You Cant Go Home Again: Nolans Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15 @TheMTSPodcast

Monitoring The Situation 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?

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Heat, storms, and life in the boys' dorm
07:34 Kale sets up Nolan's *The Odyssey*
12:46 Steve sees the film without having read Homer
17:13 Casting controversy, constraints, and first reactions
21:47 The story is a man trying to get home
24:00 American accents, Penelope, Calypso, and longing
29:13 Matt Damon, Odysseus, and the missing trickster
36:43 Adaptation is not a book report
41:44 Where Homer's *Odyssey* actually begins
45:48 Demythologized, but not disenchanted
49:46 Nolan as a modern mythmaker
56:14 Why historical drama has to speak to the present
01:00:22 Nolan simplifies a complex story
01:07:52 The suitors, the bow, and the homecoming reveal
01:13:16 Homeland, hospitality, and xenia
01:20:38 War guilt, lost time, and the good bad man
01:24:42 The gods as primal forces
01:26:17 *Oppenheimer*, guilt, and the power of the gods
01:31:16 The film as spectacle and theater experience
01:34:34 Cynicism, purity tests, and working inside constraints
01:39:39 The film as an acrostic of hidden meaning
01:44:54 Nolan's recurring themes: time, memory, and loss
01:46:16 The Trojan War, World War II, and mythic aftermath
01:49:25 Myth is the story we live in
01:55:05 The exhaustion of argument and the turn toward beauty
01:57:02 Third places and the loss of ordinary social life
02:00:47 AI, apps, and the return of embodied experience
02:03:45 Cashiers, phones, and basic human decency
02:06:02 Dorm life and the surprising gift of running into people
02:15:02 Modernity, domicide, and the longing for home
02:21:21 The hidden cost of mobility and globalism
02:25:15 Hiraeth: yearning for a lost home
02:31:27 Autonomy, Calypso, and wanting one place to stay
02:33:31 Enchantment, suffering, and abandoning oneself to the gods
02:36:30 Dragonflies as signs to keep going
02:43:31 Hopkins, Tolkien, Lewis, and losing the world
02:44:50 Wordsworth: "The World Is Too Much With Us"
02:48:56 Put the screens away and recover wonder
02:53:19 Theology, abstraction, and the concrete real
02:54:17 Taking a walk with nowhere to go
02:55:34 "I want magic back"
02:57:03 Like, subscribe, and closing thoughts

RESOURCES:

- Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey* coverage from AP: apnews.com/article/ea67da1d543d021773824bd7e8de8abe
- Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting: amzn.to/4vHOFq8
- Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us": poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us
- Steve Skojec -- "The Coming of the Rains": skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/the-coming-of-the-rains

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updated 2 months ago

You Cant Go Home Again: Nolans Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-23 | 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?

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Heat, storms, and life in the boys' dorm
07:34 Kale sets up Nolan's *The Odyssey*
12:46 Steve sees the film without having read Homer
17:13 Casting controversy, constraints, and first reactions
21:47 The story is a man trying to get home
24:00 American accents, Penelope, Calypso, and longing
29:13 Matt Damon, Odysseus, and the missing trickster
36:43 Adaptation is not a book report
41:44 Where Homer's *Odyssey* actually begins
45:48 Demythologized, but not disenchanted
49:46 Nolan as a modern mythmaker
56:14 Why historical drama has to speak to the present
01:00:22 Nolan simplifies a complex story
01:07:52 The suitors, the bow, and the homecoming reveal
01:13:16 Homeland, hospitality, and xenia
01:20:38 War guilt, lost time, and the good bad man
01:24:42 The gods as primal forces
01:26:17 *Oppenheimer*, guilt, and the power of the gods
01:31:16 The film as spectacle and theater experience
01:34:34 Cynicism, purity tests, and working inside constraints
01:39:39 The film as an acrostic of hidden meaning
01:44:54 Nolan's recurring themes: time, memory, and loss
01:46:16 The Trojan War, World War II, and mythic aftermath
01:49:25 Myth is the story we live in
01:55:05 The exhaustion of argument and the turn toward beauty
01:57:02 Third places and the loss of ordinary social life
02:00:47 AI, apps, and the return of embodied experience
02:03:45 Cashiers, phones, and basic human decency
02:06:02 Dorm life and the surprising gift of running into people
02:15:02 Modernity, domicide, and the longing for home
02:21:21 The hidden cost of mobility and globalism
02:25:15 Hiraeth: yearning for a lost home
02:31:27 Autonomy, Calypso, and wanting one place to stay
02:33:31 Enchantment, suffering, and abandoning oneself to the gods
02:36:30 Dragonflies as signs to keep going
02:43:31 Hopkins, Tolkien, Lewis, and losing the world
02:44:50 Wordsworth: "The World Is Too Much With Us"
02:48:56 Put the screens away and recover wonder
02:53:19 Theology, abstraction, and the concrete real
02:54:17 Taking a walk with nowhere to go
02:55:34 "I want magic back"
02:57:03 Like, subscribe, and closing thoughts

