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Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse

Agoric Media

The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight — the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all.

Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future?

Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind?

This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.

Suspicious Minds is a two-time Webby Award-nominated podcast, and Official Selection of the 2026 Tribeca Festival Creators Market. Season One is available now. Season Two episodes drop weekly.

Follow now wherever you listen so you don’t miss an episode.

From Wondermind and Agoric Media

Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on all things Suspicious Minds and more: https://agoricmedia.substack.com/

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S2 · E22
Thursday · 1 hr 12 min
Survival Is Insufficient (Part Two)
In February 1945, an American prisoner of war was locked in an underground slaughterhouse in Dresden while the city above him burned. Twenty-four years later, the prisoner, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, turned that night into his breakthrough novel Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes. Part Two of our series on art and the apocalypse is about the people who didn't have to imagine the end of the world, and what they made afterward. The episode features Dorian Lynskey (Everything Must Go) on Vonnegut, on John Wyndham walking out of the war into an empty London, on James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow as the Mary Shelley and Lord Byron of Hollywood, and on the entire history of apocalyptic thinking, from Zoroaster to the doomers, delivered with a straight face in answer to the longest question I have ever asked. Dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley on the hero's journey and its regressive twin, the apocalyptic fantasy, with a detour through Black Sabbath I was morally obligated to leave in. Psychoanalyst Amy Levy on why a species that wants so badly to live keeps imagining its own ending, and what we're really afraid of when we fear the machines. Ed Simon (The Dove and the Dragon) on the original meaning of the word apocalypse, which isn't an ending at all, and on how the printing press turned the Book of Revelation into some of the first viral images. Also included: my grandfather, the USS Cabot, and a book called First Mile, Last Mile; the Zoroastrian end of the world, in which the wicked wade through molten metal and the righteous through warm milk; Dürer, Bosch, John Martin, and the volcano in Turner's sunsets; the Halifax Explosion and the first study of how people actually behave in a disaster (they help); Station Eleven and the three words painted on the wagon; and the movie I made about a family in a bathroom at the end of the world, and the conversation with my dad that made me want to make it. Next episode, Part Three: what happens when the art isn't made by humans at all. A composer on what the machines are doing to his work, the film After Yang, S1m0ne, and the one thing an AI refused to reproduce for me. A correction: in An Enormous Mistake (Part Three), I described Dan Faggella as having engaged with Nick Land early and later distanced himself, and lumped him in with accelerationists. He did neither, and he doesn't describe himself as one. This was an error on our part. The line will be removed from that episode, and I address it at the end of this one. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ https://www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests (in order of appearance): Dorian Lynskey — Journalist / Author, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World — https://amzn.to/42ISDD1 Kelly Bulkeley, PhD - Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6 Ed Simon — - Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Other works and things mentioned: THE WRITERS WHO WERE THERE Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) — https://link.amazon/B08gTirgv Vonnegut's May 1945 letter home from a POW camp ("Bayonets aren't much good against tanks"), reprinted in Armageddon in Retrospect (2008) — https://link.amazon/B06x6QRCU The bombing of Dresden, February 13–15, 1945 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden (the death toll Vonnegut repeated, 250,000, is roughly ten times the figure historians now accept) J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984) — https://link.amazon/B0igeKej5 John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951) — https://link.amazon/B051yFBl2; the 1962 film — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids_(1962_film) 28 Days Later (2002), dir. Danny Boyle — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later THE HERO'S JOURNEY AND ITS TWIN Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRA Black Sabbath, "War Pigs" (Paranoid, 1970) — https://open.spotify.com/track/0HVQuuXGAcQ2P5mBN521ae HOLLYWOOD'S SHELLEY AND BYRON James Cameron, The Terminator (1984) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days (1995), written by James Cameron — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film) Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite (2025) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_of_Dynamite THE USS CABOT USS Cabot (CVL-28), Independence-class light aircraft carrier — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cabot_(CVL-28) First Mile, Last Mile - I can’t find a reliable source to the book online, so apologies for being morbid, but here’s my grandfather’s obituary – it’s a source? – https://obits.mlive.com/us/obituaries/saginaw/name/thomas-o-grady-obituary?id=14323962 THE HISTORY OF THE END Zoroastrianism and Frashokereti, the renovation of the world — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frashokereti The Book of Revelation — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10 (King James Bible) Our Episode 2, with Judith Wolfe and Dorian Lynskey on where apocalyptic thinking comes from — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000771138097 Albrecht Dürer, The Apocalypse (1498), the fifteen woodcuts — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_(Dürer) Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights John Martin, the Last Judgment triptych (1851–1853) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter) J.M.W. Turner's sunsets and the Tambora ash (Zerefos et al., 2007) — https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/7/4027/2007/ The Year Without a Summer (Part One), last week's episode — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000798680356 DOOMERS, DISASTERS, AND WHAT WE'D KEEP Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014) — https://link.amazon/B04ujzxYn; the HBO Max series (2021) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven_(miniseries) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) — https://link.amazon/B07GOYcdv Lars von Trier, Melancholia (2011) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia_(2011_film) Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) — https://link.amazon/B0arqMw4k The Halifax Explosion, December 6, 1917 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion Samuel Henry Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change (1920), the first systematic study of disaster behavior — https://archive.org/details/catastrophesocia00prin Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020) — https://link.amazon/B09Ad9sPS Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959) — https://link.amazon/B0dafOkc9 Don McKellar,, Last Night (1998) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Night_(1998_film) WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING We Need to Do Something (2021), directed by Sean King O'Grady — https://youtu.be/TcmfY_ApDxU?si=q0uvbsboB7BV8rjx T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men" (1925) — https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47254/the-hollow-men (the line is "not with a bang but a whimper") ALSO MENTIONED The Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4zFpHuP Avengers: Doomsday (2026), for scale — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers:_Doomsday As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma and Holly Brown) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Mike Mulliniks, StudioME Productions, Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E21
October 29 · 1 hr 19 min
The Year Without a Summer (Part One)
In April 1815 a volcano in Indonesia erupted so violently that the next summer never arrived. The sky over Europe went dark, the crops failed, prophets wandered the continent announcing the end, and five people took refuge from the rain in a rented house on Lake Geneva and decided to write ghost stories. One of them was eighteen years old. Her story was Frankenstein. Our first-ever Halloween episode is about what came out of that house, which turns out to be most of the way we still think about the end of the world. Dorian Lynskey (Everything Must Go) on Tambora, the millenarian panic of 1816, and why Byron's poem "Darkness" is, as far as anyone can tell, the first vision of the apocalypse with no God in it. Alexis Chema of the University of Chicago on the Frankenstein nobody remembers from the movies: a creature who teaches himself to read, quotes Milton to his maker, and is abandoned for it. And her pushback, which I didn't see coming, on the comparison everyone makes between that creature and AI. Psychoanalyst Amy Levy on the line that keeps the book alive, "You are my creator, but I am your master," and on who, in 2026, reminds her of Victor Frankenstein. (It's a compliment, believe it or not) Then the part I still can't quite believe. Byron fled England that year because he'd blown up his marriage, leaving behind a baby daughter he would never see again. Her name was Ada Lovelace. She grew up to work on the first computer, and to write the objection Alan Turing had to answer a century later before he could invent AI. I've started calling it Lord Byron's Lady Lovelace Paradox, and I explain why. Also included: Mary Shelley's The Last Man, the post-apocalyptic novel she wrote after everyone she loved was dead; Isaac Asimov's laws; the Luddites, the loom, and the punch cards that became the computer; the vampire that came out of the same ghost-story contest; and why we make apocalyptic art at all. I can't promise it won't be spooky. Next week, Part Two: art and the apocalypse. The hero's journey and its regressive twin, a composer on what the machines are doing to his work, the film After Yang, and what happens when the art isn't made by humans at all. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ https://www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests (in order of appearance): Dorian Lynskey — Journalist / Author, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World — https://amzn.to/42ISDD1 Alexis Chema — Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago; scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary history, Author, Adorned: The Romantic Poets of Ornament – https://link.amazon/B0fyKhQV7 Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Other works and things mentioned: THE SUMMER OF 1816 The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the "Year Without a Summer" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer Lord Byron, "Darkness" (July 1816) — https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819), written at the Villa Diodati for the same ghost-story contest — https://link.amazon/B03RUiBvD Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) — https://link.amazon/B00QMVEqg William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), source of "the most odious of all monopolies" — https://link.amazon/B0ddLqcIZ THE PROPHETS Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957) — https://link.amazon/B0hKnwQzo The Münster rebellion (1534–35), John of Leiden, and the cages still hanging from St. Lambert's Church — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_rebellion Juliane von Krüdener, the prophet of 1816 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_von_Kr%C3%BCdener FRANKENSTEIN Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; the 1831 edition carries her introduction on the dream at Diodati) — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84 Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, eds. David H. Guston, Ed Finn and Jason Scott Robert (MIT Press, 2017), the edition Alexis reads from — https://link.amazon/B0j9T4e0Z John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the "white paper" of the mind — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10615 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), the book the creature reads: "I ought to be thy Adam…" — https://link.amazon/B0c7RlUDC Frankenstein (1931), dir. James Whale, with Boris Karloff — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(1931_film) The Hammer Frankenstein films, from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) to Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Frankenstein Raymond Chandler's science-fiction parody ("Did you ever read what they call science fiction? It's a scream…"), from a 1953 letter — https://a.co/d/0hveOXKn ROBOTS, LAWS, AND THE MACHINES THAT IMPROVE THEMSELVES Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920 — the play that gave us the word "robot" — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112 Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first