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.
