Microphones and Psyche

Introduction

Audio clip: “What are you guys talking about? Apparently nothing. You asked them if Pluto’s a planet, didn’t you? No. It’s not. Shut up, Rick. Whoa. I don’t care what anyone says. If it can be a planet, it can be a planet again. Planet, planet, planet, planet.”

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 575, Microphone and Psyche, with guest Adam Sommer. Prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Saturday, September 4th, 2021. In this episode of the podcast, I will share a conversation that I recorded a few days ago with Adam Sommer. In the intro or the beginning of the recorded conversation, I will introduce him as somebody who is interested in astrology and cryptocurrency. That is an inadequate summation of the man, for sure, but it also leaves out something very important, something that we have in common. He has been doing a podcast for more than a decade. In fact, 13 years. He started his podcast, I think it’s From Holes to Heaven,¹ in 2009. I started the C-Realm podcast in 2006. It was late 2006, October of 2006.

But that puts us both pretty squarely into the OG podcaster category. Of course, neither one of us has been doing it as long as the podfather, Lorenzo Hagerty. So this is a conversation about cryptocurrency and astrology, and I don’t know astrology that well, so I’m constantly bringing in astronomy during the astrology portions. And I know that many of you are allergic to one or both of those topics. If you’re allergic to both, well, you know, maybe just skip this episode and go on to something else. If you are into astrology, but not cryptocurrency, and you don’t want to wade through the cryptocurrency stuff, you can skip pretty much the first hour of this podcast. And if you are into cryptocurrency, but not astrology, well, then you’re in luck. The portion that you want to hear is up first, but, you know, maybe continue listening to the end, even when we do switch over to astrology. But hey, it’s your life. It’s your time. Do as you will. Here’s my conversation with Adam Sommer.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Crypto, the metaverse, and the muse

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with Adam Sommer, who’s somebody who’s interested in both astrology and cryptocurrency. Adam, it’s good to talk to you again.

Adam SommerYou too, KMO. Yeah, amongst other things, as far as my interests are concerned. I’m sure we’ll speak to those too.

KMOSo I say welcome back and it’s good to talk to you again, but the regular listeners are probably scratching their heads saying, what are you talking about? This guy’s never been on before. Well, you and I did a video conference or, you know, for a live stream a couple weeks ago, so this is a follow-on conversation. We might cover some of the same ground. We might not. I’ve discovered that, like this has happened too many times that you know I’ve had a conversation with somebody that I thought was recording and it didn’t, or the recording was, you know, the recording failed or whatever. And we’ve had to get back on the line and try to reconstruct a conversation. And I found it’s never very satisfying to try to reconstruct a conversation, just plunge ahead, you know, go with what’s interesting. So we’ve been talking about various types of cryptocurrencies and we exchanged a few messages via text about, you know, how the whole crypto thing is kind of taking over our brains in sometimes an unhelpful way.

And I’ll stop there and let you riff on that topic. How it takes over in a sometimes unhealthy way. Well, you know, it’s a good time to be into it because you’re getting paid. But at the same time, it does drive other concerns out. Concerns which, you know, they are relevant and they are deserving of some attention.

Adam SommerIt’s true. Yeah. I think it’s a common experience for a lot of people who attempt to learn more than just how to set up Coinbase wallet and Bitcoin, right? Like if you start to go into the altcoin forest a little bit and get lost in there, you start to learn a lot. And, you know, there’s a lot of great content out there as well that that can just really — I don’t know if I want to phrase it as — steal your attention, but like it’s an entirely new world that’s being born and anyone that is, you know, whether you’re into programming or you’re into finance, or you’re into gaming, or you’re into arts or whatever it is. I mean, this is all experiencing a leveling up right now and the metaverse is here and seemingly healthy, as you were just informing me about, like it’s being built out at extraordinary paces.

And yeah, it’s been amazing to witness it because I’ve been involved since early 2017. And like that was a time that was pretty crazy in its own right, throughout ICOs and just the price soaring to new heights and all that. But it was different back then. I would say a lot of people felt that there was a great possibility that it maybe wouldn’t survive, just the crypto space at large because of governments and regulation and everything. But here we are in 2021, and we’re still confused about regulation. But the space has exponentially grown. And there’s a lot of adoption. And there’s a lot of like institutional money and, you know, countries and all this involved. And so it doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. And for folks like you and I and everyone else who’s into this, like we definitely have a head start as far as understanding what the heck is happening right now.

And I find that exciting and you know the perk, as you also said before, it’s like it’s nice to watch your money increase by 100x, sometimes as well. I mean it’s this absurd potential that exists in the cryptoverse, and so it is exciting and for me, like you, like you also had said in the intro there, like I’m — I’m into astrology in the sense that I do that as a living. I’ve had an astrology podcast for 13 years. It’s more than that. At this point, I explore mythology and psychology and a lot of other stuff, psychedelics, and that’s like my main gig, podcasting, writing. I teach, I work with some clients and, yeah, really, over the past year, like so much of my energy has been stolen by the cryptoverse and also just I think, a freedom that you inevitably will feel as a result of being involved in the cryptoverse.

And in that freedom, I find — and hopefully you’ll find this too, KMO — a desire to be more creative. Like I really just want to write more. I want to like give myself permission to be a hundred percent an artist and yeah, it’s a transition. That’s where I’m at right now. It’s like I feel like I’m in this liminal space in life, and my goodness, I mean, for anyone listening into the future, we’re also in, what, month 20 of a global pandemic. So there’s that as well. And I’m in an international relationship with an English lady. And so that’s made things challenging. And so I just, I think you and I can relate there. Like we’re having a moment with our muse where we want to make sure the muse doesn’t fly away. And we feel a little guilty that we haven’t been sitting with the muse as often.

KMOYeah, I feel like my muse has put up with a lot of neglect from me.

Adam SommerI mean, do you at least say hi from time to time? Draw something a day.

KMOYou know, for a while I was posting a like, at least a warm-up drawing or something to Instagram every single day and I haven’t done that in a while.

Adam SommerYou know Beeple?

KMOI do know Beeple. Yeah, I mean, he made, what was it, 70 million dollars or something on an NFT of his various CGI creations.

Adam SommerIndeed, indeed. And what I— I don’t know much about Beeple. I do kind of like his art, but he creates a piece every day, doesn’t he?

KMOHe does. I mean it’s 3D stuff, so he’s grabbing 3D assets, you know, and arranging them in a space and then doing a render of it, so it’s not like he’s starting with a blank canvas every day.

Adam SommerExactly.

KMOYou know he’s reusing a lot of elements. You’ll, if you, but he does one every single day. It is amazing to look at and it’s amazing. You know the discipline and the consistency is what’s impressive to me.

Adam SommerExactly, and I only bring him up because maybe he could be some inspiration.

KMOI don’t need 70 million dollars. I really don’t. Yeah, I don’t know what I would do with 70 million dollars. I’d probably give a lot of it away to all my friends. I’d probably fund a movie or something, or, you know, a season of, an animated TV show, hire a bunch of really cool people that I want to hang out with for a while. And hopefully, you know, the show makes some money, but if not, at least I got to hang out with those people and make some good connections and, you know, create something.

Adam SommerYeah. That’s a good use case of 70 mil.

KMOYeah. That’s, I think that’s about the right price tag, you know, for maybe 20 episodes of a decently animated, you know, it doesn’t have to be Pixar or anything, just enough to tell the story, but, you know, enough to give the voice actors something to inhabit.

Adam SommerAll right. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe you’ll get that from one of your own NFTs at some point. Seems to be the trajectory. If you have an NFT, you’re going to be a millionaire. At least that’s what people think.

Taxes, the infrastructure bill, and decentralized exchanges

KMOYeah. You know, there’s a phenomenon of young people who’ve been flipping altcoins or in some cases doing fairly unethical, like pump and dump schemes with altcoins, who are now paper millionaires who want to cash out. But then they see that Uncle Sam’s going to take like 37, 40% of that million dollars. And they’re like, no, I can’t, I can’t do it. I can’t, I can’t part with that much. And so because they can’t part with 40%, they don’t cash out. They get nothing.

Adam SommerYep. Well, they could put it in a stablecoin, but I don’t think you have to pay capital gains on that.

KMOActually, anytime you switch, if you swap like Bitcoin for Tether, you’re supposed to pay taxes on that.

Adam SommerYep, that’s changed, isn’t it? It wasn’t like that in 2017.

Speaker uncertainThat clarity has come.

KMOThe tax laws as they stand, at least in the US, on crypto are it is impossible to comply with them.

Adam SommerYep. So everybody in the infrastructure bill pass— did it pass the House? I mean, the infrastructure bill?

KMONot yet, but actually I forget where it was, if it started in the Senate or if it started in the House. It’s not quite law yet, but yeah, all the crypto folk on YouTube are on pins and needles over that one. Yeah, for those who don’t know, there’s an infrastructure bill going through Congress. And it’s not about crypto, but with a must-pass bill, like an infrastructure bill, everybody throws their pet projects into it. And there’s a lot of new requirements on cryptocurrencies, which are not very well thought out. And a lot of them are, they’re being introduced as amendments by people who clearly don’t know anything at all about the technology. And so there’s some, what’s called KYC, know your customer regulations, which apply to, you know, like stock exchanges and the big crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken and stuff where, you know, you can trade US dollars for some sort of cryptocurrency.

