Norman Ohler, the German writer whose book Blitzed documented systematic methamphetamine use in the Third Reich, recounts how the project began. A Berlin DJ friend told him the Nazis had used drugs, having found and swallowed 1940s Pervitin tablets left in a medicine cabinet in an East Berlin apartment. Ohler located a single academic paper arguing there would have been no blitzkrieg without methamphetamine, then worked in the German military archive at Freiburg and found the Wehrmacht’s use largely unwritten. He had intended a novel; his publisher pushed him toward nonfiction with a full source apparatus, a choice he says was right. The conversation also covers self-publishing and the origins of LSD, and closes with Bernardo Kastrup’s argument that scientific materialism has been superseded by analytic idealism, which Pinchbeck says he broadly accepts.

Pinchbeck talks with Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and now of the New Center for Holistic Learning, and Walter Alexander of the Anthroposophical Society of New York, ahead of a month-long seminar on Rudolf Steiner held both at the society’s building on West 15th Street and on Zoom. White proposes judging Steiner by his legacy: biodynamic agriculture and its part in the rebirth of organic farming, Waldorf education, the Camphill communities for children and adults with special needs, and roughly six thousand lectures. Alexander notes Steiner’s influence on Joseph Beuys, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, and a recent Gagosian piece observing that this influence went largely unattributed. Pinchbeck recalls visiting the Goetheanum at Dornach. The discussion ends on karma, reincarnation and Steiner’s spiritual science.

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.