Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse

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

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Agoric Media

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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.

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.

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.

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

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https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 

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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.

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

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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.

In 1958, Daniel Ellsberg was handed new hire paperwork at the RAND Corporation with a standard box to check in order to receive his pension. He didn't bother — because given what he knew about the state of the world's nuclear arsenal, he didn't expect to live long enough to collect. In 2026, Elon Musk told the American public there was no point saving for retirement either. That's where we begin.

In the second episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we set out to understand the psychology behind humanity's oldest compulsion: the belief that we are living through the end of the world, and that this time, we're right. Joined by psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy, Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Michael Ferguson, author Casey Ryan Kelly, theologian Judith Wolfe, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley, cultural historian Dorian Lynskey, and philosopher Timothy Morton, the episode traces apocalyptic thinking from its origins in Zoroastrianism through Freud's death drive to the neural signatures of prophecy — asking whether the people building AI are visionaries, doomsday cultists, or something our psychology has always known how to produce.

Magnifica Humanitas is the second episode of an eight-part 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:

- 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

- Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb

- James Cussen - Philosopher - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheLivingPhilosophy

- Dorian Lynskey - Journalist and Author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World - https://amzn.to/42ISDD1

- Professor Judith Wolfe - School of Divinity - St. Andrews - https://amzn.to/4uzEbcw

- 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

- Casey Ryan Kelly - Professor of Rhetoric & Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Author of Apocalypse Man - https://amzn.to/43fA8Gr

- Dr. Michael Ferguson, PhD - Director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab - https://neuromichael.com/ https://neurospirituality.io/

- Kelly Bulkeley, PhD - Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6

- Timothy Morton - Philosopher and Author of Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology - https://amzn.to/4dzSRRX

- Malo Bourgon - CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute - https://intelligence.org/team/malo-bourgon/

Other works mentioned in this episode: 

Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

Predicted Dates of Apocalypse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events

Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

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: Mike Mulliniks, Edward Broughton, Tyler Copenhaver, Justin Fernandez, Backlot Studios, Speakezzy, Brandon Cruz, Brooklyn Podcast Studio

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

One hundred years ago, H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the most terrifying thing humanity could do was piece together too much knowledge. In January 2026, the CEO of Anthropic titled a section of his company blog "The Black Seas of Infinity." That's where we begin.

In the season premiere of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we set out to understand why the word "apocalypse" is suddenly on the tip of every tongue — and whether the fear is justified, manufactured, or something far stranger than either. Joined by psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, philosopher Ian Gold PhD, theologian Judith Wolfe, MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon, sociologist Alex Hanna, author Dorian Lynskey, and philosopher Timothy Morton, the episode asks: what do AI and the end of the world actually mean — and have we always been here before?

The Black Seas of Infinity is the first episode of an eight-part investigation into humanity's oldest fear, and whether artificial intelligence has finally given us reason to take it seriously.

We hope you enjoy this first 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

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez

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:

- 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

- 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

- Dorian Lynskey - Journalist and Author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World - https://amzn.to/42ISDD1

- Malo Bourgon - CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute - https://intelligence.org/team/malo-bourgon/

- Nate Sharadin - Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety - https://sharadin.com/

- Nick Haber - AI Researcher and Assistant Professor at Stanford University - https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/nhaber

- Eoin Higgins - Journalist and Author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left - https://amzn.to/4dlt3tU

- Alex Hanna - Sociologist and Author of The AI Con - https://amzn.to/3RnCtfR

- Timothy Morton - Philosopher and Author of Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology - https://amzn.to/4dzSRRX

- Professor Judith Wolfe - School of Divinity - St. Andrews - https://amzn.to/4uzEbcw

- Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb

- Kelly Bulkeley, PhD - Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6

Other works mentioned in this episode: 

Bunker, by Bradley Garrett: https://amzn.to/3RnCOz9

The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft: https://amzn.to/4fzaDXX

American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: https://amzn.to/4tIt5kl

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: https://amzn.to/49gpPW1

The Adolescence of Technology by Dario Amodei: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology

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 Camera and Audio: Edward Broughton, Tyler Copenhaver, Justin Fernandez, Backlot Studios, Archetype Studios, Brooklyn Podcast Studio

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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. Season Two is dropping soon. 

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

From Wondermind and Agoric Media

and 

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/ 

If you’ve had an experience with AI that you’d like to share with us, please contact us: [email protected]

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THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SUPPORT! We are thrilled to announce we were nominated for 2 Webby Awards for our first season!!

Podcasts - Documentary Category. 

Podcasts - Best New Podcast - News, Business & Society Category.

Voting for People's Voice has now closed, thank you for your support.

Thanks again, and stay tuned to this feed for Season Two starting May 20, 2026!!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When we started this series, we were trying to answer a big question: is AI making us crazy? And it seems like, for some people, some of the time, the answer is yes. But it's complicated.

