Interview with KMO of the C-Realm
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
KMO was once a winner in the capitalist game. He had high tech dreams and plenty of ambition, but somewhere along the line KMO dropped out, spent what he had, and started over in a simpler way. No longer rich and no longer so enamored with the technocratic fantasies of the prevailing order, he squeaks by in this world while seeking another. More than anything KMO is a broadcaster and interviewer who has a gentle and amiable way of challenging and inspiring interesting conversations with authors, artists, psychedelic gurus, sociologists, NASA scientists, economists, and more on his weekly podcast called the C-Realm. I was lucky enough to turn the tables on KMO and get him to agree to an email interview.
Q: Did you always want to be a broadcaster? When you were a boy did you have dreams of being on the radio or on television? How did you get started podcasting. What led you to create the C-Realm?
A: No, I wanted to be a cartoonist. To the extent that I saw myself participating in television or movies, I imagined myself working in animation.
As for how I got drawn into broadcasting, I would direct you to a recent interview in which C-Realm correspondent AyasminA directed questions to me. You can find that here:
http://www.archive.org/details/AyasminaInterviewsKmo
In short, it seems as though some part of me has been gearing up for this sort of work for a couple of decades. It just didn’t bother to tell my conscious mind, which stayed focused on visual story-telling.
Q: You’ve managed to talk to many fine and interesting people. How do you connect to so many people, and how difficult is it to get people interested in your podcast and willing to be interviewed?
A: I basically just read things that interest me on-line, and when I read something that articulates my own thinking better than I have done, or when I read something that takes my thinking in an interesting new direction, I send an email to the author and invite them to the appear on the show. I don’t keep careful track of invitations and replies, but I would guess that about one in five invitations leads to an interview that appears on the podcast.
While it’s fairly easy to find interesting and articulate people to appear on the show, I have found that it doesn’t serve me well to set my heart on securing an interview with any particular guest. For example, I’ve been trying to get Michael Pollan on the show from the very beginning without success.
On the bright side, some of my best interview subjects arrive on my doorstep with no effort required on my part. Albert K. Bates, who has appeared on numerous episodes of the C-Realm Podcast contacted me after he heard my interviews with Dmitry Orlov and Catherine Austin Fitts. I first became aware of Neil Kramer, a repeat guest who is particularly popular with the psychedelic segment of the audience, when I saw that I was getting regular hits from a link on his website.
He had been listening to the show for a while before he appeared as a guest, so he had a much better understanding of the larger C-Realm project than do most of my interviewees.
A: What are some of the technical challenges to getting your show off the ground?
A: I use Skype and another program to record phone interviews. The audio quality is not always what I would like it to be, and sometimes the timing goes off so that it sounds like I’m talking over the guest when in fact I waited for them to finish speaking before asking the next question. Also, I use a four-year-old laptop to put the show together, and I’m basically operating right at the limits of my machine’s capacity in creating the audio files. Each week I have to delete the temporary files I created the week before and clear out any other podcasts I’ve downloaded in order to free up enough hard drive space to create a new episode.
Q: And what part of the process do you enjoy the most? Editing? Interviewing? Lining up the guests?
A: Lining up the guests is the least interesting part of it, but it’s not onerous. Aside from that, I enjoy every aspect of creating the show.
Q: To what extent does the C-Realm provide you with a living? I believe the show is one of the most interesting podcasts around, and that you deserve to make a comfortable living providing such a fine service. You have a thousand subscribers. Is this your livelihood? How can people donate to the C-Realm. How can people subscribe?
A: I probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand regular listeners, but I have fewer than 30 “subscribers.” In terms of the C-Realm Podcast, a “subscriber” is someone who has set up an automatic recurring payment via PayPal in the amount of $3 a month. In addition to the subscribers, there are several generous benefactors who make one-time contributions. I also have an Amazon store and a Cafe Press store. All told, the C-Realm Podcast pays like a part time job. It does not provide me with “a living.”
For a while it seemed like the podcast was just on the verge of “taking off” and I pursued it full time, but the money never materialized and I ended up in a very bad position financially. I lost my house to foreclosure, and my marriage is in a very bad place as a result of my single-minded pursuit of this project. I’m in debt not only to credit card companies but also to the IRS. I now work a full-time job doing internet tech-support. I drive a ‘91 Ford Ranger that will not pass the safety and emissions inspections required by my new home state of Maryland.
I’m not in an enviable position financially (except to the majority of the global population living in the Two-thirds World), but I worry a lot less about money now than I did when I was down to my last hundred thousand dollars in the bank. I used to lose sleep worrying about money back then. That seems utterly absurd to me now.
Q: You often describe yourself as a libertarian. To what extent do you feel a kinship with the European and historical schools of libertarianism?
http://www.dietsoap.org/2008/02/03/q-what-is-a-libertarian
A: I describe myself as a “recovering libertarian.” I’m coming from more of a right-wing libertarian position, but I’m not dogmatic about it, and “let them eat cake” Libertarian ideologues irritate me as much as they do anybody.
