Video Essays

A solo essay on the public conversion to Christianity of figures in Silicon Valley’s rationalist and investor circles, including crypto and AI wealth, and their attendance at Peter Thiel’s invitation-only lectures on the Antichrist. Pinchbeck reads this as a crisis of legitimation rather than a spiritual awakening, and draws on John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards, which described the collapse of public confidence in technocratic elites and their utilitarianism, and on Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind and its account of the spiritual death produced by a worldview that treats questions of being as unaskable. He argues that scientific materialism cannot answer religious fanaticism because faith can only be met by faith, and proposes analytic or monistic idealism, which takes consciousness rather than matter as ontologically primary, as the alternative to both.

Pinchbeck argues in this solo piece that the United States has crossed a threshold into an authoritarian consolidation with consequences beyond its borders, given American weight in ecology, the military, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence. He points to the recent speeches by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth to assembled military leadership, the loosening of rules of engagement, Trump’s suggestion that American cities serve as training grounds, and his call for full force against protesters in Portland. He criticizes his own milieu for avoidance, arguing that regenerative land projects and Climate Week programming are beside the point against a state-corporate apparatus dismantling environmental regulation, and that friends who dismiss politics as ego are practicing a bypass. He ends by calling for a cross-partisan movement against concentrated oligarchic wealth.

A solo essay in which Pinchbeck argues that scientific materialism is an exhausted hypothesis and that idealism is the better one. He recounts the research behind Breaking Open the Head, a Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon, ayahuasca with an indigenous community in Ecuador, and time among Mazatec people in Oaxaca, as the experiences that moved him from hardcore skepticism toward animism and Jung. He sets the hard problem of consciousness against analytic or monistic idealism, cites Amit Goswami’s Physics of the Soul, Ian Stevenson’s cases of children recalling past lives, and Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner on reincarnation and the earth’s successive incarnations. He closes by arguing that psychedelic research has become a safe investment for wealthy progressives, and recalls his own attempt at an alternative through Evolver and How Soon Is Now.

Pinchbeck argues that Trump’s economic policies are not incompetence but deliberate demolition carried out for a syndicate of oligarchs he names as including Putin, Peter Thiel and the Saudi royal family. On his reading, tariffs, the tax cuts in the ‘big beautiful bill’ and the shutdown of US aid are meant to inflate federal debt, devalue the dollar and let internationally mobile wealth buy distressed American assets cheaply — the pattern Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine, and what the West imposed on the former USSR after 1989. He points to farm bankruptcies in Arkansas and Nebraska, China’s halt on US soybean purchases, Bill Gates’s farmland holdings and JD Vance’s investment in AcreTrader. Citing David Graeber’s Debt, he closes on money as a collapsible social relation.

Pinchbeck speaks directly to camera to announce a free open Zoom call on artificial intelligence risk and to argue that the subject needs a citizens’ movement rather than expert advocacy alone. He sets out several distinct dangers: that systems approaching artificial general intelligence could become recursively self-improving and reach superintelligence within a few years while the alignment problem remains unsolved, with expert estimates of catastrophic outcomes ranging widely; that automation is already eliminating entry-level cognitive work and will extend to manual labor as robotics matures, citing programmer layoffs, self-driving vehicles, trucking, and Philippine call-center work; and that control of the technology is concentrating among figures including Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He also names a mental health crisis, the collapse of shared standards for what is true, and ecological damage.

A solo seminar session, the first of a series, on the passage from scientific materialism to what Pinchbeck calls animistic idealism. He opens with Gerald Heard’s line that civilization is the shadow cast by evolving consciousness, then argues that materialism — matter as the only reality, consciousness an accidental byproduct of the brain — still governs universities and institutions and underwrites transhumanism and the Silicon Valley singularity, which he reads as a technological rewrite of Christian eschatology. Against it he sets monistic idealism as named by Amit Goswami, alongside David Bohm’s holographic universe, Robert Lanza’s biocentrism and Rudolf Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom. He recounts his own turn from skepticism, his mother’s connection to the Beats, and the psychedelic initiations behind Breaking Open the Head, framing his work as joining revelation to intellection.

A solo essay on why the reopened Jeffrey Epstein scandal, triggered by a single Elon Musk post and the White House declaration that no client list or files exist, threatens to fracture the MAGA coalition. Pinchbeck announces at the outset that he will use psychoanalytic theory to read the reaction, working from the concept of disavowal named in the title. He walks through the oddities of the case: Les Wexner handing Epstein control of his fortune and properties, Epstein’s hiring at the Dalton School by Donald Barr, father of William Barr and author of a novel about oligarchs running child sex slavery, Pam Bondi’s claims about video evidence, and the death of Jean-Luc Brunel in French custody. He ends on Musk’s growing hold over the online right.

The first session of a seminar series built around Pinchbeck’s 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, covering shamanism and psychedelic revival. He describes growing up with a scientific-materialist worldview, his father an abstract painter and his mother a writer connected to the Beat Generation, and argues the resulting nihilism made people around him unable to take the ecological crisis seriously. He credits Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs with treating consciousness as something to investigate firsthand rather than through received authority, and names the poet Michael Brownstein as his route to ayahuasca, which he wrote about for the Village Voice. He quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard on thinking past the boundaries of a culture, and closes by comparing the psychedelic revival to a second Reformation: as printing gave laypeople direct access to scripture, psychedelics give direct access to visionary experience.

The opening session of Pinchbeck’s course Secret Histories and Spiritual Revolutions, on Hermeticism and the sources of Western esotericism. He introduces himself through Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (reissued as Quetzalcoatl Returns), How Soon Is Now and When Plants Dream, co-written with the anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin, and describes how paranormal experiences during indigenous initiations made a materialist position untenable and moved him toward analytic idealism. The lecture then takes up the prisca theologia, the claim of a single primordial revelation surviving in fragments across religions, quoting Antoine Faivre’s definition of esotericism as the means of recovering it and noting that academic scholarship generally rejects the idea. He discusses Hermes Trismegistus, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Hebrew alphabet’s role for John Dee and Cornelius Agrippa.

Pinchbeck films himself at an April 2025 anti-Trump demonstration outside Bryant Park in New York and argues that the moment demands active participation rather than dissociation. He centers the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident with an American wife and an autistic child, deported to a Salvadoran facility Pinchbeck insists should be called a concentration camp, alongside Trump’s stated interest in sending American citizens there. He describes Elon Musk’s DOGE operation as gathering tax, medical and social security records on the entire population, cites reporting that Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder, is contracting to build detention camps near the southern border, and notes that even the Wall Street Journal editorial page has raised impeachment. He faults the Democrats for failing working people and regrets the reversal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy manufacturing push.