Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Sarah Wilson, the Australian author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and This One Wild and Precious Life and founder of the I Quit Sugar movement, hosts Pinchbeck on the first edition of her Substack Live series, built around his essay The Rise of Sovereign Individuals. Pinchbeck sketches his path from magazine journalism through Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the Evolver network and How Soon Is Now. The talk turns to the tech right: Curtis Yarvin, whom Pinchbeck interviewed in Miami and treats as a Buckminster Fuller style trim tab giving permission for a CEO dictatorship; the South African backgrounds of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; and the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, whose forecast of nation-state decline he says is being turned into a self-fulfilling program.

Jamie Wheal, co-author of Stealing Fire and author of Recapture the Rapture, discusses an essay he had just published on the turn toward militant Christianity in Silicon Valley, written at nearly the same moment as related pieces by Erik Davis and Jules Evans. Wheal describes a shift away from individualist secularism toward a millenarian, Manichaean Christianity keyed to end times, and ties it to the industry’s parallel move into defense contracting through firms such as Palantir and Anduril, Eric Schmidt’s clandestine work in Ukraine, and the presence of tech CEOs at Trump’s inauguration. He points to the ACTS 17 Collective, started by Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens and his wife, as one carrier of the trend. Pinchbeck presses him on whether any of it answers a genuine meaning crisis.

Monetary anthropologist and former derivatives broker Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance, talks with Pinchbeck in a Substack livestream about money, crypto and the ideology of the current tech right. Scott describes moving from left-wing finance criticism to writing about the fusion of big tech and big finance and its public expression as an attack on physical cash. Drawing on growing up at the tail end of apartheid in South Africa, he reads the alpha-male posturing of figures like Andrew Tate as a defense strategy born of insecurity, and links that settler mentality to the South African backgrounds of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. He also discusses libertarianism as a cosmology of isolated individuals and a course in economic anthropology he is building.

Nafeez Ahmed, the investigative journalist and systems theorist whose background is in international security, discusses his book Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within. Ahmed says he had stepped back from tracking far-right and extremist groups because the work was traumatizing, then returned after a viral article on the British Conservative minister Michael Gove led his wife to push him to assemble years of reporting into a chronology. Laid out that way, he argues, a deliberate effort by a technology oligarchy to dismantle democratic foundations from the inside becomes legible. Pinchbeck connects this to the 1930s technocracy movement, Elon Musk’s grandfather, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its corporate donors, and both discuss AGI timelines announced by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei.

Marianne Williamson hosts Pinchbeck on a Substack Live in February 2025, opening by reading aloud his argument that American decline predates Trump and that Trump and Elon Musk serve as frontmen for a transnational financial elite conducting a controlled demolition of the country. Pinchbeck compares the strategy to the disaster capitalism described in The Shock Doctrine — engineer a crash, then buy up distressed public assets — citing the emptying of the Park Service and talk of privatizing air traffic control. He argues the larger factor is artificial intelligence, pointing to JD Vance’s anti-regulation speech at the Paris AI summit and to Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind forecasting artificial general intelligence by 2030, which could make most knowledge work redundant. Williamson insists the moment calls for organized refusal rather than spiritualized denial.