Q: The C-Realm seems to have three primary ideas at its center, three ideas which are in many ways at odds with each other and which could conceivably be entirely dubious and wrong, but which nonetheless seem to me to be interconnected and obviously correct. The first idea that permeates and influences the C-realm is the notion that we can change society by altering our consciousness, and what’s a corollary to that idea is that the use of psychedelics have a role to play in changing our consciousness. The second idea, as I understand it, is that we are approaching some sort of technological and informational Singularity which will essentially end history and possibly save humanity (or enslave, destroy, alter beyond recognition, etc…). The final idea is that we are headed for an economic, ecological, and cultural collapse because of dwindling oil supplies, climate change, and other factors that spell out doom. Okay, so I’ve spelled out the ideas, here’s the question: How do you think these three ideas work together, and is it possible that all three of these notions or predictions are somehow true at the same time?
A: Those three ideas seem related in that each one holds at its core the hope or fear that business as usual is not a tenable expectation and that we’re in for some sort of intense discontinuity in the human experience in the near future. I think each of them is weighted heavily with a different brand of wishful thinking, and I find each one appealing in spite of their seeming contradictions.
And yes, they could all prove quite compatible with one another in actual fact. We could well suffer a global economic collapse that does little to deter the R&D march toward the Singularity. The Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite in orbit and took an early lead in the space race while simultaneously failing to adequately feed it’s population much less provide them with the level of material comfort that the populations of the United States and other western democracies enjoyed. Today, the majority of people in China still live under pretty austere conditions even though so much of the hardware on which the cyber-world runs is manufactured there. The progression of technology need not be so tightly coupled to economic growth or material abundance as common sense intuition would suggest.
The population of the so-called “First World” could find itself reduced to the standard of living of people in the Two-thirds World with barely a blip in the ongoing progression of Moore’s Law and related exponential trends. The amount of energy needed to carry on research in artificial intelligence is negligible compared to the energy consumed by the practice of petro-chemical agriculture or by having most people commute to work in individually owned automobiles. I can easily imagine a timeline that includes both a Global Great Depression in 2009 and a Technological Singularity in 2040.
As for the psychedelic side of things, a collapse of the US federal government and the apparatus of the Drug War would come as quite a boon to the entheogenic plants and their human allies, as would a diminishing of the distracting and anesthetizing stimulation provided by the corporate media.
Q: I work for the cable company here in Portland, Oregon, in an environment I imagine might be very similar to the environment you work in. Over the last year and half I’ve concluded that the job is less than optimally desirable, and while I’ve had some marginal success in other areas, I often dream of revolution or even collapse as an escape from the conditions I find myself in. I have visions or daydreams where the power goes out and the warehouse of cubicles is suddenly filled with riot as productivity slows to a standstill. I imagine the prozac laden football fanatic in the cubicle next to mine with blood on his face and blue cotton t-shirt. I imagine him bearing down on the supervisor with a stapler.
A: I don’t see things playing out like that. What you’re describing sounds like the effects of the rage virus from the movie 28 Days Later more than it sounds like the effects of economic collapse. I think that if the power went out in your office and didn’t come back on, most people would go home and wait for a call from the company telling them when to come back in to work. Other countries have endured economic melt-down. People generally don’t go berserk. Even food riots tend to be short lived and self-contained.
Q: It seems to me that perhaps the reason Peak Oil predictions and the prospect of economic collapse holds me rapt is that I long for it. To what extent does your job make you feel the same way?
A: My day job is not that bad. It’s nothing I would do were I not getting a paycheck, but it beats selling insurance, which is how I’ve kept myself afloat (to the extent that I’m not sunk) for the past few years. It’s the predation of banks and other corporate debt-peddlers, the Drug War and other governmental abuses, the highway robbery perpetrated by police, and the corporate media that have me looking forward to just getting the whole messy, painful business of disintegration and renewal underway.
Q: When Daniel Pinchbeck was recently on your program he suggested to Dmitry Orlov that there might be a positive aspect to the coming eschaton. Putting 2012 and the prophecies aside, to what extent do you think the positive side of the collapse relies on people acting in concert and in opposition to the prevailing system?
A: I think part of the positive side of collapse, the so-called “upside of down,” is that “the prevailing system” ceases to function and that no particular opposition to it, concerted or otherwise, is needed. To a large extent, I think our troubles spring from people “acting in concert” on a larger-than-human scale.
Q: You’ve raised chickens in the past and I currently have four chickens. I find the eggs my own chickens produce are far superior to the eggs I can buy from the market. Even organic/free range eggs are simply pale and bleak in comparison to Luna’s eggs. Why are the yolks of store bought eggs such a sickly pale yellow when the eggs from my coup have bright orange yolks?
A: Chickens raised in an industrial setting live on a diet of corn. Backyard chickens eat grass, bugs, and table scraps in addition to whatever chicken feed you give them. You have a much richer assortment of nutrients going into the chickens and a much higher quality of eggs coming out the other end.
Q: And how is it that most people don’t even know what a real egg is supposed to look like or taste like? Okay, so those are rhetorical questions. Here’s a real one. Where do you find good eggs now that you’ve lost your chickens?
A: I don’t eat many eggs these days, but there’s an Amish market in a nearby town, so good eggs are available.
Q: Final question. My internet isn’t connecting ever since I moved my computer. What’s the problem do ya think?
A: The internet gods demand a blood sacrifice.
