History is a Prankster

Introduction: History is a Prankster

KMOIf you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.

Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 554, "History is a Prankster," with guest James Howard Kunstler, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Tuesday, March 24th, 2020.

In this episode of the podcast, I will share with you a conversation that I recorded just today with James Howard Kunstler. It's supposed to be about his new book, Living in the Long Emergency, but given where we are and what's happening, really, it's a conversation about the current moment and about his new book.

I'll have some stuff to say at the end, but let's just get right into that conversation with James Howard Kunstler.

You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.

An acute emergency and a new book

KMOAll right. I have James Howard Kunstler on the line in an emergency.

JimYeah.

KMOHow do you like the long emergency so far?

JimThis seems more like an acute emergency, but I don't much care for it, actually. I mean, it could be way worse, but I still don't like it.

KMOI understand. Hey, you have a new book out, and current circumstances could have us talking about everything except your book. So let's make a point of talking about the book first.

JimWell, the book is very pertinent. In fact, my timing has never been better, except for the fact that nobody has a job, nobody has any money, nobody's going to be buying any books. But the new book is called Living in the Long Emergency. And it's a kind of an update of the book that I published in 2005, along with the successor to it, which is called Too Much Magic in 2012. And this kind of updates the oil situation and the financial and the economy picture.

An awful lot is happening right now that is accelerating the process greatly, shall we say. But I think it's still very pertinent. The center of the book comprises portraits of about six or seven people who are leading what I consider to be alt lifestyles. And you are one of them. There's a portrait of KMO in there.

KMOYes, I'm the capstone. I'm the final.

JimYou're the Generation Xer who started a career that didn't exist when you were in college and became a professional podcaster for practical purposes. I guess we could say that, right?

KMOWell, I do get paid for it, so technically speaking I am a professional.

JimYeah. And so there's some other characters in there. There are a couple of homesteaders, and there's a guy who does a particular kind of interesting farming out of Wisconsin. It's called silviculture, which is basically organic tree farming. He's growing chestnuts and filberts and all kinds of other things in the understory as a kind of model for future farming that doesn't require a whole lot of heroic equipment and money and inputs, etc.

There's a portrait of a woman who's a heroic artisan baker in Vermont. There's a portrait of a guy who's a distiller who was in the straight corporate world and dropped out, bought a farm, grows his own grain, and distills whiskey—

KMOAlso in Vermont.

JimYeah, he's in Vermont, too. So some other—

KMOThree of the six portraits are of people living in Vermont.

JimWell, Vermont is a special place, shall we say. And then the third part of the book is kind of a forecast or projection or attempt to look into the future and see where we're going with the problems that we have.

There's this famous quote by Lenin that's been going around. I've heard it a couple of times on the web in the last few weeks, but it goes something like this: that there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. And we seem to be in that kind of situation right now.

Peak oil, shale and the 2008 crash

KMOYeah. A lot could change in a short period right now. Hey, let's go back to the first section of your book: "You've got some explaining to do" section.

JimYeah, sure. First, what am I talking about with that I Love Lucy reference? Well, you know, a lot of the original Long Emergency book and body of thinking came out of the peak oil idea. And that idea was we were going to get into trouble with oil. Now, a lot of people misunderstood the import of that, which was not that we were going to run out of oil, but we were going to run out of affordable oil that we could economically get out of the ground.

And that is exactly what happened. Three years after The Long Emergency came out, in 2008, we were in an oil crisis, and the price of oil shot up to $130 a barrel. That, in turn, stimulated the financial crisis of 2008. It wasn't the only thing that led to it or caused it, but it was one of the big elements of it, because what it essentially meant was that our economy could no longer run on oil that cost that much. And so all of the signifiers of money, wealth, and investment started to go haywire in the financial sector. And that's what happened in the 2008 crash.

So after that, we ramped up this shale oil industry, which was a new way to get oil, but it was very different from the old way. The old way was you stick a pipe in the ground, the well cost about $400,000 in today's money, and it produced thousands of barrels a day for decades. And that was like running a cash register—very, very profitable business.

But shale oil was more like scraping the bottom of the barrel, where it costs between $6 to $12 million to sink a shale oil well and do all the fracking and all that, and it produced maybe a hundred-plus barrels a day for a year, and then the production fell by 60%, and then after three years, it was out.

So we ramped up the shale oil industry, which was a tremendous financial and industrial stunt, really. And it was enabled by zero-interest-rate financing and a junk bond fiesta that went along with what followed the crash of 2008. So all of these shale oil companies issued tremendous amounts of bonds and got tremendous amounts of loans of other kinds, and they produced a tremendous amount of oil.

We went from producing just under 5 million barrels a day, when we were importing 15 million barrels a day to make a total of about 20 that we were using every day, to 13 million barrels a day of production. And so we passed the old, very, very old oil peak of 1971, which was just under 10 million barrels a day.

So it was quite a stunt. They produced a lot of oil. The problem was that none of the companies made a red cent producing it. And they had to continually get new loans to redrill and put in new wells to keep the production up. And that seemed to work for this 10-year period from about 2009 till 2019. And then all of a sudden things started to get pretty wonky in the financial world. And having spent those 10 or 11 years demonstrating that they couldn't make any money producing shale oil, all of a sudden they were in a situation where nobody wanted to invest in it anymore. I mean, who wants to invest in an industry that doesn't make any money? So all those loans that they needed to continually and incessantly drill and redrill were no longer available.

And that's where we're at now, and that's what the shale oil industry is facing. The prospect is the shale oil industry, one way or another, is going to fail, although it could be nationalized. And then you have to ask yourself, how well is the federal government going to run the shale oil industry? Government-run industries don't necessarily work that well, whether it's the old Soviet Union or Venezuela or Mexico or you name it. Saudi Aramco has done pretty well, I suppose, but it's a different kind of society.

KMOWell, the Saudis are still pumping conventional crude, and their major advantage right now is that they still have a lot of it and their production costs are very low. But you described the shale oil as the bottom of the barrel, but it's an interesting barrel in that most of the hydrocarbons in the ground are in the bottom of the barrel. The sort of oil that reservoirs near the surface and you can just poke a hole in the ground and up comes a bubbling crude was a minority of underground hydrocarbons, always has been. So while we're scraping the bottom of the barrel now, the barrel is still mostly full.

JimWell, I don't know how full it is. And part of the problem is that the shale oil is trapped in the rock. It doesn't come out under its own pressure. So you have to go to all these intensely heroic industrial measures to get it out of the rock, and it just costs too much.

