Conversations

Ashanti Kunene, a South African storyteller and strategist who serves as executive director of The Elevator, the consciousness think tank Pinchbeck works with, discusses her upbringing and her reading of the present crisis as an initiation. Born into South Africa’s born-free generation shortly after Nelson Mandela’s release, she describes attending white schools and living in white suburbia while her mother worked as the country’s first Black woman airport manager. She talks about losing her father to suicide when she was fourteen, and interprets it through masculinity, entitlement and the absence of any vocabulary for mental illness in Black South African families, where depression registered only as laziness. The conversation later moves to the divine feminine, ecological damage and an essay by Paul Kingsnorth they agree to take up in a following session.

Jay Michaelson, an author, journalist and rabbi whose books include The Heresy of Jacob Frank and who serves as field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, talks with Pinchbeck about what a second Trump administration might mean for psychedelics. Michaelson, whose Substack piece on the subject anticipated a coming pivot, notes that figures around Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are hostile to FDA regulation and have flagged the rejected MDMA application for expedited review. He warns that compounds now in the pipeline are not attached to therapeutic modalities, which could open the door to off-label prescribing of the kind already routine for ketamine and Abilify. He points to rising emergency room visits in Oregon and Colorado and New York’s cannabis rollout as cautionary cases. The conversation later turns to Israel and Gaza.

Laura Loomer, the right-wing investigative journalist and activist who began her career with Project Veritas, speaks with Pinchbeck days after being further deplatformed on X for challenging Elon Musk over H-1B visas. She recounts growing up in Tucson, transferring out of Mount Holyoke to Barry University in Miami after feeling isolated for her conservative politics, running the College Republicans while working at a Fox affiliate, and how the September 11 attacks shaped her early interest in Islam and the war on terror. The conversation turns to the technocrats and Silicon Valley oligarchs gathering around Trump, with Loomer naming David Sacks and questioning whether such figures could pass an FBI background check, and to her doubts about Republican prospects in 2026. She points to her book and her Rumble program.

Brett Scott, author of Cloudmoney and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance and writer of the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter, joins Pinchbeck to examine the post-election surge in cryptocurrency. Scott, who once tried to live on Bitcoin and pay rent and interns in it, argues that it never became a currency and now functions as a limited-edition collectible whose price is driven by successive waves of speculation, from early experimentation through the hodler era and the FTX collapse to institutional ETFs and, most recently, deliberate political promotion under Trump. Pinchbeck brings in Gramsci’s crisis of hegemony and Peter Turchin’s End Times, with its accounts of elite overproduction and the wealth pump, to ask what is driving the broader political rupture.

Jonathan Taplin, tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, producer of Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and later a professor at USC’s Annenberg School, discusses his book The End of Reality with Pinchbeck. Taplin recounts a career running from the Newport Folk Festival and the Concert for Bangladesh through the 1984 fight to block Saul Steinberg’s raid on Disney, a stint in Merrill Lynch’s mergers group, and Intertainer, an early video-on-demand company he shut down and then won an antitrust suit over. He explains that his earlier book Move Fast and Break Things began with Levon Helm’s collapsing royalties as streaming replaced the CD. The discussion covers libertarianism, the history of propaganda, and the political power of tech billionaires; Pinchbeck raises Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, and Taplin names Senator Chris Murphy as a rare coherent political voice.

Pinchbeck speaks with Melik Kaylan, a journalist who has covered international politics and conflict zones for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Forbes, and who wrote for Connoisseur when Pinchbeck worked there. Kaylan argues that Donald Trump is not an American anomaly but one instance of a global authoritarian-populist archetype. He traces the campaign script, warnings of civil war and of foreigners overrunning the country, to a 2012 election he covered in Georgia in the Caucasus, where an oligarch used near-identical lines four years before Trump’s first win, which led him to suspect a shared origin. He attributes the pattern’s success to genuine grievances, particularly over immigration and demographic change, that incumbent Western parties were too cautious to address. Toward the close they discuss Peter Thiel’s enthusiasm for The Sovereign Individual and proposals to displace the dollar with crypto.

Pinchbeck interviews Curtis Yarvin, the software designer and neoreactionary writer known as Mencius Moldbug, credited with supplying Peter Thiel and JD Vance with arguments for replacing democracy with monarchical or autocratic technocracy. Pinchbeck says in his introduction that they met at Hereticon, the Miami event run by Thiel’s Founders Fund, that he disagrees with Yarvin on most things, and that the exchange became abrasive because Yarvin monologued. Yarvin explains the origin of the Moldbug handle in early blog comment culture, then argues that Plato’s cave has layers, so that each escape only reaches a brighter fire, and that reaching the surface is bleak rather than liberating. He reads E. M. Forster’s story The Machine Stops as a prophecy of a comfortable, machine-dependent population that cannot repair its own infrastructure.

Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist covering Russia and Ukraine for PBS NewsHour who previously reported from Crimea for Vice, argues against the pre-election view that the United States should pull back from Ukraine. He traces a pattern across Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power: the second Chechen war, which Ostrovsky covered for the Moscow Times and which crushed Chechen independence so completely that Chechen units now fight for Russia in Ukraine; the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which drew objections but no sanctions and left Russia occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and the 2014 seizure of Crimea. He cites Hillary Clinton’s reset as an example of incoming American politicians wiping the slate clean. Asked at the end for good news, Ostrovsky points to European rearmament and to Giorgia Meloni’s continued support for arming Ukraine.

An excerpt from a talk by Jennifer Partridge, an EFT tapping teacher and author who developed an approach she calls Dream Awake Tapping, given during Pinchbeck’s Future of Consciousness online course in 2024. Partridge presents EFT as a combination of three elements: modern psychology, in the practice of speaking thoughts, memories and emotions aloud to reach the subconscious, which she says holds the great majority of a person’s patterns; Chinese medicine, in the percussive tapping of acupressure points along meridian lines that she notes contemporary research has linked to nerve bundles; and neuroplasticity, in revisiting the memories that installed limiting beliefs. She describes working with early childhood, ancestral and cultural conditioning, and demonstrates the method with a participant. She closes by arguing that individual nervous system regulation has consequences at the collective scale.

Psychotherapist Stephanie Canavesio, who developed the somatic and transpersonal approach Presence Embodied, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. She recounts a childhood with an addicted father and an emotionally unstable mother, an eating disorder from age twelve, years of modeling, and a long stretch of drug and alcohol addiction, and describes meeting Gabor Mate in 2008 when he was being interviewed for the documentary Neurons to Nirvana. His questioning of her people-pleasing and anxiety began her move toward sobriety and later toward the group work that became compassionate inquiry. Canavesio says she spent roughly a decade spiritually bypassing, mistaking numbing for elevation, and also studied contemplative psychotherapy with Robert Thurman and Joe Loizzo at the Nalanda Institute in New York.