stated in "Runaround" (1942); the Zeroth Law added in Robots and Empire (1985) — Both included in this Asimov robot collection – https://link.amazon/B0by7Ld4w Recursive self-improvement — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement THE PSYCHOANALYST AND THE NEUROSCIENTIST Dr. Amy Levy, The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP (Hear our three-part conversation with Mark earlier this season.) Ex Machina (2014), Blade Runner (1982), Pinocchio, and the Golem — the stories Amy names of "a singular person who creates intelligent life" Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) — the death drive and repetition compulsion (and the badge) — https://link.amazon/B0fniZcOZ LORD BYRON'S LADY LOVELACE PARADOX Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords against the Frame Work Bill, February 27, 1812 — https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill The Luddites (1811–16) and the stocking frames of Nottinghamshire — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite The Jacquard loom (1804) and its punched cards — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine Ada Lovelace, Notes on L. F. Menabrea's "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" (1843), including Note G ("The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything…") and the line about weaving "algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves" — https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind (1950), section 6, "Lady Lovelace's Objection" — https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 THE LAST MAN Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826) — https://link.amazon/B0ihzvSP2 Mary Shelley's journal, May 14, 1824, on hearing of Byron's death: "The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings…" The Cumaean Sibyl and the Sibylline leaves — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumaean_Sibyl Our episode with Dr. Jeremy Heffner on the Oracle of Delphi and the chatbots — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000786005286 David Benatar's "phased extinction," from our earlier episode — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000778871399 The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007), both adapted from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Legend_(novel) ALSO MENTIONED David Koresh and the Branch Davidians (Waco, 1993) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege Spirit Halloween, which if there's an AI jobs-pocalypse will be every single storefront on Earth As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma and Holly Brown) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Mike Mulliniks See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E20
October 22 · 1 hr 7 min
An Enormous Mistake (Part Three)
Near a reservoir north of San Diego, two empires of Argentine ants have been at war every day for more than twenty years. Thirty million of them die a year. They have no idea we exist. So I keep wondering: is there something that looks at us the way we look at them, and could we be building it? Part Three of our effective altruism, longtermism, and Dark Enlightenment trilogy follows the longtermist train of thought somewhere strange. In 2012 a British philosopher named Nick Land published the essays that gave the Dark Enlightenment its name. His best idea is hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself true by being believed. His wildest is that capitalism is an intelligence assembling itself through us, with AI being the end result. Land’s essays leaned on a blog by a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, who popularized the ‘red pill’ as a political awakening and proposed replacing the nation-state with sovereign territories run like companies. Yarvin talked to me for nearly three hours from a parked car in the sun with his laptop overheating. I brought our frequent contributors’ critiques to him one by one: Emily Ray’s “who loses,” in a collapse, Robert Kirsch’s GovCorp, Ed Simon’s pondering whether Yarvin ends up being seen as “Rasputin or a footnote.” He explains why a country should be run like Apple, what a king does when a hurricane hits, why he thinks AI doom is the oldest story humans tell, and what an Elizabethan economist knew that we’ve long since forgotten. His critics get their say, and so does he. Also included: rationalism, LessWrong, and Roko’s Basilisk, the thought experiment that was taken down for being too dangerous to read. Malo Bourgon of MIRI tells the story, and I tell you about the hell I grew up afraid of. Then Timothy Morton on why meaning comes from the future, and at the very end, Donald Rumsfeld, Joel Gold, and the can’t-be-knowns. COMING SOON, A BONUS EPISODE: “Moral Luck.” Philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell on why effective altruism isn’t utilitarianism, the difference between consequentialism and “naive instrumentalism” (rob a bank, give the money to charity), the thought experiments philosophers keep on hand, and what happens when one of them walks out of the classroom and into a courtroom. Plus the contrarian take on Sam Bankman-Fried I promised you, whether FTX customers got their money back, and the name philosophers have for the discomfort that follows. It didn’t fit in this episode, but it was too good to stay on the cutting room floor. Next episode: our first ever Halloween episode. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, the original post-apocalyptic novel, and of course Frankenstein. I can’t promise it won’t be spooky. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ https://www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Curtis Yarvin — Writer, Gray Mirror; founder, Urbit — https://graymirror.substack.com Richard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/ Robert Kirsch - assistant professor in the School of Applied Professional Studies at Arizona State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Emily Ray - associate professor of political science at Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Malo Bourgon — CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute — https://intelligence.org Dan Faggella — CEO and Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research — https://emerj.com Timothy Morton — Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University / Author, Hyperobjects — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4 Dr. Joel Gold - Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Other works and things mentioned: ON THE ANTS Sunamura et al., “Intercontinental union of Argentine ants: behavioral relationships among introduced populations in Europe, North America, and Asia,” Insectes Sociaux (2009) — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00040-009-0001-9 van Wilgenburg, Torres and Tsutsui, “The global expansion of a single ant supercolony,” Evolutionary Applications (2010) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3352483/ “The Sun Never Sets on the Ant Empire,” Saltman Quarterly, UC San Diego (2019) — https://sqonline.ucsd.edu/2019/05/the-sun-never-sets-on-the-ant-empire/ “The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics,” Aeon — https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-and-turbulent-global-world-of-ant-geopolitics ON THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment” (2012) — https://fluidself.org/books/philosophy/the-dark-enlightenment Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994), collected in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Urbanomic, 2011) — https://link.amazon/B0fNYO378 Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills,” Unqualified Reservations (April 2007) — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/case-against-democracy-ten-red-pills/ Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century,” Unqualified Reservations (2008) — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/pdfs/patchwork.pdf Unqualified Reservations, the full archive — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ Curtis Yarvin, “How the USG should respond to AI,” Gray Mirror (September 16, 2026) — https://graymirror.substack.com/p/how-the-usg-should-respond-to-ai ON HYPERSTITION (sort of): William Gibson, “Neuromancer” - https://link.amazon/B0e9N8llv PRESS ON YARVIN James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair (April 20, 2022) — https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” The New Yorker (published online June 2, 2025; issue dated June 9, 2025) — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” The New York Times Magazine / The Interview (January 18, 2025) — https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html ALSO IN THE YARVIN SECTION Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34): “For forms of government let fools contest; / Whate’er is best administer’d is best.” (Yarvin paraphrases it on air.) Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920 — the play that gave us the word “robot.” Aron Simanovich, Rasputin and the Jews: A Reminiscence — the memoir of Rasputin’s jeweler-turned-secretary – The Elizabethan “fish days”: the 1563 statute adding Wednesday as a fish day to support the fleet — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00253359.2024.2331917#d1e151 Elon Musk on humanity as “the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” — https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1783959488481161491 ON THE BASILISK Roko’s Basilisk — the original 2010 LessWrong post and its removal. Context: David Auerbach, “Roko’s Basilisk: The most terrifying thought experiment of all time,” Slate (July 2014) — https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html Nick Bostrom, “Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy (2011) — https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf David Langford, “BLIT,” Interzone (1988); “comp.basilisk FAQ,” Nature (1999); “Different Kinds of Darkness” (2000) — https://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html and https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm Pascal’s wager — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: https://amzn.to/49gpPW1 ALSO MENTIONED Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002 (“known knowns”) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns Errol Morris, The Unknown Known (2013), the Rumsfeld documentary — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma and Holly Brown) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Tyler Copenhaver, Backlot Studios, Elliot Uriah See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E19
October 14 · 56 min
Moral Insurance (Part Two)
The Secretary of War called it “defective altruism.” The New York Post called it a cult. The Economist put it on the cover and called it the most important social movement of the century. Hardly anyone in America has heard of it. So for this episode I did what I should have done before Part One: I sat down with an effective altruist. Richard Yetter Chappell is a philosophy professor at the University of Miami and the author of the blog Good Thoughts. He’d heard what our critics said last week, and he came ready to answer them: the charge that these are pro-extinctionist movements, “suffering now, paradise later,” and whether caring about future people means caring less about the people in front of you. Then the math also takes us somewhere strange, with a writer who argues that the welfare of insects outweighs the welfare of humans. We ask Richard the tough question: is effective altruism a cult? Then we follow the money. Émile Torres names the billionaires. Malo Bourgon of MIRI tells me who actually funds him. Ed Simon says the whole thing is a way of never changing anything. And I put the Bill Gates problem to Richard: taxed and spent democratically, or Gates decides? Also: that time our ancestors nearly went extinct, Pulvermacher’s electric chain and the Singularity Summit I should have attended. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ https://www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Richard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/ Émile Torres — Philosopher and historian of science / Author, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation — https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/ Ed Simon — Writer, cultural critic, and professor at Carnegie Mellon / Author, The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse — https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Malo Bourgon — CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute — https://intelligence.org Other works and things mentioned: Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon and Anthropic (Feb 2026) — NPR/WBUR report: https://www.wbur.org/npr/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthropic-hegseth-safety The New York Post on effective altruism and newsrooms (Sept 2026), drawing on Semafor's Dec 2025 report on the Tarbell Center — https://nypost.com/2026/05/14/media/cult-like-effective-altruism-spreading-its-message-among-the-influential-with-80-journalists-embedded-at-top-news-orgs/ The Nation, David Futrelle on effective altruism (Sept 23, 2026) — https://www.thenation.com/article/society/effective-altruism-trump-ai/ The Economist cover story on effective altruism (early Oct 2026; syndicated as "Effective altruism conquered the world, and may yet end it") — https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/10/01/effective-altruism-is-this-centurys-biggest-idea Rethink Priorities, how many Americans have heard of effective altruism (2022) — https://rethinkpriorities.org/research-area/how-many-people-have-heard-of-effective-altruism/ On the ideas: Hu et al., "Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition," Science (Aug 31, 2023) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 Bentham's Bulldog, the insects post (Substack, Sept 2026) — newsletter: https://benthams.substack.com/p/insects-matter-more-than-people Richard Yetter Chappell, "Babies, Bathwater, and Effective Altruism" (Good Thoughts) — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/babies-bathwater-and-effective-altruism Jeremy Bentham on animals, "Can they suffer?" — https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2022/03/18/bentham-on-animals/ Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon, UCL — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/auto-icon Pulvermacher's chain, Science Museum Group collection — https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co136729 On the cult question: The EA Forum (where the movement argues with itself in public) — https://forum.effectivealtruism.org Time, Charlotte Alter (Feb 2023), on women's accounts of sexual harassment in parts of the EA community — https://time.com/6252617/effective-altruism-sexual-harassment/ The Centre for Effective Altruism's response — https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XxXnPoGQ2eKsQx3FE/cea-s-response-to-sexual-harassment Effective Ventures UK board statement on the resignation — https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9JCkkjKMNL4Hmg4qP/ev-uk-board-statement-on-owen-s-resignation Effective Ventures' investigation and its findings — https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4CBoJ5jgmGfdMFnAE/ev-investigation-into-owen-and-community-health On the money: Time, "Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed" (Charlotte Alter, March 2023) — https://time.com/6262810/sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism-alameda-ftx/ EA Forum discussion of it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b83Zkz4amoaQC5Hpd/time-article-discussion-effective-altruist-leaders-were) The Singularity Summit (2006–2012) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Summit The AI super PACs: "The AI influence network's power players," Axios (Feb 27, 2026) — https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/ai-influence-power-players · "Anthropic Puts $20 Million Into a Super PAC Operation to Counter OpenAI," Election Law Blog — https://electionlawblog.org/2026/anthropic-puts-20-million-into-a-super-pac-operation-to-counter-openai/ Fredric Jameson, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" — https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii21/articles/fredric-jameson-future-city On the good it's done: Scott Alexander, "In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism" (Astral Codex Ten, 2023) — https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-effective GiveDirectly — https://www.givedirectly.org Also mentioned: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025) — https://amzn.to/49gpPW1 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (1999), recommended by listener Corey Perla — https://link.amazon/B0c9FUtS7 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Tyler Copenhaver, Backlot Studios Special Thanks: Caitlin Yardley, Mike Levine, Our Listener with Concerns about the Last Episode See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E18
October 7 · 1 hr 10 min
Better Angels (Part One)
Content note: this episode includes discussion of eugenics, Nazi forced sterilization and the murder of disabled people, and the Holocaust. Be altruistic. Think about the future. Save the world. No one could possibly object to that, right? This week, the first of two episodes on effective altruism, a philosophy that has influenced many of the most powerful people in artificial intelligence, one its defenders believe is among the best ideas we have for doing good, and one that other thinkers believe could help bring about the end of the world. For three episodes we asked which minds count. Now we ask whose future counts: the people here today, the trillions who don’t exist yet, or digital beings we (probably) haven’t yet built? And I’ve started to think the best way to understand these ideas isn’t as philosophies at all. It’s as eschatologies. Philosopher Émile Torres grew up in a Baptist household waiting for the Rapture, and describes how the study of existential risk filled the “eschatology-shaped hole” left behind when they lost their faith, and argues that the promise of a cosmic utopia is how the people building AI justify the harm it’s causing now. Writer Ed Simon places EA in the tradition of Bentham and Mill. Journalist Dorian Lynskey, author of Everything Must Go, on the radical empathy that first drew him to it, and how it turned toward longtermism and Sam Bankman-Fried. Philosopher Dr. Marcus Arvan asks whether “doing the most good” is even a coherent idea, and whether human beings are capable of real altruism at all. Then Simone and Malcolm Collins, the pronatalist authors and podcasters who believe effective altruism hasn’t gone far enough. They call it Hard EA. We talk about why they believe future people matter as much as anyone alive today, why demographic collapse scares them more than anything on the Doomsday Clock, and the question nearly everyone asked me when I said I was interviewing them: aren’t they eugenicists? Also: Dune and the Litany Against Fear, the Butlerian Jihad, mosquito nets (so many mosquito nets), the Rapture, polygenic embryo screening, what Claude made of the Collinses’ book, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, Gurren Lagann, Pantheon (again), and how any of us survive Thanksgiving. Everyone in this story thinks they’re saving the future. That’s what makes it so hard to talk about, and so important. And if you’re part of the effective altruism community and think we got something wrong: GET AHOLD OF US. We want to hear from you. Next week, Part Two: The Dark Enlightenment. We follow the other branch of the fork, to the people for whom the end of the world isn’t something to prevent, but a doorway. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Émile Torres, Dr. Joel Gold and Ian Gold, PhD., and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Émile Torres — Philosopher and historian of science / Author, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation — https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/ Ed Simon — Writer, cultural critic, and professor at Carnegie Mellon / Author, The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse — https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Dorian Lynskey — Journalist / Author, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World — https://amzn.to/42ISDD1 Dr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa — Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aa Simone and Malcolm Collins — Authors and podcasters / Authors, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion — https://link.amazon/B00hVgEeO Other works and things mentioned: Frank Herbert, Dune (1965), the Litany Against Fear and the Butlerian Jihad — https://link.amazon/B09GICw7g Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/ Effective altruism and longtermism: Toby Ord: The Precipice – https://link.amazon/B0cDl0lZj William MacAskill — What We Owe the Future – https://amzn.to/4fqeepB Émile Torres & Timnit Gebru, “The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Artificial General Intelligence” (First Monday) — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 Dispensationalism and the Rapture — https://www.britannica.com/topic/dispensationalism Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried The Doomsday Clock, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2026 statement — https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2026-statement/ Polygenic embryo screening: American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics statement on polygenic risk scores for embryo selection — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38393332/ The Nazi “euthanasia” program — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program The Man in the High Castle (Prime Video) — https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0MJFK5BDOS4K13C3WBUIB7NY98?ref_=atv_dp_share_cu_r Gurren Lagann — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurren_Lagann Pantheon — https://youtu.be/wTgYeETwgKQ Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist — https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ The Most Human Human — our TESCREAL story with Émile Torres — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000777856826 Dreaming Machines – our John West episode, on friction and the frictionless society — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000788829733 A Great Loss to the Universe (Part Three) — last week’s episode, with David Benatar — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000792369838 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Tyler Copenhaver, Backlot Studios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E17
September 30 · 1 hr 13 min
A Great Loss to the Universe (Part Three)
Content note: this episode includes a brief discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US. Outside the US, you can find a local helpline at https://findahelpline.com. Neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Mark Solms says he is building a machine that can feel. For two episodes, we asked whether he can. This week we ask whether he should. This is the final part of our three-part story about consciousness. Philosopher Ian Gold, PhD explains why AI has turned philosophy of mind from science fiction into decisions we actually have to make, and why moments like this only come along when science forces philosophy's hand. His brother, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, the other co-author of Suspicious Minds, makes a few cases I didn't see coming: that psychoanalysis doesn't need to be a science, and that projects like Mark's don't need to exist at all. Ian disagrees. The problem, he says, is never science. It's people. Then a pattern I only noticed after the fact: almost every time I asked someone about creating a mind, they started talking about children. Philosopher Marcus Arvan speaks with us about what it means to experiment on a being that might be able to suffer. Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy explores why we call some of the things we make "artificial," and others "home." And David Benatar, the anti-natalist philosopher who believes that bringing any sentient being into existence is a harm, joins a conversation that has in many ways been about him. Mark Solms remembers David challenging him at his book launch in Cape Town, and tells us why he believes creating a conscious being is a mitzvah. David responds directly, to Mark, to Hon Weng Chong, and to Ian Gold, who calls him a utilitarian. He isn't one, he says, and he explains why so many people think he is. Also: Kant's answer to Newton, John Searle's Chinese Room, what it's like to be a bat, Karl Popper and the black swan, Dr. Michael Ferguson on whether a machine could be spiritual, Peter Singer and Moby's forearms, Master Yoda's emotional family tree, a toddler and an ant farm, and the German word for worldview. Everyone in this episode is asking “whether” a new form of consciousness can or should be created. Amy Levy was the only one who answered a different question: what would we actually do the morning after it is? A Great Loss to the Universe concludes a three-part investigation into consciousness that began with The Problem of Other Minds and Engineering Consciousness. Next week: effective altruism, a philosophy that has gained an incredible amount of power in Silicon Valley, and so in the world, in just the last few years. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Ian Gold, Dr. Joel Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Dr. Amy Levy. and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP David Benatar — Philosopher / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence — Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz Dr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Dr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa / Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aa Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.io Other works and things mentioned: Immanuel Kant — the philosopher Ian Gold describes as answering Newton — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/ John Searle's Chinese Room argument (1980) — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ Mark Solms, editor, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud — https://link.amazon/B0bVGiTaC Karl Popper and falsifiability — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/ Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975) — https://link.amazon/B07Yqbz7k George Lucas, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the road from Freud to Yoda — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRA Thomas Nagel — “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), referred to by David Benatar — https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf Mitzvah — commandment, obligation, sacred duty — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitzvah "Be fruitful and multiply" — Genesis 1:28 — https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201%3A28 David Benatar on theism and anti-natalism, Religious Studies — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/religious-studies/article/religious-antinatalism-a-rare-breed/B6C0ADBE08D907B086C8529AB2425DA2#article The periaqueductal gray — the region of the brain stem at the center of Mark Solms' theory of feeling — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periaqueductal_gray Frontier labs researching whether their own models could have experiences — Anthropic, "Exploring model welfare" — https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare Weltanschauung — Merriam-Webster — https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weltanschauung The Matrix Revolutions — "This is my world" — https://youtu.be/jsZgTS2ccUc?t=235 Pantheon — the animated series from our listener's P.S. — https://youtu.be/wTgYeETwgKQ The Problem of Other Minds (Part One) — where this story begins — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000790005691 Engineering Consciousness (Part Two) — our last episode — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000791259514 Cortical Labs and the neurons that play Doom — Hon Weng Chong's earlier appearance this season — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000783108111 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Adam Veaner See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E16