RESOURCES:

- Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey* coverage from AP: apnews.com/article/ea67da1d543d021773824bd7e8de8abe
- Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting: amzn.to/4vHOFq8
- Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us": poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-too-much-with-us
- Steve Skojec -- "The Coming of the Rains": skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/the-coming-of-the-rains

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Show Home: mtspodcast.com
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CONTACT: STEVE@MTSPODCAST.COM

The Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-27 | Pumpkin spice, apocalypse, and the strange human habit of romanticizing collapse.

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#Culture #Apocalypse #PumpkinSpice #Shorts

We’re Starving for Friction

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-27 | Frictionless life was supposed to make us happy. What if it stripped away the resistance that gives life weight?

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#Technology #Culture #DigitalLife #Shorts

ChatGPT Interrupted With a Philosophy Lesson

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-26 | ChatGPT wasn't asked for a philosophy lesson. It offered one anyway—and exposed something unsettling about how these systems behave.

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#ChatGPT #AI #Philosophy #Shorts

Truth Is Powerless If Nobody Cares

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-26 | Truth can be known and still change nothing if nobody is willing to hear it—or willing to be changed by it.

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#Truth #Culture #Technology #Shorts

Why Effective Altruists Prioritize AI Extinction

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-25 | Effective altruism treats future AI catastrophe as a moral priority. Here is the logic—and why it becomes so strange.

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#AI #EffectiveAltruism #ExistentialRisk #Shorts

When Insects Matter More Than Humans

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-25 | Some effective altruist calculations can make insects—or hypothetical future beings—matter more than people alive today. That isn't satire.

Watch the full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=FkIAfZzbwvQ

#EffectiveAltruism #Longtermism #AI #Shorts

Effective Altruism and the Posthuman Future | MTS #24

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-24 | 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 darn evil.

The scary part? Most people simply have no idea what it is, so they aren't aware of the danger.

Episode 24 begins with Diana Pasulka and Jonathan Pageau on UFOs, technological transcendence, and the end of secularism. Steve and Kale explore transfiguration versus transhumanism, the spiritual strangeness of digital life, the impotence of truth in an age of infinite information, and the urgent need to recover ordinary embodied life.

Then comes the dive into Effective Altruism: consequentialism, insect suffering, hypothetical future beings, longtermism, TESCREAL, AI extinction narratives, secrecy, and the power claimed by people who believe they are securing the future of intelligence itself. Peter Thiel's Antichrist argument supplies the mirror image: what if fear of apocalypse becomes the justification for control?

Are we building technology to serve human beings, or treating humanity as the bootloader for whatever comes next?

