Conversations

Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, speaks in a clip from Pinchbeck’s Breaking the AI Barrier course on whether human capacities can survive the current wave of technology. He builds the talk on Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, which traces how information technologies from the telegraph and radio to the internet begin decentralized and utopian and end hegemonic and centrally controlled. Wheal extends the pattern to psychedelics, which he treats as an information technology, and says it is why he was skeptical of the psychedelic renaissance years before others were. He maps the AI debate into three camps and argues that the fixation on superintelligence crowds out nearer-term harms, pointing to Cambridge Analytica as an early and crude case.

Joe Dolce, former editor-in-chief of Details magazine and author of Brave New Weed, joins Pinchbeck to discuss his newly published handbook on psychedelics, released the day of the recording. Dolce traces his route from running press for the New York club Area in the 1980s through Harper’s Bazaar to Details, and says he returned to psychedelics partly to loosen the hardening categories of middle age and partly because intelligent friends kept asking him unanswerable practical questions about ayahuasca, ketamine and MDMA. He describes the neuroscientist Gul Dolen’s work giving MDMA to octopuses and her theory of reopening critical periods, which he argues shifts attention from the trip itself to preparation and integration. Pinchbeck recounts his iboga work in Gabon and his interest in paranormal effects.

A session from Pinchbeck’s course Breaking the AI Barrier with Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity and a founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. She speaks from an Indigenous AI gathering in Montreal, where she represents a Canadian consortium proposing that the country lead on AI that is inclusive, relational and life-affirming. Her presentation argues that the way AI is discussed is itself the problem, because the questions people can ask are constrained by modernity, the single story of progress, development and civilization that suppresses other knowledge. She distinguishes a subject-object ontology, in which land becomes property and resource, from a subject-to-subject ontology that treats land and rivers as beings, and calls that shift neurobiological rather than merely intellectual. Pinchbeck closes by citing Bernard Stiegler on technics and the fragility of digitized memory.

Robert Falconer, a psychotherapist who co-wrote Many Minds, One Self with Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz and wrote The Others Within Us, describes how three decades of work on childhood sexual trauma led to cases he could not explain in trauma terms. One client carried something he judged was not part of her own history; after it left, she wrote that her earlier attempts to describe a nonhuman presence inside her had brought electroshock and forced drugging. Falconer argues that the IFS premise that mind is plural — closer to an orchestra than a soloist — extends to material arriving from outside a person’s own lifetime, and that spirit possession is the metaphor most cultures have used for a real dynamic. Pinchbeck adds that the medicalized psychedelic movement has been weakened by refusing to take this seriously.

Jeffrey Kripal, the religious studies scholar behind How to Think Impossibly and Authors of the Impossible, talks with Pinchbeck about writing on the paranormal from inside the university. Kripal traces his route through his memoir Secret Body, early work on ecstatic religious experience and sexuality, and research at the Esalen Institute and on the human potential movement, where he met people whose experiences had no accepted vocabulary. He describes his aim as mainstreaming and authorizing that conversation, and notes that Authors of the Impossible uses literary theory to treat figures such as Frederic Myers and Charles Fort. Pinchbeck raises the academy’s materialist bias and his own exclusion from it. The closing turns to anomalous communication as a symptom of stories breaking down.

Pinchbeck hosts Robert Falconer, the Internal Family Systems teacher and author of The Others Within Us, for a talk on parts work, the porous mind and spirit possession. Falconer opens with his own history of severe childhood abuse and decades of clinical work with men who survived similar violence, and uses that experience to argue two claims. The first, developed within IFS by Richard Schwartz, is that consciousness is multiple rather than unitary, organized as sparsely interconnected subroutines. The second, harder claim is that consciousness is porous. He draws on Tanya Luhrmann’s anthropology of psychosis and spirituality, Isabel Clarke’s clinical work in England, and Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, treating their convergence on the same conclusion from separate evidence bases as consilience.

A conversation with Morgane Ciot and Alice Maynewaring, who run the production company The Classics Department, about their New York piece Psychomagic 9, inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and set on the film set of a fictional remake of it. They describe their earlier work as chaos theater, live theatrical dating shows partly modeled on Eric Andre’s prank sensibility and staged to push festival crowds into collective effervescence. One of these, Bet on Love, was commissioned by a founder of the prediction-market startup Manifold Markets and pitched as a revival of the corporate industrial musicals of the 1950s. They argue that the silent seated audience is a recent invention and that participation recovers an older function of ritual theater. Much of the discussion concerns LARP, specifically the parlor or theater style driven by character and motivation.

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.