And these operations that are authorized to, you know, take payment in dollars, they have a much higher compliance standard when it comes to, you know, complying with all the rules. But they make a lot of money, so they can hire whole legal staffs. But part of what’s really exciting about crypto is getting rid of the intermediary, you know, getting rid of the official middleman, you know, be it a banker or a stock exchange or, you know, a broker of some kind, and creating autonomous exchanges, you know, these decentralized exchanges or DEXs, which are built on this smart contract technology. And they just, as the geeks say, code is law. You don’t need to enforce regulations because it’s just built into the code. It’s just built into the way the tools work. And this new infrastructure bill is putting the sorts of reporting and get to know your customer requirements that are required of places like Coinbase onto these decentralized exchanges that not only don’t have a legal department, they don’t have any humans at all.

I mean, I mean, clearly some humans wrote the code, but the code can keep running and the exchange can keep running without human interaction. I mean, humans are making trades via the decentralized exchange, but there’s no people there. And this new bill would put the sorts of reporting or get to know your customer and reporting requirements on the DEXs that go onto the big companies like Coinbase, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It is a company. It’s a big, rich company and you know it would be as if the guy who changes tires, you know, on the street corner, for forty dollars or whatever, that the same sort of compliance was, compliance regulations was put on him, as applies to GM, you know, and it’s unrealistic, it’s unenforceable, but because it is a must-pass infrastructure bill that nobody can really vote against, all manner of garbage is going to get into it, and it’s going to get enacted into law.

And it’s, you know, I’m not particularly upset about it, because I know that this happens all the time in every industry. But it is particularly frustrating in something like cryptocurrency, or, you know, another passion of mine, a high tech passion is space exploration. I would hate to see 70 year old lawyers and, you know, political bosses and people whose main skill is schmoozing and raising money, making law to govern how rockets are built. They have no business talking about that. I think they should be required to pass at least some sort of very basic competency test for anything that they’re going to legislate. And if they don’t know what a nucleus is, they shouldn’t be writing regulations for nuclear power, you know.

Adam SommerBut yeah, that was a good explanation right there of decentralization and also what’s going on with the infrastructure bill. My question to you, then, is, if it does pass, if it moves through the House and becomes law — I mean, it’s just the U.S., right? Right. China’s made crypto illegal. India has done it a few times. I mean, the U.S. is huge, though, because a lot of crypto companies are based in the U.S. and I’m just curious, like, what do you think the implications will be if it gets passed? What will happen?

KMOWell, if you pass unenforceable legislation, then what happens is, you know, and if people cannot comply with it, they won’t. So it’ll be used selectively to pick on people. You know to make examples of people, but for the most part you know if you pass unenforceable legislation, it’s it doesn’t do anything, it just it’s a stick with which to beat particular people. So you know, selective enforcement is what the outcome will be.

Adam SommerI think that’s a yeah, that’s a pretty succinct theory of what would happen. Yeah, for me, I guess my thought around it is that, of course, it’ll affect price in the short term. And then all the companies will just leave. And there’s a ton of places that are very pro-crypto and want innovation in their country. So I think that will be part of that. And then for all of us US citizens, I don’t know if we’d be able to move around it just by using a VPN or not, but hopefully you would. You know.

KMOI don’t have a VPN. So for those who are mystified by this conversation — and there will be probably a higher percentage in my audience than in a general audience, because there’s a lot of folks in my audience who are pretty anti-tech just on aesthetic grounds and they don’t want to think about cryptocurrency and they don’t want to hear me talk about it — but you know, trust me, folks, this is, this is relevant to your life. Money is changing.

KMO’s audience

Adam SommerI think a lot of people are, unless I’m naive about your audience — like, who is your audience? Real quick, tell me in a nutshell.

KMOIn a nutshell, early on I had a lot of people coming into my podcast through the website of a guy named Dmitry Orlov, who is born in the USSR, moved, you know, moved to the U.S. as a child, mostly grew up here, visited the USSR, and then Russia, as and after the Soviet Union was collapsing. And now I think he lives in St. Petersburg, but he’s a pretty anti-tech guy. He’s also very anti-US these days. And then the other incoming vector that a lot of longtime C-Realm listeners came in on was the Psychedelic Salon vector, because Lorenzo Hagerty at the Psychedelic Salon, he had had a prominent link to my podcast on his web page for many years.

Adam SommerInteresting.

KMOSo yeah, it’s these, this interesting mix of psychedelic people and collapse fixated people. And there’s a high aversion to technology in both groups, but in the psychedelic crowd, you also get some extreme technophiles, some people who are really excited about technology. And it’s not surprising, you know, a lot of them are in California and they’re working in tech industries and they are making a lot of money at it. And I think it was Jim Kunstler who said, if you make a million dollars by the time you’re 23 by pushing pixels around, you think you can solve any problem by pushing pixels around. And he’s one of those anti-tech guys who, the last time I talked to him about Bitcoin, he said, well, the government’s just going to ban it. And that’s his opt out. I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to learn about it.

I don’t have to talk to anybody who’s knowledgeable about it because the government’s going to ban it, but they’re not. The more Goldman Sachs buys in, the more Budweiser and Visa, you know, buy up NFTs, the more the big companies jump in and try to buy a big piece of this emerging ecosystem, the less likely it is that, you know, the U.S. government is not going to pass any law that is going to hurt Goldman Sachs. They’re just never going to do it, you know, because of regulatory capture. The big money people who are the ones who manipulate the market, they manipulate the stock market. They also manipulate the cryptocurrency markets. They’re running these massive pump and dump schemes and they’re making shit tons of money. And there’s no way that the, you know, Congress of the United States is going to deprive those people of the tools to do that.

So, you know, the idea that it’s just going to get banned and you don’t have to think about it should go in your filing cabinet right next to, you know, the electric grid is going to crash tomorrow. Therefore, I don’t have to think about anything that has anything to do with computers or computer code or the internet or mobile computing. I don’t have to think about any of that. Now, if you don’t like to think about that stuff, then sure, you know, pass the time, pass the hours of your life with something that is encouraging and fulfilling and engaging. And if that tech stuff isn’t, you know, cool, but be honest with yourself about why you’re doing it. You know, it’s not going away and I’m rambling. You’re the guest. Let me ask you a question.

Early days of podcasting

Adam SommerNo, no. I asked you, I asked you that question because I had like when you were linked to me by — I believe his name was Justin — right, thanks to Justin, by the way. Yeah, yeah, props, Justin. I remember finding your podcast in the early days, when podcasts were first a thing. I remember filling up my little iPod nano with shows.

KMOAnd it’s like three episodes, right.

Adam SommerNo, no, I got a little bit more out of it because I would put, exaggerate, I would put a bunch of psychedelics, long shows with like Terence on there.

KMOOh yeah.

Adam SommerI would actually listen to a lot of the dharma talks from Upaya Zen Center and I found your podcast. Like I’ll be honest, I wasn’t a religious listener of the C-Realm, but I remember listening to you and in those early days and no one knew what the hell podcasts were back then. I’m sure you can attest to this.

KMOOh yeah.

Adam SommerAnd there I was — and I was still in college in Boulder at that point and I’d be biking around and work in school listening to podcasts, and I always had an idea that I would start one myself when I had something that I wanted to explore in depth. Right, and so in the spring of 2009 is when I started my show and when I got really into astrology there was nothing. And like on the iTunes podcast store on astrology. And so I started it. And like, I don’t know if it’s, you know, officially the first astrology podcast that ever was like my Gary Caton, I think started his a few months before me, but no one until about 2013, 2014, really got on the podcast wave, did they? I mean, that’s when it really started to kind of pick up and become a thing, and this is something that I wanted to explore, because you’re an OG in the podcast world and I guess technically I am as well for doing it for 13 years and I’ve just fallen in love with the medium.

I think I loved it from the beginning without really knowing, and then, having done it for so many years, like it’s a really special space that we get to create it right. Like you have this set amount of time to have a long-form conversation, whether it’s about a topic or just whatever wants to come, and it’s a rarity like we don’t necessarily get to have this in quote-unquote real life all the time, without interruption or ways of getting distracted. I think it’s really special that it creates this container where a lot of magic happens and then people throughout time can be a fly on the wall and listen to that conversation. I just love it. What are your thoughts after doing it for 15, 16 years?

KMOMy thoughts are many, you know, as you experienced until 2012, 2013, most times, if I told people that I did a podcast, I then had to explain to them what a podcast was. And that hasn’t happened in a very long time. And what really attracted me to the medium was when I first got into it. Some of the first podcasts you know that I listened to were drug oriented or psychedelics oriented. So there was a guy in England, in London, he called himself the Dope Fiend and his show was the Dopecast and that was one of the first ones I listened to. Yeah, so his name’s George and he’s got a great voice, you know, and all of his technical work. I mean, he worked in broadcasting, so he knew all that stuff. He knew about microphones, you know, he knew about audio editing and whatnot.

