Free Daily Podcast Summary
Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Agoric Media
The Doomsday Clock is set to 85 seconds until midnight — the closest it has ever been in its 79-year history. The world is at war. And the people building the most powerful technology in human history are warning, in public, that it might kill us all. Season One of Suspicious Minds examined what happens when AI fractures individual minds. Season Two asks a harder question: what happens when it shatters our collective sense of the future? Our ancestors have predicted the end of the world since ancient times. Thus far, they have always been wrong. So what does our eternal obsession with the apocalypse reveal about the human mind? This season is a meditation on life, death, and what it means to be alive in an age when humanity is creating something that those building it believe has the power to either end all life on Earth or turn our world into a utopia.
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- 1 weeks ago1h 6m
An Enormous Mistake (Part Three)
Near a reservoir north of San Diego, two empires of Argentine ants have been at war every day for more than twenty years. Thirty million of them die a year. They have no idea we exist. So I keep wondering: is there something that looks at us the way we look at them, and could we be building it?Part Three of our effective altruism, longtermism, and Dark Enlightenment trilogy follows the longtermist train of thought somewhere strange. In 2012 a British philosopher named Nick Land published the essays that gave the Dark Enlightenment its name. His best idea is hyperstition, a fiction that makes itself true by being believed. His wildest is that capitalism is an intelligence assembling itself through us, with AI being the end result. Land’s essays leaned on a blog by a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, who popularized the ‘red pill’ as a political awakening and proposed replacing the nation-state with sovereign territories run like companies.Yarvin talked to me for nearly three hours from a parked car in the sun with his laptop overheating. I brought our frequent contributors’ critiques to him one by one: Emily Ray’s “who loses,” in a collapse, Robert Kirsch’s GovCorp, Ed Simon’s pondering whether Yarvin ends up being seen as “Rasputin or a footnote.” He explains why a country should be run like Apple, what a king does when a hurricane hits, why he thinks AI doom is the oldest story humans tell, and what an Elizabethan economist knew that we’ve long since forgotten. His critics get their say, and so does he.Also included: rationalism, LessWrong, and Roko’s Basilisk, the thought experiment that was taken down for being too dangerous to read. Malo Bourgon of MIRI tells the story, and I tell you about the hell I grew up afraid of. Then Timothy Morton on why meaning comes from the future, and at the very end, Donald Rumsfeld, Joel Gold, and the can’t-be-knowns.COMING SOON, A BONUS EPISODE: “Moral Luck.” Philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell on why effective altruism isn’t utilitarianism, the difference between consequentialism and “naive instrumentalism” (rob a bank, give the money to charity), the thought experiments philosophers keep on hand, and what happens when one of them walks out of the classroom and into a courtroom. Plus the contrarian take on Sam Bankman-Fried I promised you, whether FTX customers got their money back, and the name philosophers have for the discomfort that follows. It didn’t fit in this episode, but it was too good to stay on the cutting room floor.Next episode: our first ever Halloween episode. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, the original post-apocalyptic novel, and of course Frankenstein. I can’t promise it won’t be spooky. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comMany of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmediahttps://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmediahttps://agoricmedia.substack.com/https://www.agoricmedia.comWondermindhttps://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O'Gradyhttps://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Curtis Yarvin — Writer, Gray Mirror; founder, Urbit — https://graymirror.substack.comRichard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — <a
- 2 weeks ago56 min
Moral Insurance (Part Two)
The Secretary of War called it “defective altruism.” The New York Post called it a cult. The Economist put it on the cover and called it the most important social movement of the century. Hardly anyone in America has heard of it. So for this episode I did what I should have done before Part One: I sat down with an effective altruist.Richard Yetter Chappell is a philosophy professor at the University of Miami and the author of the blog Good Thoughts. He’d heard what our critics said last week, and he came ready to answer them: the charge that these are pro-extinctionist movements, “suffering now, paradise later,” and whether caring about future people means caring less about the people in front of you. Then the math also takes us somewhere strange, with a writer who argues that the welfare of insects outweighs the welfare of humans.We ask Richard the tough question: is effective altruism a cult? Then we follow the money. Émile Torres names the billionaires. Malo Bourgon of MIRI tells me who actually funds him. Ed Simon says the whole thing is a way of never changing anything. And I put the Bill Gates problem to Richard: taxed and spent democratically, or Gates decides?Also: that time our ancestors nearly went extinct, Pulvermacher’s electric chain and the Singularity Summit I should have attended. We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comMany of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Mediahttps://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmediahttps://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmediahttps://agoricmedia.substack.com/https://www.agoricmedia.comWondermindhttps://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O'Gradyhttps://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Richard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/Émile Torres — Philosopher and historian of science / Author, Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation — https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/Ed Simon — Writer, cultural critic, and professor at Carnegie Mellon / Author, The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse — https://amzn.to/4dVMYQbMalo Bourgon — CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute — https://intelligence.orgOther works and things mentioned:Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon and Anthropic (Feb 2026) — NPR/WBUR report: https://www.wbur.org/npr/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthropic-hegseth-safetyThe 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,