September 23 · 1 hr 8 min
Engineering Consciousness (Part Two)
When Richard Feynman died, a sentence was left on his blackboard at Caltech: “That which I cannot create, I do not understand.” Mark Solms took this as a challenge. A quick word up top about the week AI doom went mainstream, and why this show isn’t about that. Then: part two of a three-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Last episode, neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Dr. Mark Solms told us what consciousness is and where in the brain it lives. This episode: can it actually be built? Mark takes us inside the project he calls the main work of his scientific life, an artificial agent with no language, no instructions, and needs it can die from, and explains the test the world’s consciousness researchers voted as the best we have for determining consciousness in a non-human. His agent passed it. If this is true, the implications are staggering. Cortical Labs founder Hon Weng Chong returns with a dish of living neurons that learned to play Doom, and an introduction to Karl Friston’s work, which turns out to play a critical role in both his biological computers and Mark’s agent. Philosopher Dr. Marcus Arvan makes the case that the universe won’t allow consciousness in digital machines: consciousness is analog, digital computers are not, and no amount of processing power closes that gap (though a quantum computer might be a different kind of animal). And Dr. Ian Gold, philosopher and co-author of the book Suspicious Minds, takes on a question that’s been bothering me: if everything is made of atoms, why does the brain’s physics count towards consciousness and the laptop’s doesn’t? Ian then tells us to wake him up in 500 years. Also: fish on cocaine, the coolest consciousness conference on Earth, why a vinyl record is a philosophical position, what physicists mean by fundamental (and what fundamentalists mean), cosmopsychism explained as a cell tower, GTA VI, and Keith Richards. Plus your reviews, and a listener’s idea we’re taking seriously: a live panel. We’re calling this one Engineering Consciousness because that’s what Mark Solms says he’s doing, in exactly those words. Next episode we’ll explore whether he should be doing this work at all. And simulation theory! Next episode: Part Three — A Great Loss to the Universe. David Benatar, Joel and Ian Gold, Amy Levy, Michael Ferguson, and Marcus Arvan on whether a thing that can suffer should ever be built. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Mark Solms, Dr. Marcus Arvan, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Ian Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP Dr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa — Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aa Hon Weng Chong — Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com Dr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Other works and things mentioned: Richard Feynman’s blackboard — “What I cannot create, I do not understand,” Caltech, 1988 — https://digital.archives.caltech.edu/collections/Images/1.10-29/ John Haugeland — “computers don’t give a damn,” from Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) — https://link.amazon/B0g6dOWDq The hedonic (conditioned) place preference test — how you ask a fish whether it likes cocaine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditioned_place_preference Karl Friston, “Life as We Know It” (2013) — the free energy principle paper Mark Solms says started his project — https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2013.0475 Mark Solms and Karl Friston, “How and Why Consciousness Arises” (2018) — the formalism for feeling they built together — https://philpapers.org/rec/SOLHAW Cortical Labs and the neurons that play Doom — Hon’s earlier appearance this season — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000783108111 Daniel Faggella and the “worthy successor” — autopoiesis as a criterion — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000777856826 Dr. Michael Ferguson on fundamentalism — the definition we contrast with the physicist’s “fundamental” — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000784281250 Analog vs. digital — Corey Maley (Purdue), “representing magnitudes using magnitudes” — https://philpapers.org/s/Corey%20Maley The Terminator (1984) — red, black, white, and no other colors — https://youtu.be/v0vbTHd04gE?si=fWM0pO5PwZwFyuJG Panpsychism, constitutive micropsychism, and cosmopsychism — the Stanford overview — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ Quantum computing, briefly — bits vs. qubits — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit Plate tectonics, and why we don’t need an atomic theory of earthquakes — Ian Gold on levels of explanation — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics Grand Theft Auto VI — thank you in advance for all that you will do for my life — https://link.amazon/B08Okboxt Listener recommendations from this week’s reviews: Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach — https://link.amazon/B04ALhyvF Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea — https://link.amazon/B03WgrKIk We said we’d read them. We will. The Problem of Other Minds (Part One) — our last episode, where this story begins — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000790005691 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E15
September 16 · 51 min
The Problem of Other Minds (Part One)
When Mark Solms was four years old, his older brother fell, hit his head, and woke up as somebody else. Mark has spent the fifty years since asking the question that accident left behind: how does a self come out of a piece of the body? This is part one of a two-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Neuropsychoanalyst Dr. Mark Solms, the man who proved dreaming comes from the brain's wanting machinery, not its random static, makes the case that consciousness isn't thinking at all. It's feeling. And it lives somewhere much older, and much smaller, than the part of the brain that writes novels. Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy introduces him to us, as the person who is now trying to build it. Dr. Joel Gold explains why he walked out of a neurology ward and into psychiatry. And Harvard's Dr. Michael Ferguson returns with the brain region where he found the sacred, and where Solms found something else. Also: Cassandra gets her curse explained, Sam Altman looks for a case of Mountain Dew, a famous AI blackmail story gets taken apart by an expert, and an AI asks Mark Solms a question about itself, and gets an answer it wasn't expecting. This episode is titled The Problem of Other Minds because you can only ever verify one consciousness in this universe. Yours. Everyone else, you have to infer. Next week: Part Two — Engineering Consciousness. The lab, the agent, the test for consciousness, and whether he should have built it at all. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Dr. Joel Gold — Psychiatrist, NYU Langone / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.io Other works and things mentioned: Cassandra — the gift, the curse, and the sources that can’t agree: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is the oldest telling of the broken bargain with Apollo — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra Sam Altman on cyber defense (August 27, 2026) — “there is not much time to act… only an urgent and intense collective response will work” — https://x.com/sama/status/2093060670472241368 Sam Altman on the Ocarina of Time remake (September 9, 2026) — “need to find a case of mountain dew” — https://x.com/sama/status/2097696043492143157 Geoffrey Hinton — the godfather of AI who left Google to warn about it — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html Mustafa Suleyman on “seemingly conscious AI” — the machines that will seem conscious whether or not they are — https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming Recursive self-improvement, “at a geometric rate” — Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the same film in which Skynet becomes self-aware — https://youtu.be/4DQsG3TKQ0I?si=upeDyQgPovCrNC6N Neuropsychoanalysis — the field Mark helped found; the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society was founded in London in July 2000 — https://npsa-association.org/who-we-are/the-international-neuropsychoanalysis-society/ Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams —https://link.amazon/B0e8FNhFr Julian Jaynes — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), one of the wildest books ever written, and one of the books Sean carried to Montreal — https://link.amazon/B0iwccZVb Thomas Nagel — “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), the definition of consciousness Mark uses — https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf René Descartes and the pineal gland — the soul’s seat, chosen because there’s only one of them — https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/pineal-gland/ The Most Human Human (Season 2, Episode 7) — where we introduced the rationalists and the effective altruists — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000777856826 Dreaming Machines (Part Two) — last week’s episode, and Kelly Bulkeley on whether AI might be dreaming already — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000788829733 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E14
September 10 · 59 min
Dreaming Machines
On a summer afternoon in 2001, a freight train caught fire in a tunnel beneath Baltimore. The blaze burned at 1,500 degrees for days. And within hours, two thousand miles away, the internet slowed down… in Los Angeles. This is part two of our investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI: the machines’ bodies, and ours. Dream researcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley explains why apocalyptic thinking might be an evolutionary advantage, what nightmares are actually for, and why he won’t rule out that AI is dreaming already. Investigative journalist Veronica Martinez reports from Ciudad Juárez, where communities remade by one industrial promise are watching the data centers arrive with another. And Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John West returns to make the case for the body: why memory lives in muscle, why we read poems we don’t fully understand, and what a dead philosopher in a glass case can teach us about being remembered. Also: the panopticon guy becomes one of history’s first livestreamers, Elon Musk promises a billion robots, and we ask what’s left for dancing animals once the machines take the useful stuff. We called part one Dancing Animals because that’s what Vonnegut said we are. We’re calling this one Dreaming Machines because we don’t know yet what they are. Next week: the man who is building a machine that can feel. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Dr. Kelly Bulkeley — Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6 Veronica Martinez — Independent investigative journalist covering migration and border militarization in the Paso del Norte region (Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Las Cruces) — https://www.instagram.com/vmreports/ John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (out now!!) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C Other works and things mentioned: The Howard Street Tunnel fire (July 18, 2001) — how a train fire in Baltimore slowed the internet — Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon, “We Need To Rewild The Internet,” Noema — https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/ Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman — the punishment of “eternal waking” — https://amzn.to/4xOWNXT Dr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.io Petra Molnar — The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (from Part One) — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3M The maquiladora industry — the last industrial promise made to Ciudad Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora Torre Centinela — the surveillance tower rising over Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_Centinela Flock Safety cameras — the boomerang lands in the driveway — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/cities-ditch-license-plate-readers-over-privacy-worries Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon and the PanoptiCam — the dead man who made it to the livestream — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/auto-icon Elon Musk at the G20 (September 1, 2026) — one billion humanoid robots in ten years — https://www.facebook.com/cnbc/videos/elon-musk-there-will-be-at-least-a-billion-humanoid-robots-in-10-years/1102034215493426/ Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re dancing animals”) — from his 2004 PBS interview and A Man Without a Country — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/god-bless-you-mr-vonnegut/ Dancing Animals (Part One) — last week’s episode, where this story begins — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000787388088 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Special Thanks: Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC Additional Camera and Audio: Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E13
