C-Realm Podcast

In this episode of the podcast guest host Larry Lowe shares a conversation he recorded with KMO about the essence of the C-Realm Podcast and his efforts to reduce its broad range of subject matter into a concise 'elevator pitch,' a boiler plate definition to serve as a definitive sound byte. Music by Dan O'Neill and the Scrub Jays.

KMO welcomes permaculture co-originator David Holmgren to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss two of his essays: Money Vs Fossil Energy: the Battle for Control of the World and Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future. David has been tracking the onset of climate change and peak oil for many years, but he says that in recent years, largely due to the work of Steve Keen and Nicole Foss, he has come to see financial systems as the fastest moving and most volatile element in emerging global crisis. He describes why he considers the Bush administration to have been guided by a certain energy realism lacking in too many social and climate activists. Finally, he describes why he thinks that multiple generations of mass affluence has left us saddled with a psycho-social debt that will be very difficult for us to discharge.   Music by The Little Stevies.

KMO welcomes Stephanie Johnstone to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about sexuality, monogamy, gender, music and more. Stephanie is co-host of the Sex For Smart People podcast, a program built in close collaboration with its audience. In the discussion, Stephanie quotes extensively from A Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy, explains why she is careful about endorsing the phrase "sex positive," and tells how she came from a place of religion-induced shame around her sexuality to a place of celebration. In the final segment, Albert K. Bates describes the upgrade he is making to the Ecovillage Training Center. Check out his Indigogo campaign.   Music by Love Songs for the Rest of Us.    

In this second conversation with David J. Blacker, the author of The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, KMO and guest review Marx's idea of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the productivity gains from technology that were supposed to free workers from the need to toil but somehow did not do so, and how the needs of the Neoliberal elite continue to shape the agenda of universal, compulsory education. David describes the vacuous talk around "accountability" in education. The minders of the public discourse treat accountability as an unqualified good, but in practice, it amounts to a record-keeping fetish dressed up as a moral imperative. The tacit assumption among accountability fetishists is that numbers are more real than words.   Music by Fernando Tarango and the Wickersham Brothers.

  Charles Eisenstein returns to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about the evolution of his thinking in his new book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is possible. He and KMO discuss how any seemingly objective metric that we use in pursuing a more just, sustainable and egalitarian world encodes our biases and justifications for existing power relationships and thus never brings about the world with think and hope it will. Charles explains why he sees the culture of American anti-intellectualism on the political right as coming from a place of valid rebellion, and how no course of action will achieve what we want it to unless it starts with an acknowledgement of the grief we feel over the wound of self-rejection.   Music by Stacco Troncoso.   You can learn more about the work of Christopher Alexander here.

In this episode of the C-Realm Podcast, KMO and guest, David J. Blacker, explore the themes of David's new book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. What's worse than being exploited by capitalists? Suddenly NOT being exploited by capitalists when that's the only way to earn a living that you've ever known. If public education in the 20th Century was shaped by the needs of capitalist production, what form does education take when what capitalists really need a growing segment of the population to do is go away? Welcome to the era of eliminationism.   Music by Dawn Drake and  ZapOte.

Seven C-Realm listeners join KMO on a conference call for a discussion of the themes of Dune, the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. They carry on the discussion from the previous episode about gender inequality among the various inhabitants of the far-future galactic Imperium whcih is the setting for the novel. Nobody in the Imperium pretends to uphold equality as a universal value, but is that worse than life in a culture that professes to value everyone equally but clearly doesn't? Dune depicts a pan-galactic feudal civilization governed by an indispensable corporate monopoly. Might corporate feudalism await our own civilization in the not-too-distant future?

KMO welcomes Dr. Keith Witt to the C-Realm Podcast for a discussion of the first ever C-Realm Book Club selection, Frank Herbert's Dune. Keith is an integral psychologist who read Dune when it was first published and has returned to it at various points throughout his life, often to find new depth and new meaning in the novel. The conversation includes the friction between religious, ideological, and tribal forms of consciousness with the more world-centric view from which Paul Atreides tries to direct his fanatical followers. The book also offers amble material for discussing feminism, drugs, technology and the dangers and abuses of fascism. The conversation will continue on a conference call with C-Realm listeners on TalkShoe.com.   Music by Float23.

In the final installment of the C-Realm Podcast for 2013, KMO talks with Dmitry Orlov, author of The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivor's Toolkit and Seth Moser-Katz of the Extraenvironmentalist Podcast about the memorable events of the past year, including the near miss with US entry into the Syrian civil war, the on-going degeneration of the US economy, the rise of Bitcoin, and speculations about Google's long-term intentions in their acquisition of the military robotics company, Boston Dynamics. Interlude skit by Darren T.

KMO and Olga welcome Wendy Jehanara Tremayne to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about her escape from the world of commodified culture and into the realm of self-reliance, learning, competence and true abundance. Wendy's new book, The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living, describes how she went from being the creative director in a marketing firm in New York City to living in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where she built an off-the-grid oasis in a barren RV park with her partner, Mikey Sklar. At the end of the podcast, KMO plays a short excerpt from C-Realm Podcast episode 53 to honor the life of Professor Albert A. Bartlett, who died in September of 2013.   Music by Fernando Tarango.

KMO remote-hosts a trialogue between Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner and John Restakis on establishing a peer-production economy in which economic rents are distributed to every member of a community who then vote with their dollars to decide how to deploy capital and determine the direction and priorities of their society. To lay the groundwork for the conversation, KMO provides some rough and ready definitions for the concepts of Georgism, economic rents and neoliberalism.

Dr. Carolyn Baker returns to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss the themes she explores in her new book, Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times, in which she addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization.  Carolyn offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created, but rather than showing us ways to prevent the collapse, Baker argues that the demise of our consumerist, corporate culture is inevitable, and that it is crucial to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the certain changes to come. Later in the episode, KMO and Arik Roper discuss why Frank Herbert's 1965 novel, Dune, is such a perfect selection for the first go-round of the C-Realm Book Club.   Music by Lydia Ooghe

KMO welcomes Kevin A. Carson, "free market anti-capitalist" and the author of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto  to the C-Realm to talk about economics, technology, natural and artificial property rights, and the general outlines of the successor society that is arising to meet human needs as the over-built infrastructure of global corporate capitalism rots from neglect. They also touch upon R. Buckminster Fuller's concept of the ephemeralization of technology. Kevin argues that an industrial society that can no longer afford to maintain its energy and capital-intensive infrastructure and is transitioning to a distributed, more supple mode of production looks a lot like a civilization that is receding from it's peak of prosperity and technical prowess in a process that John Michael Greer describes as catabolic collapse.  The interlude features excerpts from a 1976 interview with R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs.

KMO welcomes Ben McLeish of the Zeitgeist Movement back to the C-Realm to talk about technology, primitivism, science, and the quest for knowledge. KMO lays out the case for thinking that resource scarcity and the sort of creeping behavioral control that Theodore Kaczynski describes in his manifesto stand between us and a rosy high-tech future, and Ben, while acknowledging the challenges and pitfalls, explains how these limitations spring from profit-based incentives and how they will not pose so great a challenge once we outgrow our capitalist values.   Music by Lady Rizo.

KMO and Olga K talk with J. P. Harpignies, author of Delusions of Normality: Sanity, Drugs, Sex, Money and Beliefs in America, about what it means to be "normal." The conversation covers the creeping pathologization of human behavior, life extension, utopian thinking, commerce, and the halting, counter-intuitive, and unpredictable nature of societal progress.   Music by Mammie Minch.