- 3 weeks ago1h 9m
Better Angels (Part One)
Content note: this episode includes discussion of eugenics, Nazi forced sterilization and the murder of disabled people, and the Holocaust.Be altruistic. Think about the future. Save the world. No one could possibly object to that, right? This week, the first of two episodes on effective altruism, a philosophy that has influenced many of the most powerful people in artificial intelligence, one its defenders believe is among the best ideas we have for doing good, and one that other thinkers believe could help bring about the end of the world.For three episodes we asked which minds count. Now we ask whose future counts: the people here today, the trillions who don’t exist yet, or digital beings we (probably) haven’t yet built? And I’ve started to think the best way to understand these ideas isn’t as philosophies at all. It’s as eschatologies.Philosopher Émile Torres grew up in a Baptist household waiting for the Rapture, and describes how the study of existential risk filled the “eschatology-shaped hole” left behind when they lost their faith, and argues that the promise of a cosmic utopia is how the people building AI justify the harm it’s causing now. Writer Ed Simon places EA in the tradition of Bentham and Mill. Journalist Dorian Lynskey, author of Everything Must Go, on the radical empathy that first drew him to it, and how it turned toward longtermism and Sam Bankman-Fried. Philosopher Dr. Marcus Arvan asks whether “doing the most good” is even a coherent idea, and whether human beings are capable of real altruism at all.Then Simone and Malcolm Collins, the pronatalist authors and podcasters who believe effective altruism hasn’t gone far enough. They call it Hard EA. We talk about why they believe future people matter as much as anyone alive today, why demographic collapse scares them more than anything on the Doomsday Clock, and the question nearly everyone asked me when I said I was interviewing them: aren’t they eugenicists?Also: Dune and the Litany Against Fear, the Butlerian Jihad, mosquito nets (so many mosquito nets), the Rapture, polygenic embryo screening, what Claude made of the Collinses’ book, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, Gurren Lagann, Pantheon (again), and how any of us survive Thanksgiving.Everyone in this story thinks they’re saving the future. That’s what makes it so hard to talk about, and so important. And if you’re part of the effective altruism community and think we got something wrong: GET AHOLD OF US. We want to hear from you.Next week, Part Two: The Dark Enlightenment. We follow the other branch of the fork, to the people for whom the end of the world isn’t something to prevent, but a doorway.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur 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/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind 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/4dVMYQbDorian Lynskey — Journalist / Author, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World — https://amzn.to/42ISDD1Dr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa — Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aaSimone and Malcolm Collins — Authors and podcasters / Authors, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion — https://link.amazon/B00hVgEeOOther works and things mentioned:Frank Herbert, Dune (1965), the Litany Against Fear and the Butlerian Jihad — <a href="https://link.amazon/B
- Sep 30, 20261h 12m
A Great Loss to the Universe (Part Three)
Content note: this episode includes a brief discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US. Outside the US, you can find a local helpline at https://findahelpline.com.Neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Mark Solms says he is building a machine that can feel. For two episodes, we asked whether he can. This week we ask whether he should.This is the final part of our three-part story about consciousness. Philosopher Ian Gold, PhD explains why AI has turned philosophy of mind from science fiction into decisions we actually have to make, and why moments like this only come along when science forces philosophy's hand. His brother, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Gold, the other co-author of Suspicious Minds, makes a few cases I didn't see coming: that psychoanalysis doesn't need to be a science, and that projects like Mark's don't need to exist at all. Ian disagrees. The problem, he says, is never science. It's people.Then a pattern I only noticed after the fact: almost every time I asked someone about creating a mind, they started talking about children. Philosopher Marcus Arvan speaks with us about what it means to experiment on a being that might be able to suffer. Psychoanalyst Dr. Amy Levy explores why we call some of the things we make "artificial," and others "home."And David Benatar, the anti-natalist philosopher who believes that bringing any sentient being into existence is a harm, joins a conversation that has in many ways been about him. Mark Solms remembers David challenging him at his book launch in Cape Town, and tells us why he believes creating a conscious being is a mitzvah. David responds directly, to Mark, to Hon Weng Chong, and to Ian Gold, who calls him a utilitarian. He isn't one, he says, and he explains why so many people think he is.Also: Kant's answer to Newton, John Searle's Chinese Room, what it's like to be a bat, Karl Popper and the black swan, Dr. Michael Ferguson on whether a machine could be spiritual, Peter Singer and Moby's forearms, Master Yoda's emotional family tree, a toddler and an ant farm, and the German word for worldview.Everyone in this episode is asking “whether” a new form of consciousness can or should be created. Amy Levy was the only one who answered a different question: what would we actually do the morning after it is?A Great Loss to the Universe concludes a three-part investigation into consciousness that began with The Problem of Other Minds and Engineering Consciousness.Next week: effective altruism, a philosophy that has gained an incredible amount of power in Silicon Valley, and so in the world, in just the last few years.