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.com Many of our full long-form expert interviews are available ad-free on Patreon. Hear complete conversations with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/cw/AgoricMedia A Wondermind and Agoric Media Production Agoric Media https://www.instagram.com/agoricmedia/ https://www.youtube.com/@agoricmedia https://www.tiktok.com/@agoricmedia https://agoricmedia.substack.com/ https://www.agoricmedia.com Wondermind 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: Curtis Yarvin — Writer, Gray Mirror; founder, Urbit — https://graymirror.substack.com Richard Yetter Chappell — Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami / Author of the blog Good Thoughts — https://www.goodthoughts.blog/ 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 Ed Simon - Carnegie Mellon University - The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse - https://amzn.to/4dVMYQb Malo Bourgon — CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute — https://intelligence.org Dan Faggella — CEO and Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research — https://emerj.com Timothy Morton — Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University / Author, Hyperobjects — https://amzn.to/4xPqGa4 Dr. Joel Gold - Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and co-author of Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness: https://amzn.to/4upyA8U Other works and things mentioned: ON THE ANTS Sunamura et al., “Intercontinental union of Argentine ants: behavioral relationships among introduced populations in Europe, North America, and Asia,” Insectes Sociaux (2009) — https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00040-009-0001-9 van Wilgenburg, Torres and Tsutsui, “The global expansion of a single ant supercolony,” Evolutionary Applications (2010) — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3352483/ “The Sun Never Sets on the Ant Empire,” Saltman Quarterly, UC San Diego (2019) — https://sqonline.ucsd.edu/2019/05/the-sun-never-sets-on-the-ant-empire/ “The strange and turbulent global world of ant geopolitics,” Aeon — https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-and-turbulent-global-world-of-ant-geopolitics ON THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment” (2012) — https://fluidself.org/books/philosophy/the-dark-enlightenment Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994), collected in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Urbanomic, 2011) — https://link.amazon/B0fNYO378 Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pills,” Unqualified Reservations (April 2007) — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/case-against-democracy-ten-red-pills/ Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century,” Unqualified Reservations (2008) — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/pdfs/patchwork.pdf Unqualified Reservations, the full archive — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ Curtis Yarvin, “How the USG should respond to AI,” Gray Mirror (September 16, 2026) — https://graymirror.substack.com/p/how-the-usg-should-respond-to-ai ON HYPERSTITION (sort of): William Gibson, “Neuromancer” - https://link.amazon/B0e9N8llv PRESS ON YARVIN James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair (April 20, 2022) — https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets Ava Kofman, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” The New Yorker (published online June 2, 2025; issue dated June 9, 2025) — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” The New York Times Magazine / The Interview (January 18, 2025) — https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html ALSO IN THE YARVIN SECTION Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34): “For forms of government let fools contest; / Whate’er is best administer’d is best.” (Yarvin paraphrases it on air.) Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), 1920 — the play that gave us the word “robot.” Aron Simanovich, Rasputin and the Jews: A Reminiscence — the memoir of Rasputin’s jeweler-turned-secretary – The Elizabethan “fish days”: the 1563 statute adding Wednesday as a fish day to support the fleet — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00253359.2024.2331917#d1e151 Elon Musk on humanity as “the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” — https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1783959488481161491 ON THE BASILISK Roko’s Basilisk — the original 2010 LessWrong post and its removal. Context: David Auerbach, “Roko’s Basilisk: The most terrifying thought experiment of all time,” Slate (July 2014) — https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/rokos-basilisk-the-most-terrifying-thought-experiment-of-all-time.html Nick Bostrom, “Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge,” Review of Contemporary Philosophy (2011) — https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf David Langford, “BLIT,” Interzone (1988); “comp.basilisk FAQ,” Nature (1999); “Different Kinds of Darkness” (2000) — https://ansible.uk/writing/c-b-faq.html and https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm Pascal’s wager — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares: https://amzn.to/49gpPW1 ALSO MENTIONED Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002 (“known knowns”) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns Errol Morris, The Unknown Known (2013), the Rumsfeld documentary — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unknown_Known As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. 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