When I think of East Forest, I mostly picture a conversation we had at a sidewalk table over lunch at a cafe in Lower Manhattan. I don't remember exactly when or where that was or what we talked about. That wasn't a recorded conversation. Just a normal human interaction. He seemed like the picture of health and of vibrant engagement with life, which I think comes through in his music. -KMO
This interview with musician East Forest appears to date from around 2018, a few years after KMO moved from New York City to Vermont. East had been a listener to the C-Realm podcast through the psychedelic podcast ecosystem rather than the peak oil or collapse scene, and that background shaped the direction of the conversation.
Instead of focusing on collapse theory or energy economics, the discussion moves across a much wider range of territory: the early days of podcasting, psychedelics and the Terence McKenna orbit, KMO’s background growing up in a Secret Service family and later wandering through various corners of the world, the early internet culture of MUDs and LiveJournal, the economics of independent media work, and the technological currents shaping the early twenty-first century.
That range is actually representative of the C-Realm podcast across its full run. Peak oil and the limits-to-growth conversation became a prominent theme for several years, but it was never the whole project. Many regular listeners were not especially interested in collapse and were not persuaded by the thermodynamic arguments behind it. They kept coming back for conversations about consciousness, philosophy, technology, culture, and the general weirdness of the modern world.
Listening to the interview now, another interesting detail emerges. By this point KMO had already begun to recognize that collapse narratives can function as psychological frameworks as much as analytical ones. The emotional pull of those narratives was becoming increasingly apparent to him. Yet he was still publicly representing many of the collapse arguments in interviews and conversations, partly because those ideas remained central within the communities where the podcast circulated.
The result is a conversation from an in-between phase: after the peak of the collapse-focused years of the C-Realm podcast, but before the perspective that would later become Getting Over Collapse had fully taken shape.
In that sense, the interview works as a small time capsule from the later Vermont period of the C-Realm era.
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