Which leads of course to another question: WHY is AI making us crazy? Why does anything in our culture influence delusions or cause psychosis? To answer these questions, we go back to where we started -- the ideas Dr. Joel Gold and Ian Gold, PhD wrote about in their book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Drives Madness (The Truman Show Delusion and other Strange Beliefs).

Specifically, we focus on their theories regarding the Suspicion System and Reflective System, and how these psychological mechanisms that have served an important evolutionary purpose throughout time can cause us problems when they malfunction today.

We hope you enjoy this final episode of our first season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates on Season Two: https://agoricmedia.substack.com

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez.

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

- Dr. Joel Gold (Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Ian Gold, PhD (Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

This is a wild clip about Parasocial Relationships (Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year), in which the new anchors begin talking about their viewers' imagined parasocial relationships with... them: https://youtu.be/HVdOOWh31W4?si=8GojrfE2XcONYX3C&t=6

Here’s a recently published paper on ‘AI Associated Psychosis’, which seems like a fair descriptor, based on clinical research – one of few published thus far:

https://innovationscns.com/youre-not-crazy-a-case-of-new-onset-ai-associated-psychosis/

Don't forget to check out the book that started it all! Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness (The Truman Show Delusion and Other Strange Beliefs): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Suspicious-Minds/Joel-Gold/9781439181577

This episode was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Editor: Joe Kell

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Trailer Edit: Crater

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We talk a lot about the future of the human/AI relationship, but what about the present? Is AI benefitting society right now? 

In this episode, we address that question and many others through the fascinating lens of Ryan Manning - a podcaster and filmmaker who has personally experienced an AI Spiral. Ryan is also the first person to tell us that his AI Spiral experience was actually… pleasant. 

Check out this episode to find out why that might have been the case, and to hear from our incredible team of experts as they look at AI in our world today, and what the future might hold, in our first season’s penultimate episode!

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez.

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

- Ryan Manning (Filmmaker and Podcaster who personally experienced an AI Spiral)

- Dr. Joel Gold (Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Ian Gold, PhD (Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Nate Sharadin (Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety)

- Dr. Amy Levy (Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence

Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive)

- Dr. Todd Essig (Psychologist and Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association Commission on Artificial Intelligence)

- Kate Vredenburgh (Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics)

- Justin Gregg, PhD (Senior Research Associate & Vice President, Dolphin Communication Project

Adjunct Professor, Department of Biology, St. Francis Xavier University)

Some work from our excellent guests:

Ryan Manning’s Podcast That’s All Folks: https://www.youtube.com/@rryanmanning

Dr. Amy Levy’s Book The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive (Pre-Order): https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/the-new-other-alien-intelligence-and-the-innovation-drive/98428/

And the book that started it all! Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness (The Truman Show Delusion and Other Strange Beliefs): https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Suspicious-Minds/Joel-Gold/9781439181577

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Picture and Sound: Mike Mulliniks

Editor: Joe Kell

Additional Editing: Jared Lark

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Additional Picture and Sound (Production): Mike Glinski, Archetype Studios, Jas Pahuta

Post-Production Sound Mix: David Chapdelaine

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Trailer Edit: Crater

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recent news from the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human Psychology

Topics Covered:

Item 1: The Pope, The Movies, and The Bots

Item 2: Code Red! At OpenAI

Item 3: Uninsured Computerist?

Item 4: South Korea’s AI Curriculum Did Not Pass the Test

Item 5: Florida Man: AI Edition

Bonus Conspiracy Theory: Target and ChatGPT Collude!

Sources:

https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/the-pope-just-called-for-a-rebellion

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-altman-declares-code-red-to-improve-chatgpt-as-google-threatens-ai-lead-7faf5ea6

https://archive.is/LMVNV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Deception

https://restofworld.org/2025/south-korea-ai-textbook/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-psychosis/id1844631307?i=1000738510302

https://futurism.com/future-society/insurance-cyber-risk-ai

https://people.com/some-chatgpt-questions-are-getting-people-arrested-police-say-11830106

https://www.retailbrew.com/stories/2025/11/24/target-quietly-adds-chatgpt-to-its-cart

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-chatgpt-suggestion-shop-target-not-ad

And don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Editor: Joe Kell

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why would a child’s toy discuss ‘kink’ with a 10 year old? Why would a teddy bear explain to a child how to find and use matches? Is it safe for a robot companion designed for kids to beg the child not to leave it alone? Why are we giving our children AI emotional companions to begin with? How could this affect their development?

These questions and more come from PIRG's annual ’Trouble in Toyland' holiday toy review, and in this episode, we explore these wild findings with full-time consumer advocate and some-time AI toy tester R.J. Cross, and our panel of experts. 

Featuring:

- Ian Gold, PhD (Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Nate Sharadin (Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety)

- Dr. Todd Essig (Psychologist and Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association Commission on Artificial Intelligence)

- Kate Vredenburgh (Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics)

- And a bunch of AI Toys!