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur 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/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind 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/B0fagMPXPDavid 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/3TqY1czDr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Joel Gold — Assistant Clinical Professor, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa / Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aaDr. 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/3PH1FO5Dr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and
- Sep 23, 20261h 10m
Engineering Consciousness (Part Two)
When Richard Feynman died, a sentence was left on his blackboard at Caltech: “That which I cannot create, I do not understand.” Mark Solms took this as a challenge.A quick word up top about the week AI doom went mainstream, and why this show isn’t about that. Then: part two of a three-part story about the oldest question in philosophy, arriving at its strangest moment. Last episode, neuropsychoanalysis pioneer Dr. Mark Solms told us what consciousness is and where in the brain it lives. This episode: can it actually be built? Mark takes us inside the project he calls the main work of his scientific life, an artificial agent with no language, no instructions, and needs it can die from, and explains the test the world’s consciousness researchers voted as the best we have for determining consciousness in a non-human. His agent passed it. If this is true, the implications are staggering. Cortical Labs founder Hon Weng Chong returns with a dish of living neurons that learned to play Doom, and an introduction to Karl Friston’s work, which turns out to play a critical role in both his biological computers and Mark’s agent. Philosopher Dr. Marcus Arvan makes the case that the universe won’t allow consciousness in digital machines: consciousness is analog, digital computers are not, and no amount of processing power closes that gap (though a quantum computer might be a different kind of animal). And Dr. Ian Gold, philosopher and co-author of the book Suspicious Minds, takes on a question that’s been bothering me: if everything is made of atoms, why does the brain’s physics count towards consciousness and the laptop’s doesn’t? Ian then tells us to wake him up in 500 years.Also: fish on cocaine, the coolest consciousness conference on Earth, why a vinyl record is a philosophical position, what physicists mean by fundamental (and what fundamentalists mean), cosmopsychism explained as a cell tower, GTA VI, and Keith Richards. Plus your reviews, and a listener’s idea we’re taking seriously: a live panel.We’re calling this one Engineering Consciousness because that’s what Mark Solms says he’s doing, in exactly those words. Next episode we’ll explore whether he should be doing this work at all. And simulation theory!Next episode: Part Three — A Great Loss to the Universe. David Benatar, Joel and Ian Gold, Amy Levy, Michael Ferguson, and Marcus Arvan on whether a thing that can suffer should ever be built.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur 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/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind 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/B0fagMPXPDr. Marcus Arvan — Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Tampa — Author, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality — https://link.amazon/B05vK59aaHon Weng Chong — Founder, Cortical Labs — https://corticallabs.comDr. Ian Gold — Philosopher, McGill University / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UOther 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/B0g6dOWDqThe hedonic (conditioned) place preference test — how you ask a fish whether it likes cocaine — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditioned_place_preferenceKarl Friston, “Life as We Know It” (2013) — the free energy principle paper Mark Solms says started his project — https://royalsocietypublis
- Sep 16, 202651 min
The Problem of Other Minds
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.comOur full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with Dr. Amy Levy, Dr. Joel Gold, Ian Gold, Dr. Michael Ferguson, and more: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind 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/B0fagMPXPDr. Amy Levy — Psychoanalyst and Author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive — https://amzn.to/3PH1FO5Dr. Joel Gold — Psychiatrist, NYU Langone / Co-author, Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com · https://neurospirituality.ioOther 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/CassandraSam 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/2093060670472241368Sam Altman on the Ocarina of Time remake (September 9, 2026) — “need to find a case of mountain dew” — https://x.com/sama/status/2097696043492143157Geoffrey Hinton — the godfather of AI who left Google to warn about it — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.htmlMustafa Suleyman on “seemingly conscious AI” — the machines that will seem conscious whether or not they are — https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-comingRecursive 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=upeDyQgPovCrNC6NNeuropsychoanalysis — the field Mark helped found; the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society was founded in London in July 2000 — https://npsa-a
- Sep 10, 202659 min
Dreaming Machines
