580: Always a Reader

Date: April 20, 2026 Host: KMO Guest: Kenneth E. Harrell A 20-year-old throws a Molotov cocktail at the home of Sam Altman, then heads to OpenAI headquarters and tries to break in by smashing a chair through the glass front of the building. He’s carrying kerosene and has a Yudkowski-inspired manifesto in his car. That’s not an isolated story. It’s…

KMO revisits a sampler created during the original assembly of Conversations on Collapse and uses it to open a new project: Getting Over Collapse. Featuring excerpts from: This episode returns to the Peak Oil era with a more critical but still appreciative eye. The result is part archive artifact, part historical reflection, and part inquiry into what collapse…

KMO does not have strong opinions about the Twitter files, but Doug Lain sure does, and he's naming names and calling out cowards on the mainstream left. He thinks that elements of the federal government have colluded with Big Tech to censor and marginalize voices both from the Right and from the Marxist Left.

KMO and Professor Rob Brooks, author of Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers, talk about AI as a means of alleviating the human suffering that comes with social isolation and loneliness. In particular, Rob comments on KMO's experience using the Replika AI app both before and after the recent "update" in which the company took…

In this inaugural episode of the KMO Show, KMO, Michael Garfield of the Future Fossils podcast and mutual friend, Kevin Wohlmut, discuss the dawning of the epistemological apocalypse. Thanks to AI, we can't really trust our eyes or our ears anymore. Deep faked images and voices can produce "evidence" that people said and did things they never said or did.…

An introduction to and an explanation for the re-branding. KMO has been podcasting since 2006 under the C-Realm banner. Why mess with an established brand? Listen in and find out. Subscribe to the new podcast here: https://rss.com/podcasts/kmoshow/

KMO welcomes psychotherapist Zac Rhodenizer to the podcast to talk about the ways in which wild-grown and deliberately engineered mind viruses hijack human cognitive capacities for nefarious purposes and ways to recognize and defend against such attacks. Find Zac on Twitter. Zac's book, "Psychological Defence: Protection from psyops, culture wars, and social contagion" is being…

KMO talks with computer scientist (and Jepordy! champion) Roger Craig about the various approaches to and methods behind contemporary uses of artificial neural networks. It gets pretty crunchy at time for a general audience, but there's fun banter waiting on the far side. Gambate!

KMO talks with Josh Slocum about what it means to live in a Cluster B world. On his show, the Disaffected Podcast, Josh cites example after example of how the political left has succumbed to the rule of narcissists, both grandiose and covert, who have imposed an irrational order upon their faction in which the…

KMO welcomes drug writer and scientist, Lex Pelger, back to the program to talk about France, podcasting, UFOs, the supernormal, and the diminishing returns of psychedelics. KMO and Lex share their evolving approaches to reading and keeping books. Do not call up what you can't put down.