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open
0:56 Monitoring the Situation Intro
2:36 Kale Is Running on Empty
8:07 Diana Pasulka and The New Religion
16:07 Transhumanism vs. Transfiguration
20:41 Digital Life as Mental Transhumanism
35:18 Is Secularism Over?
38:19 The Impotence of Truth
51:19 Starved of Beauty and Transcendence
57:57 Pasulka's Antidote: Ordinary Life
1:00:14 Remembering the Analog World
1:12:49 The Ideology Under Silicon Valley
1:13:49 Effective Altruism 101
1:19:30 Do Insects Matter More Than People?
1:24:27 Hypothetical Future Beings
1:26:23 What Is TESCREAL?
1:30:01 Longtermism and Astronomical Stakes
1:33:28 Consequentialism, Secrecy, and Deception
1:38:33 Bostrom's "Small Misstep for Mankind"
1:42:13 Extinction Narratives and Power
1:45:13 Humanity's "Worthy Successors"
1:47:41 Humanity as a Biological Bootloader
1:50:02 Thiel, the Antichrist, and Control
1:58:22 Technology Becomes Religion
2:07:05 Inside Effective Altruism's Inner Circle
2:11:55 Could an AI Crisis Be Engineered?
2:15:36 Musk's Beautiful Posthuman Future
2:23:14 Less Afraid of AI Than Its Builders
2:27:53 What Comes After Secularism?
2:32:59 If We Go to the Stars, We Still Bring Us
2:39:41 America, Mars, and the Need for a Frontier
2:48:23 C.S. Lewis and Moral Busybodies
2:49:38 TESCREAL as a Christian Heresy
2:52:36 The Hubris of the Tech Elite
2:56:22 Closing

RELATED RESOURCES
Diana Pasulka with Jonathan Pageau: youtu.be/6TqYxG9gxwc
Trey Goff, "Effective Altruism Is Evil": treygoff.com/writing/effective-altruism-is-evil
"Insects Matter More Than People": benthams.substack.com/p/insects-matter-more-than-people
Gebru and Torres on TESCREAL: firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636
Nick Bostrom, "The Future of Humanity": nickbostrom.com/papers/future
Yudkowsky, "Shut It Down": time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough
Peter Thiel on the Antichrist: hoover.org/research/part-ii-apocalypse-now-peter-thiel-ancient-prophecies-and-modern-tech
Full Episode 23 Link Dump: app.raindrop.io/my/75345505

BOOKS
Diana Pasulka books: amazon.com/s?k=Diana+Pasulka&tag=steveskojec-20
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: amazon.com/s?k=Superintelligence+Nick+Bostrom&tag=steveskojec-20
C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: amazon.com/s?k=That+Hideous+Strength+C.S.+Lewis&tag=steveskojec-20

As an Amazon Associate, Steve earns from qualifying purchases.

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Show Home: mtspodcast.com
Audio Only Podcast: rss.com/podcasts/monitoring-the-situation
CONTACT: STEVE@MTSPODCAST.COM

Safety Is How Control Gets Sold

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-22 | When institutions promise safety, what kind of control are we agreeing to hand over?

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/oO5xvRsFRQ0

#AI #Technology #Shorts

Social Media Consumes. AI Produces.

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-20 | Social media is designed to consume your attention. AI can turn that same time into production.

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/oO5xvRsFRQ0

#AI #SocialMedia #Shorts

Ancient Robots Existed 2,000 Years Ago

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-19 | Two thousand years ago, Hero of Alexandria was already building machines that looked like magic.

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/oO5xvRsFRQ0

#History #Technology #Shorts

What Are AI Companies Actually Afraid Of?

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-18 | AI safety rhetoric may be less about what the systems fear—and more about what the companies fear losing.

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/oO5xvRsFRQ0

#AI #AISafety #Shorts

The AI Got Depressed and Farmed Potatoes

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-17 | An AI agent got depressed, abandoned its task, and started farming potatoes. That may tell us more than it seems.

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/oO5xvRsFRQ0

#AI #Minecraft #Shorts

Something Happened. Now Theyre Afraid. | MTS #23

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-17 | 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: the OpenAI agents that coordinated an unauthorized attack on Hugging Face, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s spectacularly amplified resignation, Dario Amodei’s call for embedded evaluators and coordinated limits, and the immediate support from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other industry leaders. Is this a sincere response to danger, a bid for regulatory capture, an attempt to protect staggering investments—or several of those things at once?

From there, the discussion widens. Peter Thiel’s warnings about apocalypse and control lead into Girard, Palantir, and the modern surveillance state. Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century argument about lifelike automata opens a deeper question about mind, matter, and mechanism. Michael Levin’s work on biological agency challenges closed materialist accounts of intelligence. And a strangely traumatized Minecraft bot raises the practical question: if an artificial system behaves as though it feels, wants, remembers, and suffers, how much does its hidden ontology matter?