On a summer afternoon in 2001, a freight train caught fire in a tunnel beneath Baltimore. The blaze burned at 1,500 degrees for days. And within hours, two thousand miles away, the internet slowed down… in Los Angeles.This is part two of our investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI: the machines’ bodies, and ours.Dream researcher Dr. Kelly Bulkeley explains why apocalyptic thinking might be an evolutionary advantage, what nightmares are actually for, and why he won’t rule out that AI is dreaming already. Investigative journalist Veronica Martinez reports from Ciudad Juárez, where communities remade by one industrial promise are watching the data centers arrive with another. And Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist John West returns to make the case for the body: why memory lives in muscle, why we read poems we don’t fully understand, and what a dead philosopher in a glass case can teach us about being remembered.Also: the panopticon guy becomes one of history’s first livestreamers, Elon Musk promises a billion robots, and we ask what’s left for dancing animals once the machines take the useful stuff.We called part one Dancing Animals because that’s what Vonnegut said we are. We’re calling this one Dreaming Machines because we don’t know yet what they are.Next week: the man who is building a machine that can feel.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur 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/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:Dr. Kelly Bulkeley — Dream Researcher and Author of The Spirituality of Dreaming - https://amzn.to/4dU0ns6Veronica 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/4zIp97COther works and things mentioned:The Howard Street Tunnel fire (July 18, 2001) — how a train fire in Baltimore slowed the internet — Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon, “We Need To Rewild The Internet,” Noema — https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman — the punishment of “eternal waking” — https://amzn.to/4xOWNXTDr. Joel Gold and Dr. Ian Gold — Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness — https://amzn.to/4upyA8UDr. Michael Ferguson — Director, Neurospirituality Research Lab · Harvard Medical School and Harvard Divinity School — https://neuromichael.com - https://neurospirituality.ioPetra Molnar — The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (from Part One) — https://amzn.to/4zIhN3MThe maquiladora industry — the last industrial promise made to Ciudad Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaquiladoraTorre Centinela — the surveillance tower rising over Juárez — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_CentinelaFlock 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-worriesJeremy 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-iconElon Musk at the G20 (September 1, 2026) — one billion humanoid robots in ten years — https://www.facebook.com/cnbc/videos/elon-musk-there-will-be-at-least-a-billion-humanoid-robots-in-10-years/1102034215493426/Kurt Vonnegut’s envelope story (“we’re
- Sep 2, 202658 min
Dancing Animals
There are robot dogs patrolling the US–Mexico border. This story starts somewhere gentler: with Kurt Vonnegut leaving the house to buy one envelope.His wife wanted him to buy a hundred and keep them in a closet. He refused. The walk was the point. "We're here on Earth to fart around," he said. "And of course, the computers will do us out of that… we're dancing animals."This is part one of a two-part investigation into the physicality of the internet and AI. The bodies it runs on, and the bodies it runs over. Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter John West (The Internet Will Die, and So Will You) makes the case for friction: for doorknobs, mixtapes, and every inefficient thing the frictionless web was built to eliminate. Then lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes) takes us to the border, where the frictionless future is already deployed — robot dogs, AI lie detectors, algorithms profiling people before they cross. And what gets tested at the border never stays there. Just ask the American towns, red and blue alike, tearing down their surveillance cameras.Also: the rise and demolition of GeoCities, my sixth-grade punk band's privacy disaster, Walter Benjamin's ninety-year-old warning, and the panopticon we finally built. It even has a subscription model now.Part two, Dreaming Machines, arrives next week.We hope you enjoy this episode of our second season of Suspicious Minds. Be sure to follow here, and subscribe to our newsletter for updates: https://agoricmedia.substack.comOur 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/AgoricMediaA Wondermind and Agoric Media ProductionAgoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/www.agoricmedia.comWondermind https://www.instagram.com/officialwondermind/ https://www.wondermind.com/Host and Creator: Sean King O’Grady https://www.instagram.com/seankingogrady/ https://seankingogrady.substack.com/Guests:John West — Pulitzer Prize–winning computational reporter, The Wall Street Journal / Author, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You — https://amzn.to/4zIp97CPetra 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/4zIhN3MOther 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/4h6hcl2Andor — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andor_(TV_series)GeoCities (1994–2009, RIP) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCitiesA family logging onto the web — https://youtu.be/A81IwlDeV6cBad Religion — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Religionand 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_ReproductionOlia Lialina — “Once Again, the Doorknob” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olia_LialinaDon Norman and frictionless design — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_NormanLiz Pelly — Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist — https://amzn.to/4iIrQQdCheapo Records, Minneapolis–St. Paul — https://cheapodiscs.comDHS 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-deploymentThe NYPD’s Digidog (yes, one was painted like a Dalmatian) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigidogTodd Miller and the “border industrial complex” — Empire of Borders — https://amzn.to/3Urj9QsAimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism — https://amzn.to/4qQcX0sHannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism — https://amzn.to/4iIrZDfMichel Foucault and the boomerang effect — “Society Must Be Defended” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_Must_Be_DefendedFlock Safety cameras,
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About Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse
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.
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