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: 

Agoric Media

https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/

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https://agoricmedia.substack.com/

www.agoricmedia.com

Wondermind

https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/

https://www.wondermind.com/

Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady

https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/

https://seankingogrady.substack.com/

Guests:

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

- Johann Hari - author, Stolen Focus: https://amzn.to/4vAL2mV

- Dr. Amy Levy - Chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive - https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5

- Sameer Gupta - Co-Founder, EvenPlay - https://www.evenplay.com/

Other works mentioned in this episode: 

Homer’s The Odyssey - https://amzn.to/3StWemv

Max Tegmark - Life 3.0 - https://amzn.to/4uTOI1C

Alan Watts - Eastern Philosophy Lecture Series -  https://amzn.to/4g4MJEe

Wall-E - https://amzn.to/4eCl0tr

Elizier Yudkowski -  “There is no fire alarm for artificial intelligence” -  https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/

Oxford Word of the Year - https://corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/

And here's our own episode where we talk about Freud's Death Drive: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suspicious-minds-ai-and-the-apocalypse/id1844631307?i=1000771138097

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too.

This episode was made by:

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

Produced by: Jesse Ford

Editor: David Justin Martin 

Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford

Sound Mix: Marc LaRochelle

Graphics: Semi:Formal 

Film/TV PR: Emma Griffiths PR

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

Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright

Additional Camera and Audio: Mike Mulliniks, James Goldman

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

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

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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: 

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Wondermind

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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

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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

Music Bed Sync IDs

MB01OTBJUHXNZXD, MB01ZQETHZDFVPZ, MB013HPYJEBPHO7, MB01J8WEVAMVGEY, MB01D67F2IMBABV, MB01BHKRGYTYDIV, MB01QM7HPQLVLJK

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