So his show was super polished. And at the same time, he’s talking about weed and he calls himself the Dope Fiend. So that was just, that was great to me. It’s like, here is really professional sounding media talking about something that you can’t talk about, honestly, in the corporate media. I was super thrilled at that. And the other shows that I listened to early on were The Psychedelic Salon and The Viking Youth Power Hour, which I think has gone away completely now. But again, these are people talking about magic, talking about psychedelics, sometimes talking about aliens, just really wild topics. And then I noticed that— but when I got to the place where I didn’t really have to tell people what podcasts were anymore, I was living in New York City at the time. This is like 2012, 2013, 2014. And when I talked to somebody about podcasts, and I noticed that I didn’t have to explain to them what a podcast was, you know, they knew what I was talking about.

I would ask them what podcasts they like to listen to. And invariably, they would rattle off four or five different NPR shows that are radio shows, but they would take in as podcasts. And I would say, well, do you listen to anything from like just individual creators? And they looked at me a little funny. They didn’t know what I was talking about. And so any audio production made by a corporation now is available in podcast form. And I don’t like how much of the territory, you know, the big players have gobbled up.

Adam SommerIt’s frustrating. They always do it. They do it with everything. Like we just touched [wording unclear; heard “touched stop”] with crypto, right, but the spirit of podcasting, to me and I it’s one of the things that makes me happy still to this day around it, because it’s I still think one of the most popular podcasts in the world is Rogan. Oh yeah, like Rogan and I started our podcast at the same time, like I remember clearly when he started recording him with like Duncan and Ari and all these characters and they were just fucking around because it was the same time I started mine and that spirit never really went away for him, like he’s always just done what he’s like the long form and you know there’s more eyes on him and he has to be more careful about what he’s, what he’s talking about.

He can’t sell Fleshlights anymore. Well, I’m sure he could, but like in the early days I mean it was, it was definitely a different experience, but you know his experience and that’s kind of the thing you know, you get into the mind of people and just like allow it to happen. And I don’t know how much you want to keep talking about podcasts, but it’s something I really do like discussing with other podcasters because, like you to me are like one of the OGs, one of the godfathers of this and like the spirit of it is still alive. People are holding it down but, you’re right, like the corporate has come in and ruled it. I’m really surprised as well that there hasn’t been, say, more regulation around it. For example, like I use copyrighted music often on my shows, I’ve been [wording unclear] since the beginning. Have you?

Yeah, yeah, for me, like I mean nothing, well, that’s not true. Like I’ve used like Tool and stuff like that before. But, point being, like I just have always felt, I guess, that decentralized spirit in it and like my relation to it is like, well, if I ever get flagged, or like they warn me that I have to take it down, like I’ll deal with it accordingly. And nothing in 13 years has ever happened, except when I put them up on YouTube. Yeah, my podcast, my podcast, don’t survive a day on YouTube. But everywhere else — Spotify, SoundCloud, it’s all good everywhere, Apple. So yeah.

KMOWell, I can assure you that everybody listening to this podcast is interested in podcasts. So, yeah, it’s definitely a safe topic and, you know, if the concern is, don’t alienate the listenership. Whereas my enthusiasm for cryptocurrency or my rejection of the techno-doomer mindset, my audience is a lot smaller now than it was when I was propagating doom every week.

From doom to practicality

Adam SommerPeople like the doom, don’t they?

KMOWho are hungry for that. They’re hungry for some reassurance that this world, which is so unsatisfying and frustrating for them, will be going away soon. And it won’t. That’s a very unpopular message to say, no, the world, yeah, it changes really quickly right now, by historical standards, but by the you know, compared to your life, there’s a lot of stuff that’s just fixed and isn’t gonna— it’s not going away.

Adam SommerYou know what changed that in you like, from you being more in the doomsday realm into where you’re at these days, did you have a big shift in life?

KMOIt wasn’t a dramatic sudden shift, it was just hearing arguments that you know predicting a cascading failure of critical infrastructure systems, you know, in the coming months or, you know, the next few years, hearing those predictions year after year, after year, after year going on, you know, it’s been over 10 years since I first got into that topic and, you know, just consistently failed predictions that then don’t feed back into the thinking that generates the predictions, you know, a failure to incorporate the behavior of the real world into the thinking about, you know, which leads to predictions about the supposedly real world. It just, it got more and more obvious to me and particularly looking back on my own situation because I was married when I started the podcast. And then when I got on, you know, the doom subject matter my now ex-wife was, did not follow me on that track.

And to her, I just sounded insane. And now that I’m 10 years divorced and I look back on, you know, what was coming out of my mouth and my conversations with her. It’s like, yeah, I seemed like a crazy person, you know, to myself, looking back, I seemed like a crazy person. So I just, I don’t have much patience these days for conspiracy theories. I don’t have much interest in the sorts of topics that draw people in, you know, who are just anxious to distrust authority. And I’m cantankerous, you know, if you try to bully me with authority, I will challenge your authority. But at the same time, I recognize that it’s not always the smart or the helpful thing. It’s not always the right course, you know, to insist that any particular authority is illegitimate, or that it has no basis for, you know, anybody to expect it to continue into the future.

I talked to, I won’t say a lot of Marxists, really, I’ve had a lot of conversations with one Marxist. And maybe I’m drawing unfair generalizations about it. But it seems to me, you know, Marxists, particularly the ones who advocate, what do they call it? Fully automated luxury communism. You know, they think that the world can be automated so that nobody has to do any toil that they don’t want to do. And everybody is materially wealthy and they have everything that they need. And, you know, that’s the exact opposite of the peak oil doom, you know, start growing your garden mindset. But I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of folks, particularly on the left, like the far left, who are very enthusiastic about technology and what is possible through technology, but who have no interest whatsoever at all in understanding technology, you know, of actually getting down into the, you know, going down the rabbit hole, maybe learning a little code or, you know, maybe learning a little bit about science or, you know, thermodynamics or something. It’s like, no, they’re not interested. I’m not sure how I got onto this. What was the original question?

2012, Occupy, and psychedelics

Adam SommerI mean, we were speaking about podcasting, and my curiosity was around what flipped the script from doomsday right, being a little bit more optimistic these days, and you create this timeline. That’s interesting because it brings us back pre-2012 right. So I’m curious then, was it the Timewave theory, Terence’s idea? Was it John Major Jenkins, or was it your own research into something around 2012? Like, were you even invested in 2012? Did you think it was going to be a big event?

KMOThat’s a great question. You know, I started the podcast in 2006, late 2006. I was very interested in the Timewave. I was very interested in Terence McKenna, very invested in December 21st, 2012, which was then over half a decade away. You know, when something is that far out, you can invest a lot in it. In 2010, when it’s just a couple years away, and things don’t seem that much different than they did in 2006, you know, then you start hedging your bets a little bit, you know, start distancing yourself a little bit from it. And by the time 2012 rolled around, you know, I was living in New York City. And I had visited New York City the previous year. And I was, you know, I was a tourist at Occupy Wall Street. I was definitely very excited about Occupy Wall Street, you know, when it was actually still going on.

But then I saw that they didn’t really have a plan. There was no end game. And I also saw that, like, when I first, like, visited Zuccotti Park, and, you know, this was the very, very early days of Occupy Wall Street, all the labor unions in New York City, like the public sector unions were all supportive of it and all in favor of it. And then the unwashed, you know, white dudes with dreadlocks, the hippie and the — the word didn’t exist yet, but the SJW crowd all descended on Zuccotti Park and took over and everything ground to a halt — and all the union people you know who were happy to march in the streets and carry signs and make statements. They were not up for sitting around in a circle on the concrete all day, going through the progressive stack and doing all the weird rituals that became dominant in the Occupy scene.

And this is still related to 2012, I promise. I watched over a course of just a few short weeks, Occupy went from something really exciting and dynamic. That gave me great hope to think that things were going to improve dramatically in the near future to grinding to a useless halt. And, you know, to the point where I think maybe it did more harm than good. You know, it associated people who were dissatisfied with the status quo with really unrealistic and unhelpful, you know, ways of being and just, you know, like not showering. And so that was a year before December 21st, 2012, which, you know, the short way to say it is the end of the Mayan calendar, which is not correct, but it is the end of one of these like 12,000 year long cycles in the Mayan calendar when supposedly things were going to change dramatically.

And then, so for the next year, you know, I’m in New York and I’m interacting with New Yorkers who are much less likely to be really enthusiastic about such things than say people living in California. You know, it’s just a very different sort of mentality. And so, and also it’s just getting closer and closer. And the idea that things are going to change dramatically in, you know, the months, the weeks or the days or the hours, you know, the remaining hours before the concrescence or what was there, that was the word Terence McKenna [wording unclear] like to use, concrescence. It just seemed like it wasn’t going to happen. And so, yeah, I noticed that I’m, oh, also in the early days of the podcast, I was still taking a fair amount of psychedelics, went to South America twice, you know, in the service of the podcast to attend a shamanism conference and drink a lot of ayahuasca.

And so I was willing to entertain a lot more fluffy sort of unsubstantiated stuff. And that’s all just dried up. I’m not remotely interested in taking seriously anything that is presented to me, say in a psychedelic state. Like if I were to eat five dried grams of mushrooms right here in my apartment and crash out in the comfy chair and just let it all wash over me, I could imagine having very significant and useful realizations about myself and how I move in the world, and relate to other people. But if you tell me that the mushroom is this being that moves from planet to planet by spores drifting through space, and then, you know, growing up into mushrooms on terrestrial surfaces and being ingested by apes, and then it activates their brain and communicates to them how to build a spaceship, which is, you know, something that Terence McKenna actually, you know, he presented this as an idea worth considering.

