Conversations

Alex Ebert, the musician who fronts Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and writes on philosophy and culture, opens with a video he made from his experience as a producer. The loudness wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s compressed recordings until an album’s waveform looked like a solid block with no dynamic range, and Ebert treats this as a picture of the dialectic: oscillations rise in frequency until positive and negative can no longer be distinguished, at which point a new state emerges that stacks with rather than replaces the old. He applies the model to consciousness, distinguishing animal automaticity from the specifically human capacity to problematize an object that already matches its mental schema. The closing turns to culture, invoking Alexander Bard’s barred absolute and arguing for exclusion as a condition of pluralism.

A conversation with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, known for Team Human and Survival of the Richest, in a session framed around artificial intelligence. Rushkoff says his view of AI shifts day to day and that on this one it looks like another investment cycle following crypto, VR and AR — closer to Adobe Photoshop, which eliminated paste-up work while creating a graphic design profession. His argument is that AI mostly exposes institutions that were already failing: he recalls telling CNN’s Jake Tapper there might be an unemployment solution rather than problem, since jobs were invented in late medieval Europe as chartered monopolies replacing craft, and says schools were degraded when administrators asked corporations what workers they needed. He warns against accepting the question of what humans are for. Pinchbeck responds on education’s role in sustaining democratic culture.

Dean Radin, the experimental parapsychologist who has spent about forty years testing psychic phenomena in the laboratory, delivers a slide talk in Pinchbeck’s online series, following an earlier speaker. Radin sets aside popular paranormal imagery and defines his subject pragmatically as interconnections that cross space and time, labelled telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. Most of the presentation walks through methodology: the ganzfeld telepathy protocol with its red light, halved ping-pong balls and white noise, a shielded two-thousand-pound steel chamber at his institute, and a worked example in which a receiver’s impressions of stone and monolithic scale matched the target image. He reports 117 published studies and 3,885 sessions with a 30.6 percent hit rate against 25 percent chance, and notes coverage in mainstream psychology journals from 1994 to 2020. He closes on why the work matters to him.

Pinchbeck hosts Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and author of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, in an event also featuring Neil Theise. Kripal recounts writing the 2018 book after an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Visions of the Impossible, and explains that he built it around scientists, engineers and physicians because his STEM students dismiss classical religious texts. He then reads a short paper setting out what he calls wagers rather than certainties, chief among them a dual-aspect monism in which consciousness and cosmos are two expressions of one reality that we split into mental and material by becoming socialized subjects. He treats paranormal experience as a temporary collapse of the subject-object structure.

Mona Sobhani, a cognitive neuroscientist trained at the University of Southern California and author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena, gives a talk in the Liminal Institute’s Future of Consciousness course hosted by Pinchbeck. She describes conventional training in neuroimaging and psychopathy research, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt on law and neuroscience funded by the MacArthur Foundation, and the assumption she absorbed that the universe is random and meaning is manufactured by the brain. Against that she sets her Persian family’s divination practice, her mother reading coffee grounds with an accuracy she began documenting during graduate school, and precognitive dreams she had forgotten. She recounts the existential crisis and run of misfortune that followed her doctorate. Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, joins near the end.

Pinchbeck hosts Jamie Wheal, author of Stealing Fire and Recapture the Rapture, and Douglas Rushkoff, the media theorist behind Team Human, in a livestreamed conversation about the absorption of psychedelic culture by the libertarian right. Pinchbeck argues that psychedelics are nonspecific psychic amplifiers rather than inherently healing, citing Amazonian sorcerers who use ayahuasca against enemies, and recounts his own iboga initiation with the Bwiti in Gabon, which he wrote about in his first book. Wheal describes colleagues and friends in the psychedelic and crypto worlds falling in behind the new administration in exchange for access and deregulation, and compares them to a courtier class around a sun king. Rushkoff dates his own disillusionment to seeing wealthy libertarian stockbrokers in the front rows at Grateful Dead shows in 1986.

Pinchbeck talks with Matthew Green, a journalist and trauma educator who works on collective trauma integration, about the political and spiritual forces he sees driving artificial intelligence. Pinchbeck argues that forecasts of mass job displacement, with estimates he cites ranging from thirty to seventy percent of work affected, are arriving with almost no societal preparation beyond gestures such as Sam Altman’s basic income trial. He treats Donald Trump as the first AI president, elected in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica’s machine-learning targeting, and reads the alliance between the tech oligarchy, naming Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and David Sacks, and the American right as positioning for both AI and ecological collapse. The conversation also reaches Rudolf Steiner’s figure of Ahriman, Carl Jung, Mayan prophecy and emerging forms of AI mysticism. It was held as a preview of Pinchbeck’s course Breaking the AI Barrier.

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.