The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight — the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all.
Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future?
Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind?
This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.
Suspicious Minds is a two-time Webby Award-nominated podcast, and Official Selection of the 2026 Tribeca Festival Creators Market. Season One is available now. Season Two episodes drop weekly.
Follow now wherever you listen so you don’t miss an episode.
In April 1815 a volcano in Indonesia erupted so violently that the next summer never arrived. The sky over Europe went dark, the crops failed, prophets wandered the continent announcing the end, and five people took refuge from the rain in a rented house on Lake Geneva and decided to write ghost stories. One of them was eighteen years old. Her story was Frankenstein.
Our first-ever Halloween episode is about what came out of that house, which turns out to be most of the way we still think about the end of the world. Dorian Lynskey (Everything Must Go) on Tambora, the millenarian panic of 1816, and why Byron's poem "Darkness" is, as far as anyone can tell, the first vision of the apocalypse with no God in it. Alexis Chema of the University of Chicago on the Frankenstein nobody remembers from the movies: a creature who teaches himself to read, quotes Milton to his maker, and is abandoned for it. And her pushback, which I didn't see coming, on the comparison everyone makes between that creature and AI. Psychoanalyst Amy Levy on the line that keeps the book alive, "You are my creator, but I am your master," and on who, in 2026, reminds her of Victor Frankenstein. (It's a compliment, believe it or not)
Then the part I still can't quite believe. Byron fled England that year because he'd blown up his marriage, leaving behind a baby daughter he would never see again. Her name was Ada Lovelace. She grew up to work on the first computer, and to write the objection Alan Turing had to answer a century later before he could invent AI. I've started calling it Lord Byron's Lady Lovelace Paradox, and I explain why.
Also included: Mary Shelley's The Last Man, the post-apocalyptic novel she wrote after everyone she loved was dead; Isaac Asimov's laws; the Luddites, the loom, and the punch cards that became the computer; the vampire that came out of the same ghost-story contest; and why we make apocalyptic art at all. I can't promise it won't be spooky.
Next week, Part Two: art and the apocalypse. The hero's journey and its regressive twin, a composer on what the machines are doing to his work, the film After Yang, and what happens when the art isn't made by humans at all.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
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Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady
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Guests (in order of appearance):
Dorian Lynskey — Journalist / Author, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World — https://amzn.to/42ISDD1
Alexis Chema — Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago; scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary history, Author, Adorned: The Romantic Poets of Ornament – https://link.amazon/B0fyKhQV7
Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5
Other works and things mentioned:
THE SUMMER OF 1816
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the "Year Without a Summer" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
Lord Byron, "Darkness" (July 1816) — https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43825/darkness
John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819), written at the Villa Diodati for the same ghost-story contest — https://link.amazon/B03RUiBvD
William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), source of "the most odious of all monopolies" — https://link.amazon/B0ddLqcIZ
THE PROPHETS
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957) — https://link.amazon/B0hKnwQzo
The Münster rebellion (1534–35), John of Leiden, and the cages still hanging from St. Lambert's Church — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnster_rebellion
Juliane von Krüdener, the prophet of 1816 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_von_Kr%C3%BCdener
FRANKENSTEIN
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; the 1831 edition carries her introduction on the dream at Diodati) — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84
Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, eds. David H. Guston, Ed Finn and Jason Scott Robert (MIT Press, 2017), the edition Alexis reads from — https://link.amazon/B0j9T4e0Z
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), the "white paper" of the mind — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10615
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), the book the creature reads: "I ought to be thy Adam…" — https://link.amazon/B0c7RlUDC
Frankenstein (1931), dir. James Whale, with Boris Karloff — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(1931_film)
The Hammer Frankenstein films, from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) to Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Frankenstein
Raymond Chandler's science-fiction parody ("Did you ever read what they call science fiction? It's a scream…"), from a 1953 letter — https://a.co/d/0hveOXKn
ROBOTS, LAWS, AND THE MACHINES THAT IMPROVE THEMSELVES
Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920 — the play that gave us the word "robot" — https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59112
Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, first stated in "Runaround" (1942); the Zeroth Law added in Robots and Empire (1985) — Both included in this Asimov robot collection – https://link.amazon/B0by7Ld4w
Dr. Amy Levy, The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5
Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP (Hear our three-part conversation with Mark earlier this season.)
Ex Machina (2014), Blade Runner (1982), Pinocchio, and the Golem — the stories Amy names of "a singular person who creates intelligent life"
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) — the death drive and repetition compulsion (and the badge) — https://link.amazon/B0fniZcOZ
LORD BYRON'S LADY LOVELACE PARADOX
Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords against the Frame Work Bill, February 27, 1812 — https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill
The Luddites (1811–16) and the stocking frames of Nottinghamshire — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
The Jacquard loom (1804) and its punched cards — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine
Ada Lovelace, Notes on L. F. Menabrea's "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" (1843), including Note G ("The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything…") and the line about weaving "algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves" — https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind (1950), section 6, "Lady Lovelace's Objection" — https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007), both adapted from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Legend_(novel)
ALSO MENTIONED
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians (Waco, 1993) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
Spirit Halloween, which if there's an AI jobs-pocalypse will be every single storefront on Earth
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. By buying our guests' books through these links, you're supporting this series too.
This episode was made by:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan and Paul Bennett
Graphics: Semi:Formal
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Podcast PR: Tink Media (Shreya Sharma and Holly Brown)
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.
Moral Insurance (Part Two)
Season 2 · Episode 19
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 • Duration 56:28
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
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.
A Great Loss to the Universe (Part Three)
Season 2 · Episode 17
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 • Duration 01:13:32
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?
Engineering Consciousness (Part Two)
Season 2 · Episode 16
Wednesday, September 23, 2026 • Duration 01:08:07
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.
The Problem of Other Minds (Part One)
Season 2 · Episode 15
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 • Duration 51:52
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
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Dreaming Machines
Season 2 · Episode 14
Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 59:59
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
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Dancing Animals
Season 2 · Episode 13
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 • Duration 58:39
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
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The Oracle Test
Season 2 · Episode 12
Wednesday, August 26, 2026 • Duration 01:04:00
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
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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
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
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 –
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
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
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
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/
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
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
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
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
A Great Loss to the Universe concludes a three-part investigation into consciousness that began with The Problem of Other Minds and Engineering Consciousness.
Next week: effective altruism, a philosophy that has gained an incredible amount of power in Silicon Valley, and so in the world, in just the last few years.
We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds.
Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.com
Our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Ian Gold, Dr. Joel Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, Dr. Amy Levy. and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia
A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production
Agoric Media
https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/
https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia
https://agoricmedia.substack.com/
www.agoricmedia.com
Wondermind
https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/
https://www.wondermind.com/
Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady
https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/
https://seankingogrady.substack.com/
Guests:
Professor Mark Solms — Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town / Author, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness — https://link.amazon/B0fagMPXP
David Benatar — Philosopher / Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence — Author, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence — https://amzn.to/3TqY1cz
Dr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
Dr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8U
Dr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa / Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aa
Dr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst / Chair, American Psychoanalytic Association's Commission on Artificial Intelligence / Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5
Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.io
Other works and things mentioned:
Immanuel Kant — the philosopher Ian Gold describes as answering Newton — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
John Searle's Chinese Room argument (1980) — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
Mark Solms, editor, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud — https://link.amazon/B0bVGiTaC
Karl Popper and falsifiability — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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/
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
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
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/
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
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
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
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
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
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/
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