Monitoring the Situation
Claim This Podcastby Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden
Podcast Overview
<p>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.</p><p>Hosted by two Gen Xers, <strong>Steve Skojec</strong> and <strong>Kale Zelden</strong>, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.</p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
1/30/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 30, 2026
Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16
<p>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. </p><p>But the conversation does not stay with the movie. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p>
July 23, 2026
You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15
<p>Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force. </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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?</p>
July 16, 2026
Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14
<p>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. </p><p>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? </p><p>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?</p>
16 total episodes available
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Frequently asked questions
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- What is Monitoring the Situation?
<p>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.</p><p>Hosted by two Gen Xers, <strong>Steve Skojec</strong> and <strong>Kale Zelden</strong>, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening?</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.</p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.
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