Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Brett Scott, the monetary writer and former finance-sector insider who publishes the Substack Altered States of Monetary Consciousness, argues that liberal capitalism issues two incompatible instructions at once: outcompete everyone, and also be a good person who cares about the unemployed and the environment. Discussing his essay Making Capitalism Bad Again, Scott places the good-capitalism scene within the older tradition of liberal reformism, in which elites alleviate the system’s damage rather than change it, and points to ESG investing, social finance and the philanthropic posture of figures like Bill Gates as its current forms. He describes spending two years working inside the financial sector as a deliberate anthropological experiment, and his irritation at being labeled a reformed banker afterward. Pinchbeck raises Grace Blakeley’s writing and the collapse of liberal media framing.

Gary Lachman, a historian of Western esotericism and former bassist in Blondie, gives a talk hosted by Daniel Pinchbeck drawn from his 2017 book The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Lachman credits the phrase to the poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, who founded the Temenos Academy in London to sustain a Neoplatonic tradition she believed English Romantic poetry had inherited and modern secular culture discarded. He argues imagination is not make-believe but a faculty of making real, closer to what happens when a person realizes something already known than to fantasy or daydreaming, and compares its resistance to definition with Augustine on time. He discusses Blake as a literal visionary and the line Aldous Huxley borrowed for The Doors of Perception. The closing turns to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Norman Ohler, the German writer whose book Blitzed documented systematic methamphetamine use in the Third Reich, recounts how the project began. A Berlin DJ friend told him the Nazis had used drugs, having found and swallowed 1940s Pervitin tablets left in a medicine cabinet in an East Berlin apartment. Ohler located a single academic paper arguing there would have been no blitzkrieg without methamphetamine, then worked in the German military archive at Freiburg and found the Wehrmacht’s use largely unwritten. He had intended a novel; his publisher pushed him toward nonfiction with a full source apparatus, a choice he says was right. The conversation also covers self-publishing and the origins of LSD, and closes with Bernardo Kastrup’s argument that scientific materialism has been superseded by analytic idealism, which Pinchbeck says he broadly accepts.

Pinchbeck talks with Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and now of the New Center for Holistic Learning, and Walter Alexander of the Anthroposophical Society of New York, ahead of a month-long seminar on Rudolf Steiner held both at the society’s building on West 15th Street and on Zoom. White proposes judging Steiner by his legacy: biodynamic agriculture and its part in the rebirth of organic farming, Waldorf education, the Camphill communities for children and adults with special needs, and roughly six thousand lectures. Alexander notes Steiner’s influence on Joseph Beuys, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, and a recent Gagosian piece observing that this influence went largely unattributed. Pinchbeck recalls visiting the Goetheanum at Dornach. The discussion ends on karma, reincarnation and Steiner’s spiritual science.

Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, speaks in a clip from Pinchbeck’s Breaking the AI Barrier course on whether human capacities can survive the current wave of technology. He builds the talk on Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, which traces how information technologies from the telegraph and radio to the internet begin decentralized and utopian and end hegemonic and centrally controlled. Wheal extends the pattern to psychedelics, which he treats as an information technology, and says it is why he was skeptical of the psychedelic renaissance years before others were. He maps the AI debate into three camps and argues that the fixation on superintelligence crowds out nearer-term harms, pointing to Cambridge Analytica as an early and crude case.