KMO
KMO is best known as the creator and host of the C-Realm Podcast, a long-running series of conversations about science, culture, technology, and the future of technological civilization. Though podcasting is no longer his main focus, he is available for guest appearances and brings a distinctive mix of systems thinking, cultural analysis, and lived long-form audio experience.
His focus now is on blogging and writing science fiction.
Across essays, commentary, and fiction, he explores artificial intelligence, technological change, systems thinking, and the unstable boundary between the imagined future and the one already arriving.
He lives in the Ozarks and works part-time at a public library.
Substack
Most of KMO's current writing appears on Substack.
Essays on science fiction, artificial intelligence, and how speculative storytelling shapes our expectations about the future—trading prophecy for a systems-theory perspective.
Explorations of human-AI collaboration, technoanimist metaphysics, and the strange cultural territory opening up as large language models enter everyday life.
Fiction
Fear and Loathing in the Kuiper Belt
A hard-science-fiction novel with cosmic horror, gallows humor, and a distinctly Gen-X lack of reverence.
The year is 2754. Artificial super-intelligence rules the inner solar system from within a Dyson Sphere. Humans can leave the Sphere, but nothing from the outside is allowed back in. Those who emerge tell wildly incompatible stories about what life inside actually looks like.
Beyond the Sphere lies the Kuiper Belt, where human civilization survives in rougher forms: spin habitats, itinerant ships, and genetically modified soldier castes.
The story follows Patricia “Trix” Nixon, captain of the ship Persephone’s Lost Nipple Ring, and her crew of battered spacers, Columbian marines, and one badly out-of-his-depth doctor from the inner system.
Their mission pulls them toward alien structures, ancient hominin remains, and mysteries that grow darker the closer they drift toward the Dyson Sphere.
Conversations on Collapse
In 2010 KMO assembled Conversations on Collapse, a book drawn from transcripts of interviews with Dmitry Orlov, Albert K. Bates, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Sharon Astyk, Albert Bartlett, Cornelia Butler Flora, Bill McKibben, James Howard Kunstler, Colin Tudge, Joe Bageant, and Daniel Pinchbeck.
The book emerged from the original C-Realm Podcast period, when long-form conversations about energy, ecology, economics, and civilizational fragility were helping define the early online Peak Oil and collapse discourse.
It remains a snapshot of that moment: a record of serious voices thinking out loud about limits, breakdown, adaptation, and the possibility that industrial modernity might be far less durable than it appeared.
Getting Over Collapse
Getting Over Collapse is the follow-on project to Conversations on Collapse: a reconsideration of the collapse-era worldview that shaped the course of the C-Realm Podcast.
The fast-collapse memeplex caught KMO’s imagination in the late 2000s, but he came to the Peak Oil conversation from an unusual direction. Before collapse thinking took hold, he had spent years following Singularitarian arguments about accelerating technological change, an interest rooted in graduate study in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science in the mid-1990s.
That tension was already present in Conversations on Collapse itself. In multiple interviews collected there, KMO presents a techno-optimistic alternative to thermodynamic fatalism — with particular emphasis on artificial intelligence — and asks his guests to respond to it.
Getting Over Collapse returns to that earlier moment, reconsiders its assumptions and blind spots, and asks what still holds up in a world where artificial intelligence is no longer speculative background noise but a lived cultural force.
In the meantime, the project is unfolding in public through the revived C-Realm Blogspot page. That archive includes the full text of some of the interviews collected in Conversations on Collapse, along with other material from the collapse-centric years of the C-Realm project. KMO revived it to serve as a public canvas on which Getting Over Collapse will take shape, but nothing has been removed. The result preserves both a record of changing focus and the continuity of an evolving perspective.
Interested in the project?
Get notified when the finished book is available, or sign up to be considered as an advance reader.
On the Mic
KMO is not doing much podcasting of his own these days, but he remains available for guest appearances and brings a distinctive mix of systems thinking, cultural analysis, and long-form audio experience.
That perspective was forged through hundreds of conversations on the C-Realm Podcast and continues to find expression in interviews, collaborations, and guest appearances on other shows.
KMO has appeared as a guest on other podcasts since the early days of the C-Realm Podcast, but the internet being what it is, much of that material has disappeared. The selection below gathers some of the best-preserved examples of what he brings to a conversation as a guest.
Listeners interested in the larger body of audio work can browse the C-Realm Podcast archive. Episodes of the Padverb Podcast are also still available on Spotify, even though the main Padverb site is not currently loading.
Interested in having KMO appear on your podcast? Send an inquiry by email.
Selected Podcast Appearances
Doomer Optimism — Episode 84
KMO joins Steven Morris and Ben Lee for a discussion of the early doomer podcast scene, the intellectual culture around Peak Oil, and the long arc from collapse certainty toward a more complicated view of technological change.
Listen
Dry Hyphen Olympics
A wide-ranging conversation about science fiction, futurism, and how stories about the future often reveal more about the present that produced them.
Part 1 —
Watch
Part 2 —
Watch
Ten Laws with East Forest — Episode 17
A conversation about the origins of the C-Realm Podcast, psychedelics, collapse narratives, and the strange intellectual terrain opened by artificial intelligence.
Watch
KunstlerCast #252
James Howard Kunstler talks with KMO about collapse thinking, technological disruption, and the uneasy persistence of industrial civilization.
Listen
Doug Lain — 15 Years in Podcasting
A retrospective conversation on the early podcast era and the enduring value of long-form discussion.
Listen