Suspicious Minds Season 2 Returns: AI, Existential Risk, and the Human Psyche
The Webby-nominated, award-winning podcast ‘SUSPICIOUS MINDS: AI And The Apocalypse’ has returned for season two. The critically acclaimed, Top 100-charting podcast series produced by Agoric Media, in partnership with Wondermind, was selected for the 2026 Tribeca Creators Market this past June.
Coinciding with the launch of Season Two, AI and the Apocalypse is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and all major platforms.
Agoric Media and Wondermind Join Forces for Audio Documentary Storytelling
SUSPICIOUS MINDS was produced as a narrative documentary by filmmaker Sean King O’Grady (Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW) and, with Wondermind executive producers like Mandy Teefey and Selena Gomez, the show treats the AI transition not as a technology story, but as a psychological event already underway inside anyone with an internet connection.
Tribeca Creators Market Selection and Critical Acclaim
Nominated for two awards at this year’s Webby’s – Best New Podcast in News, Business & Society and for Podcast: Documentary – SUSPICIOUS MINDS has established itself as one of the most original projects exploring the way AI is transforming human life.
Awards:
- Winner! – 2026 Telly Awards- Bronze-Series-Non-Scripted
- Winner! – 2026 Telly Awards- Bronze-Series-Documentary
- Winner! – 2026 Telly Awards-Bronze-Campaign-Health & Safety
- Nominated – 2026 Webby Awards- Best New Podcast in News, Business & Society
- Nominated – 2026 Webby Awards-Podcast: Documentary
Watch the SUSPICIOUS MINDS: AI and the Apocalypse trailer.
In addition to Teefey and Gomez, other Executive Producers include: Jonathon Glucksman, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shammami, Jesse Ford, and Molly Borman. The series is produced by Jesse Ford.
Season 2 Deep Dive: Exploring ‘AI and the Apocalypse’
In Season one, episodes examined the emergent phenomenon often referred to as AI Psychosis, which laid the groundwork for a second season that takes a grander view while questioning: what does the age of AI mean for our collective psychology and sense of the future?
Season two, AI and the Apocalypse, provides a deep investigation into humanity’s oldest and most persistent fear – the end of all things – and whether, in 2026, we are inching perilously close to those age-old predictions becoming real. The series asks not just whether AI could end the world, but why humans have always needed to imagine it might – and what that obsession reveals about meaning, mortality, and the strange moment we are all living through.
The Truman Show Delusion and Psychological Foundations
Host and Creator Sean King O’Grady spent two years speaking with the world’s leading philosophers, scientists, psychologists, historians, and theologians. As with Season one of the series, AI and the Apocalypse is anchored by the thinking and contributions of Dr. Joel Gold and Ian Gold, PhD – the brothers who coined “The Truman Show Delusion,” and authors of the book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness.
Together, they examine whether AI represents a genuine existential threat, and what it reveals about the human psyche that so many of us are now living inside of that question.
Key Thought Leaders and Interview Subjects
Across eight episodes, the season moves through the deep history of apocalyptic thinking, the psychology of dread, doomsday prepping, transhumanism, anti-natalism, pro-extinctionism, and the art we create to face what we most fear.
Key interview subjects this season include:
- Timothy Morton – author of Hyperobjects and Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
- David Benatar – antinatalist philosopher and author of Better to Have Never Been
- Professor Judith Wolfe – St. Andrews School of Divinity
- Sheldon Solomon – Psychologist and founder of Terror Management Theory
- Dr. Michael Ferguson – Harvard Neurospirituality Lab
- Dr. Samuel Justin Sinclair – Psychologist and Writer for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
- Nolen Gertz – author of Nihilism and Technology
- Johann Hari – author of Stolen Focus
- Malo Bourgon – CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute
- Emily Ray and Robert Kirsch – authors of Be Prepared
- Kelly Bulkeley – Psychologist and renowned Dream Expert
- James Cussen – The Living Philosophy on YouTube and Substack
- Dorian Lynskey – author of Everything Must Go
- and many more
Suspicious Minds Season 2 Episode Guide
SUSPICIOUS MINDS: AI and the Apocalypse Episode descriptions:
Episodes 201–204: Historical Dread, Doomsday Clocks, and Underground Bunkers
EP201: Why are the very people building potentially world-ending technology its most dramatic prophets of doom? We trace the long human tradition of fearing dangerous knowledge – from Prometheus and Frankenstein to the AI labs of Silicon Valley.
EP202: Is our AI anxiety historically unique, or just the latest in a very long human habit of believing we’ve finally built the thing that ends us? With guests spanning neuroscience, psychoanalysis, theology, and dream research, the episode asks whether apocalyptic thinking is a warning system – or a compulsion.
EP203: The Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight, its closest setting ever, and for the first time, AI shares the global stage of existential threats with nuclear weapons. Our experts make the clearest case yet for why misaligned AI could cause human extinction, while we also look at people being affected, for better and for worse, by AI right now.
EP204: Silicon Valley billionaires are building lavish underground compounds, and the U.S. government has a plan to save itself if civilization collapses – a plan that doesn’t include you. Our experts explore what it means for society when its most powerful members start quietly building exits.
Episodes 205–208: Anti-Natalism, Biological Computing, and Terror Management Theory
EP205: If AI could plausibly end civilization within a century, is having children a moral act? This episode takes seriously the philosophical case that in an age of existential risk, it might not be. And then we go further, talking with people who believe humanity should become extinct. We also explore nihilism, and biological computing – which is exactly what it sounds like – human neurons being used to make computer chips. They even play video games!
EP206: Mary Shelley wrote *Frankenstein* during a volcanic winter in 1816. Two centuries later, the people building AI cite it more than almost any other text. This episode explores the eerie feedback loop between our apocalyptic fiction and the technology we build, and asks: if we create artificial general intelligence, will it develop something like belief in God? And where does that leave us, as its creators?
EP207: TESCREAL is a constellation of Silicon Valley ideologies – Transhumanism, Effective Altruism, Longtermism. But are adherents to these philosophies using the threat of apocalypse to justify real harm to real people right now. Could these interlocking philosophies function as a secularized religion that systematically devalues present human life in service of a fictional future? Or do they represent a future of abundance unlike anything humanity has ever known?
EP208: The season’s final answer: the real engine of the AI arms race isn’t ambition or greed – it’s terror. We explore how Ernest Becker’s Terror Management Theory reframes everything we’ve heard this season as an attempted escape of the inevitability of death and decay. And believe it or not, in looking at death, we find some hope.
Where to Stream Suspicious Minds
Full episodes of SUSPICIOUS MINDS: AI and the Apocalypse are available to watch on YouTube and listen to via Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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