The End of the World with Michael and Stu

The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.

The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a comedy podcast hosted by Michael, with 133 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Michael hosts The End of the World with Michael and Stu, a comedy show with 133 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #134

  134: A Palazzo of Some Fantastic Proportion

  Aug 18, 202654 minS1

  This week we are delving into Stu's new article on Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity. What are some of the consequences of the potential merger of our brains with superintelligent AI? Are they good? Are there any downsides? What about immortality? Should we want to live forever? We get into all this, while also making a comparison to a vision of a kind of immortality expressed in Mark Frost's and David Lynch's brilliant series, Twin Peaks . Subscribe to Stu's new substack, Cybernetic Observations . "Ray Kurzweil's Intimations of Immortality" by Stu Watson Send us Fan Mail https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #133

  133: Now I Can't See, I Just Stare

  Aug 11, 202652 minS1

  This week we are covering the 1993 film, Alive , directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton. A sort of apocalypse in miniature, the movie depicts the miraculous survival of sixteen members of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains in 1972. We talk about the film's reputation, which perhaps surpasses its dramatic merits, while also considering the choices one would be forced to consider making were one to find oneself in such a scenario, specifically, cannibalism. We make comparisons to the situation the crew members of the famous whaling ship Essex made in a somewhat similar scenario, oddly also while en route to Chile. The episode opens with a conversation about another, more recent plane crash, this one seemingly caused by a test of a newly developed GPS jammer. This film contains spoilers for Alive. Futurism on the New Mexico plane crash caused by a GPS jammer Send us Fan Mail https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #132

  132: Sleep with One Eye Open

  Aug 4, 202656 minS1

  This week we are tackling The Odyssey , both the ancient Greek epic and the recent adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan. We go over the context of the poem's composition and dissemination, its significance to the Greeks, and give a broad outline of the major incidents in the poem. Fear not, Zeus's Law is mentioned! We discuss how the film compresses the twenty-four book epic into a three hour movie, as well as Nolan's use of Vergil's Aeneid as a kind of narrative supplement. We also touch on Emily Wilson's review of the film in the London Review of Books and consider how profoundly stupid the "Emily Wilson is Woke" reading of her translations has always been, even while taking some issue with her critique of Nolan. Lastly we consider how Nolan superimposes contemporary historical understandings of the Bronze Age Collapse onto a narrative set in the period when that collapse was occurring, and how this leads to some of the film's most unsatisfying, clunkiest dialogue. Emily Wilson's Review of Nolan's The Odyssey in LRB Our Episode on the Ancient Greek Afterlife Our Episode on The Bronze Age Collapse Send us Fan Mail https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #131

  131: The End of Laughter and Soft Lies

  Jul 28, 20261h 1mS1

  This week we have a two pronged episode. We open up discussing the suit four states have brought against Meta, alleging the company has knowingly caused irreparable damage to millions of teens in promoting its harmful and addictive products to them. The bulk of the episode then looks at a recent, brilliant essay by Mathias Fuelling from Cosmonaut magazine on three works of non-fiction, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alex C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, and If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Fuelling points out how all three works, despite superficially different ideological shadings, share a certain technocratic DNA that points in the same, dispiriting direction: a techno-fascist elite born out of Silicon Valley commandeering control of the United States government in the name of a renewed nationalism in opposition to the so called "Chinese Century." The essay also makes a strong case for the way AI serves as a "cop out mechanism" that allows these authors to avoid addressing the pressing questions of climate change and wealth stratification. It's a really excellent essay that we enjoyed discussing and that helped us to refine some of our own previously discussed ideas on these matters. "A Thesis on the History of the 21st Century: Technocracy, AI, and the End of the World" by Mathias Fuelling in Cosmonaut Reuters on the Four States suing Meta over Youth Safety Our previous episode on Abundance , Ep 62, on Apple Podcasts Send us Fan Mail https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #130

  130: When You Wish Upon a Star

  Jul 21, 202659 minS1

  We're going back to where it all began; that's right, it's aliens, this time those friendly aliens from Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind . We talk about the general optimism and lack of paranoia in the film, contrasting it with more recent "first contact" narratives. We also get into the grittiness of Spielberg's early films, a texture he seems to have mostly outgrown by his 1990s blockbuster era. While the movie may have less to say about politics and the hard realities of apocalyptic cultural moments than we would have liked, perhaps that very absence is in itself a lesson for us all. This episode contains spoilers for Close Encounters of the Third Kind . Send us Fan Mail https://www.instagram.com/theendoftheworldwms/ https://youtube.com/@TheEndoftheWorldwMS?si=xmj-2e0s58JdN8-B https://linktr.ee/endoftheworldwithmichaelandstu

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on The End of the World with Michael and Stu. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.