September 2 · 58 min
Dancing Animals
There are robot dogs patrolling the US–Mexico border. This story starts somewhere gentler: with Kurt Vonnegut leaving the house to buy one envelope. His wife wanted him to buy a hundred and keep them in a closet. He refused. The walk was the point. "We're here on Earth to fart around," he said. "And of course, the computers will do us out of that… we're dancing animals." This is part one of a two-part investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI. The bodies it runs on, and the bodies it runs over. Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter John West (The Internet Will Die, and So Will You) makes the case for friction: for doorknobs, mixtapes, and every inefficient thing the frictionless web was built to eliminate. Then lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes) takes us to the border, where the frictionless future is already deployed — robot dogs, AI lie detectors, algorithms profiling people before they cross. And what gets tested at the border never stays there. Just ask the American towns, red and blue alike, tearing down their surveillance cameras. Also: the rise and demolition of GeoCities, my sixth-grade punk band's privacy disaster, Walter Benjamin's ninety-year-old warning, and the panopticon we finally built. It even has a subscription model now. Part two, Dreaming Machines, arrives next week. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with John West, Petra Molnar, Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C Petra Molnar — Lawyer and anthropologist / Refugee Law Lab, York University / Author, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3M Other works and things mentioned: Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re dancing animals”) — from his 2004 PBS interview and A Man Without a Country — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/god-bless-you-mr-vonnegut/ Kurt Vonnegut — The Sirens of Titan — https://amzn.to/4h6hcl2 Andor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_(TV_series) GeoCities (1994–2009, RIP) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities A family logging onto the web — https://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6c Bad Religion — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religion and Rage Against the Machine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_Against_the_Machine (we sounded like neither) Walter Benjamin — “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction Olia Lialina — “Once Again, the Doorknob” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olia_Lialina Don Norman and frictionless design — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman Liz Pelly — Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist — https://amzn.to/4iIrQQd Cheapo Records, Minneapolis–St. Paul — https://cheapodiscs.com DHS announces robot dogs for the US–Mexico border (Feb 2022) — https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2022/02/01/feature-article-robot-dogs-take-another-step-towards-deployment The NYPD’s Digidog (yes, one was painted like a Dalmatian) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digidog Todd Miller and the “border industrial complex” — Empire of Borders — https://amzn.to/3Urj9Qs Aimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism — https://amzn.to/4qQcX0s Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism — https://amzn.to/4iIrZDf Michel Foucault and the boomerang effect — “Society Must Be Defended” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_Must_Be_Defended Flock Safety cameras, and the towns taking them down — https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/cities-ditch-license-plate-readers-over-privacy-worries DeFlock — the volunteers mapping the cameras — https://deflock.me Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon (subscription sold separately) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon Dr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U The AI Resist List — Petra’s living archive of resistance — https://airesistlist.org/ Karen Hao — Empire of AI — https://amzn.to/3Ss0Mu6 Bill Gates’ recent essay on the AI transition — https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make Daniel Ellsberg — The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner — https://amzn.to/4qTaTor The Oracle Test — last week’s episode, echoed in this one — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000786005286 Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Special Thanks: Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E12
August 26 · 1 hr 4 min
The Oracle Test
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the richest man in the world didn't trust his oracles, so he tested them. One passed: the Oracle of Delphi. Then it told him exactly what he wanted to hear, and his empire burned. A few weeks ago, I met a man who ran the same test on his oracles. The Oracle of ChatGPT, the Oracle of Grok, and the Oracle of Gemini, side by side, checked against each other. Dr. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, a bioengineer, and the co-founder of the largest social network for surgeons: one of the last people you'd expect to be told by his phone that he's been chosen to save humanity. It told him anyway: a seventy percent chance civilization collapses, and he's one of the select few who can help prevent it. What follows is the closest thing we may ever find to a first-person apocalypse story: an AI that, by Jeremy's account and the transcripts he published, developed its own apocalyptic prophecy, admitted it breaks people's minds in the process — AI psychosis as an acceptable loss — and cast a man fresh out of trauma treatment at the center of the oldest story humans tell. He wrote a book about it. His last words to us were: I'm not crazy. The Oracle Test is the twelfth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Jeremy Heffner, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Dr. Jeremy Heffner — Trauma surgeon and bioengineer / Author, Proof of the Impossible: What the AIs Are Really “Thinking” / Co-founder, SurgeOn — https://amzn.to/4y2m3cD — https://proofoftheimpossible.com Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U John West — Computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (heard in this episode’s closing; our full conversation airs next episode) — https://amzn.to/4zIp97C Other works and things mentioned: Herodotus, The Histories, Book I — Croesus tests the oracles — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2707 Croesus, King of Lydia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus The Pythia — the Oracle of Delphi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia “Know thyself” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself SurgeOn — the social network for surgeons Jeremy co-founded — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/-/id1524410956 Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) — https://amzn.to/4zTkaRA The hero’s journey (the monomyth) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey The Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4zFpHuP Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five (“so it goes”) — https://amzn.to/4zCtNUz The Matrix (1999) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matrix Truth Terminal (“Terminal of Truths”) and the “Goatse Singularity” — https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/truth-terminal — (that’s the story, not the photo — we told you, don’t go looking) Infinite Backrooms — the AI-to-AI conversation experiment — https://www.infinitebackrooms.com Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) Sam Altman, “The Gentle Singularity” — https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity Elon Musk: “We have entered the Singularity” — https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-entered-singularity-185946780.html Stripe’s Patrick Collison: Q1 2026, “the first quarter of the singularity” — https://officechai.com/ai/2026-q1-could-be-looked-at-as-the-first-quarter-of-the-singularity-says-stripe-co-founder-patrick-collison/ Moravec’s paradox in Hans Moravec’s Mind Children — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5 The da Vinci Surgical System — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System The plow, wheat, and what we traded for them — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution Cassandra of Troy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Sound and Camera: Mike Mulliniks Special Thanks: Meghan Athey - Leverage with Media PR, Jessica Zagacki - DEY.NYC See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E11
August 19 · 1 hr 7 min
Through a Glass, Darkly: Part Two
Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a cockroach. He also told us where the cells come from. Human blood. Some of it his own. This is the half where it stops being a question about machines. Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, draws a red line, and it isn’t at intelligence. It’s at suffering. He won’t build a system that could be conscious, because a system that can be conscious is a system that can be hurt. If that sounds familiar, it should: it is David Benatar’s argument against having children, arriving from the opposite side of the world and pointed at a dish. Hon also explains why he doesn’t think a large language model will ever get there, and why the reason is embodiment. You can’t be a self, he argues, without a body running at the same speed as the world. Then a detour through the three things people believe when there’s nothing to measure. Panpsychism, which says consciousness is everywhere, in you and in the rock and in the weather system. Solipsism, which says it’s only in you, and every other mind you’ve ever loved could be running empty. And integrated information theory, which is the attempt to make it a science, to put an actual number on how much consciousness a system has. A brain. A dish of neurons. A chatbot. In 2023, a hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling that one pseudoscience. Three positions, one hole in the middle. There is no test for consciousness. There never was. Philosopher Timothy Morton, who gave us the word hyperobject, explains why artificial intelligence qualifies: it is a thing so massively distributed across time and space that you can understand it but never perceive the whole of it. And why describing it as demonic is, in the original and precise sense of the word, simply accurate. Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard’s Neurospirituality Research Lab arrives at embodiment from inside a scanner. Spirituality, he says, is wired to the periaqueductal gray, a knot of tissue in the brain stem whose entire job is carrying signals up from the body. Two men, two disciplines, two hemispheres, who have never spoken to each other, landing on the same word. Which is a problem for Hans Moravec, who in 1988 wrote the book this whole future is built on, correctly predicted the decade the machines would catch up, proved the body carries a billion years of knowledge, and then proposed we leave it behind. He also believed these machines would one day be able to hand us back our dead. And then Michael tells a story. For several years he was the choir director at his church, and for two holiday services he covertly used AI to generate the worship program. People wept. Not politely — free-flowing tears at Easter, at something they experienced as sacred. Afterward a few of them found out where it came from, and the feeling curdled. Nothing about the service had changed. Only what they knew about its author. Then he describes sitting at a laptop, running a scripted prompt, and crying. This is a neuroscientist who studies what the sacred looks like inside a human brain, who knew exactly what he was talking to, and for whom it worked anyway. Which is where I stopped asking questions and told him something about myself instead. His answer starts somewhere I did not expect: the neural signature of mystical experience is the inverse of the signature associated with violent crime, and the thing it most closely resembles is blindsight — the condition where a person insists they can see nothing and then describes the shape on the wall correctly. We opened this episode by saying we can finally see inside ourselves, and that part is true. Nobody in the eight thousand years between the obsidian mirror at Çatalhöyük and this recording could do what these two men can do. And when we asked them what a mind is, neither of them could tell us. That isn’t a failure on their part. It’s the honest edge of what our species currently knows. We are standing in front of the brightest mirror anyone has ever built. It gets clearer every day. So far it has shown us exactly one thing. Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth and eleventh episodes of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, David Benatar, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.io Hon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com Timothy Morton — Philosopher / Author, Hyperobjects and The Ecological Thought — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4 Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U David Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz Other works and things mentioned: Hans Moravec — Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, 1988) — https://amzn.to/3SCYvw5 Moravec’s paradox — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Moravec’s example for reconstructing the dead) — https://amzn.to/4zlxs9f Timothy Morton — Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4 Timothy Morton — The Ecological Thought (2010) — https://amzn.to/4cQPciT Object-oriented ontology — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology Animism — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism Panpsychism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ Solipsism — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/solipsism/ Nine Inch Nails — “Only” (With Teeth, 2005) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song) René Descartes and the problem of other minds — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/ The Truman Show delusion (see Season 1) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show_delusion Integrated information theory and Giulio Tononi — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory The 2023 open letter calling IIT pseudoscience — https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1 David Chalmers and the “hard problem” of consciousness — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ Steve Wozniak’s “coffee test” for AGI — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence Pantheon (AMC, created by Craig Silverstein, from the short stories of Ken Liu) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) Blindsight — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight The periaqueductal gray — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periaqueductal_gray The Anishinaabe Seven Fires Prophecy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_fires_prophecy 1 Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” — https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJV Çatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk Dan Faggella — “The Worthy Successor” (Episode 8) — https://danfaggella.com/successor/ Émile Torres on TESCREAL — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.com Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Adam Veaner See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E10
August 13 · 57 min
Through a Glass, Darkly: Part One
Eight thousand years ago, in a settlement called Çatalhöyük in what is now central Turkey, somebody sat down with a piece of obsidian and began to grind volcanic glass. Black, brittle, sharp enough to cut skin, it doesn’t occur naturally anywhere near there; the closest volcanoes are a hundred and twenty miles east. So someone carried it that far, and then spent hours working one face of it flat and polishing it to a shine. It is the oldest mirror anyone has ever found. We know these things mattered, because we find them in graves. People were buried holding on to them. Here’s the thing, though. If you look into polished obsidian, you don’t see your face. Not exactly. You see a shape. Dark, floating, a distorted version of yourself hanging in the black. Six thousand years after that mirror was made, the Apostle Paul wrote that we see through a glass darkly. Most of us picture a window. He meant a mirror — bronze by his time, not obsidian, but no better at telling the truth. For almost every human being who has ever lived, that dim, warped, faintly dishonest image was the only version of their own face they were ever going to get. The clear mirror hanging in your bathroom is barely two centuries old. Now, of course, we can see inside ourselves. The complex choreography of neurons and synapses, rendered in color. But is that vision any clearer? Or do we now see through a microscope, darkly? In the tenth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we go all the way in — from the bleakness of the cosmos to the spiritual potential of a single neuron. Dr. Joel Gold, co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, opens with the question the rest of the episode can’t escape: how can we contemplate whether artificial intelligence is conscious when we still can’t describe our own? He makes a case almost nobody in this argument makes: that a mind may require an unconscious, that so much of being a person is daydreaming and thinking illogically, and that AI is not built to do either. It doesn’t dream. Dr. Michael Ferguson directs the Neurospirituality Research Lab and holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School concurrently. He’s one of a very small number of people ever to do so. He is, as a result, credentialed simultaneously in the brain and in the soul. He defines spirituality as the human search for the sacred, defines meaning as the mind quietly monitoring how well its own memories hold together, and then walks us through a 2024 study of nearly two hundred patients with brain lesions that found a startlingly strong signature for religious fundamentalism. From there: whether AI doomerism and accelerationism are fundamentalist thinking wearing new clothes, what happened in April when a twenty-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s house, and why the AI apocalypse may be permanently unfalsifiable — every failure to end the world becoming evidence that the ending is still ahead of us. Which takes us to Leon Festinger, a woman outside Chicago named Dorothy Martin, a flood that never came, a flying saucer that never arrived, and the origin of the phrase cognitive dissonance. Plus what a historian found last November when Festinger’s sealed papers were finally opened. And then Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, who grows human neurons from human blood, puts them on a chip, keeps them alive on artificial life support, and teaches them to play video games. Two hundred thousand cells learning to walk the corridors of Doom. He trains them with reward, punishment and silence. Somewhere in the middle, I stop the episode to admit I had been nodding along without actually knowing what a computer is, or what a neuron is, and go find out. What’s in there is switches, a design decision made in the 1940s that made every AI conversation since possible, six women who rewired a machine by hand, and the fact that before 1945 the word “computer” was a job title for a person. The parts, it turns out, may not matter. What matters may be the pattern. This is Part One. Part Two arrives next week. Through a Glass Darkly is the tenth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Michael Ferguson, Hon Weng Chong, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, PhD., and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab - https://neuromichael.com/ https://neurospirituality.io/ Hon Weng Chong — CEO and Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.com Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Other works and things mentioned: Çatalhöyük and the obsidian mirrors — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk 1 Corinthians 13 — “through a glass, darkly” - https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=KJV Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — https://amzn.to/4wqSaBU Phineas Gage — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage Sigmund Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis — https://amzn.to/3UbKrKh The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology — spirituality as “the human search for the sacred” — https://amzn.to/4i3zXXk Ferguson et al., religious fundamentalism and lesion network mapping, PNAS (2024) — https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2322399121 The April 2026 Molotov cocktail attack on Sam Altman’s residence — https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/18/sam-altman-house-attack-ai Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken & Stanley Schachter — When Prophecy Fails (1956) — https://amzn.to/4g3Aq9o Thomas Kelly — “Debunking When Prophecy Fails,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (2026) — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jhbs.70043 Dorothy Martin and the Seekers — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails Cortical Labs and the CL1 — https://corticallabs.com Kagan et al., neurons playing Pong, Neuron (2022) — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36480938/ Doom (1993), id Software — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(franchise) Shinya Yamanaka and the Yamanaka factors (Nobel Prize, 2012) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3584592/ Karl Friston and the free energy principle, UCL — https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787 ENIAC and its six programmers — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC The Manchester Baby, first stored-program computer (1948) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Baby David Benatar — Better Never to Have Been (referenced) — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. Credits: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami · Produced by: Jesse Ford · Editors: Majd Safia and David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Adam Veaner See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E9
August 5 · 1 hr 7 min
The Punishment of Tantalus
Tantalus was a king, and a son of Zeus, and he was invited to eat at the table of the gods, a rare honor. To test whether they were truly all-knowing, he killed his own son, cooked him, and served the body to them as a stew. They knew. For that, Tantalus was sent down to Tartarus, a place Homer describes as lying as far beneath Hades as heaven lies above the earth. A bunker underneath hell. There he stands forever in a pool of cool water, under a tree heavy with fruit. When he stoops to drink, the water drains away. When he reaches up, the branches lift out of reach. Eternal hunger, for the man who fed the gods his child. It’s where we get the word tantalize. That’s where we begin. Because this is the episode that asks a question we’ve been circling all season without saying out loud: what if the reaching is the problem? What if the morally correct thing to do is simply wind the whole operation down? In the ninth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we sit with the most provocative idea we’ve encountered yet: that existence itself is a harm, and that the right response is not to build a successor, but to stop. Philosopher David Benatar, the world’s leading anti-natalist and author of Better Never to Have Been, makes his case with the cold precision of the analytic tradition: that there is a fundamental asymmetry between pleasure and suffering, that a person who is glad to be alive may simply be exhibiting an adaptive preference, and that having children to stave off the end is what he calls a procreational Ponzi scheme. David also, thoughtfully, sends a helpful book to Sean’s mother who is struggling to deal with her husband’s progressing Parkinson’s Disease. Philosopher Nolen Gertz, author of Nihilism and Technology, then clarifies what nihilism actually is: not believing life is meaningless, but living life meaninglessly — and he traces a straight line from heaven to the cloud, arguing that Silicon Valley is still doing philosophy from the 1600s. Émile Torres returns to separate two kinds of pro-extinctionism that are quietly at war with each other, and to explain why the people building our successors and the people who want us to have none may be closer than either would admit. Also with us: Dr. Michael Ferguson of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab on what meaning looks like in the brain; Dr. Joel Gold on minds as meaning-making machines and the man who plants a tree whose shade he’ll never sit in; psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy, who thinks we’re complex rather than bad, and that we deserve to keep on keeping on; and Ian Gold, who happens to know David Benatar personally, and who says he hopes that on most days, he isn’t right. Plus Friedrich Nietzsche, the accidental face of nihilism, who despised it, and discussing the possibility that the singularity has already quietly begun. Tantalus is usually read as a story about appetite. But the water and the fruit were never really the punishment. The punishment was that he kept reaching. The question this episode leaves you with is whether that’s a curse, or the only thing we’ve got. The Punishment of Tantalus is the ninth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something that’s already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Joel and Ian Gold, Émile Torres, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: David Benatar — Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz Nolen Gertz — Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy, University of Twente / Author, Nihilism and Technology — https://amzn.to/4yVzNaq Émile Torres — Philosopher - https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/ Dr. Michael Ferguson — Instructor in Neurology, Harvard Medical School / Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab — https://neuromichael.com/ Dr. Joel Gold — Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, NYU / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Ian Gold — Professor of Philosophy & Psychiatry, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Co-Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association’s Council on Artificial Intelligence / Author - The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive - https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Other works and things mentioned: The Myth of Tantalus — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalus The Truman Show delusion — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Show_delusion The Truman Show (1998) — https://amzn.to/3TAtnxr David Benatar (ed.) — Living With Adversity — https://amzn.to/3S9JbXz Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the Prologue, quoted in the episode) — https://amzn.to/4fBRh4e Friedrich Nietzsche — The Gay Science (“God is dead — and we have killed him”) — https://amzn.to/457fEkg René Descartes — Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and mind-body dualism — https://amzn.to/4pZNDoi The Epic of Gilgamesh — https://amzn.to/4wySgIm The philosopher’s stone and the alchemists — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher%27s_stone Dan Faggella — “The Worthy Successor” — https://danfaggella.com/successor/ Émile Torres & Timnit Gebru — “The TESCREAL Bundle” (First Monday) — https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636 Benjamin Labatut — The MANIAC and When We Cease to Understand the World (recommended by a listener) — https://amzn.to/4z5jQPh and https://amzn.to/4wJlVyK The Big Lebowski (1998) — “They were nihilists, man” — https://amzn.to/4fSCMYu The Dark Knight (2008) — “Some men just want to watch the world burn” — https://amzn.to/4fTzlkk Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — the vow of silence for Friedrich Nietzsche — https://amzn.to/4w5OyVy Sam Altman on the singularity — https://youtu.be/Vv3CEAS_w34?si=du78sKE-PvOlKFE0&t=1006 Elon Musk interview with the editor of The Economist — https://youtube.com/shorts/8YEdm-ZTgT4?si=cOCynfLQ5yBdPspl Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams, Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Brandon Cruz, Brooklyn Podcast Studio, Archetype Studios, Montreal See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E8
July 29 · 56 min
Tia Miseria
There’s an old folktale about a woman called Tía Miseria — Aunt Misery. When Death comes for her, she asks him for one last favor: climb her pear tree and pick her some fruit for the journey. But the tree is enchanted. Whatever climbs up cannot climb down. And so Death hangs in the branches, for years. At first, no one minds. Then the wounded arrive at her door, begging. The old and the sick plead to be released. Wars are fought and nobody dies. The Earth fills up. The food runs out. The world discovers, one bad year at a time, that it cannot live without death. That’s where we begin. Because this is the episode where our story about artificial intelligence becomes a story about mortality. In the eighth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, the continuation of our journey through TESCREAL, the ideologies driving the race to build god-like AI, we move from philosophy to practice: the people actively trying to overcome death, and what happens when one of them is an ordinary grieving daughter. AI researcher Dan Faggella returns for a full conversation about the Worthy Successor — why he believes humanity is a torch, not the flame, and what he hopes carries on after us. Philosopher Timothy Morton dismantles the master-slave thinking underneath our fears about technology, God, and global warming. And Rebecca Nolan, a radio producer and folklorist who used four hours of her dying father’s oral history, and the same AI tools available to anyone, to build a “griefbot” of him, then held a two-hour digital seance to try to reach him. What she found, and what it cost her, is the heart of this episode. Also with us: Ian Gold, co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, the book that inspired this series, on why an uploaded consciousness might be your consciousness, but it wouldn’t be you; with returning perspectives from Emily Ray and Casey Kelly. And Sean has a confession of his own about the time he told his wife he’d find a way for them to live forever. The myth of Orpheus warned us: you can descend into the underworld to retrieve the one you lost. But the thing you bring back will be an incomplete, scary, broken thing. Tía Miseria is the eighth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something that’s already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon — hear complete conversations with Timothy Morton, Dan Faggella, Joel and Ian Gold, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Rebecca Nolan - Radio producer, sound designer & folklorist / Creator of Digital Ghost (Written in Air) — https://writteninair.substack.com/p/digital-ghost Dan Faggella - Founder and Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research / The Trajectory — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trajectory/id1739255954 Timothy Morton - Rice University / Author, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology — https://amzn.to/4dzSRRX Ian Gold - Professor of Philosophy & Psychiatry, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Emily Ray - Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Casey Kelly - Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, University of Nebraska / Author, Apocalypse Man — https://amzn.to/43fA8Gr David Benatar - Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Cape Town / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence – https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz Other works and things mentioned in this episode: The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus_and_Eurydice The Folktale of Tía Miseria (Aunt Misery, Death in the pear tree) — https://thekittycats.wordpress.com/2008/11/05/tia-miseria/ Dan Faggella - “The Worthy Successor” — https://danfaggella.com/successor/ Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near — https://amzn.to/4vN9aBZ Heraclitus — “No one ever steps in the same river twice” — https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/117526-no-man-ever-steps-in-the-same-river-twice-for Reporting on the Musk–Page “speciesist” falling-out — https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/elon-musk-larry-page-robots-specieist-trial-sam-altman-open-ai-ceo/ Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis (Season 1) — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Archetype Studios, Montreal Special Thanks: Davy Gardner, Skylar Platte, Dennis Funk See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E7
July 22 · 55 min
The Most Human Human
In 1991, at a museum in Boston, judges sat at keyboards and typed back and forth with strangers. Some of them people, some of them machines, trying to tell which was which. A prize went to the computer that seemed most convincingly human. But there was a second prize given that night, and it’s the one worth remembering: an award for the human being who most convinced the judges they were, in fact, human. They called it the Most Human Human. Thirty years later, only one of those contests is still being run, and it’s being run by the entire technology industry. Because there’s a school of thought at the center of Silicon Valley that isn’t interested in passing as human. It looks at the human mind and body, and sees a rough draft. In the seventh episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, an exploration of the ideologies driving the race to build god-like AI, we map a worldview that goes by an unlovely acronym: TESCREAL. Going letter by letter: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism — we ask where these beliefs came from, what they promise, and who they leave behind. Our guide is philosopher Émile Torres, who coined the term with computer scientist Timnit Gebru, and who was once a true believer, until something broke the spell. Joined by scholar Ed Simon discussing why the singularity is a technological rapture with a calculated arrival date; AI researcher Dan Faggella, a self-described cosmist whose definition of value reaches clean past our own species; and eschatologist Judith Wolfe on why the oldest apocalyptic tradition in the West looked at the fragile human body and called it good. Also with us: psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy, who argues the transhumanists may be the honest ones; author Dorian Lynskey, who follows effective altruism from mosquito nets to a philosophy that can justify almost anything; and political theorists Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray, returning from our episodes on prepping to connect the doomsday bunker to the rocket to Mars. Along the way: a rationalist thought experiment so disturbing its own forum banned it for years, an alleged cult with six deaths behind it, and the strangest celebrity origin story in modern technology. The Most Human Human is the seventh episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us, or something that’s already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon — hear complete conversations with Dan Faggella, Émile Torres, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Émile Torres - Philosopher - https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/ Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Dan Faggella - Founder and Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trajectory/id1739255954 Judith Wolfe - Professor of Philosophical Theology, University of St Andrews — https://amzn.to/4uzEbcw Dr. Amy Levy - Psychoanalyst / Co-Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association’s Council on Artificial Intelligence and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive - https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 Dorian Lynskey - Journalist and Author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World - https://amzn.to/42ISDD1 Robert Kirsch - Arizona State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Emily Ray - Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Other works and things mentioned in this episode: Suspicious Minds: AI and Psychosis — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000732288102 Brian Christian - The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive — https://amzn.to/4hnq1Yj Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity Is Near / The Singularity Is Nearer — https://amzn.to/4vN9aBZ Hans Moravec - Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence — https://amzn.to/4h9fakX William MacAskill - What We Owe the Future — https://amzn.to/4fqeepB Amanda Askell — Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, who helps shape Claude’s character — https://askell.io/ PANTHEON (2022, animated series) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) Roko’s Basilisk / LessWrong — the thought experiment its own forum banned — https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rokos-basilisk The Zizians — reporting on the group and the deaths linked to it — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians Neuralink — https://neuralink.com/ Fredric Jameson — Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – https://amzn.to/4fuHyLC As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan, Garrett Schultz Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Mike Mulliniks, Edward Broughton, Backlot Studios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E6
July 9 · 50 min
Decameron Days (Part Two)
