Conversations

Bernardo Kastrup, the philosopher and computer scientist who has developed the position he calls analytic idealism, gives a talk in Pinchbeck’s series. He begins with the metaphysics he rejects: physicalism, on which only unconscious, purely quantitative matter exists and all qualities are manufactured inside the skull. Against it he sets the hard problem of consciousness, the 2022 Nobel-recognized experimental work indicating that physical properties are not definite prior to measurement, and cases where brain activity falls while experience becomes richer, as under psychedelics, breathwork and cardiac arrest. He traces objective idealism from the Indus Valley through Schopenhauer’s 1818 formulation, distinguishing it from Berkeley’s subjective version. The closing section develops dissociation and emotionally bound complexes, which Kastrup speculates could persist past a dissociative boundary and be captured by a later one. Pinchbeck notes points of disagreement between them.

Drew Dellinger, a poet and teacher known for the collection Love Letter to the Milky Way and for founding Planetize the Movement, joins Pinchbeck for a conversation about cosmology, ecology and the American right. Dellinger describes studying with Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, and a long-term book project treating Martin Luther King Jr. as an ecological and cosmological thinker. Much of the talk concerns his Substack criticism of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Charles Eisenstein, whom he faults for assuring readers before the 2024 election that Trump would not implement Project 2025, an error he treats as a misreading of Trump’s entire agenda. They also take up techno-authoritarianism, surveillance, and the erosion of shared standards of evidence. Dellinger closes by reading his poem To the Quislings.

Samuel Delesque, founder of the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal and co-creator of the governance tool Closer, describes with Pinchbeck how his project combines land stewardship with Web3 infrastructure. Delesque, formerly a software worker in New York, explains a three-layer structure in which a Portuguese operating company holding the land title, registered as a tourism project so it can interface with local government and apply for grants, is itself owned by a Swiss nonprofit called OASA that enforces regenerative constraints across its network. Residents buy or earn a token granting both access to live on the land and a vote on the project’s direction. The project runs on Celo, chosen for sub-cent fees, its ambition to hold natural assets on its balance sheet, and its adoption in Africa. Delesque cites Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics as an influence on that ecosystem.

A conversation with Grace Blakeley, the British writer and activist whose book Vulture Capitalism argues that capitalism has never been a free-market system. Blakeley recounts working for a left-wing think tank on UK economic policy, then becoming the commentator broadcasters wheeled out to defend Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity economics because the rest of the political establishment opposed him, before writing for the New Statesman and leaving London for Cornwall. She traces the book to rereading Marx’s Capital during COVID, in particular the passages on the concentration and centralization of capital during crises, and to interviewers including Piers Morgan asking whether bailouts meant Britain had adopted socialism. She describes existing capitalism as concentrated markets fused with states that intervene for big business. Pinchbeck presses her on the transnational oligarchy he sees consolidating across borders.

Starhawk, the ecofeminist author of The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing and The Empowerment Manual and founder of Earth Activist Training, talks with Pinchbeck in a Substack livestream about the second Trump administration and the condition of the American left. She says her sense of dread had lifted somewhat because opposition was slowing the administration down, and argues that its cruelty is paired with ineptitude because empathy is a form of intelligence its figures lack. Both note the oddity of now defending institutions they once protested, including aid bodies they regarded as intelligence fronts. Pinchbeck argues that an organic American left was never permitted to form, and Starhawk calls for soul-searching about why progressives failed to build a coalition broad enough to absorb the frustrations the right has captured.

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.