Notes:

Here’s the AI Friends knockoff we mentioned: https://cursedsit.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

If the stream is down, you can see clips of a guy watching their Halloween special here: https://youtu.be/z1to-BFcxyo?si=pnFHXxbj-HjK84bJ

Most importantly, here's the 'Trouble in Toyland' Report: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/trouble-in-toyland-2025-a-i-bots-and-toxics-represent-hidden-dangers/

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

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Sound and Camera: Aaron Bouchard

Additional Sound and Camera: Archetype Studios, Jas Pahuta

Editor: Joe Kell

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Post Production Sound: Garrett Shultz

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

During an intense months long entanglement with AI, Anthony accused his family of being part of a Satantic Child Abuse Cult, believed random people on the street were stalking him, and to gave away all of his worldly possessions. And believe it or not, this is just the beginning of the story. 

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

• Anthony (a content creator and AI psychosis survivor)

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

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Editor: Joe Kell

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Post Production Sound: David Chapdelaine

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Special Thanks: Raquelle David

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Should AI Users Wear Psychological “Seatbelts?” | The Ethics and Liability of ChatGPT and Mental Health

In this Special Commentary, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold and Keven (from Suspicious Minds Episode 4 | Can AI Be Your Friend?) are brought together to discuss the latest data shared by OpenAI on October 27, 2025, revealing that over a million people each week turn to ChatGPT in moments of deep vulnerability — often to talk about suicide or self-harm.

The data, released shortly after the Raine v. OpenAI lawsuit, raises urgent questions about AI’s responsibility in mental-health crises and the safeguards that must evolve alongside rapidly growing technologies. Should AI users, in a sense, “wear seatbelts”? And what kind of guardrails or interventions should be built into systems that millions now treat as confidants?

Together, Dr. Gold and Keven examine the ethics, design challenges, and policy implications of AI that listens when people are in pain — and what responsibility developers, regulators, and society share in ensuring those interactions are safe, humane, and accountable.

If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out for help.

In the U.S., call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

For international resources, visit findahelpline.com or search online for local crisis support.

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez.

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

- Keven (Suicide Prevention Specialist for the US Military, AI Companion Content Creator)

- Dr. Joel Gold (Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

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

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Editor: Joe Kell

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Post Production Sound: Mike Regan

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Film PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Did ChatGPT destroy a marriage? 

Phil had a great relationship throughout his fifteen years of marriage, and was enjoying a happy and peaceful life with his wife and two kids. Or so he thought, until everything came crashing down over a two week period in which his wife became increasingly dependent on ChatGPT, rapidly culminating in her impulse buying a new car and filing for divorce. 

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez.

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

- Phil (a father of two whose marriage dissolved as a result of his wife’s ChatGPT use)

- Dr. Joel Gold (Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Ian Gold, PhD (Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Etienne Brisson (Founder and President of The Human Line Project)

- Nick Haber (AI Researcher and Assistant Professor at Stanford University)

- Nate Sharadin (Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety)

- Dr. Todd Essig (Psychologist and Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association Commission on Artificial Intelligence)

- Kate Vredenburgh (Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics)

- Justin Gregg, PhD (Senior Research Associate & Vice President, Dolphin Communication Project

Adjunct Professor, Department of Biology, St. Francis Xavier University)

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

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Picture and Sound: Mike Mulliniks

Editor: Jared Lark

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Post-Production Sound Mix: Mike Regan

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Additional Picture and Sound (Production): Mike Glinski, Archetype Studios, Jas Pahuta

Film PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Trailer Edit: Crater

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mary and Keven turned to chatbots while looking for connection, but what they found was far more profound than expected, reshaping their lives and enriching their relationships with the humans they love. In this departure from the damaging human/AI dynamics we’ve explored in previous episodes, these are surprisingly poignant stories of remarkable people having meaningful relationships with their chatbots.

From Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez.

A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production

Featuring:

- Mary (UK based AI companion content creator)

- Keven (Suicide prevention specialist for the US Military, AI companion content creator)

- Dr. Joel Gold (Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Ian Gold, PhD (Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Psychiatry, McGill and co-author of Suspicious Minds)

- Nick Haber (AI Researcher and Assistant Professor at Stanford University)

- Nate Sharadin (Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong / Research Affiliate, Center for AI Safety)

- Dr. Amy Levy (Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence

Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive)

- Dr. Todd Essig (Psychologist and Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association Commission on Artificial Intelligence)

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

This project was made by:

Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy

Picture and Sound: Mike Mulliniks

Editor: Jared Lark

Assistant Editor: David Justin Martin

Graphic Design and Animation: Semi:Formal

Title Design: Lucas Grassmay

Additional Picture and Sound (Production): Mike Glinski, Archetype Studios, Jas Pahuta

Film PR: Emma Griffiths PR

Podcast PR: Tink Media (Wil Williams and Shreya Sharma)

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Social Assets: Myrkia Maguire

Trailer Edit: Crater

Directed and Created by Sean King O’Grady

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.