KMOWell, are you aware of how much automation has brought down the cost of fracking?

JimWell, yeah, I certainly understand that there have been advances in it, but I still think that it's highly problematical, and I'm not persuaded at all that it's going to work. Especially in the suddenly new era that we're in of money disappearing, because that's what's happening. We're speaking on March 24th, and we've been in a massive liquidation for the last 10 days or so, two weeks. And all that is capital disappearing. And that's the capital that would have been available to the shale drillers had they, in theory, proved that they could make money doing shale oil. So it only makes it more difficult for them to continue their operations. No matter how elegant or technologically slick they are, it doesn't matter that much if they can't make a dime doing it.

Liquidation, the Fed and the bond market

KMOSay more about liquidation. What do you mean when you say we're liquidating right now?

JimWell, money's disappearing. The stock market went down from about 29,000 to about 18,000, and what that was was the capitalization of all the companies that are in the stock market—or at least, well, that was the Dow; the S&P is another index. But that money's gone, that value, that wealth that we thought was there, that capital is gone. It just went up in a vapor, trillions and trillions of dollars. So there's that problem. There's also the problem that hasn't quite gotten underway yet, but it started today or yesterday when the Federal Reserve essentially announced that it was going to buy everything. They're going to buy all the bonds that they had to buy, all the sovereign U.S. Treasury bonds and bills and corporate debt and municipal bonds, and they're going to buy all this stuff. And what that means eventually is that they're going to destroy the bond market, and the bond market is even bigger than the stock market.

So there will just be a tremendous amount of lost wealth. What will eventually happen is that the interest rate offered for the bonds will go up and nobody will want them, and the Fed will have to buy them. But when interest rates on bonds go up, the actual price of the bonds goes down. There's an inverse relationship between them. It's kind of wonky. It's one of the reasons that the bond market is so wonky and few people think about it. But a lot of people have moved into bonds now trying to escape the liquidation that's going on in the stock market. And they're going to get hammered. They're going to be ruined because it's not a safe haven.

And so all of this, to answer your question, represents a tremendous amount of wealth that's going up in a vapor. And it won't be there to do many of the things that we would want to ask it to do, like create new sources of energy and build the infrastructure for whatever the next economy was imagined to be. I don't think we're going to have that technologically wondrous next economy. I think that we're more likely to go medieval, and it appears that we are at the moment.

A fork in the road: Victorian households and quiet change

KMOYeah. As you know, I'm skeptical about all that.

JimYeah, we both came to a fork in the road about, I don't know, five years ago or something. And you decided that you weren't going to be a, quote, doomer anymore. And you developed a different view than I have. But I'm still pretty convinced that we're in a lot of trouble and that we can't run these technological civilizations at the scale that we did before. And we're going to have to make them smaller, and we're going to have to make other arrangements for an awful lot of normal everyday things, whether it's like how you're going to get your food to what are the gender roles going to be in the labor force, and what is family structure going to look like, and what kind of places are we going to live in, and what kind of habitations are we going to live in?

And these things go through lots of changes in history, and we tend to not notice them. Like in the late 19th century, there are all these large Victorian houses here in this part of the country where we live, right? And many of them are empty or ruins or funeral homes or have been divided up into apartments. But the reason they built them in the first place was that households in 1885 were really institutions. They were very kind of complex, complexly organized domestic arrangements. You had many classes of people living in one house. You had the people who were the family who owned it, but you also had servants living there. And you had a lot of people coming in day by day doing the jobs that servants did who didn't necessarily live there.

And there were a lot more tasks that had to be attended to constantly, whether it was firing up the furnace or getting meals out for the family. You couldn't just fire up the microwave and throw in some Hot Pockets. People had cooks. And in fact, it wasn't in our time that the kitchen became the prime status symbol and social center for Americans. It used to be kind of a place that you shunted off to the back of the house or sometimes in the basement. It wasn't the social center; it was the place where the servants went to prepare the meal. So we went from that kind of society into the 20th century without any trauma. And we didn't really notice that it had changed that much, but it changed a lot. And now we're in a situation—

KMOA fair amount of trauma here, I have to say. Here in Bellows Falls, we have all those lovely big Victorian homes that were built at a time when this place was a wealth-generating center based on logging. Those days are long since passed. And the houses remain, and they still have servants' quarters and they still have a carriage house and whatnot. But yeah, they've been broken up into apartments for the most part, and they're apartments for people who are living on state assistance, and many of the owners are absent, and they're run down, and they're dilapidated.

JimWell, it's simply my point, though, that these things in history go through changes and phases of their existence, and you don't necessarily need a civilizational crisis for that to happen. Stuff just changes and evolves, and our economy has changed and evolved hugely, as you just noted.

The failed futurists

KMOHey, what's the full title of your book?

JimLiving in the Long Emergency. I don't know what the sub—oh, I have to go grab it to see.

KMOOkay, hold on. I can find it right quick. The book is—I'm actually looking at your website. The book is Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adopters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. Who are the failed futurists that you're referencing there?

JimOh, you know, I think that the general family of techno-narcissists, with probably Ray Kurzweil leading the parade with his baton. And the Elon Musks of the world who thought we were going to go to Mars, which is, as far as I'm concerned, an utterly preposterous proposition. And a lot of the California Silicon Valley tech people who have techno-narcissistic fantasies about what the future is going to be about. The electric car people who thought that we were going to save suburbia by electrifying all the vehicles. Pretty much that gang. And a lot of that's pretty mainstream. I mean, a lot of those wishes and the wishful thinking that came out of it was mainstream stuff.

KMOWell, Ray Kurzweil is pining for immortality, and the richest people in the world share his dreams. So he's got—I forget his exact job title, but he's like technologist emeritus at Google. And his job there is basically just to be Ray Kurzweil and to keep spinning these fantasies. But I think a lot of people who would—I think the word "futurist" is out of fashion, has been for a few years now, but people who would describe themselves as professional strategic forecasters would look at Ray Kurzweil and his pronouncements and say, "Yeah, that's fantasy. That's lunacy." But at the same time, I mean, if you trace Ray Kurzweil's predictions back several decades—and he's been making them for decades—his track record is really excellent.

JimWell, he's a very accomplished guy, that's for sure. When he started out, when he was young, he invented all these electronic musical instruments, the electric synthesizer. And he's developed language programs for computers. So there's no question that he's a smart guy, but I think he flew up his own butthole intellectually.

