The End of the World with Michael and Stu

This week we are talking about the so-called utopian promise of the internet, the "information superhighway" as it was once known, and how it has, over the last thirty years, transformed into an information superhighway...to HELL. 

We look at some predictions and early ideas about the internet from the 90s before considering the critiques brought by Astra Taylor in the 2010s regarding the way the internet had been subverted by ...

This week we are discussing the Challenger space shuttle disaster, looking at what caused the shuttle to explode and how the aftermath specifically affected the psyche of the United States in the late 1980s. We also share personal recollections from the disaster, both as it happened and as a feature of our lives growing up as elder millennials. 

Challenger: The Last Flight on Netflix

Major Malfunction: A Recap of the Challe...

This week we're discussing the April 28, 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union and its aftermath. We use the 2019 HBO mini-series Chernobyl as our guide, despite some of its historical inaccuracies and acts of dramatic compression. We note, in particular, how those very acts of dramatic compression in fact work as a metonymy for the residual Cold War ideology that animates much of the show...

We're back covering a film that is directly in our wheelhouse this week, namely 2020's ridiculous apocalypse movie, Greenland, a Gerard Butler vehicle that explores what it's like to negotiate the aftermath of infidelity as the world around you is literally destroyed by fragments of a murderous comet. We get into all the timely news broadcasts, the Hobbesian AND Rousseauvian responses different people have to the end of the wo...

This week we are going over some recent news, including word of an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the hypothetical "end" of the Iran War, the Pope's powerful statement warning against the hazards of AI for human dignity, and China's minor interventions in Cuba as that country comes more squarely into the sights of the United States. 

New York Times on the Ebola Outbreak

New York Times on the Iran War "Ending...

We're concluding our coverage of The Leftovers, going over the final season in detail. We debate the series' ending, entertain the hypotheticals offered within the show itself (Michael didn't have to think of one this week), and consider the parallels between the "sudden departure" and its aftermath and Covid-19 and its impacts on contemporary society. 

This episode contains spoilers for all three seasons of The Lefto...

After a 111 episode break, we're finally returning to one of our favorite shows about the end of the world, that's right, it's The Leftovers Season Two. To celebrate, we have recorded our longest ever episode. There are so many themes to dissect, characters to consider, hypothetical questions to ask...we had to do our best to do this tremendous season of television justice!

As was just implied, the episode opens with a tri...

This week we are covering recent events in the news, including NBA playoff conspiracies, time travel conspiracies about the recent attempted shooting of President Trump, the "missing scientists" conspiracy (which maybe, just maybe, ties into the attempted shooting), and the Supreme Court decision that has gutted the Voting Rights Act. We go over a lot of "interesting" ground, including speculating about the nature of conspiracies a...

This week we travel to the Americas to consider the Aztec conception of the afterlife. Unlike many of the cultures we have covered, the Aztecs put a great weight on the manner of your death in determining the location of your eternal (or not so eternal) rest. We also give a brief overview of the practice of human sacrifice, and the episode once again opens with more of Michael's patented hypotheticals.

The theme music for this episo...

This week we are going to Ancient Greece and exploring their vision of the afterlife. We talk about the judges in hell, about Hades, about all of our favorite denizens of Hades, such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Ixion, and we even relate the stories of Orpheus and Heracles and their journeys into the underworld. It's all here!

We open the episode with one of Michael's brain-bending hypotheticals...this one...is perhaps the most outrag...

Our occasional series, "A Brief History of the Afterlife," is BACK. This week we are covering the Zoroastrian vision of the afterlife, including the Chinvat Bridge, the four layers of heaven, the four layers of hell, Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, the historicity of Zoroaster, all of your favorites. While we don't get into any "hypotheticals" in this episode, there are searching questions about what, so far, may be the most appealing c...

It is finally here: the cybernetics episode! We go over the origins and basic concepts of the 20th century science of cybernetics, looking specifically at the work of Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson. We  draw on Stu's 2025 article "Cybernetics or the Evolution of Philosophy" from Do Not Research. 

We open the episode discussing Donald Trump's continuing bewildering comments on the Iran War.

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This week we are discussing The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. We go over the film's approach to the utopian and apocalyptic potential posed by AI, getting into some of the areas the film neglects as we go. Characters familiar to listeners of the pod feature throughout, as do themes we have discussed in detail before, but the film offeres us a useful springboard for disc...

This week we are talking about the recently anointed best picture of 2025, that's right, it's Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. We discuss the film's "message" regarding revolutionary politics, while also delving into parallels between the movie and its source material, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Wilhelm Reich is also mentioned, albeit briefly, as another point of reference for the picture's depiction of the...

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 Security Issue

The Guardian on the P...

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 deployment o...

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 of Black Mirro...

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 also draw out the imp...

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 dismissed as yet an...