Conversations

Don Lattin, the award-winning journalist who covered the religion beat for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle and wrote The Harvard Psychedelic Club, draws parallels between Donald Trump and the messianic leaders he reported on for decades. Lattin came to the beat through Jim Jones, whose People’s Temple ended in the November 1978 murder-suicide of more than 900 followers in Guyana, and he stresses that Jones was a politically connected progressive appointed to head the San Francisco Housing Authority by Mayor George Moscone. He recalls covering the Unification Church and Hare Krishnas during the 1970s cult wars, and his earlier reporting on the shepherding movement and Pentecostal spiritual-warfare groups that he sees as groundwork for the New Apostolic Reformation and white Christian nationalism. Lattin also discusses his Substack series and his later psychedelic books.

Pinchbeck brings together Warren Farrell, author of The Boy Crisis and a long-time writer on men and masculinity, and Frank Schaeffer, the novelist and podcaster who grew up inside the evangelical movement his father Francis Schaeffer helped build and later broke with it. The three had not met before. Farrell opens by disputing the word patriarchy, arguing that the organizing force in earlier societies was survival, under which neither sex held rights, only obligations. Schaeffer, who read The Boy Crisis that morning, connects it to current reporting on why fewer women are marrying, and quotes Farrell on making marriages better rather than divorce harder and on the developmental value of a father’s hands-on style. Pinchbeck describes growing up in a feminist household in New York and the guilt about maleness he carried from it, which Farrell’s work helped him rethink.

Pinchbeck speaks with Roman Hanis, author of Beyond Ayahuasca and co-founder of the Paititi Institute in Peru, about two decades apprenticing with Andean and Amazonian elders. Hanis, who grew up in Moldova and arrived in New York in 1997, recounts a chronic intestinal condition his gastroenterologist called psychosomatic, a turn through Jung, Daoist practice, yoga, Tibetan Buddhism and Castaneda, and a psychedelic period shaped by reading Albert Hofmann and Alexander Shulgin before he first traveled to the rainforest in 2001. He describes a two-week survival trip with a Bora guide, living on snails and water drawn from vines, and a later formal apprenticeship with several elders including a Yagua teacher. He characterizes modern civilization as suffering an illness of forgetfulness, argues that ayahuasca tourism has diluted the traditions, and frames sacred reciprocity and rites of passage as the corrective.

Filmmaker Betsy Chasse, who co-created the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, talks with Pinchbeck about how the movement her film helped popularize hardened into a self-help industry. Chasse says she still agrees with much of what the film said, but not with how others turned it into a self-serving business model, and describes being drawn into and then pushed out of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, the group her two collaborators belonged to, for refusing to defer to JZ Knight. She treats The Secret as the turning point, recalling Joe Vitale telling her he was a marketer rather than a guru and that the film cut the part about doing the work. Pinchbeck frames the conversation around New Age support for Trump and MAHA. They close on AI driven by profit rather than benefit.

Another session of Breaking the AI Barrier, with Ari Kuschnir, the film-school-trained storyteller who founded the production company Missing Pieces two decades ago and now makes widely shared AI-generated satirical videos. Kuschnir walks the group through his working method and urges participants to subscribe to a cheap tier of a tool such as ElevenLabs, Midjourney or Veo and actually make something, on the grounds that the craft now reduces to combining an image, a sound and a motion pass. He raises the ethics of training data, pointing to Moonvalley as a fully licensed model, while noting it does not address energy use. Pinchbeck argues that the tech oligarchs’ move into government reflects insecurity, since AI is democratizing the advantages their fortunes rest on, citing DeepSeek, BYD and TikTok.

Pinchbeck speaks with Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical missionaries Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who helped build the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s through films and books before repudiating it in his memoir Crazy for God. Schaeffer describes working alongside Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, and Billy Graham, and making the film series with his father and C. Everett Koop that politicized American evangelicalism. He explains why he keeps being called back to explain Christian nationalism, and why he wrote the introduction to a book on confronting Christofascism. The conversation opens with his account of a memorial at which a widow publicly forgave her husband’s killer while the leader who followed her declared he hates his enemies, which Schaeffer calls unparalleled sacrilege.

Brett Scott, the monetary writer and former finance-sector insider who publishes the Substack Altered States of Monetary Consciousness, argues that liberal capitalism issues two incompatible instructions at once: outcompete everyone, and also be a good person who cares about the unemployed and the environment. Discussing his essay Making Capitalism Bad Again, Scott places the good-capitalism scene within the older tradition of liberal reformism, in which elites alleviate the system’s damage rather than change it, and points to ESG investing, social finance and the philanthropic posture of figures like Bill Gates as its current forms. He describes spending two years working inside the financial sector as a deliberate anthropological experiment, and his irritation at being labeled a reformed banker afterward. Pinchbeck raises Grace Blakeley’s writing and the collapse of liberal media framing.

Gary Lachman, a historian of Western esotericism and former bassist in Blondie, gives a talk hosted by Daniel Pinchbeck drawn from his 2017 book The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Lachman credits the phrase to the poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, who founded the Temenos Academy in London to sustain a Neoplatonic tradition she believed English Romantic poetry had inherited and modern secular culture discarded. He argues imagination is not make-believe but a faculty of making real, closer to what happens when a person realizes something already known than to fantasy or daydreaming, and compares its resistance to definition with Augustine on time. He discusses Blake as a literal visionary and the line Aldous Huxley borrowed for The Doors of Perception. The closing turns to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Norman Ohler, the German writer whose book Blitzed documented systematic methamphetamine use in the Third Reich, recounts how the project began. A Berlin DJ friend told him the Nazis had used drugs, having found and swallowed 1940s Pervitin tablets left in a medicine cabinet in an East Berlin apartment. Ohler located a single academic paper arguing there would have been no blitzkrieg without methamphetamine, then worked in the German military archive at Freiburg and found the Wehrmacht’s use largely unwritten. He had intended a novel; his publisher pushed him toward nonfiction with a full source apparatus, a choice he says was right. The conversation also covers self-publishing and the origins of LSD, and closes with Bernardo Kastrup’s argument that scientific materialism has been superseded by analytic idealism, which Pinchbeck says he broadly accepts.

Pinchbeck talks with Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and now of the New Center for Holistic Learning, and Walter Alexander of the Anthroposophical Society of New York, ahead of a month-long seminar on Rudolf Steiner held both at the society’s building on West 15th Street and on Zoom. White proposes judging Steiner by his legacy: biodynamic agriculture and its part in the rebirth of organic farming, Waldorf education, the Camphill communities for children and adults with special needs, and roughly six thousand lectures. Alexander notes Steiner’s influence on Joseph Beuys, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, and a recent Gagosian piece observing that this influence went largely unattributed. Pinchbeck recalls visiting the Goetheanum at Dornach. The discussion ends on karma, reincarnation and Steiner’s spiritual science.