Pinchbeck hosts Robert Falconer, the Internal Family Systems teacher and author of The Others Within Us, for a talk on parts work, the porous mind and spirit possession. Falconer opens with his own history of severe childhood abuse and decades of clinical work with men who survived similar violence, and uses that experience to argue two claims. The first, developed within IFS by Richard Schwartz, is that consciousness is multiple rather than unitary, organized as sparsely interconnected subroutines. The second, harder claim is that consciousness is porous. He draws on Tanya Luhrmann’s anthropology of psychosis and spirituality, Isabel Clarke’s clinical work in England, and Daniel Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, treating their convergence on the same conclusion from separate evidence bases as consilience.

A conversation with Morgane Ciot and Alice Maynewaring, who run the production company The Classics Department, about their New York piece Psychomagic 9, inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain and set on the film set of a fictional remake of it. They describe their earlier work as chaos theater, live theatrical dating shows partly modeled on Eric Andre’s prank sensibility and staged to push festival crowds into collective effervescence. One of these, Bet on Love, was commissioned by a founder of the prediction-market startup Manifold Markets and pitched as a revival of the corporate industrial musicals of the 1950s. They argue that the silent seated audience is a recent invention and that participation recovers an older function of ritual theater. Much of the discussion concerns LARP, specifically the parlor or theater style driven by character and motivation.

Carne Ross, the former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq War and became an advocate of anarchism and bottom-up governance, returns to discuss the collapse of the rules-based international order. Ross calls Peter Thiel’s techno-libertarian self-presentation dishonest, pointing to his chairmanship of Palantir, whose aggregation of citizen data across US government agencies he regards as a form of state power beyond what is usually meant by surveillance capitalism. He argues Trump is a consequence rather than a cause: falling living standards across the West, inequality, and a Democratic Party severed from ordinary voters created the opening. Unless capitalism is systemically reformed, he says, instability will keep producing figures promising to control the chaos. Pinchbeck raises Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism thesis and scenarios of engineered US debt default.

Christopher Bache, who taught philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University and wrote an account of two decades of high-dose LSD work, presents at a multi-speaker event on consciousness and regenerative society. He describes 73 sessions at 500 to 600 micrograms, following a protocol adapted from Stanislav Grof’s psychedelic therapy, and a sequence of death and rebirth passages through personal, collective, archetypal and causal levels toward what he calls the diamond luminosity. He gives most of his time to two episodes: an encounter with what he names the ocean of suffering, and what he calls the birth of the future human. Because this is a panel, a later speaker reframes the material through Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness and the end of the mental-rational age.

Political writer and civic technologist Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Civic Hall and author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, talks with Pinchbeck about American democracy under a second Trump administration. Sifry traces his path from The Nation to campaign finance work with Public Campaign, which built state-level public financing systems in Maine, Massachusetts and Arizona, and then to internet politics, where open-source collaboration and the Howard Dean campaign suggested a more participatory model. Pinchbeck, pointed toward Sifry by Douglas Rushkoff, argues that liberal and progressive circles are dissociated and insufficiently alarmed. Sifry counters that grassroots organizing is growing, citing the No Kings protests and Indivisible, and closes by urging listeners to join a local group, since organized money usually beats people who stay unorganized.

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.