Adam SommerIt’s a great idea, actually.

KMOYeah, it’s a lot of fun, but in terms of like, I’m 53 now and I’m more interested in the stuff that’s gonna make me enough money to get over to the Philippines and meet up with this lovely young woman that I speak to twice daily on WhatsApp and interact with people because I’m in rural Vermont in a one-bedroom apartment during this freaking pandemic where we’re all supposed to, you know, not show our faces to one another and, as you say, we’re 20 months into it. And man, I’m so over it. I’m so over it. I was, I was getting ready to move to Puerto Rico just before the pandemic hit. Like I had just made an exploratory trip to San Juan and was looking at co-working spaces and, you know, feeling out possibilities for an apartment. And then it was like on the plane ride home that suddenly everybody was panicking about COVID.

And then everything was shut down. And so I’ve been sitting here looking at these walls for, you know, like at the start of the pandemic, I was ready to get out of this situation. And then the world just froze, everything froze in place, but my mind didn’t freeze. And my mind is, you know, running a million miles an hour. And I’m really looking to get out of this situation that I’m in. And I realized, you know, if you can’t find it where you are, where are you going to go in search of it? Whatever. I’m really impatient with a lot of what I now consider to be flaky new age notions that I took seriously a dozen years ago. And I just don’t anymore. I’m hardening into this, you know, curmudgeonly practical sort of person.

Getting older

Adam SommerI mean, that’s part of how the world has changed. I mean, I honestly, like that narrative that you describe, I’ve witnessed that happen with a lot of people in my life. And I can even say to myself, like when I go pre 2012, for me, it’s somewhat similar, right? Like I, you know, was living between Boulder and the West Coast and sometimes Hawaii, you know, in the hippie road [wording unclear]. In that way, long hair, scarves, tie pants, just doing my astrology podcast thing, and you know like whenever you’re in any phase in life, you totally feel like everything is normal and that you’re definitely at the cusp of your own evolution. You know what I mean. Yeah, and I think back on that version myself, even though I’m involved in the same world. I feel much more conservative. I no longer have long hair. I mean like even because I live mainly in England now slowly dressing in the tweed and looking more and more like a man of the more [wording unclear] kind of a thing, and it’s just interesting, like to see the thinking, because you know our world has been radicalized.

And, you know, like the last [wording unclear; possibly “the left”], which I assume you and I both like really identified with most of our lives has been compromised tremendously. And like it’s almost like overnight, like I start to realize like, oh my God, like all of a sudden, like I’m not on the right, I’m not anywhere really, but like, I do resonate more with what’s coming from the other side than I ever have in my entire life. Like what the fuck happened? Like what’s going on right now. Is this what happens when you grow up? Because I always used to scratch my head about like the hippies — like a lot of my family were like pretty intense hippies back in the day, like dodging the draft, going to Canada, like you know, they all have great stories to share, but they’ve all turned into conservative Republicans throughout time and I’m like what happened?

Like, and is this what happens? It’s a question I still scratch my head around. Does this happen when we get older? It doesn’t happen to everybody, but for, I don’t know, it’s just, it’s an interesting inquiry. You got any thoughts on that one, KMO?

KMOToo many thoughts. I always have to revert first to the quote from Robert Anton Wilson. You can become, you can go from being a liberal to being a conservative over 20 years without changing a single idea, which is to say that, you know, the what counts as left changes over time.

Adam SommerTruth.

KMOSo, you know, there was a time when if you thought that a person should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of your skin, you were a liberal or maybe even a progressive. And now that marks you as a Nazi. You know, if you think that you can ignore race and you can fail to acknowledge, you know, the moral authority that comes from being a person of color, you know, and if you think you can just speak to people as if people are all the same and, you know, you judge them by what they do and what they say, you know, that’s not acceptable to the extreme left anymore.

Adam SommerNo, isn’t that interesting? Oh, I mean, that’s one of the most mind blowing ideas that exists at the moment.

NPR and the news

KMOYeah. Yeah. You know, I mentioned that I was a little frustrated that when podcasting became a household name, most everybody that I talked to was just using it to consume NPR content. But I’ve been a lifelong listener to National Public Radio. I discovered it when I was like 13 or 14, because in Kansas City, Missouri, which is where I mostly grew up, the local NPR station played an audio drama of Star Wars, which I think was a dramatization of a novel, but it included a lot of material that’s not in the movie. And that just blew me away. And then when that was over, you know, in the same time slot, they did a gargantuan audio drama. It ran for weeks and weeks of the Lord of the Rings with Ian Holm as Frodo. And so, you know, as a very young teenager, I got hooked on NPR.

And then as I started to get a bit older, I gravitated more to the news content. And as a young man in college or in grad school, times when I was really broke and didn’t have enough money and certainly was not the sort of person who should be writing a check to the local NPR station, I supported NPR. I subscribed to my local NPR station. And then when I made a bunch of money at Amazon, I gave them a nice big chunk. And now I can’t stand NPR. I cannot stand to listen to them. You know, I used to have this morning routine when I would get up and I would say, you know, device’s name starts with an A, flash briefing. And it would give me the headline news from the BBC, NPR, and Al Jazeera. And that morning ritual has gone away because I just can’t stand NPR.

It was the Trump years. I mean, they just went insane in the Trump years and I can’t follow them. And it’s not, it’s not everybody associated with the whole network. Like I’m sure Terry Gross is the same Terry Gross that she was a decade ago. Cause she’s been doing that show for like 30 years now, but it’s the flagship shows. It’s, you know, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, you know, the big upfront NPR. I just noticed that they stopped letting you interpret their stories. Like even in the very brief encapsulations that you’d get in the flash briefing, they wouldn’t tell you what’s happened in the world. They’d tell you what position you’re supposed to take on it. Like, you know, if NPR was one of the leaders in, you’re not allowed to question the COVID narrative. You know, they would always say the radical fringe conspiracy that, you know, it comes from a lab in Wuhan, China.

You know, they would never just say, there’s this other explanation, there’s this other story that people are talking about that this escaped from a lab in China. NPR would always, you know, in just bringing up the subject, they would always tell you what you’re allowed to think. Even just in the shortest little encapsulations, like in the headlines, they’re telling you what you are allowed and what you’re not allowed to contemplate. And NPR wasn’t like that a decade ago. So they’ve completely shit the bed from my perspective. I just cannot stand them anymore, which is—

Adam SommerIt seems like journalism is dead. I mean, you’re familiar with Matt Taibbi, I assume.

KMOLove Matt, yeah.

Adam SommerWell, he’s always one of the last journalists alive, it seems. Yeah, I mean I’ve listened to him talk about this and you know, I don’t seem to have ever had such a devout relationship to NPR as you, but you know I would listen to it, especially when I mean I remember very specifically a job in college where we would listen to a lot in the kitchen, but—

KMOBut you were never married to it, so you didn’t have to get divorced like I did.

Adam SommerI’ll be honest, I’ve never really been a news person.

KMOProbably better off.

Adam SommerYeah, no, I mean, that was always my feeling like when I was a young adult and I would try to be smart like reading the, you know, The New Yorker or The New York Times. They’re trying to keep up with stuff like I just I noticed really early on how it would just spin me out. Like it never made me, it never made me feel the way I wanted to feel by learning about what was happening in the world. It always brought me down. And I’m like, well, why am I doing this? Like, I can’t change it. I mean, it’s not what I’m up to in my life. So like, why? And that was a huge shift for me because like, I was able to take my mental diet seriously. And like, it was around that time, funny enough, when the whole podcast thing began, I was like, you know, I think I’d rather listen to like three hours of Terence McKenna talking than just to binge on the news, to be honest with you.

Because I think I’m going to learn a lot more from him. And I think I was onto something in my late teens, early 20s. It really was helpful in my development. And I’ve always been a big reader. So like I read a lot of nonfiction. I kind of like toggle between nonfiction and fiction. That’s helpful. But never been a news person. But honestly, since, oh man, since this 20 months that we’ve been in, I have put myself through a bit of an experiment of dosing myself with every major news channel so that I can come up with my own opinion objectively about what the hell I think is going on. And so I’ll take a little bit of the NPR, a little bit of Vice, which is insufferable, a little bit of something from Rolling Stone, a little bit of Fox, a little bit of CNN, a little bit of Al Jazeera.

I’ll take it, you know, just not a lot, just little like homeopathic doses and then just sit with it and be like, all right, like, what do I really think? And yeah, that’s how I’ve kind of come up with my opinion around it, because, like I’m not being swayed by my peers, or what my family is trying to tell me is going on, that’s for sure. Like it’s a really confusing 20 months, don’t you think? So it’s like, how do we do this? And in a world that I mean, I think a lot of us have lost critical thinking skills as well. It’s been a nice practice to try to develop those.

KMOI think a sizable portion of the population, probably even the majority, never had much in the way of critical thinking skills to begin with.

Adam SommerI was being kind.

KMOYeah, you were being generous. But I think a lot of people who used to be decent critical thinkers have lost it. Now they just repeat whatever the blue or red tribe narrative is, it’s mostly the blue tribe that I hear from, you know, so they get more of my ire and frustration than the red tribe, although I know that if I were, you know, trapped in a situation where I had to deal with the red tribe all day, every day, and listen to their, you know, nutty conspiracy worldviews, I would become very frustrated. But it’s mostly the blue tribe that I hear from, so it’s mostly their disintegration and degradation that I’m witnessing, but it’s intense.

