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. From Wondermind and Agoric Media Executive Producers Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on all things Suspicious Minds and more: https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ If you’ve had an experience with AI that you’d like to share with us, please contact us: info@agoricmedia.com (mailto:info@agoricmedia.com) https://www.agoricmedia.com/suspicious-minds https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia
What this show covers
consciousnessAI ethicsphilosophy of mindneuroscienceAIembodimentspiritualityeffective altruismpronatalismlongtermismexistential riskartificial sentiencesufferingartificial intelligencefree energy principle
What listeners will find here
Effective altruism, AI, and the fight over whose future matters
Effective altruism is the focus here, as the episode examines how a philosophy about doing the most good came to shape influential thinking around AI, longtermism, and existential risk. It asks whether saving the future can become a justification for harm in the present.
Should we create conscious AI at all? The finale turns the question ethical
Consciousness is the subject here, but the real pressure point is whether building a feeling machine would be justified. In this final chapter, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and scientists argue over suffering, responsibility, and what happens the day after a new mind exists.
Can consciousness be built? This episode follows the argument to its strangest edge
Artificial consciousness is the focus here, as Mark Solms argues he may have built an agent with needs, no language, and a testable claim to consciousness. The episode widens into living neurons playing Doom, analog-vs-digital philosophy, and a deeper question about why brains might count differently from laptops.
Can consciousness be reduced to thought, or is it something deeper and older?
Consciousness is the subject here, approached through Mark Solms’s lifelong attempt to explain how a self emerges from the body. This first part blends philosophy, neuropsychoanalysis, psychiatry, spirituality, and AI into a story about why feeling—not thinking—may be the core of mind.
When AI stops being a machine question and becomes a suffering question
Consciousness, embodiment, and the ethics of AI drive this second half of the series. The episode moves from lab-grown neurons and philosophical dead ends to spiritual experience, asking what it would mean for an artificial system to feel, suffer, or seem sacred.
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