Conversations

Pinchbeck hosts a live conversation with Ari Kuschnir, the filmmaker behind widely circulated AI-generated satirical videos of political figures, and Schuyler Brown, ahead of a course the three are teaching on producing short, socially and spiritually conscious AI videos. Kuschnir describes his Trump ayahuasca piece as a response to August 2024, made in the first week Grok’s image tools were available, and contrasts it with the darker MAGA Ballroom 2028 video made a year later. He floats a Christmas Carol treatment with Jeffrey Epstein as Jacob Marley and invites viewers to suggest the ghosts. Pinchbeck raises his own initial reservation, echoed in his comments section, that humanizing portrayals could numb audiences, and recounts a discussion at the Museum of the Moving Image about Sora and fabricated memories. Brown closes with a heart-centered visualization practice.

Pinchbeck speaks with Salih Hudayar, foreign minister of the East Turkistan Government in Exile, about the Uyghur population of the region China administers as Xinjiang. Hudayar gives an extended historical account: the Qing invasion of 1759, the independent state declared in 1864 under Yaqub Beg and recognized by the British, Russian and Ottoman empires, its overthrow in 1877 after both Britain and Russia backed the Qing reconquest, the short-lived republics of 1933 and 1944, and the Chinese Communist takeover in December 1949. He argues that Beijing’s campaign is driven by colonial control of territory rather than by religion, noting that China’s ethnically Chinese Muslims face no comparable persecution. Both raise the claim that American firms, Oracle among them, supplied and field-tested surveillance systems on Uyghurs that are now being adopted domestically.

Ramez Naam, a former Microsoft program manager turned science fiction novelist and clean energy specialist, and author of The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, talks with Pinchbeck about the American political situation. Naam says he has become effectively a single-issue activist for protecting democratic governance, on the grounds that climate action, civil rights and rational economic policy are all downstream of not becoming a dictatorship. He faults the tech right, naming Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, for backing Trump in exchange for lighter regulation, and traces part of that culture to the extropians and the Burning Man scene where he and Pinchbeck first met in 2000. He describes authoritarian rule-testing and referee capture, but reads Trump’s falling approval as grounds for cautious hope.

David Z. Morris, a journalist who has covered cryptocurrency since 2013 and author of Stealing the Future, a Repeater Books study of Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse, argues that effective altruism and longtermism supplied the moral logic for the fraud. He points to Caroline Ellison’s sworn testimony that Bankman-Fried did not think rules against lying and stealing bound a sufficiently gifted utilitarian calculator, and says this licensed diverting customer funds into ventures including the AI company Anthropic. Morris places Bankman-Fried in a network running through Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and draws on Byung-Chul Han in discussing technofeudalism. He and Pinchbeck differ over crypto’s usefulness: Pinchbeck sides with Paul Krugman’s skepticism, while Morris defends real use cases, particularly for people outside the United States cut off from the banking system by post-9/11 anti-terror rules.

Adam Levy, a Twin Cities singer-songwriter, educator who has taught high school history and government, and longtime local activist, describes the federal immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis as a siege. He reports roughly 3,000 officers operating in the area, detentions in a makeshift holding area in the basement of the Whipple building that serves as ICE headquarters, and an incident in which a tear gas canister fired under a family’s car left an infant unable to breathe. Levy says most people arrested are long-settled residents who work legally, pay taxes and are pursuing naturalization. He describes his own daily vehicle patrols tracking and slowing ICE units, and the wider infrastructure that has formed around them: whistle-based rapid response, mutual aid for families afraid to leave home, business canvassing, and trained legal accompaniment into immigration court.

Mike Brock, a former technology executive who writes about American politics and knows many figures in that industry, talks with Pinchbeck in the days after a round of elections and the release of a large batch of Epstein emails. Brock argues the Trump administration is better described as a regime pursuing regime change from within, notes military personnel on American streets, and says the eight Senate Democrats who voted to end the government shutdown do not understand what time it is. He explains his essay The Simulation Is Collapsing as an account of epistemic closure among the centrist technocratic middle, which lives on polls, focus groups, consultants and what Jon Stewart called ultra-processed speech, and invokes Upton Sinclair on the difficulty of convincing someone whose salary depends on not understanding.

Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters and the source of the call that set off Occupy Wall Street, discusses his recent book, a manifesto for world revolution. He recounts being born in Estonia and fleeing with his family when the Soviets arrived, growing up in Australia, studying pure and applied mathematics, working three years for the Australian defence department on early war-simulation software, then abandoning a trip to Europe to stay in Japan, taking up Zen, and emigrating to Canada in 1973. He describes founding Adbusters more than thirty years ago and writing Culture Jam, Design Anarchy and Meme Wars. Occupy, he says, grew from an Adbusters brainstorm inspired by the Arab Spring and by indebted graduates without work, with the September 17 date chosen as his mother’s birthday.

A session from an online course in which Pinchbeck hosts Adam Aronovich, a medical anthropologist who spent nearly five years doing fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon around Iquitos. Aronovich uses Iquitos, the largest city in the world unconnected by road, as a case study in cultural homogenization: local residents campaign election after election for the road that would bring McDonald’s and Starbucks, while visiting Westerners romanticize the absence of global branding. Pinchbeck adds Helena Norberg-Hodge’s account of Ladakh, where the arrival of Western consumer culture dissolved local practice like acid. Aronovich describes a friend in a rural village living in a wooden shack with a satellite dish for Champions League football as an image of what joining the global village actually means to people.

Pinchbeck hosts Jeffrey Kripal, the Rice University scholar of religion who works on anomalous experience in the humanities, and Dean Radin, the laboratory parapsychologist whose new book is The Science of Magic. Both report that institutional resistance to psychic phenomena is weakening. Kripal credits psychedelic studies and the UFO question with reopening the subject in academic circles, and Pinchbeck adds the popular response to the Telepathy Tapes. Radin points to journals cautiously publishing psi papers and to invitations from universities, including a Harvard talk where he was advised not to press the word magic. He describes opening lectures with audience experience before presenting odds against chance, and argues that quantum brain function could close the explanatory gap without adopting analytic idealism. The closing frames science fiction as a recent idiom for much older religious ideas about becoming superhuman.

Patrick McCollum, a peacemaker and chaplain who is the subject of Gabe Polsky’s documentary The Man Who Saves the World, talks with Pinchbeck about a life he describes as ten separate ones. At fifteen he was hit by a drunk driver, pronounced dead for roughly seven and a half minutes, and was among the early cases studied when researchers coined the term near-death experience. He says he encountered God as a woman, which did not match his Methodist upbringing, and that sharing the experience helped seed the goddess and feminist spirituality movement. He later became the first American chaplain serving non-traditional faiths, working with about two thousand inmates across thirty institutions and spending eleven years on death row at San Quentin, where he counseled Charles Manson. The conversation closes on the film’s theatrical rollout.