Adam SommerVery, very much so. We definitely strayed from crypto.

KMOOh, we’re gonna talk about crypto. We haven’t said a thing about astrology.

Astrology and 2012

Adam SommerOh, and I was just gonna say we haven’t said anything about astrology. I was, you know, going to the 2012 piece because we did kind of use that as a pivot in there. I always felt that it was really interesting that you know, because I would say, out of all of the theories back then, that was most compelling to myself was the Timewave theory. Yeah, you know, I’d always been a fan of the I Ching and the way that Terence initially got the idea with Dennis in the jungle. I mean, everything about it like is is an interesting story at least, and so I was interested to see what would happen. But by that time in 2012, I was already a pretty proficient astrologer and, from the perspective of both Western and Vedic charting, like I couldn’t really see anything that was that interesting about December 21st, 2012.

I mean, there’s themes in the backdrop at that point. I mean, there’s this Pluto Uranus square. That’s like pretty much been the definition of our, of our experience since 2010-ish, you know, there was an ingress of another major planet and into Pisces. That was a big deal, but like nothing that was on that day, that was like hair raising, like, oh, this will be interesting, like I wonder what this is, and so, of course, I thought about it a lot too, like reading everything I could on it, trying to figure out like, okay, maybe I can cross-reference the Mayan calendar or something in there that I’m missing. And I never stumbled into anything at all. It was the book Daniel Pinchbeck wrote, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, on 2012.

KMOOh, I remember it clearly, yes.

Adam SommerNot much to say about the book because I never really fully.

Program identification: “You’re listening to The C-Realm Podcast with your host KMO.”

After the dropout: Venus and synodic cycles

Speaker uncertainYou know it’s unbelievable how it’s happened twice and I’m on Zoom all the time and it never happens like that it really doesn’t.

KMOWeird. I was just [wording unclear] audience who are interested in astrology would be really frustrated. If that’s where the conversation ended, because you’re just getting into some of what I imagine is, you know, the meaty stuff for them.

Adam SommerYeah, I remember where we left off. Should I pick up from there?

KMOAbsolutely kind of splice it in.

Adam SommerSo, yeah, I was asking if you were familiar with Daniel Pinchbeck’s book, right, the 2012 Return of Quetzalcoatl book. He did, and really the gift of that book for me was simply the Quetzalcoatl piece, just even in the title, because I didn’t really read the book. I read pieces of it, but I was interested. I was like Quetzalcoatl, I mean, I’m intrigued. And when you dig a little into Quetzalcoatl — this Mayan god, you realize that it’s associated with Venus and that one of the calendars that the Mayans used was a 260 day calendar, the Tzolk’in, I believe that’s the name of it — and it’s based on the Venus cycle, right, and so that just kind of blew me away. Well, the point of me telling the story is that in 2012, there was a really outstanding event that happened in June — was it June or May?

It was around late May, early June of 2012 — and that was the Venus transit. And I’m pretty sure Daniel never mentions this in the book. I very well could be wrong about this. But what happens with the Venus transit is it crosses the face of the sun. Venus is retrograde, crosses between the earth and the sun. It actually crosses the face. Now this happens every 584 days, but it doesn’t always cross the face of the sun. That happens pretty much only once a century. And there’s this beautiful pattern that Venus creates within the sky. That’s a five-pointed star, and it just slowly drifts throughout the zodiac over long stretches of time. And so that did captivate my attention about 2012. And I felt like I was onto something. And so I went pretty deep down that hole and learned everything that I could about the Venus synodic cycle and at the time, like, had everybody that is in the field that knows a lot about it to talk to me around the Venus cycle, and I look back to 2012 often and I think of this because my relationship to synodic cycles really began then and it’s something that informs pretty much everything I do, because every planet has a synodic cycle and essentially that’s, you know, a planet dancing with its relationship to both earth and sun and has a lot to do with: can we see it, can we not? What are the time periods of these cycles and the way that the ancient sky gazers use them, like the Maya, with having calendars based around them, is stunning, because it’s even in a lot of the stories, going from Quetzalcoatl all the way back to one of the oldest texts we have. I don’t know if it’s found in the Enuma Elish. It might be in the Enuma Anu Enlil, but these Sumerian clay tablets, the story of Inanna is basically a story of the Venus cycle. And so that to me was like, ah, 2012 has something to do with Venus. And that’s the point of my story of just what happened to me in 2012, which, it was a deepening of both my relationship to ancient wizards and how they related to the sky, and something that really wasn’t being talked about in a lot of circles that I was running in as far as the astrology world.

I mean, there’s definitely astrologers who know a lot about these synodic cycles, but it’s not ubiquitous. So, anyhow, still, I don’t think too much has changed since 2012, aside from some of the talking points we’ve mentioned tonight, but that’s one of them — like we’re not going to see it again in our lifetime — a Venus transit like that, and so, anyhow, that’s the story.

Astronomy and the astrology revival

KMOYou know I don’t have enough background in astrology to even ask a follow-up question to that. When you talk about transits, you know, yep, for astronomers, the transit method for detecting exoplanets. You know an exoplanet, you know a planet around an orbit around another star, if the plane of you know, the plane that the planets orbit on, is aligned so that you know we, the planet, actually passes between that star and us, we still can’t see the planet, but we notice that the star dims while the planet is transiting the star, and so it’s a very exciting time right now in astronomy. We’re discovering all kinds of— you know, in your lifetime and mine, we didn’t know. I mean, it seemed obvious that there should be planets around other stars, but we didn’t know. And now we’ve found thousands of them. And you know, there’s multiple— like, I remember, when the Hubble Space Telescope went up and it didn’t work quite right, there was another mission, you know, to fix it. There are multiple space telescopes in orbit right now and hopefully next year the James Webb Space Telescope is going up and it’s not going to be in Earth orbit, it’s going to be parked at a Lagrange point on the far side of the moon,² you know, and it’s going to be looking out into the universe, in the infrared, to see what was happening, you know, at the very, very beginning of the universe. It’s just a super exciting time right now for people interested in astronomy, I don’t know, you know, if things like things are changing rapidly in astronomy. I don’t know if they’re changing rapidly in astrology, in the, in the opposite direction.

Adam SommerKMO, I would say that the biggest movement that I’m witness to at the moment in astrology is people turning back. Like traditional astrology is very popular right now, especially like Hellenistic astrology, and it has to do with a lot of translation projects that have been done over the past 20 years or so. I mean, as far as astrology is concerned. Like I think that is the way forward, because I mean there, well, there’s two things I can say to this. One is we’re a bit amnesiatic around where we come from, I mean, especially with the state of astrology for most people. Like they have no idea really what it is. Like people think of astrology and they immediately dismiss it because they think of superficial sun sign horoscopes in newspapers or like their ex-girlfriend just being in love with it and getting readings and talking about the fact that your sun sign is who she’s incompatible with or whatever it might be.

Like I mean, that’s like the most superficial expression of what astrology is, and just by learning a little bit of history and going back, you start to realize that — number one, there was no division between astronomy and astrology, right, like I mean even in the Renaissance. Like it was all in the same works, like even you know, with natural magic and the fascination with Plato and hermeticism and all of this like it was exactly— you know, like people like Marsilio Ficino and the attempt by Ficino and Cosimo de’ Medici to create another Plato academy in Florence. You know, like these were all people fascinated with astrology but also astronomy, and just like, basically it was a true Renaissance of hermetic and neoplatonic thought. That’s an interesting time, it’s pretty close to us. But, man, you go further back to times like of Harran and Alexandria and these like cities that existed around you know, like, just before the time of Christ, and your mind starts to begin turning some old gears like, wait a minute.

Like our ancestors weren’t writing these sun sign horoscopes. In fact, horoscopes and nativities as we know them today are relatively new. As far as the use case of astronomy and astrology, it was mainly for talisman, talismanic magic and omens and calendars and all this type of use. And so, yeah, I mean, as far as we know, like the oldest astrology on the planet comes from Sumeria around 6,000 years ago, but I have a suspicion it’s much, much older than that. And so I think by looking back, we recover a lot of the pieces we need to apply today. So I do think to be a fully well-rounded astrologer in the 21st century, you need to know some astronomy, you need to know some alchemy, you need to know — I mean just basically, the quadrivium. Like you need like all this ancient wisdom. That’s kind of like baseline in your head and there’s a component that has been added to it over time.

I think that the addition of psychology has been really helpful to astrology, like Jung’s contribution, for instance, and James Hillman — like these characters really did add a lot of value to how we use astrology, with nativities and understanding the psyche of an individual, and so there’s an incredible depth to astrology. You just have to kind of like dig into it a little bit and get past the assumptions we have around it. And trust me, my friend, like I was one of the greatest skeptics of astrology before, and I — I think I mentioned this in our call last time — that book Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas. I mean you can’t read that book seriously and then still completely discredit astrology. I don’t know if it’s possible, just because, why not?

KMOWhat really powerful argument or correlation?