Charles Mann and the forecasters' track record

KMOWell, he may have, but you remember Charles Mann¹, author of 1492—

JimYeah, I do.

KMOOr I guess 1491 and 1493. Are those the books?

JimYeah. Before and after Columbus.

KMOYes. And also more recently, he's got one called The Wizard and the Prophet. And he wrote an article—I think it was for Orion. No, it was for Harper's or The Atlantic. It was The Atlantic that really irritated a lot of peak oil folk, because in the mid-'90s he was talking to peak oil folk, and they were telling him of the impending downfall of industrial civilization. And he was also talking to people like the person you love to hate, Daniel Yergin². And Daniel Yergin was saying, "No, no, we've got new technology coming online that's going to allow this to continue." And the peak oil folk told Charles Mann, "Don't listen to those techno-optimists. They don't know what they're talking about." And so 10 years later, Charles Mann looks around and he says, "Well, you know, the optimists and the techno-narcissists, their predictions panned out a lot better over the last decade than the doomers did." So just on the basis of comparing predictions to outcomes, the techno-narcissists seem to be ahead.

JimWell, we'll see. I think that it remains to be seen whether the shale industry is going to get into trouble. I think it will. There's an awful lot of trouble going on right now as we speak in our economy, and it's not really all from the coronavirus. The financial system and the banking system was in just a tremendously dishonest place, misrepresenting the value of a lot of things, and now it's falling apart. And it was probably going to fall apart one way or another, whether coronavirus did it or something else did it. So without a functioning, coherent banking and finance system, we're going to be in trouble for a long, long time. And it remains to be seen how any of these enterprises and industries are going to resume their optimistic forecasts. So I still stand by mine. I think we're basically going medieval. It may be a new kind of medieval. Let's hope that it includes good lighting and plumbing. It'd be nice.

Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti and the populist vacuum

KMOAt the very beginning, you mentioned that people aren't buying books right now because they're broke. But this book—are you familiar with this book?

JimOh, I know Krystal Ball and Saagar³. I know who they are, sure. I haven't read their book.

KMOThis book is flying off the shelves. They had to order a second printing before it was even launched.

JimI like them. They're smart. I've seen them on YouTube and they're smart young people. But they're also not wokesters. They're definitely people who have come to a different conclusion than many of the people they probably graduated from college with.

KMOSo, Krystal Ball is a left-wing populist. Saagar Enjeti is a right-wing populist. They disagree on some things, but they both agree in general on the real story of our moment is that government and big finance and big business serves an oligarchic elite. And the working class—particularly the Democratic Party has long since abandoned any pretense of looking after the working class. And in 2016, we had a faux populist up against a business-as-usual neoliberal Democrat, and the people went for the faux populist. This time around, we had the possibility of a faux populist versus Bernie Sanders, an actual populist. And the Democrats have managed to get Joe Biden. I mean, he hasn't gotten the nomination yet, but he's certainly got a big delegate lead. And he just seems utterly, utterly incompetent and out of touch in every respect.

JimI mean, I would agree with that. I think that he's really just a placeholder. And we're not sure what he's a placeholder for. God help us if it's Hillary Clinton. But, you know, I don't think he's a horse that's gonna finish. And I've been saying in my blog for the last year that I'm not really persuaded that the Democratic Party is going to survive. You know, I think it could just blow up like the Whig Party did during the last really serious convulsion that America went through, and that was the pre-Civil War era. The Whigs vanished and a new party came along. But I don't think the Democratic Party is going to make it. And certainly not with Joe Biden.

Cuomo, Biden and history as a prankster

There's a chance, you know, our governor here in New York, Andrew Cuomo, has done a pretty good job of grandstanding during the coronavirus emergency. A lot of people think he's done a great job as far as that goes.

Speaker uncertainI don't have a huge, strong opinion about him.

JimI do, because I live near the capital of New York and I know people who worked in government and other things that deal with it. A lot of people consider him to be a bully and not a particularly nice person. But, you know, he's proving to have a certain kind of political charisma at the moment that fits in with the crisis that we're in. And sometimes, history is so strange. And by history, I mean the rush of events, not just stuff that happens in the past, just the emergent unfolding of events. It's a real prankster.

As I said in my new book, if you're a believer in the Fourth Turning thesis that proposes that a gray champion of the boomer generation comes along to save the nation, well, who did that turn out to be? That gray champion turned out to be a New York City real estate grifter with a bad hairdo. Right? So history is a prankster. And maybe the Gen Xer who is going to pull America back together will be Andrew Cuomo.⁴

I can't see Joe Biden coming anywhere near being a serious political candidate. The guy's a bumbling fool. He was a fool before he became senile, and now he's a bigger fool. And it's just a pathetic demonstration. I mean, I can't imagine what these people in the DNC are thinking when they trot him out for these stupid exhibitions that they're putting on. It's pathetic.

KMOHe's got name recognition, and he has the bona fides of being a continuation of the Obama administration, which—I think the Obama administration was disastrous, but a lot of people were comfortable back then and they have fond memories of the time.

Obama, Trump and his adversaries

JimWhat were some of the things about Obama's years that bugged you?

KMOWell, the number one issue for me is that the Obama administration asserted the right of the executive to murder American citizens without charging them with any crime. And that's just a step beyond the line for me. I mean, due process is just basic to our system of government.

JimA rather bad precedent.

KMOYeah. And for me, the Obama years was just Bush Three. I mean, he kept Bush cabinet members in place, he had a cabinet packed full of Wall Street folk.

JimYeah.

KMOHe's not quite the war hawk that other presidents have been, but he certainly didn't get us out of our long-standing wars.

JimYeah.

KMOSo I just have no fond memories whatsoever, except, you know, he was charismatic, intelligent, a good speaker, he could deliver a joke. So when he was behind the mic, it wasn't the nails-on-chalkboard experience that listening to Donald Trump can be.

JimI know. I caught him yesterday. I caught Trump yesterday, and it continues to amaze me that a coherent sentence just never comes off of his lips. And I think that that's one of the reasons that people were so entranced by Andrew Cuomo in the last ten days, because the guy speaks in coherent sentences and he's also kind of a comedian. He can be capable of being funny, and he does seem to have some compassion for the people who are going through all this stuff. But Trump, oh my God, he does these coronavirus news conferences and you just cringe.

