Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Carne Ross, the former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq War and became an advocate of anarchism and bottom-up governance, returns to discuss the collapse of the rules-based international order. Ross calls Peter Thiel’s techno-libertarian self-presentation dishonest, pointing to his chairmanship of Palantir, whose aggregation of citizen data across US government agencies he regards as a form of state power beyond what is usually meant by surveillance capitalism. He argues Trump is a consequence rather than a cause: falling living standards across the West, inequality, and a Democratic Party severed from ordinary voters created the opening. Unless capitalism is systemically reformed, he says, instability will keep producing figures promising to control the chaos. Pinchbeck raises Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism thesis and scenarios of engineered US debt default.

Christopher Bache, who taught philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University and wrote an account of two decades of high-dose LSD work, presents at a multi-speaker event on consciousness and regenerative society. He describes 73 sessions at 500 to 600 micrograms, following a protocol adapted from Stanislav Grof’s psychedelic therapy, and a sequence of death and rebirth passages through personal, collective, archetypal and causal levels toward what he calls the diamond luminosity. He gives most of his time to two episodes: an encounter with what he names the ocean of suffering, and what he calls the birth of the future human. Because this is a panel, a later speaker reframes the material through Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness and the end of the mental-rational age.

Political writer and civic technologist Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Civic Hall and author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, talks with Pinchbeck about American democracy under a second Trump administration. Sifry traces his path from The Nation to campaign finance work with Public Campaign, which built state-level public financing systems in Maine, Massachusetts and Arizona, and then to internet politics, where open-source collaboration and the Howard Dean campaign suggested a more participatory model. Pinchbeck, pointed toward Sifry by Douglas Rushkoff, argues that liberal and progressive circles are dissociated and insufficiently alarmed. Sifry counters that grassroots organizing is growing, citing the No Kings protests and Indivisible, and closes by urging listeners to join a local group, since organized money usually beats people who stay unorganized.

Alex Ebert, the musician who fronts Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and writes on philosophy and culture, opens with a video he made from his experience as a producer. The loudness wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s compressed recordings until an album’s waveform looked like a solid block with no dynamic range, and Ebert treats this as a picture of the dialectic: oscillations rise in frequency until positive and negative can no longer be distinguished, at which point a new state emerges that stacks with rather than replaces the old. He applies the model to consciousness, distinguishing animal automaticity from the specifically human capacity to problematize an object that already matches its mental schema. The closing turns to culture, invoking Alexander Bard’s barred absolute and arguing for exclusion as a condition of pluralism.

A conversation with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, known for Team Human and Survival of the Richest, in a session framed around artificial intelligence. Rushkoff says his view of AI shifts day to day and that on this one it looks like another investment cycle following crypto, VR and AR — closer to Adobe Photoshop, which eliminated paste-up work while creating a graphic design profession. His argument is that AI mostly exposes institutions that were already failing: he recalls telling CNN’s Jake Tapper there might be an unemployment solution rather than problem, since jobs were invented in late medieval Europe as chartered monopolies replacing craft, and says schools were degraded when administrators asked corporations what workers they needed. He warns against accepting the question of what humans are for. Pinchbeck responds on education’s role in sustaining democratic culture.

Dean Radin, the experimental parapsychologist who has spent about forty years testing psychic phenomena in the laboratory, delivers a slide talk in Pinchbeck’s online series, following an earlier speaker. Radin sets aside popular paranormal imagery and defines his subject pragmatically as interconnections that cross space and time, labelled telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Most of the presentation walks through methodology: the ganzfeld telepathy protocol with its red light, halved ping-pong balls and white noise, a shielded two-thousand-pound steel chamber at his institute, and a worked example in which a receiver’s impressions of stone and monolithic scale matched the target image. He reports 117 published studies and 3,885 sessions with a 30.6 percent hit rate against 25 percent chance, and notes coverage in mainstream psychology journals from 1994 to 2020. He closes on why the work matters to him.

Pinchbeck hosts Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and author of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, in an event also featuring Neil Theise. Kripal recounts writing the 2018 book after an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Visions of the Impossible, and explains that he built it around scientists, engineers and physicians because his STEM students dismiss classical religious texts. He then reads a short paper setting out what he calls wagers rather than certainties, chief among them a dual-aspect monism in which consciousness and cosmos are two expressions of one reality that we split into mental and material by becoming socialized subjects. He treats paranormal experience as a temporary collapse of the subject-object structure.

Mona Sobhani, a cognitive neuroscientist trained at the University of Southern California and author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, gives a talk in the Liminal Institute’s Future of Consciousness course hosted by Pinchbeck. She describes conventional training in neuroimaging and psychopathy research, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt on law and neuroscience funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and the assumption she absorbed that the universe is random and meaning is manufactured by the brain. Against that she sets her Persian family’s divination practice, her mother reading coffee grounds with an accuracy she began documenting during graduate school, and precognitive dreams she had forgotten. She recounts the existential crisis and run of misfortune that followed her doctorate. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, joins near the end.

Pinchbeck hosts Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, and Douglas Rushkoff, the media theorist behind Team Human, in a livestreamed conversation about the absorption of psychedelic culture by the libertarian right. Pinchbeck argues that psychedelics are nonspecific psychic amplifiers rather than inherently healing, citing Amazonian sorcerers who use ayahuasca against enemies, and recounts his own iboga initiation with the Bwiti in Gabon, which he wrote about in his first book. Wheal describes colleagues and friends in the psychedelic and crypto worlds falling in behind the new administration in exchange for access and deregulation, and compares them to a courtier class around a sun king. Rushkoff dates his own disillusionment to seeing wealthy libertarian stockbrokers in the front rows at Grateful Dead shows in 1986.

Pinchbeck talks with Matthew Green, a journalist and trauma educator who works on collective trauma integration, about the political and spiritual forces he sees driving artificial intelligence. Pinchbeck argues that forecasts of mass job displacement, with estimates he cites ranging from thirty to seventy percent of work affected, are arriving with almost no societal preparation beyond gestures such as Sam Altman’s basic income trial. He treats Donald Trump as the first AI president, elected in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica’s machine-learning targeting, and reads the alliance between the tech oligarchy, naming Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and David Sacks, and the American right as positioning for both AI and ecological collapse. The conversation also reaches Rudolf Steiner’s figure of Ahriman, Carl Jung, Mayan prophecy and emerging forms of AI mysticism. It was held as a preview of Pinchbeck’s course Breaking the AI Barrier.