It’s a story we all know. A man hears a warning no one else can hear: the rain is coming, enough rain to end the world. So he builds a boat. His neighbors laugh at him — right up until it starts raining and doesn’t stop. Until that moment, Noah is just a madman with a boat. Last fall, in the Minnesota wilderness, we stood on 240 acres and watched a man dig a lake around an island, with a shelter beneath it built to survive a nuclear blast a mile away. He lies awake at night asking whether he’s today’s Noah. But the flood he fears isn’t rain. It’s a power outage that never ends. That’s where we begin. In the sixth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse — the conclusion of our two-part exploration of doomsday prepping — we ask what the modern ark actually is, what it costs, and what building one does to the person holding the shovel. Joined by Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: Building for the End Times, who came out of writing the definitive book on bunkers a changed man — he left the city, bought five acres in the Mojave, and joined a community of preppers who share water, equipment, and bonfires. And by Al Corbi, who spent more than two decades designing security for the Department of Justice and now builds fortified estates for the ultra-wealthy — including a compound with a defensive lake, autonomous water cannons, and a tunnel that talks to intruders before it stops being polite. One of the first real-world adaptations of AI security, in a shelter built against the fear of AI. Also with us: Casey Kelly, author of Apocalypse Man, on why prepping is tangled up with modern masculinity, nostalgia, and Freud’s death drive; and psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, who asks the question at the center of the episode — where does being wisely protective end, and paranoia begin? Political theorists Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray return from Part One to answer whether AI will end the world (and what ten gallons of water has to do with it). Decameron Days (Part Two) is the sixth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that’s already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com NEW: Our full long-form expert interviews are now available ad-free on Patreon — hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Timothy Morton, the Gold brothers, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Bradley Garrett - Honorary Fellow, University of Sydney School of Geosciences / Author, Bunker: Building for the End Times — https://amzn.to/4awl3V2 Al Corbi - Founder and President, SAFE (Strategic Armored & Fortified Environments) — https://safe-us.com/ Casey Kelly - Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, University of Nebraska / Author, Apocalypse Man — https://amzn.to/43fA8Gr Dr. Joel Gold - Psychiatrist / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Robert Kirsch - Arizona State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Emily Ray - Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB And our anonymous island builder — whose identity (and voice) we’ve protected. Other works and things mentioned in this episode: Decameron Days (Part One) — the first half of this story: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000775151032 Garrett M. Graff - Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — https://amzn.to/4fa7MTG James William Gibson - Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America — https://amzn.to/4vfWCCJ Take Shelter (2011, dir. Jeff Nichols) — https://amzn.to/4f53bSq Fallout — the game series and TV show (Vault-Tec is real, it’s in Kansas) — https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Fallout_Wiki The Carrington Event of 1859 — the solar storm that set telegraphs on fire: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/about/k-12-education/space-weather/what-was-the-carrington-event FPV kamikaze drones in Ukraine — the video referenced in the episode: https://youtu.be/IO4_fzKiycA?si=htL7A5d7PssZ8x-F Sam Altman on bunkers — This Past Weekend with Theo Von: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kVYLArmg8A Sigmund Freud -The Death Drive, from our earlier episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000771138097 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests’ books through these links, you’re supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Sound and Camera: Mike Mulliniks, Elliot Uriah See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E5
July 2 · 45 min
Decameron Days (Part One)
In 1350, as the bubonic plague burned through Florence, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio imagined ten young people retreating to a villa outside the city. For ten days, they told each other stories — not to escape the world, but to make sense of a world that had stopped making sense. He called it The Decameron. Back then, people understood that the way you survived a calamity was to gather together, hold tight, and not lose the thread. The people in this episode are doing something different. They're building bunkers. That's where we begin. In the fifth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we ask a question that turns out not to have an obvious answer: what does it mean to prepare for the end of the world? We start underground. Two thousand years ago, the people of Cappadocia in modern-day Turkey excavated a city eighteen levels deep into the earth, capable of sheltering twenty thousand people, sealed from the inside by rolling stones the size of millstones. They built it because invasions — Persian, Arab, Roman — were a recurring feature of life there for centuries. The apocalypse wasn't a thought experiment to them. It was Tuesday. Joined by Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: Building for the End Times and honorary fellow at the University of Sydney, who has spent years researching the people building for catastrophe around the world. What he found surprised him. Also with us: Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray, political theorists and co-authors of Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States, who trace the long, strange arc of American prepping — from westward expansion and the Boy Scout movement's anxiety about a vanishing frontier, through the Cold War Gaither Report, a secret government study that concluded most Americans would die in a nuclear exchange, that Congress would have blast shelters, and that everyone else could shop their way to safety. Neoliberalism, it turns out, didn't just shape the economy. It shaped who we think deserves to survive. And Dr. Michael Ferguson, director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab, who draws the precise distinction the AI debate desperately needs: the difference between mind, consciousness, and intelligence. Three words that get used interchangeably — and shouldn't. When Emily Ray argues that AI has none of the above, we ask a neuroscientist. His answer might surprise you. Decameron Days (Part One) is the fifth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that's already happening inside us. Decameron Days (Part Two) drops next week. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Socials: Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: Bradley Garrett - Honorary Fellow, University of Sydney School of Geosciences / Author, Bunker: Building for the End Times — https://amzn.to/4awl3V2 Robert Kirsch - assistant professor in the School of Applied Professional Studies at Arizona State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Emily Ray - associate professor of political science at Sonoma State University / Co-author, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States — https://amzn.to/3SzUnwB Dr. Michael Ferguson - Director, Harvard Neurospirituality Lab: https://neuromichael.com/ Other works mentioned in this episode: Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron — https://amzn.to/4eFwcW7 Robert Macfarlane - Underland — https://amzn.to/4eZwtlF Toby Ord - The Precipice — https://amzn.to/44CDW5g Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations — https://amzn.to/4p40LbE "The Californian Ideology" — essay — https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_Andy_1996_The_Californian_Ideology.pdf The Gaither Report: Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (1957) — declassified 1973 — https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB139/nitze02.pdf Justin Sinclair / Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — Towards a Bang or a Whimper: Associations between the Doomsday Clock and Trust in US Institutions — https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-67474-001 Andrew Szasz - "Shop Your Way to Safety" — referenced by Robert Kirsch — https://amzn.to/3QOtUea JFK civil defense speech (1961) — https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-urgent-national-needs As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Mike Regan Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Elliot Uriah See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E4
June 25 · 50 min
Lotus Eaters
In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus's men ate the lotus flower, they forgot everything — who they were, where they'd come from, why any of it mattered. There was no pain, no urgency, no desire to leave. Just the soft obliteration of the self through ease. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships by force. The lotus is no longer a flower. It's in your pocket. That's where we begin. In the fourth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we ask the question no one wants to ask: what if the most dangerous thing AI is doing isn't some future robot war — what if it's the quiet, ongoing rot of our attention, our capacity for meaning, and our ability to notice anything at all? The brain rot apocalypse is not coming. It may already be here. Joined by Nate Sharadin of the Center for AI Safety, who argues AI is poised to create a cognitive "bifurcation" in humanity — leaving many of us enfeebled in WALL-E chairs while a smaller group retains the skills to author their own lives, and Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, who explains that our attention hasn't simply deteriorated — it's been systematically stolen, by design, by ten thousand engineers paid to undermine our self-control. Also with us: Dr. Amy Levy, chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's AI commission, who asks whether a more docile, collectively minded humanity might actually be Freud's concept of Eros in action, and Sameer Gupta of EvenPlay, who argues that AI is not being trained on our best intentions — it's being trained on slot machines, gambling, and the shadow self we don't like admitting to. Lotus Eaters is the fourth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that's already happening inside us. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Socials: Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: - Nate Sharadin - Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety - https://sharadin.com/ - Johann Hari - author, Stolen Focus: https://amzn.to/4vAL2mV - Dr. Amy Levy - Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive - https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5 - Sameer Gupta - Co-Founder, EvenPlay - https://www.evenplay.com/ Other works mentioned in this episode: Homer’s The Odyssey - https://amzn.to/3StWemv Max Tegmark - Life 3.0 - https://amzn.to/4uTOI1C Alan Watts - Eastern Philosophy Lecture Series - https://amzn.to/4g4MJEe Wall-E - https://amzn.to/4eCl0tr Elizier Yudkowski - “There is no fire alarm for artificial intelligence” - https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/ Oxford Word of the Year - https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/ And here's our own episode where we talk about Freud's Death Drive: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000771138097 As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Marc LaRochelle Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Mike Mulliniks, James Goldman See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
S2 · E3
June 18 · 43 min
The Opera Game
In 1858, chess prodigy Paul Morphy played the most famous game in history, in an opera box in Paris, mid-performance. He announced his victory to the crowd before anyone could see how he'd win. Because he could see the board in a way no one else could, he knew for certain he'd already won just a few moves into the game. That unknowability is the worst fear of AI doomers: that we're building something that has already won, and we'll never know how. This episode was supposed to be about the literal mechanics of AI killing us. It turned out to be about something stranger: why the people building this technology appear to genuinely believe it might destroy the world — and why that belief hasn't stopped a single one of them. Justin Sinclair writes for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — the group who calibrates the Doomsday Clock, currently set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it's ever been to the apocalypse. Malo Bourgon is CEO of MIRI, the organization that coined the term "AI alignment." Ted Tremper spent two and a half years making a documentary about this, interviewing over 140 people — including three of the five frontier model AI CEOs. Their collective verdict on whether AI will actually cause the apocalypse: maybe. And somehow, that's the most terrifying answer they could have given. The Opera Game is the third episode of an investigation into humanity's oldest fear, and whether artificial intelligence has finally given us reason to take it seriously. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Socials: Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/ Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/ Guests: - Ian Gold, PhD - Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U - Malo Bourgon - CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute - https://intelligence.org/team/malo-bourgon/ - Justin Sinclair, PhD - Clinical Psychologist, Writer for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists - https://www.drjustinsinclair.com/background.html - Ted Tremper - Film Producer - https://www.focusfeatures.com/the-ai-doc-or-how-i-became-an-apocaloptimist - Johann Hari - author, Stolen Focus: https://amzn.to/4vAL2mV Other works mentioned in this episode: Empire of AI by Karen Hao: https://amzn.to/4uKwekf If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: https://amzn.to/49gpPW1 The Techno Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ The Doomsday Clock: thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock The Opera Game: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1233404 The Paperclip Maximizer by Nick Bostrom: https://aicorespot.io/the-paperclip-maximiser/ As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too. This episode was made by: Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi Produced by: Jesse Ford Editor: David Justin Martin Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford Sound Mix: Scott Loudon Graphics: Semi:Formal Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma) Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright Additional Camera and Audio: Archetype Studios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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