Monitoring the Situation | Podcast in RSS.com

Monitoring the Situation

Monitoring the Situation

di Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden

Notizie Società e cultura

Stagione 1

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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

Is AI Eating Our Curiosity? | MTS #11

In this episode, Kale and Steve begin by discussing aging, money anxiety, and the uncomfortable lessons they wish they could send back to their younger selves. From there, the conversation turns toward AI fatigue, Magnifica Humanitas (the new papal encyclical on artificial intelligence), and the question of whether AI is taking away our desire to learn, to know, and to grow. They cover classroom life, surveillance work, phones, boredom, literacy, friendship, education, Shakespeare, suffering, and the question underneath all of it: what remains most human when the machines get better at almost everything? This is a conversation about curiosity, attention, formation, old books, modern tech, and why boredom might be more necessary than we want to admit.

Convergences: New UFO Files, Government Secrecy, & Control | MTS #10

A new round of UFO/UAP files, Eric Weinstein’s recent comments on Joe Rogan, alleged CIA whistleblower claims, Skinwalker Ranch, White Sands, Epstein, string theory, AI, Mars, and the deeper question underneath all of it: who is actually in control? In Episode 10 of Monitoring the Situation, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden follow the convergences between government secrecy, scientific gatekeeping, media silence, technological acceleration, and the strange breakdown of the modern story about reality. This is not just a conversation about UFOs. It is a conversation about evidence, trust, power, disclosure, and what happens when the institutions that claim to explain the world no longer seem capable of explaining what is happening inside it. Subscribe for more conversations from Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden.

UFOs, UAPs, Demons, Disclosure, & Deception | MTS #09

The biggest UAP week in years is unfolding right as the first major Trump-era UFO document dump is expected. Kash Patel says releases are coming “literally in the very near future.” Rumors are bubbling it will happen by the end of the week. Is this real disclosure — or narrative sabotage? In this episode, Steve & Kale give a full UFO 101 then dive into the current chaos: deep state, black programs to recover and reverse engineer craft, secret pastor briefings, Grusch’s Catholic pushback on all the "demon" talk, the infamous Collins Elite, and why this moment feels different in years of build-up to "disclosure."

Narrative Shaping in the Digital Thunderdome | MTS #8

In a world drowning in manufactured narratives, how do you know what’s real? From the SPLC’s shocking indictment and the latest assassination attempt on Trump, to the mechanics of belief, permission structures, and why radical isolation + digital mythcraft turns smart people into fanatics. This is a raw, wide-ranging masterclass on: • Epistemic humility in the age of infinite propaganda • How stories become spirits that possess people • The SPLC funding the very “hate groups” it profited from fighting • What happened with the White House Correspondents' Dinner Shooter • Why the digital Skinner Box makes real-world violence feel like a video game • The coming explosion of analog as the ultimate rebellion against AI and hyper-reality If you’re tired of being spun, gaslit, and herded by the current thing — this episode is for you.

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