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Society & Culture

Monitoring the Situation

by Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden
Explicit Sociedad y culturaNoticias
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Latest episodes

  • You Can't See Anything | Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder & Managed Reality | MTS #28

    October 22, 2026 · 3 hr 12 min

    What if the most transparent documentary ever made shows you everything, and you still don't know what's real? Steve and Kale both went to see Nathan Fielder's You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary in which Elizabeth Holmes…

  • If We're Not Alone, Why Are They Hiding It? | MTS #27

    October 15, 2026 · 2 hr 47 min

    What if the biggest disclosure isn't that we aren't alone, but that we were never in control? Steve and Kale follow the latest claims from David Grusch, Jay Stratton, and Eric Weinstein, where military testimony, secrecy, and high…

  • We Stopped Believing. The World Stayed Strange. | MTS #26

    October 9, 2026 · 3 hr 21 min

    What if the categories we use to explain reality are hiding more than they reveal? Steve and Kale begin with Digger, the strange new Tom Cruise film that is almost impossible to market without spoiling, then follow the problem outward…

  • Magic, Science & the Quest for Hidden Knowledge | MTS #25

    October 1, 2026 · 3 hr 16 min

    What if the people building the future are not escaping myth, magic, and religion, but writing new versions of them? Are we doing science or magic or both? In this episode, Steve and Kale examine the mythic structure beneath supposedly…

  • Effective Altruism and the Posthuman Future | MTS #24

    September 24, 2026 · 2 hr 59 min

    Silicon Valley has a religion. It has a creation story, a priesthood, an apocalypse, a promise of salvation, and a vision of beings that will succeed humanity. It's bougie and narcissistic and morally incoherent: in other words, pretty…

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  • Something Happened. Now They're Afraid. | MTS #23

    September 17, 2026 · 2 hr 55 min

    Something happened in AI—and suddenly the people building the most powerful systems on Earth began asking the world to slow down. In Episode 23, Steve and Kale reconstruct the chain of events behind the new “pace the frontier” campaign…

  • We Built the Future. It Doesn't Need Us. | MTS #22

    September 10, 2026 · 3 hr 26 min

    The future was supposed to free us from drudgery. What happens when it frees the system from needing us? Kale and Steve follow the AI bottleneck into work, relationships, and civilization itself. New employment figures and disappearing…

  • Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21

    September 4, 2026 · 2 hr 55 min

    What if the voice in your head is not entirely your own? Kale and Steve follow that possibility across three domains: AI systems that humans can no longer reliably monitor, claims of technology capable of reading or influencing the mind…

  • The Singularity is Here | MTS #20

    August 27, 2026 · 3 hr 11 min

    What if the Singularity is not merely the moment artificial intelligence surpasses us, but the point at which the old rules of reality stop holding? Kale and Steve begin with the Lindsay Clancy case and the social-media identification…

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

    August 20, 2026 · 3 hr 6 min

    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…

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

    August 13, 2026 · 3 hr 13 min

    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…

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

    August 6, 2026 · 2 hr 50 min

    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…

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About the show

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.