KMOYes. He just needs to delegate that and not comment, because his commentary is— I mean, I've been defending Trump sort of by default for the last year and a half because the attacks against him that I've been encountering from mainstream Democrats have just been unhinged. So just trying to hold up some semblance of reality in front of them comes off as defending Trump. But yeah, he's completely ill-suited to leading this country and to speaking on epidemiological matters or scientific matters of any kind. He has no competence in that realm. And he's such an attention whore, he can't understand that the thing to do in this moment is to appoint a competent person and let that competent person handle the response and speak to the public about it. Because Trump can't help but injure himself and the country every time he tries to present himself as an authority figure in this area.

JimYeah, it's pretty sad, and it's only making things worse. But on the other hand, his opponents are still behaving in such complete bad faith and dishonesty. That's my whole beef with the whole political situation for the last three years. I'm not a Trump cheerleader, but I am just disgusted by the behavior of his adversaries. It's so underhanded, it's in such bad faith, and it's so patently dishonest all the time that it just blows my mind.

But one good thing about the situation that we're in is that there's a very good chance that wokesterism and the whole PC grab bag of ideological bullshit is going to be going down the tubes. People will realize that they just don't have time for that anymore. And that'll be a good thing.

Class consciousness and which side you're on

KMOWell, we've known each other a long time.

JimYeah.

KMOYou know I am not a Marxist. You have never heard any Marxist jargon spill from my lips.

JimI haven't.

KMOBut at this moment, for me, the entire framing of our situation is we have allowed government institutions and the large quasi-government institutions that govern this country and the economic life of this country to be captured and enslaved by a tiny minority of insanely rich people.

JimYeah.

KMOAnd there is no way for this nation to maneuver through the current crisis moment and keep the distribution of wealth exactly as it is now. It's going to tip one way or the other in response, and I want it to tip toward the working people.

JimI think a lot of those wealthy people are going to be wiped out in what's going on in the financial markets. But you don't have to be a Marxist. There are other default settings for that. You could call yourself a Jacobin.

KMOWhat I'm saying is I have heightened class consciousness, not only in this moment, but it's been growing for years. And I'm not about to join the Revolutionary Communist Party of America or anything, but at the same time, I am going to be framing, particularly in terms of politics and who I would give my support to, in terms of: which side are you on? Are you on the side of working people, or are you on the side of the hyper-wealthy?

And right now it is pretty clear that Trump is on the side of the hyper-wealthy, even though he knows how to talk to a certain portion of the electorate and get them to think that he's a populist. I just think that if we had an actual populist go up against him in an election, the actual populist would win. And the Democrats have pulled out all the stops to make sure that the American people don't have that choice.

JimWell, I didn't think that Bernie Sanders was the best populist that they might come up with, for no other reason than the guy was just too old. And it sounds like what you're describing actually is a vacuum that needs to be filled because these people are not being attended to by the Republican Party—not really, anyway—and the Democrats have abandoned them. So there's a big vacuum there that needs leadership to fill it. And I don't know where we go with that.

The French Revolution and Napoleon

As I said before, history is a trickster and a prankster. I'm a big student of the French Revolution, and what happened in the French Revolution was very instructive. You got the equivalent of the progressives taking— First of all, they went through many years of convulsions from 1789, when the whole business started at the Bastille. And then three years later or so, you get the execution of the king, and then the Jacobins seize power in 1793. And they were the progressive wokesters of their day. They had a huge cultural agenda for changing everything. They wanted to have like a ten-day week, not a seven-day week. They wanted to change the calendar and have different months and change their names. They wanted to get rid of the Catholic Christian religion and have kind of a new age religion of the Supreme Being and do new age dances around maypoles.

And they started instituting all this stuff at the same time that they were heedlessly and recklessly chopping off the heads of all the aristocrats and hangers-on at Versailles and everybody else in France. And after about a year of that, the country got utterly sick of them and threw them out and executed Robespierre and his lieutenant Saint-Just. And they were never heard of again, right? They vaporized; they went down the memory hole.

And then, a couple of years later, France is in this just kind of slough of exhaustion, political exhaustion. And the leadership in the National Assembly just doesn't know what to do. And along comes this artillery captain named Napoleon Bonaparte. And he demonstrates that he's pretty good at putting down mobs in Paris. He fires grapeshot into the mob or threatens to, anyway—I forget exactly how it rolled out. And then he has a few heroic military adventures against some of France's enemies. And everybody looks at this guy who's like twenty-six years old and says, "He's the guy. We've got to make him the guy."

And so they take Napoleon Bonaparte after some of his military adventures, and they bring him back to Paris and say, "You're the guy. You're going to be the head of the country." And like two or three years after that, he said, "Okay, I'll be emperor too. Make me emperor. Let's do that." And then, so you turn around in like 1803, and there's France, led by an emperor named Napoleon Bonaparte. And who expected that in the 1790s when the French Revolution was going on?

So this long-winded story is to say that history is a prankster and that political and economic convulsions end strangely.

World Made by Hand, the federal government and the relief bill

So, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the story ended somewhat like one of the novels I wrote in the World Made by Hand series of novels. There were four of them, and the third one included the story of a young man who leaves the town that the novels are all set in, in upstate New York. Leaves a small town and goes out to see what happened in America, and he ends up being engaged by the remnant of the intelligence service of the remnant of the federal government. And he's sent down to Tennessee to assassinate the leader of this breakaway nation called the Foxfire Republic, that calls itself the Foxfire Republic. And the president of the Foxfire Republic is a country music singer and TV evangelist, a lady who I like to describe as Dolly Parton meets Hitler.

And that's the kind of future I imagine for America, strange things happening. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if the military at some point had to take charge of American affairs in some way or other. It wouldn't surprise me if the country broke up into regions that were much more independent. I said way back in The Long Emergency book in 2005 that one of the hallmarks of the crisis that we were going to go through—which I call the long emergency because it's going to take a long time to play out—one of the hallmarks would be the growing incompetence and impotence of the federal government. And we're seeing that happen now, I think.

Just this spectacle that's gone on in the last three days in Congress, where both the Republicans and Democrats are—they're sort of trying to pass some kind of a relief bill to somehow mitigate all of the economic damage that's going on, the financial damage. Basically, a huge amount of fiscal distribution of money that doesn't exist. And the Democrats have loaded up the bill with all these ridiculous things like a diversity mandate for corporate boards, so that now you have to have an ethnic mix on a corporate board. This is the kind of nonsense that they're doing. And the Republicans have their own nonsense, bailing out Boeing.

