arose in northwestern India in the second millennium BCE. We talk about the idea of being reincarnated in other realms (as opposed to in this world), and the different factors that might alter the realm in which one finds oneself. We also get into various hypotheses about where the Ved...

Moving in a parallel direction to our last topic, we are going over the afterlife beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians this week, touching on mummification, the pyramid texts, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the elusive Field of Reeds. We compare the classes afterlife of the Mesopotamians to the highly stratified beliefs of the Egyptians, while also noting that, for the first time in our series on the ancient world, there is an idea...

It's part three of our foray into the history of the afterlife, this time with a focus on Ancient Mesopotamia and the legendary Epic of Gilgamesh. We go over the conception of the afterlife presented in the poem, which is very egalitarian if not very comforting, and we then move on to consider the second half of the tale, which focuses on Gilgamesh's attempt to achieve immortality. 

This episode contains spoilers for The E...

In the second installment of our afterlife miniseries we delve into the prehistoric realms, discussing the earliest evidence we have for some kind of a belief in the afterlife in prehistoric, neolithic peoples. We also consider the Neanderthal and Denisovans, cave paintings, early totemic art, and the practices of ceremonial burial. We also touch on Göbekli Tepe and other early ritual sites and end up by making reference to skull c...

This week we are deviating from our normal subject matter slightly in covering Albert Brooks's wonderful 1991 film Defending Your Life as a way of introducing the miniseries we'll be running for the next month. The afterlife seems like a natural corollary to the show's typical focus on the end of the world, and Brooks's film felt like a good way in, as it explores a secular vision of the world to come, one ruled...

This week we are discussing right-wing paranoia about weather control and how it is being used as a comforting belief that enables one to evade accepting the reality of human influenced climate change. We go through the history of the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory, while also situating it in the earlier (and much more interesting) beliefs of Viennese Psychiatrist turned out-of-the-box thinker, Wilhelm Reich and his conce...

This week we are discussing the recent furor over the Jeffrey Epstein case which has begun to surface divisions within the MAGA movement. We go over the actual history of the prosecutions of Epstein and Maxwell, look at the various ways Trump supporters have justified the administration's refusal to "release the files," while also speculating about what the reasons behind that refusal might be.

Sources:

Scott Adams&apo...

This week we are discussing the Biblical Antichrist. What does the New Testament have to say about this ominous figure? Why do some Christians maintain his return is a necessary precondition for the so-called "second coming" of Jesus Christ? What historical (or contemporary) figures have people asserted might just be this Antichrist? Is the Antichrist even a singular person or is it more of a generic turn for anyone who i...

This week we are discussing Edgar Wright's zombie comedy about the mundanity of day to day life under late capitalism, Shaun of the Dead. Featuring star turns for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the movie examines the question of how to live a meaningful life through the familiar tropes of a zombie picture. We consider the ways the issues at play in this film from 20 years ago might be handled today, while comparing our own feeling...

For our 75th episode spectacular, we are discussing 28 Days Later, the 2002 film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland that reinvigorated the zombie movie for the 2000s and launched a franchise that has been back in the news lately. We go over the film's links to Stu's favorite topic, Romanticism, while also comparing it favorably to such dystopian British pictures as Shaun of the Dead and Children of Men. W...

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 ...

This week we are discussing the introductory miniseries of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica as a kind of "culmination" of our recent robot/AI-themed episodes. For once we both really like the show, and we dissect how it deals with the complex issues of technology and religion as well as the question of "fatherhood" with respect to both characters in the show as well as the dynamic between the Cylons and humanit...

This week we are continuing our suite of robot themed episodes by discussing the play that originated the word, R.U.R. by Karel Čapek which was first written in 1920. Derived from a Czech term meaning "serf" or "worker," these robots are more akin to the androids and other humanoid robots to be found in works like Blade Runner or Companion than the metallic beings to be found in Star Wars. While the play itself ...

This week we are talking about robots. Where did they come from? What are they? Are they really going to replace all human workers? We get into the history of these machines, while looking at the implications for them, should they be paired with AI. We also discuss Elon Musk's fixation on humanoid robots, and where this obsession derives from. 

We also get into the Ukrainian drone attacks in Russia, as well as discussing the re...

This week we are discussing E.T.A. Hoffman's short story, The Sandman, which presciently anticipates some potential psychological consequences of a too-deep dependence on artificial beings for companionship, while also pointing towards the fundamentally destabilizing possibilities a world filled with autonomous, robotic beings might bring. We go over the story, making reference to Freud's famous essay "The 'Unca...

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 threatens to make human beings completely redundant while at the same time the resources used to power AI make the planet increasingly uninhabitable as climate change accelerates. We segue dir...

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 invented and its primary use seems to be the elimination of hit men who are sent back in time to be murdered by their younger selves. We get into some of the problems with this premise while also prai...

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 supply chain, the early days of Covid-19, and look at how the current potential supply chain disaster differs. We also revisit another cherished memory from recent years, the EVER GIVEN inciden...

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 the essential examination of the question of humanity, and what it would mean for an android to achieve a fully realized humanity, we both had some issues with the way the film attempted to raise thi...