2019 pre-COVID transition
A Transitional Conversation from 2019
KMO is reposting this C-Realm Vault episode from September 2019 as part of the ongoing Getting Over Collapse Notebook project. Listening to it now, the conversation lands in an interesting historical moment: late enough that the cracks in the old narratives were already visible, but still early enough that the world had not yet passed through the strange filter of the pandemic years.
In late September of 2019, we were still living in the carefree days of our pre-COVID innocence.
The discussion began somewhat accidentally. KMO had just returned from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he had recorded a formal studio interview with John Michael Greer. As part of that production, he had the unusual experience of having professional on-camera makeup applied—something that became a passing anecdote in conversation with Doug Lain.
Doug initially misheard the story as a complaint about the hypocrisy of celebrity environmentalists. From there, the conversation briefly wandered into elite signaling and public moral theater before the two realized they had crossed conversational wires.
Once the misunderstanding cleared, the discussion moved toward the actual intended topic.
KMO had invited Doug on primarily to talk about Andrew Yang, universal basic income, and the growing recognition that automation might reshape the structure of work and class politics. Those themes do eventually emerge, but the episode ranges more widely—touching on narrative management, ideological framing, and the strange ways political identity shapes what people are able to hear in a conversation.
At one point Doug remarks:
“The hypocrisy is offensive, but it’s a diversion.”
That line captures something important about the moment. Much of the political discourse of the late 2010s revolved around identifying villains and exposing contradictions. But focusing on hypocrisy can itself become a distraction from the structural forces actually shaping events.
In retrospect, this conversation sits at the edge of a shift in KMO’s own thinking.
For many years the C-Realm Podcast was strongly associated with collapse narratives, particularly the peak oil framework that dominated parts of alternative media in the 2000s and early 2010s. By 2019, however, KMO was already beginning to reconsider that orientation.
The collapse frame still appeared in public conversations, but it was increasingly being treated less as settled certainty and more as part of a larger psychological and narrative pattern.
That shift eventually became explicit in the Getting Over Collapse project, which explores how collapse narratives shaped a generation of thinkers—and why many people who once embraced them are now trying to move beyond them.
In that sense, this episode functions as a transitional artifact. The old worldview is still present in the background, but it is no longer the only lens through which events are interpreted.
Listeners interested in the other side of this story may also want to hear the studio interview with John Michael Greer recorded a few days earlier in Lancaster. In that conversation, Greer offered a characteristically sharp observation about modern media culture:
“Threats are useful if you want to distract attention or if you want to get people not thinking.”
Later in the same interview, Greer added:
“We do live in a time when a lot of news is managed. A lot of news is the management of appearances rather than the presentation of information.”
This repost is part of an effort to revisit that period with clearer eyes.
The conversation wanders, but the wandering tells its own story.
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