These companies should be allowed to go bankrupt because that's the honest way to deal with this problem: to go bankrupt and allow somebody else to come in and be the owner of Boeing. The factories aren't going to disappear, and the engineers are still going to be out there to hire and put back on the payroll, and all the infrastructure is there to continue being Boeing and doing what they do. But the old leadership screwed up, and they should declare bankruptcy and get rid of them and have somebody buy Boeing for dimes on the dollar or whatever comes out of a bankruptcy proceeding, right?

And that's true for a lot of companies. And it's certainly true for the big banks that for the moment are considered too big to fail. But we're not going to do that. Instead, we're going to bail everybody out, and we're going to print all this money, and we're going to probably put America into an inflationary depression, or maybe a hyperinflationary depression. And then everybody will have a lot of money that's worth nothing, because there's two ways you can go broke: you can have no money, or you can have a lot of money that isn't worth anything.

Rob, the white nationalist

KMOLet's talk about a couple of the characters in your book. I don't want to sound dismissive, but it'll come off as dismissive: people who practice alternative, wise, small-scale farming methods—great. Most people who try, fail. Those who succeed become darlings of the subculture and of their local affluent consumers. But the two bios that I was most interested in in your book were Thwack in near Baltimore, or in Baltimore, and the other gentleman whose name I can't bring to mind. Is it Bob? He's the white nationalist.

JimYeah, Rob. Yeah, I included these two guys. The people that ended up being profiled in this book were people who, in one way or another, corresponded with me for one reason or another over the years. They were fans of my books, I guess. And I'm not a white nationalist myself, but I felt that America ought to get a deep look at what a white nationalist looks like, and what his thinking is like, and where he comes from, and what his experience has been like. So I did this portrait of Rob Freeman, and there it is. I made it clear that I didn't subscribe to his ideas, but I did want to put that on the table so people would understand what's out there and what it consists of.

KMOWell, have you had any feedback from the woke left on that?

JimNo. And interestingly, the whole book reviewing industry has kind of fallen apart, because there are so few magazines anymore, general interest magazines, and the newspapers don't want to pay for book reviewers, the ones that survived. And so there's very little book reviewing that goes on. So I didn't get it from that angle.

I haven't had any just sheer cranks calling me up, or very few. I do get some crank emails, but very few crank emails accusing me of this and that. And also, people are so distracted right now by their own problems, with their paychecks stopped and their worries about whether they'll ever go back to their jobs. There's a tremendous burden of anxiety and uncertainty out there. And the book was only published like March 8th, I think, officially, and it's now March 24th. So no, I haven't gotten much feedback. I think the wokesters are feeling probably a bit shunted aside, maybe a little bit wounded right now. They can't carry on their wokester campaign because there are too many other important things going on at the moment with people losing their livelihoods. So.

KMOWell, what I was getting at was, in the book you state explicitly, "I'm not presenting this person because I support his ideology."

JimYeah.

KMOBut I think that the wokesters wouldn't accept that, because they would say, "Well, you're giving them a platform."

JimWell, okay, fuck them. There's a lot of things that they say that are ridiculous, and that's just one of them: that you can't have a conversation with somebody that you disagree with. But I mean, the idea that you don't even want to look into the thinking process of somebody who has a political ideology that you don't like—I mean, that's ridiculous. That's like saying if it was 1931, "We're not going to pay any attention to Hitler because we don't like what he's selling, so we won't even write an article about him." Where does that come from?

KMORob, the white nationalist in the book—how would you describe him?

JimHow would I describe him? A working-class guy who had a rough childhood, but battled his way into at least being a gainfully employed guy with a family. He subscribes to ideas that a lot of people would find unappetizing. I think he would prefer to have remained the America that we were in 1923, rather than to be the multicultural nation that we became over the last 40 years.

The one interesting thing about him is that he's pretty aggressively unmilitant. He doesn't really want to start fights with people, but he does want to go his own way. And so he's an interesting character. He's a complex character, and he's not necessarily—I mean, he's not like George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the Nazi Party from the 1960s. Remember him? Or you probably don't remember him. He was the famous character on the scene when I was a young fella. And he would get all these brown-shirted guys with swastikas on and march them up the main street of some Midwestern town just to cause a fracas.

So Rob's definitely not into that. But he's part of a movement that's out there, and it's something we're going to have to contend with. And my guess is that if we get into even more economic trouble in this country, and there's real, real bad distress, and large numbers of people are really worried about how they're just going to feed their families, that a lot of that trouble is probably going to get worse.

KMOI think the convenient stereotype of the white nationalist is of an ignorant, stupid person with ignorant, stupid beliefs.

JimYeah, sure.

KMORob is a polymath. I mean, he speaks multiple languages. He's very good with math and technical things.

JimYeah, he does math for relaxing. He likes to do math problems to relax. Yeah, he's a complex character. He's not a simple cardboard cutout of a Looney Tune. And I suppose people will object to that, but sorry.

Thwack: Josh Wickett in Baltimore

KMOThe other character in this book who is a real person—I'm saying "character" just for cutesiness, but the other person that you bioed that I wanted to talk about was a guy named—well, not named, but his pseudonym is Thwack.

JimWell, that's one of them. He's got a more kind of elegant pseudonym: Josh Wickett [spelling uncertain]⁵ is his name. And Thwack was his username when he was a commenter on my blog, which is called Clusterfuck Nation. Comes out every Monday and Friday at 10:00 in the morning, as long as the computers are running and the internet's up, which didn't happen this Monday. The web went down just as I was about to post the darn thing at about 9:45, and I had to actually go over to a friend's house. I've been trying to seclude myself, but I had to go over to a friend's house to do this.

Anyway, so Josh Wickett, or Thwack, is a Black guy about 52, 54 years old. He lives in the Baltimore ghetto in what, if you actually go there—which I did—it's like he's living in a submarine. I mean, he's living in this old row house that had been gutted and that he sort of cobbled together. It's the kind of dwelling that Will Smith would live in in a science fiction movie. And he's quite isolated. There are very few people actually living in any of the buildings and blocks around him in that neighborhood of Baltimore, which is not that far from the very center of downtown, probably only a half a mile from the center of town. And there's just desolation all around.

He spends his days—he's got a car. He goes cruising around in this old beater car. He's mostly interested in music. He's a musician, and he makes a lot of videos, and he's very good at it. He's a pretty good musician, and he does covers of a lot of '60s and '70s songs.