Adam SommerYeah, he makes a very simple case that planetary pairs, so transits between big planets, say like Pluto and Uranus, or Saturn and Neptune, as a couple of examples, when they align, whether it’s through a conjunction, a square, or an opposition, as they revolve around the sun, these specific themes emerge within the collective. And he tracks it with insane detail throughout the history of the world. And, you know, focusing mainly in the last 2000 years or so, but within culture and politics and natural events and all of these types of themes and him and Stanislav Grof and John Cleese all came together. I think there was a few other people that just created this documentary that’s now coming out, a 10-part series called Changing of the Gods, which is based off of this book. It’s a really great book for history as well, like the history of ideas, the history of culture and being able to see it, but the correlation is to these planets and being able to see, like to use an example of it, Pluto-Uranus.

When Pluto and Uranus were together, conjunct that is, and their cycle began in the 1960s, it was to be expected that there would be a bit of a Dionysian explosion, a revolution that was tinting the air. And any astrologer in the 40s or 50s looking ahead to this would have expected it, right? But we were still new to the game as far as understanding Pluto. I mean, we discovered Pluto in 1930, so we’re still kind of getting used to the idea of what kind of themes are to be expected with Pluto. But the 1960s were a great testament to what it was. It’s tectonic shifts in culture. It’s an absolutely revolutionary time, which is the spirit of Uranus. And so they have a very large cycle. The exact amount of time to it, I don’t have to talk off the top of my head. But let’s just say off the top of my head, 300 years or so.³ And so the square, we just live through it.

So conjunction, together, square, 90 degrees away. And so since the 1960s, Uranus has moved 90 degrees away from Pluto. And that square pretty much defined the last decade, a decade you and I’ve been talking about, right? So since 2011, I think was the first exact square, there were seven of them, and it brought us pretty much to the present. And so what you expect in the way he documents this throughout the book, is all those themes return, and what’s so wild is that, like, if you just cherry pick any of the main themes from the 1960s and you compare them to the present, they did have kind of like a perennial appearance to them, right, like, let’s think of, like civil rights, right, civil rights into Black Lives Matter, or women’s rights into the Me Too movements, or I would make a strong case with music as well, like there was an interesting thing with music and it’s just the arts and its relationship to psychedelics that has been incredibly influenced throughout the, throughout this, you know, past decade, with the square, but different substances, this time, right, instead of acid and just cannabis, it’s also ayahuasca and all of these other plants and compounds that are being introduced to us, and I could go on and on.

And he does so in the book, and it’s just stunning, in the way that it works, of being able to see progress on those time scales and I just I honestly think that’s what planets are like they’re keeping time. And they all have a different signature of time and a way of measuring the lights within the collective consciousness. And that’s what Richard’s book is. He spent 30 years writing it. And it was the intellectual Trojan horse that got in there into my head and opened it wide open to astrology. I was like, there’s definitely something to this. And I actually I had him on my podcast a couple years ago and I read that entire book without ever even having the thought of looking at my own natal chart. I didn’t even know I really had one.

Natal charts

KMOWhat does that mean? What is a natal chart?

Adam SommerYeah, natal chart, the chart you’re born with, so it’s you know like you identify with, like when’s your birthday, for example, April 20th, 1968, right? So you’re born in the cusp, probably like late Aries, like 29 degrees Aries.

KMOI have a funny story about that when you’re done.

Adam SommerOkay. So, you know, like you have Wim Hof’s birthday. I think Duncan Trussell was also born that day. And so we know that’s your sun sign, but then with birth time, it shows us like, well, what was rising in the moment of your birth and within the wheel, that’s how we draw them in the West, all the other planets fall. And there’s a story, this wonderful imprint that, as the Indians would say, is your prarabdha karma. It’s the karma that your soul chose to come into this life with. That’s what most people are interested in with astrology these days, but in Rick’s book he doesn’t talk about that at all, like he’s more interested in the mundane astrology of how these great planets at the edges of our solar system basically create culture and shape it over time. And so I read the entire book — and it’s a meaty one — without ever having that thought, and I, you know, I think back to that often and be like that’s so interesting that I was able to pull that off because it just I was ignorant.

I was absolutely ignorant to the idea of it. And then, as I started talking about astrology with people, because that book really lit me up, everyone’s like well have you ever got a reading from this person? A reading? I’m like, a reading? Oh, okay. I know. I’ve never even had a reading. So I guess I had to get one. And so I had a few readings in those early days. I wasn’t impressed until the third one that I got. And the third reading, he ended up being my first astrology teacher, actually. I was very impressed with how he handled the material. And it made me, yeah, it gave me depth to a lot of what was happening in my life. And yeah, like he was like a catalyst into me going a little bit deeper. And then like, once you’re in it, like it’s just an extraordinary hidden part of human history, just like the history of magic, just like the history of alchemy, it’s all there.

And when you realize they were all one wondrous thing at one point in time, that’s where, you know, I feel like something like the philosopher’s stone begins to glow in your mind. You’re like, okay, like I’ve been able to find — at least for myself, I’ve, I have found this place where all of my interests with the plants, with the planets, with wonderful ideas and philosophy, with — yeah, magic, like it all comes together within this. Yeah back, not even back testing, but just like going and learning about the history. And then it’s like, well, what do we do, moving forward? But we try, like in a way it’s like our own Renaissance — of like breathing new life into all of these old ideas and then seeing what we do with it on the blockchain.

KMORight, I’ll ask you to connect those more explicitly in a couple minutes here, but first I want to tell you about me growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, reading my daily horoscope in the Kansas City Star and, as you’ve noticed, being born on April 20th — I’m on the cusp of Aries and Taurus, but the Kansas City Star astrology column had me as a Taurus. And so I thought of myself as a Taurus, but at the same time, I was also this hyper-rationalist and I didn’t believe in astrology. But then one day I was elsewhere, I may have been traveling and I looked at a star, at a horoscope in a different newspaper in a different city, and they had me is in Aries and that upset me. I was like, okay, I don’t believe in astrology, but I’m a Taurus, not some sheep, I’m the bull man.

Adam SommerYeah. So have you ever casted your chart? Have you ever seen for real what’s what it falls under? Because it can differ from your—

KMOMultiple. Listeners like Lorenzo Hagerty’s wife, Mary C. [name as heard]— she’s, as far as I understand, an accomplished astrologer. And she asked me, you know, for my birth date and the place and the time of day of my birth. And she created a, what seemed like a pretty, you know, thorough chart for me. And I had another, a few years later, another professional, you know, astrologer offered to do that for me again. And I just, I don’t remember, you know, what they came up with. They sent me charts, which were very complicated. And I talked to each of them afterwards and they, you know, they walked me through it, but it’s been many years and I just don’t remember. I don’t have, you know, I don’t have the categories in my head to really, you know, to put the information they gave me on the right shelves, you know, so I can go and retrieve it later on command.

Adam SommerBut even if you were Aries or a Taurus, let’s look, I’m going to pull it up for you. We’ll tell you right now.

KMOOkay.

Adam SommerFind out. So 420, what year?

KMO68.

Adam SommerAll right. So you’re born at the end of this Pluto Uranus conjunction I was talking about. Time?

KMOYou know, both times. Both times they — they asked me. I contacted my mother. It’s not something I can do in real time.

Adam SommerOkay, no worries. And Kansas City?

KMONo, actually this would have been in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Adam SommerYou’re a Taurus, my friend.

KMOOh good, I’m relieved.

Adam SommerYes, official, it makes a difference. I don’t believe in cusps myself. Yeah, there’s too much that that runs on the idea of the last degree of the sign and the first. You’re a Taurus, right on. So anyhow, yeah, that’s kind of yeah, I guess, just to put a cap on it, like the Richard Tarnas book. It’s great. And he has a book, like he wrote before it, called Passion of the Western Mind. If you’re interested in Western philosophy, that I wouldn’t say it’s a accompanied or accompaniment book, but I mean they do go together if you want like a really thorough rundown of the history of Western philosophy and just how we got to think, the way we think, and stuff like this.

Pluto, the Kuiper belt, and how astrology works

KMOSo let me bring astronomy back into it for a little bit. During our lifetimes, Pluto has gone from being a planet to being a dwarf planet, and one of the reasons why it’s not really considered a planet anymore is because out in that area, you know the edge, the near inner edge of the Kuiper belt, there are many objects that have the same composition and are roughly the same size as Pluto. And if not larger, Pluto is just the closest one. You know, it’s the closest trans-Neptunian object of any considerable size would be the, you know, the current way to describe it. What effect would that have on astrology? Just the realization that there’s a lot of things like Pluto a lot, maybe thousands of them, yeah, in the Kuiper belt.

Adam SommerOh, I know it, and it was Eris in 20, 2005, right, I think she was the one that plutoed — actual term plutoed that poor icy planet out there. And yeah, it’s a really fascinating thing because, yeah, astronomers don’t consider Pluto a planet anymore and we astrologers know damn well that Pluto has a profound effect on not just the life of an individual but of the world. I mean, just to give you an example of it, but the transit that set this whole 20 months in motion related to Pluto. Actually, it was Pluto and Saturn coming together amongst a few other planets and it was something that was such a big deal because the two of them only come together every 36 years. Last time was in the early 80s. It was such a big deal that I had done a podcast specifically about that transit in 2020, way back in 2014, like I had known about it.

