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 told each other stories — not to escape the world, but to make sense of a world that had stopped making sense. He called it The Decameron. Back then, people understood that the way you survived a calamity was to gather together, hold tight, and not lose the thread. The people in this episode are doing something different. They're building bunkers.
That's where we begin.
In the fifth episode of Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse, we ask a question that turns out not to have an obvious answer: what does it mean to prepare for the end of the world? We start underground. Two thousand years ago, the people of Cappadocia in modern-day Turkey excavated a city eighteen levels deep into the earth, capable of sheltering twenty thousand people, sealed from the inside by rolling stones the size of millstones. They built it because invasions — Persian, Arab, Roman — were a recurring feature of life there for centuries. The apocalypse wasn't a thought experiment to them. It was Tuesday. Joined by Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: Building for the End Times and honorary fellow at the University of Sydney, who has spent years researching the people building for catastrophe around the world. What he found surprised him.
Also with us: Robert Kirsch and Emily Ray, political theorists and co-authors of Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States, who trace the long, strange arc of American prepping — from westward expansion and the Boy Scout movement's anxiety about a vanishing frontier, through the Cold War Gaither Report, a secret government study that concluded most Americans would die in a nuclear exchange, that Congress would have blast shelters, and that everyone else could shop their way to safety. Neoliberalism, it turns out, didn't just shape the economy. It shaped who we think deserves to survive.
And Dr. Michael Ferguson, director of the Harvard Neurospirituality Lab, who draws the precise distinction the AI debate desperately needs: the difference between mind, consciousness, and intelligence. Three words that get used interchangeably — and shouldn't. When Emily Ray argues that AI has none of the above, we ask a neuroscientist. His answer might surprise you.
Decameron Days (Part One) is the fifth episode of an investigation into artificial intelligence, the human mind, and whether the apocalypse is something that happens to us — or something that's already happening inside us. Decameron Days (Part Two) drops 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
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Host and Creator: Sean King O'Grady
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Guests:
Bradley Garrett - Honorary Fellow, University of Sydney School of Geosciences / Author, Bunker: Building for the End Times — https://amzn.to/4awl3V2
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
Dr. Michael Ferguson - Director, Harvard Neurospirituality Lab: https://neuromichael.com/
Other works mentioned in this episode:
Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron — https://amzn.to/4eFwcW7
Robert Macfarlane - Underland — https://amzn.to/4eZwtlF
Toby Ord - The Precipice — https://amzn.to/44CDW5g
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations — https://amzn.to/4p40LbE
"The Californian Ideology" — essay — https://monoskop.org/images/d/dc/Barbrook_Richard_Cameron_Andy_1996_The_Californian_Ideology.pdf
The Gaither Report: Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (1957) — declassified 1973 — https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB139/nitze02.pdf
Justin Sinclair / Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — Towards a Bang or a Whimper: Associations between the Doomsday Clock and Trust in US Institutions — https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-67474-001
Andrew Szasz - "Shop Your Way to Safety" — referenced by Robert Kirsch — https://amzn.to/3QOtUea
JFK civil defense speech (1961) — https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-urgent-national-needs
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This episode was made by:
Executive Producers: Mandy Teefey, Selena Gomez, Jonathon Glucksman, Molly Borman, Jesse Ford, David Tuohy, Feras M. Shamammi
Produced by: Jesse Ford
Editor: David Justin Martin
Original Music by: Shane Patrick Ford
Sound Mix: Mike Regan
Graphics: Semi:Formal
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Wondermind Chief of Staff: Emma Wright
Additional Camera and Audio: Elliot Uriah
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