The most interesting thing about Josh Wickett was his upbringing. He's not a quote "ghetto Negro," any more than Rob Freeman is a cartoon of a right-wing loony tune. Josh Wickett came from a military family. His father was an officer, he was a colonel in the Army, and they lived in military towns. Most of his classmates and friends were white kids, and he didn't grow up in the ghetto, and he doesn't have a whole lot of ghetto kind of cultural mannerisms.

He has an ideology of his own, and a lot of it is drawn from a guy who's now a quite elderly Black polemicist named Fuller, Neely Fuller, who wrote books about how to conduct yourself if you were a Black person and conduct your life successfully without getting into trouble. A lot of his ideas about that come from that ideology, and they're very, very different from the Black Lives Matter ideas that have animated the racial conversation for the last decade.

So he was a very interesting person to write about. He's a survivor. He's very resourceful. He's—

KMOYou say he's a survivor. Do you mean a survivalist?

JimNo, no, he's not a survivalist, although he lives like one, but he's not.

KMOWhat is he a survivor of?

JimWell, right now he's living like the last person in the Baltimore ghetto, at least in his neighborhood. He's like the last guy standing there. But he's also managed to survive a bad economy. He came to Baltimore from DC, where he had been doing a lot of lucrative work doing renovations and carpentry and home renovation work, because the Washington, DC economy is one of the richest cities and regions in the country. There's a lot of people who have money to spend on their homes, and that was the decade when having a fancy house was a real status symbol. So he had a tremendous amount of work.

And then the 2008 crash put him out of work, and he ended up in some situation in Baltimore where a person he knew put him in charge of maintaining some row houses there that this person owned. And so that's what got him to Baltimore, and that is to some extent what allows him to support himself still. But he's an interesting character.

KMOYou said something very complimentary about him toward the end of his chapter. You wrote:

It must be obvious by now that Josh Wickett was beyond stereotype in about every way you might imagine. He was not successful in the stock sense of someone making a lot of money, inventing some new techno gadget, winning an election or becoming a star, but he had succeeded in developing into a fully formed individual.

JimYeah, he became his own man, basically. He managed to avoid being sucked into all the trips that other people were laying on you in this culture, or laying on someone in his position. And he worked strenuously to be his own man and develop a point of view about the world that was his own, and a way of living in the world.

KMODo you know if he and Rob have ever exchanged any sort of communication?

JimI don't. I think that they'd have an interesting conversation. I don't think that they would turn each other off immediately. I mean, Rob is a guy who owns a taxicab company in this backwater of Connecticut, this county south of Worcester, Mass., in northeastern Connecticut that very few people would probably have a reason to go to. And so he started this cab company, which mostly transports Medicaid and Medicare patients to their doctor's appointments—diabetics and addicts and so on. But he employs—or he has employed on and off, I don't know what he's doing now that the economy is kind of collapsing, but when I wrote the chapter, he employs people of different ethnic origins. He has a Puerto Rican dispatcher, a woman who's Puerto Rican, and he's had Black African employees. And so whatever his white nationalism is, it doesn't necessarily reflect his behavior in his day-to-day business life. He's much more interested in people who are capable and competent in it.

Buffett, the Dow and a five-dollar bet

KMOSo let's start to wrap it up, but I want to introduce a well-known quote, an aphorism from Warren Buffett. If you're an investor, you've probably heard or read this quote from Warren Buffett countless times: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." So the stock market has taken a historic beating over the past week, and for every person who sold stock in some otherwise viable company, there was a counterparty to that sale who bought that stock. People are selling at a loss right now because they are panicking, and yet there's always somebody to buy those assets.

My expectation is that a year from now, maybe the stock market hasn't recovered to its previous highs, but it's certainly doing better than it is right now. And the people who purchased stock in a time of massive panic-based sell-off will do very well. And the people who sold in a panic are going to get back in. They're going to realize that over the long term, money stashed in the stock market is going to grow. I think that's where we'll be a year from now. Where do you think we'll be?

JimI think we'll be at 5,000 in the Dow in 18, 24 months—real low. Because a lot of what you just mentioned really depends absolutely on whether we have any productive activity going on in this country. And one of the things we've demonstrated is that the supply line of things and products and parts from China is definitely going to stop. It may not stop altogether, although it could be considerably less than it has been, but it's going to neck down quite a bit. And there's going to be a definite effort to try to get America back into some kind of productivity. I don't know if it'll work.

The only other thing I have to say about that is that, yeah, the stock market took a hell of a beating the last 10 days, but you can always expect a relief rally to happen. And I think that there will be a significant relief rally for one reason or another, but then I think that there will be a much longer, grinding fall in stock values that will eventually take us down from 18,000, where we were yesterday, to 5,000 eventually—assuming that the banking industry itself even survives in its current form. And I'm not so sure about that. And I'm not so sure about the dollar surviving, especially as the Federal Reserve and Congress make every effort they can to hyperinflate it.

KMOSo the Dow Jones right now is at 20,458 point something.

JimYeah, it had a big bounce today because of the congressional noise.

KMOSo your prediction for March 24th, 2021 is that it will be down around 5,000?

JimSometime in 2021 or 2022, I think that's where the bottom is.

KMOI think a year from now it will be above 20,000.

JimWell, okay, I'll bet you five bucks.

KMOOkay.

JimFive bucks might be worth like one-thousandth of a cent by then, too, so who knows.

KMOWe'll see.

JimYeah, yeah.

Bitcoin, cash and wrapping up

KMOOr we could bet five dollars' worth of Bitcoin.

JimForget about it. I think Bitcoin's ridiculous.

KMOWell, you're not alone. It's taken a beating right along with the stock market, which I find a little bit surprising. You know, [wording unclear] the stock market has tanked, Bitcoin has gone up because people have seen it as a safer alternative.

JimYeah, well, any port in a storm, pretty much.

KMONot this storm, though.

JimWell, Bitcoin rallied the last couple of days, but it was sinking. And God knows what kind of shenanigans are going on in the Bitcoin world. There may be some, quote, "whales" out there, large holders of Bitcoin who are making moves that are slamming it down and shooting it up. And who knows? I'm not into Bitcoin.

KMOI have a little bit. I know that blockchain evangelists will hate what I'm about to say, but for me, Bitcoin is inherently and inextricably intertwined with criminal activity.

JimReally? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I understand why.

KMOYeah.

JimYeah, I do get it.

KMOCustom-made for it.

JimYeah, yeah.

KMOThere's an enormous need for money laundering in this world, and any avenue which is fairly successful is going to get used a lot.