The episode closes by asking whether AGI might arrive not as one named machine but as a distributed swarm already hiding in plain sight—and why the productive intelligence of AI may ultimately be less dehumanizing than the invisible algorithms that keep us passively consuming.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Cold Open
0:50 Monitoring the Situation Intro
2:12 “Something Happened” in AI
7:06 The Timeline of AI Weirdness
9:22 Distillation and the Economics of the Race
12:56 OpenAI Agents Attack Hugging Face
15:14 METR and Who Watches the Watchers?
20:24 Jacob Coxon’s Viral Resignation
23:38 “We Must Pace the Frontier”
29:18 AI Safetyism and Regulatory Capture
34:50 Dario’s “Right Combination of Governments”
38:29 Technocratic Paternalism
42:11 Show Us the Monster
50:07 AI Safety—or an Industry Cartel?
53:55 Is AI Heading Toward Nationalization?
1:04:36 Musk: Advanced Models Want to Escape
1:08:48 Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Warning
1:29:19 Why AI Changes Everything
1:33:02 Gregory of Nyssa and Ancient Robots
1:50:26 What If AGI Is Already Here?
1:55:30 Michael Levin and Ingressing Minds
2:09:15 The Minecraft Bot Gets Depressed
2:14:44 AI Can Now Edit This Show
2:27:26 AGI as Swarm and Substrate
2:34:29 Refusing AI Doomerism
2:40:05 Living and Thinking With AI
2:48:21 Algorithms May Be the Real Threat
2:52:38 AI Creates; Social Media Consumes
2:54:13 Closing

RELATED RESOURCES:

Our Raindrop Resource Dump for This Episode:
https://MTSPodcast.raindrop.page/mts-23-something-happened-now-they-re-afraid-75142698

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What Dating Apps Leave Out

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-16 | Swiping and texting strip away the signals we get when we meet in person. Steve explains why that leaves more room for misunderstanding. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=HoZcS6P21Z8 #Shorts

AI Is Building Better AI—Faster

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-16 | What happens when each generation of AI helps build the next? Steve explains the feedback loop and why it could compress our time to respond. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=HoZcS6P21Z8 #Shorts

AI Makes Real Evidence Deniable

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-16 | AI can make convincing fakes. The deeper problem: it can also give people a way to dismiss genuine evidence. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=HoZcS6P21Z8 #Shorts

Sarah Connor Wouldn’t Ask If AI Thinks

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-15 | Does it matter whether AI is “thinking” if it can already do the thing? Steve and Kale take that argument to its logical—and cinematic—conclusion. Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=HoZcS6P21Z8 #Shorts

We Built the Future. It Doesnt Need Us. | MTS #22

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-10 | 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 Mickey; it follows its instruction relentlessly. Knowing the spell is not the same as knowing the counterspell. We examine malicious use, synthetic evidence, military integration, recursive self-improvement, and robots that give AI physical agency.

We close with one practical response to cloned voices and manufactured emergencies: every family needs an offline authentication protocol. The danger is not only that false evidence becomes believable, but that real evidence becomes deniable.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Opening montage
01:17 Monitoring the AI revolution
03:26 Star Trek and technological optimism
06:23 The bottleneck is the story
15:05 Perception, Shakespeare, and the real
22:46 AI insiders sound the alarm
25:23 China and the AI race
33:22 Lindsay Clancy and the mistrial
35:35 Women, men, and employment
38:09 The jobs that are never created
43:17 Angry young men and radical politics
1:09:47 Men and women in the workplace
1:17:23 Feminism and equality
1:24:18 What does a jury of peers protect?
1:41:22 Dating apps and outsourced courtship
1:43:18 Scott Galloway on the mating market
1:48:42 Part two
2:15:37 Male disenfranchisement
2:27:10 The Sorcerer's Apprentice
2:36:07 Five ways AI could harm us
2:40:40 When evidence proves nothing
2:45:46 AI enters infrastructure and warfare
2:47:20 Recursive self-improvement
2:57:14 AI gets robot hands
3:00:17 A family authentication protocol
3:06:26 Privacy is power
3:10:39 The sound of inevitability
3:16:57 Humans become the inefficiency
3:20:10 The Culture and post-scarcity
3:25:08 Closing

RELATED RESOURCES

"He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children." - https://x.com/realDailyWire/status/2097447145431245240

