Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Joe Dolce, former editor-in-chief of Details magazine and author of Brave New Weed, joins Pinchbeck to discuss his newly published handbook on psychedelics, released the day of the recording. Dolce traces his route from running press for the New York club Area in the 1980s through Harper’s Bazaar to Details, and says he returned to psychedelics partly to loosen the hardening categories of middle age and partly because intelligent friends kept asking him unanswerable practical questions about ayahuasca, ketamine and MDMA. He describes the neuroscientist Gul Dolen’s work giving MDMA to octopuses and her theory of reopening critical periods, which he argues shifts attention from the trip itself to preparation and integration. Pinchbeck recounts his iboga work in Gabon and his interest in paranormal effects.

A session from Pinchbeck’s course Breaking the AI Barrier with Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity and a founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. She speaks from an Indigenous AI gathering in Montreal, where she represents a Canadian consortium proposing that the country lead on AI that is inclusive, relational and life-affirming. Her presentation argues that the way AI is discussed is itself the problem, because the questions people can ask are constrained by modernity, the single story of progress, development and civilization that suppresses other knowledge. She distinguishes a subject-object ontology, in which land becomes property and resource, from a subject-to-subject ontology that treats land and rivers as beings, and calls that shift neurobiological rather than merely intellectual. Pinchbeck closes by citing Bernard Stiegler on technics and the fragility of digitized memory.

Robert Falconer, a psychotherapist who co-wrote Many Minds, One Self with Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz and wrote The Others Within Us, describes how three decades of work on childhood sexual trauma led to cases he could not explain in trauma terms. One client carried something he judged was not part of her own history; after it left, she wrote that her earlier attempts to describe a nonhuman presence inside her had brought electroshock and forced drugging. Falconer argues that the IFS premise that mind is plural — closer to an orchestra than a soloist — extends to material arriving from outside a person’s own lifetime, and that spirit possession is the metaphor most cultures have used for a real dynamic. Pinchbeck adds that the medicalized psychedelic movement has been weakened by refusing to take this seriously.

Jeffrey Kripal, the religious studies scholar behind How to Think Impossibly and Authors of the Impossible, talks with Pinchbeck about writing on the paranormal from inside the university. Kripal traces his route through his memoir Secret Body, early work on ecstatic religious experience and sexuality, and research at the Esalen Institute and on the human potential movement, where he met people whose experiences had no accepted vocabulary. He describes his aim as mainstreaming and authorizing that conversation, and notes that Authors of the Impossible uses literary theory to treat figures such as Frederic Myers and Charles Fort. Pinchbeck raises the academy’s materialist bias and his own exclusion from it. The closing turns to anomalous communication as a symptom of stories breaking down.

Pinchbeck hosts Robert Falconer, the Internal Family Systems teacher and author of The Others Within Us, for a talk on parts work, the porous mind and spirit possession. Falconer opens with his own history of severe childhood abuse and decades of clinical work with men who survived similar violence, and uses that experience to argue two claims. The first, developed within IFS by Richard Schwartz, is that consciousness is multiple rather than unitary, organized as sparsely interconnected subroutines. The second, harder claim is that consciousness is porous. He draws on Tanya Luhrmann’s anthropology of psychosis and spirituality, Isabel Clarke’s clinical work in England, and Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, treating their convergence on the same conclusion from separate evidence bases as consilience.

A conversation with Morgane Ciot and Alice Maynewaring, who run the production company The Classics Department, about their New York piece Psychomagic 9, inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and set on the film set of a fictional remake of it. They describe their earlier work as chaos theater, live theatrical dating shows partly modeled on Eric Andre’s prank sensibility and staged to push festival crowds into collective effervescence. One of these, Bet on Love, was commissioned by a founder of the prediction-market startup Manifold Markets and pitched as a revival of the corporate industrial musicals of the 1950s. They argue that the silent seated audience is a recent invention and that participation recovers an older function of ritual theater. Much of the discussion concerns LARP, specifically the parlor or theater style driven by character and motivation.