Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:03 — 37.8MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS
KMO talks with Dr. Dan Freilich, a Navy veteran and VA doctor who hopes to defeat Vermont's incumbent Representative, Peter Welch, in the upcoming primary election. For Dr. Dan, every problem and every issue that progressives care about comes back to campaign finance reform. He has vowed not to accept campaign contributions from corporations or from special interests of any kind. He says he'll drop out of the race if Representative Welch will make the same pledge. The conversation ranges over many topics, including the F-35 fighter, the opiate addiction crisis, the role of lobbyists and the unworkability of throwing up one's hands and declaring the entire system to be hopelessly corrupt.
KMO talks with 
The profession of writing books has changed in recent decades, and now 
Charles Hugh Smith is a critic of the idea of UBI (universal basic income), but in order to understand his critique it is necessary to take a deep dive into the nature of work. Any simple formulation of what constitutes work will either over-generalize and capture too much, or it will leave out certain activities which are necessary for the functioning of a healthy society and which create benefits for people other than the one engaged in the activity but which do not generate a profit and so are often unpaid. KMO and Charles Hugh Smith talk about work, leisure, commodification and the effects of information technology and machine intelligence on how we all participate in the web of exchanges and interactions we call "the economy."
We're all familiar with the archetypal alien abduction scenario. You wake up in your bed. You can't move. Short gray humanoids with big black eyes surround you. They whisk you off to some other place for painful and humiliating procedures and then mostly wipe your memory of the event, at least in the short term. People have reported encounters with a whole menagerie of alien types. Some are beautiful and benevolent, others monstrous and hostile. But with the Grays, their intentions seem self-interested, but they're mostly just unfathomable. Larry Lowe describes how this narrative coalesced in the late 80s and early 90s and cemented itself as our cultures dominant schema for contact with alien intelligence.