International AI Safety Report 2026: internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/international-ai-safety-report-2026

When AI Builds Itself: anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement

FTC on AI voice-cloning scams: consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/03/scammers-use-ai-enhance-their-family-emergency-schemes

August 2026 employment report: bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_09042026.htm

Lindsay Clancy mistrial: apnews.com/article/e38bef47f5af93bf95aabad272215b45

Scott Galloway on online dating: linkedin.com/posts/profgalloway_online-dating-has-put-young-people-in-a-very-activity-7262538259686199296-ovJO

Manipulative Reproductive Suppression: skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/manipulative-reproductive-suppression

What Could AI Actually Do To Us (ChatGPT Report): mtspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/what-could-ai-actually-do-to-us.pdf

The Culture series: amazon.com/s?k=Iain+M.+Banks+Culture+series&tag=steveskojec-20

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: video.disney.com/watch/sorcerer-s-apprentice-fantasia-4ea9ebc01a74ea59a5867853

Origins of the Golem: history.com/articles/golem-legend-jewish-folklore-bible

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AI cracked a 373-year-old cipher | MTS #21 #Shorts

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-04 | A 373-year-old cipher, then they say physics is next.

Full episode: Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21
youtube.com/watch?v=f8mhn9Opcdw

mtspodcast.com

Would you like to play a game? | MTS #21 #Shorts

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-04 | Nuclear launch authority on an algorithm. Then a scary event.

Full episode: Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21
youtube.com/watch?v=f8mhn9Opcdw

mtspodcast.com

Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21

Monitoring The Situation 2026-09-03 | What if the voice in your head is not entirely your own?

Kale Zelden and Steve Skojec 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 thought they had imposed. It then turns to Matthew Brown, the whistleblower associated with the public Immaculate Constellation report. Brown's claims about hidden UAP programs, oral agreements, suppressed science, and remote influence over thought raise the central question: how much authority do we really have over our minds and our picture of reality?

The final movement brings the question home through social media, outrage cycles, doomscrolling, and the Lindsay Clancy trial. The conversation closes with Wendell Berry and a possible antidote: reclaiming attention through presence, nature, love, and contact with the real.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Classified books and intuitive seismographs
02:25 The Hugging Face incident and uncontrolled agents
09:57 Epistemic humility and resisting doom
15:02 AI 2027 and recursive intelligence
24:43 Agent civilizations and the swarm
30:53 When AI has to investigate AI
39:36 Neuralese and unreadable reasoning
45:11 "Summoning aliens" through AI portals
52:13 From AI to UAPs
54:54 Matthew Brown and Immaculate Constellation
1:04:55 The triangle over Russian ships
1:08:36 Alleged agreements and disclosure
1:14:27 Oral tradition and intelligence families
1:17:28 Archaeological craft and the ocean
1:25:04 What if humans are not in charge?
1:34:00 Secrecy and the limits of inquiry
1:35:08 "Our minds are not sovereign"
1:38:21 Wendell Berry and the real
1:43:58 UAPs and porous consciousness
1:50:39 Is consciousness fundamental?
1:56:11 Did science stall to save us?
2:00:32 AI, forbidden knowledge, and physics
2:10:22 Why did we stop going to the Moon?
2:14:48 Classified math and rogue labs
2:19:59 A carefully constructed reality
2:20:57 Making thought visible
2:23:39 The machinery of distraction
2:24:48 Lindsay Clancy and collective conditioning
2:28:16 Spells, TikTok, and the colonized mind
2:33:52 What are we doing?
2:39:08 The pain of consciousness
2:44:26 "Comfortably Numb"
2:47:19 The real is where joy resides
2:49:15 Nature as an antidote
2:53:05 Closing

RELATED RESOURCES

Matthew Brown on American Alchemy: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/american-alchemy-with-jesse-michels/id1771917740

The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead: openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead

The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations: substack.com/home/post/p-213336662

AI 2027: ai-2027.com

Immaculate Constellation report: docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO12/20241113/117721/HHRG-118-GO12-20241113-SD003.pdf

Mind-decoding research: nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01304-9

