Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

The New Zealand singer and songwriter Kimbra joins Pinchbeck and Jamie Wheal to discuss Christian mysticism and what a workable faith community might look like now. Raised in an atheist, scientific household, Kimbra describes an early mystical experience in New Zealand, an out-of-body state of overwhelming love carrying both a Christ aspect and a feminine presence, and her inability to find language for it within the church until she encountered mystics who could hold paradox. The three argue that religious vocabulary has become so politically loaded that words like Christian and sin land as landmines. Wheal recommends Jim Marion’s Putting on the Mind of Christ, which reads stages of faith through developmental psychology and spiral dynamics, and separates congregational belonging from actual mystical experience. Burning Man, the Grateful Dead and Taylor Swift fandom are raised as contemporary substitutes.

Poet and activist Drew Dellinger, founder of Planetize the Movement and author of Love Letter to the Milky Way, talks with Pinchbeck about a Substack essay arguing that RFK Jr. and Charles Eisenstein were wrong to assure readers Trump would not implement Project 2025. Dellinger says he expected Kennedy to play a spoiler role but never expected him to endorse Trump, and calls Eisenstein’s relaying of Trump’s denial to his Substack readership irresponsible given how many voters were still undecided. Pinchbeck, who published Eisenstein at Reality Sandwich and edited Sacred Economics, describes his own earlier reservations and uses Buckminster Fuller’s trim tab image to explain Eisenstein’s disproportionate influence in these circles. Dellinger dates his criticism to Eisenstein’s pre-pandemic essay The Polarization Trap. This is an excerpt from a longer conversation.

Samuel Delesque, founder of the Traditional Dream Factory ecovillage in Portugal and co-creator of the Closer governance platform, explains to Pinchbeck how the project ties a crypto token to physical access rather than financial speculation. One token, priced at roughly 242 euros at the time of the conversation, entitles the holder to one night on the land per year in perpetuity, and the same unit of time serves as the basis for dividing both build costs and governance rights. Delesque describes it as a stewardship token: buyers accept that the land is placed into the commons and regenerated rather than extracted from. He contrasts this with 1960s back-to-the-land communities, discusses the roughly fifteen permanent residents and the tiers of participation on site, and addresses the speculation question directly.

Bernardo Kastrup, the philosopher and computer scientist who has developed the position he calls analytic idealism, gives a talk in Pinchbeck’s series. He begins with the metaphysics he rejects: physicalism, on which only unconscious, purely quantitative matter exists and all qualities are manufactured inside the skull. Against it he sets the hard problem of consciousness, the 2022 Nobel-recognized experimental work indicating that physical properties are not definite prior to measurement, and cases where brain activity falls while experience becomes richer, as under psychedelics, breathwork and cardiac arrest. He traces objective idealism from the Indus Valley through Schopenhauer’s 1818 formulation, distinguishing it from Berkeley’s subjective version. The closing section develops dissociation and emotionally bound complexes, which Kastrup speculates could persist past a dissociative boundary and be captured by a later one. Pinchbeck notes points of disagreement between them.

Drew Dellinger, a poet and teacher known for the collection Love Letter to the Milky Way and for founding Planetize the Movement, joins Pinchbeck for a conversation about cosmology, ecology and the American right. Dellinger describes studying with Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, and a long-term book project treating Martin Luther King Jr. as an ecological and cosmological thinker. Much of the talk concerns his Substack criticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Charles Eisenstein, whom he faults for assuring readers before the 2024 election that Trump would not implement Project 2025, an error he treats as a misreading of Trump’s entire agenda. They also take up techno-authoritarianism, surveillance, and the erosion of shared standards of evidence. Dellinger closes by reading his poem To the Quislings.

Samuel Delesque, founder of the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal and co-creator of the governance tool Closer, describes with Pinchbeck how his project combines land stewardship with Web3 infrastructure. Delesque, formerly a software worker in New York, explains a three-layer structure in which a Portuguese operating company holding the land title, registered as a tourism project so it can interface with local government and apply for grants, is itself owned by a Swiss nonprofit called OASA that enforces regenerative constraints across its network. Residents buy or earn a token granting both access to live on the land and a vote on the project’s direction. The project runs on Celo, chosen for sub-cent fees, its ambition to hold natural assets on its balance sheet, and its adoption in Africa. Delesque cites Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics as an influence on that ecosystem.

A conversation with Grace Blakeley, the British writer and activist whose book Vulture Capitalism argues that capitalism has never been a free-market system. Blakeley recounts working for a left-wing think tank on UK economic policy, then becoming the commentator broadcasters wheeled out to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity economics because the rest of the political establishment opposed him, before writing for the New Statesman and leaving London for Cornwall. She traces the book to rereading Marx’s Capital during COVID, in particular the passages on the concentration and centralization of capital during crises, and to interviewers including Piers Morgan asking whether bailouts meant Britain had adopted socialism. She describes existing capitalism as concentrated markets fused with states that intervene for big business. Pinchbeck presses her on the transnational oligarchy he sees consolidating across borders.

Starhawk, the ecofeminist author of The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Empowerment Manual and founder of Earth Activist Training, talks with Pinchbeck in a Substack livestream about the second Trump administration and the condition of the American left. She says her sense of dread had lifted somewhat because opposition was slowing the administration down, and argues that its cruelty is paired with ineptitude because empathy is a form of intelligence its figures lack. Both note the oddity of now defending institutions they once protested, including aid bodies they regarded as intelligence fronts. Pinchbeck argues that an organic American left was never permitted to form, and Starhawk calls for soul-searching about why progressives failed to build a coalition broad enough to absorb the frustrations the right has captured.