Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Thomas Roberts, emeritus professor at Northern Illinois University and author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind and Mindapps, describes teaching what he believes was among the first university courses devoted to psychedelics and the long stretch during which almost no colleagues followed. He recounts encountering the subject as a doctoral student in Willis Harman’s human potential course at Stanford in the late 1960s, when married graduate students described experiences that did not fit his assumptions about drug users. Roberts lays out his multistate theory, which treats psychedelics as one instance of a broader class he calls mind apps or psychotechnologies, alongside hypnosis, breathing practices, yoga, martial arts and brain stimulation. He and Pinchbeck discuss the current expansion of psychedelic interest and Roberts’s writing archive.

Carolyn Elliott, author of Existential Kink, talks with Pinchbeck about where her method came from. The two trace their acquaintance to Pinchbeck’s Evolver network and Reality Sandwich magazine and an Evolver conference in 2012. Elliott describes getting involved around 2013 with OneTaste and its practice of orgasmic meditation, led by Nicole Daedone, which she treats as both a real teaching and a nefarious organization. From it she took the idea that people accept only a narrow band of sensation and reject everything outside it, and that the band can be deliberately widened. She extends the logic of BDSM containers to a person’s relationship with their own circumstances. The closing turns to fear of death as the mechanism of social control.

A conversation with Brett Scott, an economic anthropologist and former derivatives broker whose book Cloud Money: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for Our Wallets argues that big tech and big finance are fusing and squeezing out physical cash. Scott describes an upwards anthropology that studies powerful institutions rather than remote communities, an impulse that took him into over-the-counter swaps and inflation and property derivatives during the financial crisis, work he treated as immersive and gonzo rather than academic. He explains derivatives as large-scale contractual bets and traces his path from the 2013 activist handbook The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance through years of reporting on alternative currencies. Pinchbeck raises Catherine Austin Fitts and her warnings about centralized digital currency. The exchange ends on physicality and slowness as things worth reclaiming, with cacao beans invoked as a classical Maya currency.