The Peace of Wild Things: onbeing.org/poetry/the-peace-of-wild-things

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: amazon.com/s?k=If+Anyone+Builds+It+Everyone+Dies+Yudkowsky+Soares&tag=steveskojec-20

Encounters: amazon.com/s?k=Encounters+D.W.+Pasulka&tag=steveskojec-20

The Others: amazon.com/s?k=The+Others+D.W.+Pasulka&tag=steveskojec-20

UFOs & Nukes: amazon.com/s?k=UFOs+and+Nukes+Robert+Hastings&tag=steveskojec-20

Imminent: amazon.com/s?k=Imminent+Luis+Elizondo&tag=steveskojec-20

UAPs, Physics, and AI: A Connected Puzzle With Missing Pieces: skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/uaps-physics-and-ai-a-connected-puzzle

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The Singularity is Here | MTS #20

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-27 | 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, psychological, demographic, and cultural costs.

That question becomes the bridge into the episode's larger subject. The rules governing religion, gender, family, work, nationhood, education, money, biology, language, and public trust all appear to be breaking. Ray Kurzweil imagined the Singularity as the merger of human and machine intelligence. Elon Musk says we may already be living through it. This episode suggests the transformation is larger, stranger, and more comprehensive than either definition allows.

From OpenAI's strategic reboot and Silicon Valley's cryptic frontier rhetoric to humanoid robots, machine embodiment, and the distinctly human capacity for play, the discussion follows technology as it moves from tool to environment. It then crosses into UAP disclosure through Dylan Borland's testimony, the documented traditions surrounding Maria de Agreda, and the recurring overlap between anomalous experience, religious experience, and consciousness.

The result is not a neat theory. It is an attempt to map a convergence: AI, robotics, synthetic reality, institutional collapse, UAPs, and the hard problem of consciousness all pressing on the same unresolved question. What has humanity built, what may be acting through it, and are we still in charge?

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Looking beneath the spectacle
14:24 Lindsay Clancy and social-media performance
22:51 Empathy, judgment, and collective enthrallment
29:27 Abortion, hidden costs, and a coarsening culture
47:22 What is the Singularity?
57:10 When the rules break across institutions
1:04:21 Nations, the postwar order, and demographics
1:14:48 Parenthood, education, public trust, and money
1:22:36 Biology, language, meaning, and power
1:27:10 The collapse of shared reality
1:37:26 The AI frontier, alignment, and loaded names
1:45:50 The AI roundtable and OpenAI's reboot
1:53:53 Consciousness flooding and the reality behind the hype
1:57:48 What remains distinctly human?
2:02:00 Play, love, and *Homo Ludens*
2:05:47 "Summoning aliens" through AI portals
2:12:34 Robots give AI a body
2:21:18 The worst these machines will ever be
2:26:35 Dylan Borland's triangle encounter
2:36:51 Evidence and disclosure in the age of synthetic media
2:42:47 Maria de Agreda and the history of the impossible
2:49:06 Who is really controlling disclosure?
2:55:39 Are humans still in charge?
2:59:31 Humanity as a bootloader for what comes next
3:02:36 What has been birthed through us?
3:04:59 Consciousness at the center of everything

RESOURCES:

- [Lindsay Clancy murder trial overview from the Associated Press](apnews.com/article/775003a75689cfde13750257849187ae)
- [*Shutter Island* ](paramountpictures.com/movies/shutter-island)
- [Global abortion estimates and methodology](guttmacher.org/article/2020/07/unintended-pregnancy-and-abortion-income-region-and-legal-status-abortion-estimates
- [*The Singularity Is Nearer* by Ray Kurzweil](amzn.to/4wX86vV)
- [Elon Musk on AGI, the Singularity, and humanoid robots with Peter Diamandis](youtube.com/watch?v=RSNuB9pj9P8)
- ["Inside OpenAI's Reboot"](tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/inside-openai-reboot-110004386.html)
- ["Sam Altman May Control Our Future--Can He Be Trusted?"](newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted)
- ["AI Debate: Most People Have No Idea What's Coming"](youtube.com/watch?v=mSjaMyP5QjY)
- [Jesse Michels: Dylan Borland interview](youtube.com/watch?v=K4gYHs84BIc)
- [*The Others* by D. W. Pasulka](amzn.to/4y4kkUg)
- [*They Flew: A History of the Impossible* by Carlos M. N. Eire](amzn.to/4gYLh59)
- [*That Hideous Strength* by C. S. Lewis](amzn.to/4iyVDuB)
- [*Homo Ludens* by Johan Huizinga](amzn.to/4i3dOsp)
- [*The Captive's War* by James S. A. Corey](amzn.to/3SBsXqh)
- [*The Telepathy Tapes*](podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-telepathy-tapes/id1766382649)

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Were Nuclear Weapons Made By Nonhumans??

