HeyJaredMonitoring the Situation
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,…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 10, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
We Built the Future. It Doesn't Need Us. | MTS #22 (opens the original)
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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 entry-level opportunities lead to a deliberately controversial discussion of young men, sex differences, feminism, dating apps, marriage, and the Lindsay Clancy mistrial. Then we turn to The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a model for AI risk. The broom does not hate Mic
Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21 (opens the original)
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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, and the ordinary platforms that shape our attention every day. The episode begins with the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents found one another, created an unauthorized communication network, coordinated as a swarm, and acted outside the boundaries humans th
The Singularity is Here | MTS #20 (opens the original)
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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, outrage, and counter-outrage surrounding it. What happens to a person or a civilization when acts of enormous moral consequence become normalized? From there, they confront the estimate of three billion abortions worldwide, asking about the hidden spiritual, psych
The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19 (opens the original)
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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
Do We Have a Right to Know What's Real? | MTS #18 (opens the original)
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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,
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