Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse

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 i

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 qu

The Problem of Other Minds (Part One)

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 acci

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

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

The Oracle Test

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 h

Through a Glass, Darkly: Part Two

Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a

Through a Glass, Darkly: Part One

Eight thousand years ago, in a settlement called Çatalhöyük in what is now central Turkey, somebody sat down with a piece of obsidian and began to grind volcanic glass. B

The Punishment of Tantalus

Tantalus was a king, and a son of Zeus, and he was invited to eat at the table of the gods, a rare honor. To test whether they were truly all-knowing, he killed his own s

Tia Miseria

There’s an old folktale about a woman called Tía Miseria — Aunt Misery. When Death comes for her, she asks him for one last favor: climb her pear tree and pick her some f

The Most Human Human

In 1991, at a museum in Boston, judges sat at keyboards and typed back and forth with strangers. Some of them people, some of them machines, trying to tell which was whic

Decameron Days (Part Two)

It’s a story we all know. A man hears a warning no one else can hear: the rain is coming, enough rain to end the world. So he builds a boat. His neighbors laugh at him —

Decameron Days (Part One)

In 1350, as the bubonic plague burned through Florence, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio imagined ten young people retreating to a villa outside the city. For ten days, they

Lotus Eaters

In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus's men ate the lotus flower, they forgot everything — who they were, where they'd come from, why any of it mattered. There was no pain, n

The Opera Game

In 1858, chess prodigy Paul Morphy played the most famous game in history, in an opera box in Paris, mid-performance. He announced his victory to the crowd before anyone

Magnifica Humanitas

In 1958, Daniel Ellsberg was handed new hire paperwork at the RAND Corporation with a standard box to check in order to receive his pension. He didn't bother — because gi

The Black Seas of Infinity

One hundred years ago, H.P. Lovecraft wrote that the most terrifying thing humanity could do was piece together too much knowledge. In January 2026, the CEO of Anthropic

Season Two Available Now! 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 powerf

We Were Nominated for 2x Webby Awards!

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

Why is AI Making Us Crazy?

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