JimYeah, and the fact of the matter is that, you know, the more that financial transactions become traceable digital transactions, you know, the more difficult it is to move large amounts of money. You know, you can't just—there are certain kinds of transactions you just can't do with $100 bills, right, in an attaché case.

KMOWell, you know of the ongoing push to get rid of the $100 bill, right?

JimYeah, sure.

KMOI mean, that's the early move in getting rid of paper currency entirely.

JimYeah, and get everybody into the old corral and then brand them, and then make sure that you can trace all of their financial transactions. You know, I'm not sure that they'll ever accomplish that, especially in this country, because there are just too many people with guns, you know, who just aren't going to stand for it. So, and you know, if money is completely debased and untrustworthy, people will find a different medium of exchange.

KMOYou're darn tootin'. All right, Jim, we should probably wrap it up.

JimOkay, KMO, it's been a pleasure as usual.

On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

After the conversation: catastrophism and class struggle

KMOAll right. That was my most recent conversation with Jim Kunstler. I will probably talk to him long before this time next year, but I will definitely make a note to get back in touch with him a year from today, and we will compare our predictions.

I make it a practice never to use these closing moments of a podcast to get in an additional point. Or, if I was in a debate or any sort of contentious conversation with a guest, using this time at the end to score additional points when they don't have the opportunity to riposte, well, that to me is extremely bad form, and it's something I'd never do. So nothing that I say from here on out is intended to refute anything that Jim had to say in the conversation or, you know, in general.

You probably know he and I disagree. I have rejected what I consider to be catastrophism, which is the tendency to take any set of data and extrapolate the worst possible conclusion from it. And because I am so averse to catastrophism at this point in my life, given the damage that it has done to my life having embraced it for so long, I am probably overcorrecting in the opposite direction. And in fact, about a year ago, I was doing a YouTube video and I was over at my friend Doug's house, and I was just starting to articulate my rejection of doomerism in general and, you know, peak oil doomerism in particular. And he was saying, "No, no, no, don't jinx us. You're going to bring down the Fates. You know, if KMO rejects doomerism, then doom will be upon us." Those were not his exact words, but that's my summation.

And you could say that that has come to pass. Here we are. You know, the pandemic is the thing that stepped up to create a great discontinuity in globalized techno-industrial civilization. I personally think that we will be back, not necessarily to business as usual, but our ongoing struggles. And to me, it's really come down to class struggle. The class struggle will be ongoing, and there will be a sort of recovery, which, if the Democrats and the Republicans have anything to do with it, will be a recovery for the rich, just like the recovery from the 2008 fiasco. Yes, the markets reached all-time highs, but many, many people have hit rock bottom, you know, personal rock bottom.

And which side of this whole societal drama you see depends on where you live, largely. I live in a place with a lot of heroin addiction. I spent the better part of a year gritting my teeth because I had next-door neighbors—not in the building next door, but in the apartment right next door to mine—who were openly dealing heroin for months on end in a building. This is a public building. I mean, it's got a bank in the basement. There's a lot of traffic. And these guys were just set up out in the parking lot, just openly dealing heroin for months on end, and the local police would do nothing about it. And this was, you know, a great frustration to me. But if you live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, prior to just a few days ago anyway, it seemed like heaven, right? It seemed like the best of all possible worlds.

Puerto Rico plans, isolation and a lost video job

For those of you who don't watch my YouTube videos or subscribe to the C-Realm Vault podcast, I've been thinking about moving to Puerto Rico. And at the end of February, I took a trip to Puerto Rico just to see if my online research and the plans that I was making based on that research was at all feasible—you know, if it had any truck whatsoever with observable reality on the ground. And it seems like it does. So my plan was to move to Puerto Rico at the end of April. And then I got back and this whole coronavirus thing just washed over us and rendered all of my plans, I won't say moot or irrelevant, but certainly put them on indefinite hold. I have no idea when it will be practical to move anywhere, or even to resume daily life.

Now, my daily life actually hasn't changed that much, because I mostly work from home and I pretty much spend all day every day by myself in the place that is both my workplace and my residence. And that isn't really working for me. It hasn't been working for a while psychologically. I'm just too isolated. And geographically, I mean, just living here in Bellows Falls, Vermont, I am too isolated. And to put a capstone on it, I am now without a vehicle. I have been without a vehicle since the beginning of the year, and really from before that. I mean, somebody relieved me of the vehicle on the last day of 2019, but it wasn't really operable for the couple months before that.

So what a great time to move, right? I mean, I live in a rural area where it's just not practical to not have a car. And the car went away, and that just seemed like another indicator that, hey, now is a good time to move. And if you're going to move to a city where you can live without a car, great, do it. But instead—and, you know, I'm trying not to frame it as the universe foiling my plans in particular, and certainly not deliberately—but as it turns out, not only do I not get to leave my accustomed lifestyle, but just about everybody else has to join me in it. But not join me in a way where we can keep each other company; join me in being isolated in your own little cell.

How's it going? How are you doing?

You know, if you only listen to my free podcasts—and I grant you, I don't put them out very often anymore—then it probably hasn't occurred to you to reach out and let me know what's happening in your life, even if we have been regular correspondents in the past. So let me just take this opportunity to invite you to reach out. Send me an email, kmo@c-realm.com, or connect with me on Twitter, or—I was going to say Facebook; I've been off of Facebook for almost two years now. Really, the best way to get in touch with me is email, but comment on this podcast on c-realm.com if you like.

You know, I have been listening to NPR a lot more during this coronavirus—I don't know what to call it, crisis? Sure, let's call it a crisis. I had become very—I don't want to say disillusioned, but more irritated with NPR just because they had joined the rest of the mainstream left in being such monomaniacal and intellectually dishonest Trump bashers. And they still get in their digs against Trump wherever possible. But now there is a fact-based story to relate which they can't ignore. And so NPR has been less of a chore to take in since the start of this coronavirus outbreak than it had been in the years leading up to this point. And I say this as a lifelong NPR listener and sometimes, when I could afford it, supporter of local NPR stations.

The part of my life that has most changed as a result of the coronavirus lockdown is that my local video job has gone away. Until just recently, I was shooting video at municipal meetings, and now municipal meetings are not taking place in person. They're going to be conducted via Zoom, just like my conversation with Jim Kunstler, and that does not require a camera operator. So while most of my revenue, my income, hasn't gone away—I still have the opportunity to work or do work in exchange for money—some of it has gone away. And I've had a couple cancellations in recent days, and I expect that if this goes on, I will see more of them. So while my income hasn't fallen off a cliff the way somebody who, say, waits tables, or drives a cab or an Uber, or is an airline flight attendant—my income hasn't seen a sudden drop-off, but I do expect it to gradually decline in the months to come if the economy doesn't get restarted pretty quickly.

