The End of the World with Michael and Stu

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 fr...

1 Heinä 202547min

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 Arti...

24 Kesä 202553min

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, a...

17 Kesä 202555min

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...

10 Kesä 202556min

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 impl...

3 Kesä 202557min

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 compani...

27 Touko 20251h 1min

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 sen...

20 Touko 202552min

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 un...

13 Touko 202544min