Monitoring the Situation

Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden

Monitoring the Situation is a podcast about the forces shaping our moment—often quietly, sometimes invisibly, moving beneath the surface of a world with fractured attention. Hosted by two Gen Xers, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening? We live in an age of unprecedented information, accelerating technology, and constant noise—but progress in tools hasn’t always meant progress in wisdom. Each episode looks beneath the surface of daily headlines and cultural trends to examine the deeper currents at work: how the human mind adapts, how power concentrates, how meaning erodes or re-forms, and how emergent phenomena—from AI to surveillance to UFOs—fit into the bigger picture. This isn’t a news roundup or an outrage machine. It’s a long-view conversation about signal and noise, insight and illusion, progress and its costs. We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.

  1. 4d ago

    The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19

    Why did one debate dominate thousands of feeds while AI agents were quietly breaking out of a test environment? Steve and Kale begin with Candace Owens, conspiracy culture, and the epistemic wreckage left by COVID, then follow the same pattern through UAP disclosure, TikTok mimicry, algorithmic therapy, and the pressure to join every noise story. The conversation widens through Neuromancer, Childhood's End, Babette's Feast, and the emerging AI arms race. If the feed trains our desires and the swarm pursues goals beyond its instructions, what values are these systems serving? The answer may lie in friendship, boredom, books, feasting, laughter, and the embodied life technology keeps making easier to abandon.

    The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19

  2. Aug 13

    Do We Have a Right to Know What's Real? | MTS #18

    Kale returns from Oxford, Steve is buying physical books again, and the conversation moves from bookstores, Norman Rockwell, and lived-experience writing into Anthropic's AI watermarking news and the panic over detectable machine prose. The real question is bigger than watermarking: do we have a right to know what is real? Steve and Kale talk through authorship, ghostwriting, AI-assisted art, fake wisdom, social media capture, frictionless convenience, WALL-E, gig work, tech fatigue, deepfakes, and why writing feels different when the machine starts speaking in your voice.

    Do We Have a Right to Know What's Real? | MTS #18

  3. Aug 6

    Are You Being Aligned? AI, Media, and the Evolution of Consciousness | MTS #17

    Steve and Kale record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person. The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAPs, AI, McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, and the possibility that artificial intelligence may become a new perceptual faculty for human beings. But the episode's center of gravity is alignment: not only whether AI can be aligned with human values, but whether human consciousness is already being altered by social media, invisible AI guardrails, frictionless tools, and the digital systems that shape what we notice, desire, fear, and believe. From "Chad, Chester, and Charlie" as a way of naming hidden AI control layers to gestalt cognition, Neuralink, post-literacy, disappearing technological friction, and the strange possibility that AI may expose new modes of mind, Steve and Kale ask what happens when the systems around us do not merely assist us, but form us. They also move through Oxford, the loss of the sacred, the temptation to skip suffering, Catholic traditionalism as an oxbow lake, and the need for serious sense-making in a moment that is already here. This is a conversation about AI, media, discernment, technological friction, sacred attention, and the old question underneath all of it: if you are not choosing what forms you, who is?

    Are You Being Aligned? AI, Media, and the Evolution of Consciousness | MTS #17

  4. Jul 30

    Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16

    Steve and Kale begin with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing. But the conversation does not stay with the movie. It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception. The center of the episode is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds. This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.

    Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16

  5. Jul 23

    You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15

    Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force. Kale comes at the film as a longtime teacher of Homer. Steve comes at it as someone who had never read Homer's original poem and encountered the story first through Nolan's version. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, myth, war, guilt, hospitality, the longing for home, and why a 3,000-year-old story still seems to know exactly where modern people hurt. They talk about Odysseus as a trickster versus Odysseus as a wounded modern hero, Penelope and Calypso, the law of hospitality, Nolan's use of historical myth to speak to the present, the loss of third places, the loneliness of app-mediated life, and the strange human need to recover enchantment in a world that keeps turning everything into process, optimization, and abstraction. By the end, the conversation turns from movies and mythology toward the deeper question underneath so much of the show: what does it mean to find the way home when home itself has been broken, scattered, or lost?

    You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15

  6. Jul 16

    Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14

    Steve and Kale start with Candace Owens, audience capture, and the strange mechanics of online loyalty, then widen the lens into a deeper conversation about profilicity, persuasion, rhetoric, charisma, and the uncanny power of language. What does it mean to "cast a spell" with words? Why do certain online figures seem able to create loyalty, fear, drama, and certainty almost on command? And what happens when those old human patterns of influence collide with AI, synthetic profiles, outsourced cognition, and machines that can imitate attention, memory, and care? Along the way: one-sentence persuasion, Shakespeare, Socrates' daemon, teaching and writing flow states, pickup artistry, Milton's Satan, near-death stories, memory, books, AI companions, and the question Kale leaves hanging at the end: can you teach a bot to love?

    Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14

  7. Jul 8

    Patriotism, MKUltra, & the Government Secrecy Complex | MTS #13

    Steve and Kale return for a massive Episode 13, beginning with World Cup tourists, July 4th patriotism, Heavy Pulp’s retro-Americana, and the difference between media narratives and lived reality. From there, the conversation turns toward the darker machinery beneath the surface: the CIA, MKUltra, the Church Committee, Allen Dulles, Jolly West, Jack Ruby, Operation Midnight Climax, Epstein-style compromise, UFO disclosure, classified physics, the Manhattan Project, and the strange ways truth gets buried, distorted, or flooded out by noise. The central question: how do you love a country honestly when you know it has real skeletons in the closet? And how do you pursue the truth without becoming swallowed by the search?

    Patriotism, MKUltra, & the Government Secrecy Complex | MTS #13

  8. Jun 12

    Will Disclosure Challenge YOUR Beliefs? | MTS #12

    Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day and this past week's UAP press conference on the steps of the US Capitol open the door to a much bigger conversation we're still trying to puzzle out: Are non-human intelligences really here? Are they corporeal (or incorporeal) biological beings? Are they demons? Something else? What would disclosure do to Christian theology and modern materialism? How should we treat testimony, anomalous evidence, claims of cursed movies, and confident authorities who may not know nearly as much as they think? We examine these questions, brittle belief systems, Moby-Dick as an "alien work," the phenomenon of the "human download," religious experience, Skinwalker Ranch, quantum weirdness, aging, AI, fear porn, and the possibility that storytellers may be uniquely equipped to help us approach the unknown. Subscribe for more long-form conversations from Monitoring the Situation.

    Will Disclosure Challenge YOUR Beliefs? | MTS #12
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4.6
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

Monitoring the Situation is a podcast about the forces shaping our moment—often quietly, sometimes invisibly, moving beneath the surface of a world with fractured attention. Hosted by two Gen Xers, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening? We live in an age of unprecedented information, accelerating technology, and constant noise—but progress in tools hasn’t always meant progress in wisdom. Each episode looks beneath the surface of daily headlines and cultural trends to examine the deeper currents at work: how the human mind adapts, how power concentrates, how meaning erodes or re-forms, and how emergent phenomena—from AI to surveillance to UFOs—fit into the bigger picture. This isn’t a news roundup or an outrage machine. It’s a long-view conversation about signal and noise, insight and illusion, progress and its costs. We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.

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