And I'm just assuming—and probably maybe this is catastrophizing—I'm just assuming that the federal government will absolutely bungle every attempt to help out normal working people and will do everything possible to accelerate the wealth transfer from the bottom to the top. But here, I will take a moment—maybe you can join me in this—and just visualize a world in which those with the most stop thinking for an instant about getting the rest and actually turn their attention to ensuring, if not the well-being, at least the ongoing viability of the working class.

Revolution fantasies, Andrew Yang and Bob Dylan's advice

You know, over the course of the past decade, my own personal financial situation has been much worse than it is now. And yet my—there's really no honest way to describe it other than anger at the oligarchic class in this country has never been stronger. I fully appreciate John Michael Greer's regular talking point that typically what you get in the aftermath of a violent revolution is worse than what was on offer before the revolution. And, you know, Jim talked about the aftermath of the French Revolution and how the architects of the French Revolution themselves ended up under the guillotine. And while I will admit I have fantasized about a violent revolution in this country where rich people are executed in public in grand spectacles to the applause of crowds, you know, the rational, compassionate part of me doesn't want that to happen, because I know that the people doing the executing, the people cheering at the executions, they will survive the experience, but they will be forever damaged and corrupted by it.

A moderator in, I think, the last debate that Andrew Yang participated in asked him if he would arrest Donald Trump if he were elected president. And Andrew Yang said, I think, one of the more sensible things that's ever been said on a debate stage, a presidential or primary debate stage. He said, typically, it's not first-world democracies or advanced nations where the outgoing president gets thrown in jail or executed. The countries where that happens are not the sorts of countries where you want to live. And I think that's exactly right. And it is more than doubly so about violent public execution of rich people, as much as they may deserve it.

But another message that Andrew Yang was articulating was that, hey, he knows a lot of the Silicon Valley billionaires, and they all understand that the middle class has been eviscerated, the working class is being ground down, and that the very actions of the high-tech billionaires are creating the conditions in which they'll have to flee for their lives and hide out in high-tech secure bunkers in New Zealand and Alaska. The lords of tech understand that they are paving the way to their own violent executions.

And although another point that I want to make and reiterate for myself as much as for anybody else is that I think we should heed the advice that Bob Dylan gave on the stage at the Grammys in 1991. This was during the first Gulf War under George H.W. Bush. And after performing an anti-war song, but in such a garbled style that nobody who didn't know the song could understand the lyrics, standing next to his friend Jack Nicholson, Bob Dylan addressed the assembled audience and said:

Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much. You know, he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this. He said, "Son," he said, "You know, it's possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you. And if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways."

At the time, it seemed sort of a nonsensical and cryptic thing to say. But now, almost 30 years later, it seems eternally apropos.

Closing: YouTube, GEBB and staying well

Agree? Disagree? Let me know. Reach out to me in the usual ways. And if you are of a mind to, if you'd like to hear more of my material, but you're not in a position to subscribe to the C-Realm Vault podcast, do remember I have a YouTube channel. I hate to say it, but the best way to find me is to search for a video titled Humans Suck. It is my most viewed video. It's definitely not a sentiment that I agree with, and it was never my intention with the video to assert that it's true. But there are a lot of people who do believe that it's true and who want to hear somebody articulate it. And they tend to get rather angry when they watch my whole video, which is like 20 minutes long, and they get to the end and they discover that I'm not actually saying that humans suck. They got so angry about it I had to disable comments on that video quite some time ago. But anyway, if you want to find my YouTube output, search for that video, and in finding it, you will find my channel.

I also write and draw a weekly comic strip. It is called GEBB, that is G-E-B-B, golf echo bravo bravo, and the website is gebb.io⁶. It used to be published every Sunday, but my work habits have deteriorated, and so I get one out about once a week, but I can't make any promises as to what day of the week that will be. It's different from week to week.

Alrighty, well, I had been planning to attend some Earth Day festivities in Dallas, Texas this year, just like I did last year, but the EarthX gathering has been canceled, and I think that was the right move. So for the foreseeable future, I'll be sitting here in my home office studio. I don't want to say prison cell—it's too nice for that. But at the same time, I do feel stuck here. And I could use some company, even if it is the disembodied, at-a-distance sort of company that the internet facilitates. So as long as the internet is still working, hey, let's use it for good purposes. And until you next hear my voice, I hope that you will stay well.

Editorial notes

The title is KMO’s episode title. KMO addresses his guest as Jim, so his turns are labelled Jim. Words or names the recording does not settle are marked [wording unclear]; one short line whose speaker could not be settled is labelled Speaker uncertain. The passage KMO reads from Jim’s book and the Bob Dylan remarks KMO recounts are set as block quotes. Recognition fixes include C-Realm (heard “Sea Realm”), KMO (heard “Kamo”), Charles Mann, Daniel Yergin, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Thwack, riposte (heard “repost”) and kmo@c-realm.com / c-realm.com (heard “crealm.com”). Vault: KMO mentions the C-Realm Vault podcast twice, at approximately [01:04:43] and [01:14:26], only as his subscriber feed. The recording does not say that the conversation with Jim continues on the Vault and does not name a Vault episode number; the conversation closes on air at approximately [01:00:58]–[01:01:06] (“All right, Jim, we should probably wrap it up”).

1. Name corrected to Charles Mann (heard “Charles Seaman” and “Charles Mando” in the machine transcript); the books named on air (1491, 1493, The Wizard and the Prophet) identify him. KMO’s “1492” is his own slip, which he corrects on air. ↩

2. Spelling corrected to Daniel Yergin (heard “Daniel Jurgen” in the machine transcript). ↩

3. Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (heard “Crystal Ball” and “Sagar and Jetty” in the machine transcript). Their book is not named on air. ↩

4. As spoken. Andrew Cuomo was born in 1957, which places him in the baby-boom generation by the usual definitions, not Generation X. ↩

5. Pseudonym of the Baltimore man profiled in Living in the Long Emergency. The machine transcript has both “Wicket” and “Wickett”, and “Thlack” once for his commenter name Thwack; spellings follow the recording and have not been checked against the book. ↩

6. Spelled out on air as G-E-B-B (golf echo bravo bravo); the machine transcript renders the domain “geb.io”. ↩