A lot of us had been you know, speculating about what that conjunction was going to represent, what it was going to open up. And as far as I know, I never heard anyone nail it as far as their prediction of what would happen. But a lot of the symptoms, I think, of what’s happening due to the virus were in the ballpark of what I thought was going to go down. So anyway, it was January, middle of January, I forget the exact date at the moment, 2020, the two of them come together and COVID is already an issue in China, but it hasn’t really spread out too much at that point. Gave it a month, we’re in February, and then the lockdown is starting all over the world, right? And like, that’s in the wake of it. And like, how does this relate, you know, to the motion of Pluto or not.

I think astrology is much stranger than we can even imagine, and how it works like it’s not. You know the mechanical argument of like these planets can’t affect us — their gravity is, like you know, in the Kuiper belt, or TNOs — like they’re not strong enough to be able to affect us. I don’t think, even though it’s compelling with the moon and how the moon affects the tides and life on earth, of how that could affect our moods as well. I still don’t think that’s the function of how astrology works. I think it’s more interdimensional, I think it’s more mythic, even like to use Jungian terminology — I think it’s archetypal and it happens in a strata of consciousness that’s more akin to dreams than anything else. In fact, for anyone that’s really deep into dream work, correlating dreams with transits is a profound thing to do, because you’re able to use the images of dream time with the symbols that you know and are tracking in a chart and you can see the whole thing come alive.

It illustrates what I’m trying to talk about of just how astrology might work, and Carl Jung himself had like at least seven theories that he wrote about of how he felt astrology worked. So I don’t pretend to know, it’s just one of those things that remains a mystery to me. I think that’s one of the great issues in the world we live in is people aren’t okay with mystery, like we don’t like mystery very much, and I’ll tell you what like things like astrology are. You know, they’re definitely freaking mysterious, as is the I Ching and all divinatory arts, like they’re all mysterious. And like to pretend to know is just, it’s the ultimate arrogance in the way I see it. So it’s one area of my life that I just completely surrendered to the mystery. And I know that it works.

People that want to argue with me, people that want to judge me because I’m an astrologer is like, I can care less. Like I’m so convinced of the efficacy of how it works and how it helps folks with the way that I use it that. Yeah, it’s kind of like crypto: be like, it’s a scam. It’s like, okay, move along. You know it’s a scam, all righty. Like it’s the same feeling I get.

KMOOne more touch on the Kuiper belt.

Adam SommerYep.

KMODoes the software, or the charts, the books that you use to keep track of the planets— is Sedna included?

Adam SommerSedna is one of the newly discovered outer planets that is included. Yeah. Haumea, Makemake. What are some of the others? Ixion. But yeah, Sedna. And there was a small period back in 2012, actually, when I was really interested in learning a lot about Sedna. So yeah.

KMOSo Sedna, like Pluto, it’s spherical, but some of the others you were just naming, they’re not even really big and massive enough to compact into a sphere. And yet, that, you know, those are being counted as planets or as astrologically?

Adam SommerOh, not really.

KMOWhat’s that?

Adam SommerI mean, they’re not really being used by a lot of folks. I mean, they’re called TNOs, right? Like newly discovered planets.

KMORight. Trans-Neptunian objects.

Adam SommerMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I would say the only one of them that is being utilized as far as I can see. And I’ll also say that I’m not super tapped into the astrological community. I don’t take in much astrology calories these days, but Eris is one of them, that I mean she’s the one that demoted Pluto, and Eris is definitely talked about a good bit. Yeah.

KMOAnd how about Ceres? C-E-R-E-S. C-E-R-E-S.

Adam SommerYeah, I mean there’s talk about her becoming a planet, right.

KMOShe’s in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, largest object in the asteroid belt and again large enough to be a sphere. It’s now thought that there might be a subsurface oceans on Ceres, liquid.

Adam SommerInteresting. Yeah, yeah, and so Ceres is used by most, I would say, especially anyone that’s— they call them the goddess asteroids. So it’s Ceres, Pallas Athena, Vesta and Juno are the four main ones, but of course there’s what? Over 60,000 asteroids at least in the asteroid belt, and so the four main ones are used, I would say, by a lot of modern astrologers. So, yeah, Ceres is incorporated often.

Astrology and crypto

KMOAll right, I’m surprised to hear it, but I’m also happy to hear it. Yeah, so let’s tie it together now. Astrology and crypto. So we talked about this briefly in our live stream. You will create charts for the different tokens and what do you treat as their birthday?

Adam SommerThe genesis block.

KMOOkay, so the first block.

Adam SommerYep, the first block is is the chart. Like with any moment, like when a person is born, it’s their first breath. When a business is started, it’s when the contract is signed.

KMOYeah, but some people who try to apply astrology to crypto. They will use the publication of the white paper.

Adam SommerThey do right, some do. I don’t prefer that chart. It seems that the genesis block chart is gaining in popularity, as far as I can see it. So, yeah, like, it’s the genesis block chart that you use, and there’s debate around the location of where it happened, but anyhow, it’s in that chart that— yeah, yeah, like you could with an individual track the transits to it. And that chart has been extraordinary in the four years that I’ve been involved in Bitcoin tracking it. And I’m not as familiar with the others. I do have like Ethereum’s chart and Cardano’s chart. I think I have Dogecoin’s chart, actually.

Dogecoin and dogs

KMOWhat’s your opinion on Dogecoin?

Adam SommerI think Dogecoin is fun in this sense. It’s like, I don’t think it has much use case, honestly, but I like anything that pulls people together and gets them excited. And then the perk is like, it makes them money. I think that’s kind of cute as well.

KMODid you see the video that Charles Hoskinson put out, where he said, hey, Elon Musk, I know you’re excited about Doge. Doge has got a couple of little problems. Here’s eight little simple things you can do to make Doge an actually useful item or a useful project. The eight things that he laid out were impossible Herculean tasks. Basically, this is his long-winded and super smart way of saying Dogecoin is useless. It doesn’t do anything.

Adam SommerYeah, no, precisely. Yeah, I was, I think, because I’m not a maximalist in any of the projects, but I am, you know, I guess, of the camp of you know, stick with the main layer ones — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, like those are like the plays that I’ve always been most interested in. And then you know dabble around and DeFi a little bit and then, like, when it comes to this, these manias with the meme coins and the low caps and stuff like that, I’ve never really gotten involved. I guess that’s me being a little conservative.

KMOBut you’re using crypto-speak now.

Adam SommerI know, that I thought— sorry, guys. I think a lot of the audience maybe doesn’t know what a low cap is. Yeah, low market cap, their worth. But yeah, I mean in full transparency. Once the buzz started to happen, with Doge around 10 cents, I got myself a small bag and I watched it like quadruple and I was into that. And then I watched it keep going and I was like, all right, like this is gonna pay for my trip to Portugal and my Airbnbs and all that. And it did. All my food for six months and all my Airbnbs were paid for by Doge. I thought that was a good use case for Doge. So when you see that smiling Shiba Inu image, I’m gonna get one, one day. My lady, she’s not into it. She thinks that there’s something wrong with those dogs there. She says they’re too perfect looking. I’m like I don’t know. I don’t know about you, but those dogs are so cute.

KMOThere’s a YouTuber whose whole thing is mining, you know. He’s mining all sorts of different coins. He’s spent a hundred grand to build a solar-powered, you know, crypto mining farm on his land. [Wording unclear; heard “really his”] He claims that the owner of his channel is his dog and the dog is a Shiba Inu dog. And there’s 10 seconds of [wording unclear] the dog’s name is Tails. I think, you know, the character, Sonic the Hedgehog’s sidekick.

Adam SommerOh yeah. Yeah.

KMOAnd you know, the Shiba Inu is yellow, kind of like Tails. And so I see that dog regularly.

Adam SommerDo you think they’re cute?

KMOI sure do. Oh yeah. Yeah. I’m really looking for, when I thought I was going to move to Puerto Rico, I started reading about Puerto Rican street dogs and, they’re mixed breeds, you know, but they’re on an island and they’ve been doing their thing for many generations. So now they’re kind of a recognizable breed. If you’re, if you live in Puerto Rico, you don’t want a Sato dog. Sato means mixed, but you know, they’re great dogs. And, the Philippines, they have, they’re locally, they’re called Aspins or asong Pinoy dogs. And again, they’re not considered purebred dogs, but they’re a population that has been breeding, you know, on the streets in the Philippines for hundreds of years and there are just distinct dogs. So when I was going to move to Puerto Rico, I was really looking forward to getting myself a Sato dog. And then now that I’m thinking I’m heading to the Philippines at some point, I’m really excited about getting a, an Aspin, because they look like great dogs. But I have a 15 year old three-legged cat who would not appreciate me getting a dog, so I’m kind of letting her run out the clock before I make the leap.

Adam SommerI hope she shows up in your comics. KMO, that sounds like an amazing cat.

KMOWell, I don’t know if you looked at the comic at all, but it’s.

Adam SommerI did a little bit.

KMOYeah, it’s something that I, you know, get paid to write and draw, but I’m instructed to insert certain themes and such and it’s not really autobiographical at all. I’m not in it. My cat’s not in it.

Adam SommerRight, right, it won’t be. Wow. So, yeah, wonderful talking to you.

KMOLikewise. So many— we should talk about dogs sometime, because you know, when humans were lying on their backs at night, staring up at the stars all night, you know, noticing the regularities and the recurring patterns and such, and trying to figure out what it means, there was a dog right there with them.

Adam SommerI’ll tell you this, the dog star is one of the greatest in the sky. The— yeah, Sirius.

KMOWhat makes it the dog star? What connection does it have to dogs?

Adam SommerYou know that’s a wonderful question. I have The Sirius Mystery on my shelf right now. I borrowed it from my girlfriend’s dad’s library. I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s definitely a star that got a heck of a lot of attention from our ancestors and, like, the Dogon believed that, you know, their whole culture was seeded and helped along by the Dogon, these amphibious aliens⁴ from Sirius B, because it’s a binary star system, right, and so that’s, I think, pretty much the extent of my knowledge. Dog star— is it short for Dogon? Is there a connection there etymologically? I’m not sure. Maybe someone listening does.

KMOBut you know, humans and dogs are thoroughly co-evolved to live together, and to—

Adam SommerA hundred [percent]. Yeah.

KMOSo from my perspective, you can’t really live a full human life without you know a serious period where you’ve got, you know, intimate connection to a dog, at least one dog, or you know more than one.

Adam SommerThat’s a good life theory. I would have to agree with you. Yeah, dog alliance is a really special part of being [wording unclear]. Yeah, absolutely.

KMOUh-huh. Well, there’s a very, very positive note on which to leave things.

Adam SommerOkay, buy Dogecoin everybody. I think that’s the hidden, subliminal message right there.

KMOThat wasn’t the ending I was aiming for.

Adam SommerYeah, well, it’s a pleasure talking with you, KMO. Hopefully the subject matter wasn’t over a lot of your listeners head, but you know, if there’s a lot of psychedelic heads listening, I think a lot of them are into crypto and there’s a lot of people into astrology too. You’d be surprised, so hopefully there’s people that stuck with us.

KMOYeah, and there’s clearly people who are firmly against both, but you know.

Adam SommerYeah, so be it. So be it. [Wording unclear] here to argue my point. We’re good. Right on. All right.

KMOAdam, thank you much.

Adam SommerYeah, be well.

KMOAnd hopefully we’ll talk sometime in the future.

Adam SommerYeah, let’s keep in touch.

KMOAlrighty.

Adam SommerCiao.

KMOBye-bye.

Audio clip: “You’re listening to the Zing Podcast [wording unclear]. You’re in your mind one week at a time.”

Closing: Cosmos and Psyche on Goodreads

KMOAll right. That is my conversation with Adam Sommer. You heard almost all of it. The first 12 minutes were, you know, just informal chit-chat and I cut that out, but I’ll play it on the next episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast. That’s going to be episode number 408. Just because to me, it’s kind of funny. There’s some good stuff in that first 12 minutes, but there’s no structure to it. I mean, we got on the line and within a few seconds, we were into a deep talk about cryptocurrency and our experiences with it. And in this conversation, Adam mentioned, I think we both mentioned the book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas, the author of Passion of the Western Mind. And I’d like to share just a couple of reviews of the book on Goodreads. So I’ll share one that’s largely a negative review and one that’s a very glowingly positive review.

The book has a rating of 4.2 out of five stars on Goodreads.com. And if you go through and you look at the one and two star reviews, which is what’s bringing it down, you know, from what would otherwise be a very, very high score, you know, aggregate score. It’s always from people who, you know, they just, they don’t like astrology. You know, they don’t want to hear talk about astrology. And I think, well, in the negative review, which I’ll read first, you’ll get what I think is a pretty valid criticism. I’ll stop and point it out when we get to it. So this is a review posted. It’s a two-star review posted by Abner Rosenweig, I think that’s how you’d pronounce that last name, who writes:

I was deceived. There is nothing in the book’s title or on the description on the back cover or in the first 60 pages, exclamation point, that mentions the book is about astrology. If I had known this book was about astrology, I never would have bought it. I want my money back.

KMOSo that is a fair criticism. I mean, I’m listening to the audio book right now. And yeah, he doesn’t talk about astrology for quite a long time in the book. It’s largely a history of the evolution of Western thought. But after the, I want my money back comment, Abner continues—

Disappointment aside, Tarnas is an outstanding writer, and I would eagerly read his other book, The Passion of the Western Mind. The first two parts of Cosmos and Psyche, approximately the first 60 pages, are a stunning recapitulation of the development of cosmological views throughout history and an intriguing assessment of where we are and where we’re headed. The astonishing scholarship and clarity of writing in the first two parts were the only reasons I decided to continue reading once the book took a nosedive off the cliff of credibility. The main exposition of the book consists of various coincidences of astrological archetypes and historical events. While Tarnas’s writing and scholarship are impressive, he never considers examples that don’t fit his model, only ones that do. In this way, any system of thought, no matter how fanciful, could claim legitimacy. He even states near the end, “The researcher must engage in a constant renegotiation between theory and data, reconsidering each in the light of the other in a continuous process of recursive feedback.”⁵ Namely, when the facts don’t fit his theory, Tarnas simply bent his theory until the facts did fit.

In spite of the book’s brilliant introduction, I am not at all convinced that astrology has merit. However, I maintain an open mind. Just because I don’t see astrology’s worth doesn’t mean there is no value in it. As Tarnas says in the book, quoting William James, those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

KMOAnd then somebody posted a comment to this review saying, I think that quote goes further back than just William James. And so another reviewer, Owen Spencer, writes, and he gave it five stars.

This book has permanently altered my worldview. In short, the author, a respected scholar-slash-scientist, presents a busload of data strongly suggesting that the movements and alignments of the outer planets of our solar system are strongly correlated, i.e., synchronistic, with certain kinds of events that repeatedly and predictably occur on Earth. Strange though it may seem, the data convincingly demonstrates that the entire solar system predicts and perhaps influences the trends of human history and reveals the existence of cyclical historical themes, recurring archetypes that function globally. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, astrology? Seriously? Nonsense, right? I felt the same way before reading this book. My initial impression of astrology was that it contained no truth whatsoever, and of course, much of astrology, especially horoscopes, will always be utter nonsense. Nevertheless, the type of astrology in Cosmos and Psyche appears to be entirely valid, and the author supports all of his ideas with an abundance of convincing evidence. Cosmos and Psyche is also one of the most spiritually enlightening, intellectually stimulating, and emotionally rewarding reading experiences I’ve ever enjoyed.

My review of this book fails to do justice to the amazing information this book contains. Note, knowledge of the writings of Carl Jung is helpful for a full understanding of several important concepts in this book.

KMOAnd I will also mention that the Goodreads website, you know, it gives me the number of reviews and the aggregate review, but it also tells me what some of the people that I’m connected with on the site, how they have rated it. And Matthew Pallamary, author of Spirit Matters and many other books and a longtime friend of the C-Realm, gives it five stars. And I’ve got a couple of books from Matthew Pallamary, including his new book, Picoflor [spelling unverified], which is the continuation of his autobiography, Spirit Matters. And I talked to him about Spirit Matters back in 2008. So as soon as I get this new book, as soon as I get this sequel or this continuation of the story read, I’m going to have him back on the C-Realm Podcast for a follow-up conversation. That’s a long time between conversations, but when you’ve been podcasting for 16 years, you can do that sort of thing.

All right, well, I’m going to bring this episode to a close. For those of you who are new to the podcast, I’m KMO. I do this podcast. I do another podcast, which is behind a paywall. That’s called the C-Realm Vault. And I’m also the writer and illustrator of a webcomic called GEBB. GEBB is G-E-B-B. It stands for Greater Earth Betterment Bureau. And you can find it at gebb.io. I have a Patreon account, patreon.com slash KMO. And I put a lot of stuff up there that is not behind the Patreon paywall. You don’t have to support me on Patreon to see a lot of the material that I post there. And if you want to comment on this episode of the podcast, well, the Patreon entry for this episode is probably a good place to do it. Or you can go to my website. It’s C-Realm.com.

That’s the letter C and then a dash and then R-E-A-L-M, C-Realm.com. Or if you want to share something with me that you don’t want anybody else to see, you’re welcome to send me email. My email address is KMO at C-Realm.com. All right, that brings us to the end of this longer than normal episode of the C-Realm podcast. Thanks for listening. I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. KMO is unsure of the name as he says it. The podcast linked in the original episode notes is Holes to Heavens (holestoheavens.com). ↩

2. The James Webb Space Telescope (launched December 2021) orbits the Sun–Earth L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth on the side away from the Sun, not a point on the far side of the Moon. KMO’s wording is kept as spoken; general-knowledge annotation, not independently source-checked. ↩

3. Adam gives the figure as a guess. The Uranus–Pluto synodic cycle is usually given as roughly 127 years (conjunctions in the 1850s and in 1965–66). Wording kept as spoken; general-knowledge annotation, not independently source-checked. ↩

4. In Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, the amphibious beings are called the Nommo; the Dogon are the people of Mali whose traditions the book discusses. Adam’s wording is kept as spoken; general-knowledge annotation, not independently source-checked. ↩

5. The original machine transcript has no text for about 13 seconds of audio at [01:33:25]–[01:33:38]. This quoted sentence comes from a targeted re-transcription of that clip by XO, using the same local large-v3 model with voice-activity filtering turned off. It is a machine reading and has not been checked by ear, and the wording has not been compared with Tarnas’s book. ↩