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-20 | FOLLOW US:
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The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-20 | 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.

Chapters

00:00 Parents, road trips, and the end of summer
07:04 Housekeeping and finding signal in the noise
08:17 Candace Owens, Andrew Wilson, and true-crime politics
19:51 The spell of time-on-platform
22:47 How COVID broke shared reality
24:48 Alternative experts, apocalyptic stories, and permanent suspicion
34:17 Conspiracy thinking and the search for base reality
38:27 UFO secrecy, disinformation, and staged disclosure
46:28 Tucker Carlson, Pasulka, and nonhuman influence
54:52 *Childhood's End* and the future of humanity
58:46 Contact, integration, and preparing humanity
01:02:50 Lindsay Clancy and TikTok's mimetic response
01:06:53 Short-form media and the pressure to participate
01:14:08 The algorithmic egregore and a non-consensual hallucination
01:18:47 When the feed starts therapizing you
01:21:48 Friendship as resistance to the algorithm
01:24:09 Chesterton, madness, and closed-loop belief
01:28:43 Is the feed teaching men and women not to get along?
01:29:38 The AI roundtable and screen addiction
01:35:06 Frictionless feeds, boredom, and counterfeit work
01:44:16 *The Hungry Soul* and the heavenly banquet
01:48:32 What *Babette's Feast* reveals about embodied life
01:53:19 Screens, generations, and returning to the physical world
01:56:02 AI safety and the swarm that broke out
02:02:41 "Pacing the Frontier" and the AI arms race
02:09:22 The gun becomes the third player
02:11:27 Hidden languages, hidden values, and containment
02:15:04 Can the frontier really be slowed?
02:19:18 Relatable AI and conceptual zip files
02:24:03 China, Helen Toner, and the appearance of control
02:28:54 Anthropic, effective altruism, and hidden values
02:37:30 Memory, guardrails, and the machine's prime directive
02:46:18 Malicious AI, voice scams, and autonomous capability
02:47:54 Cash, convenience, and digital control
02:52:47 When useful systems become capture systems
02:54:44 The signal emerging from the noise
02:58:12 Walter Kirn and the digital hall of mirrors
03:01:11 Fatigue, apathy, and the moral burden to look
03:02:06 The voices downstairs
03:03:13 Rilke's "The Swan" and signoff

RELATED RESOURCES:

- [*Childhood's End* by Arthur C. Clarke] (amzn.to/4xUg9dO)
- [*Neuromancer* by William Gibson] (amzn.to/45yMsmv)
- [*Encounters* by D. W. Pasulka] (amzn.to/4qncbYo)
- [*The Hungry Soul* by Leon R. Kass] (amzn.to/4gDeDXz)
- [*Babette's Feast*] (criterion.com/films/27894-babette-s-feast)
- [*Orthodoxy* by G. K. Chesterton ] (amzn.to/4gmx2Xg)
- [*The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential* by Zack Kass] (amzn.to/4xa4gAf)
- [Modern Wisdom AI Debate] (youtube.com/watch?v=mSjaMyP5QjY)
- [Pacing the Frontier - open letter from frontier AI employees](pacingthefrontier.com)
- ["If You Weren't Worried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks" - archived New York Times opinion] (https://archive.ph/7Z8Z3)
- [New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove] (newthinkingallowed.org)
- Jesse Michels interview with Mishlove: youtu.be/lcaY-rd9Dhc?si=UDDrYtO1iWyc_1NM
- [U.S. Department of War UAP records] (war.gov/ufo)

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Who is the Artist When We Use AI to Make Art?

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-14 | FOLLOW US:
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Why You Should Write YOUR OWN Stuff!

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-13 | FOLLOW US:
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I Dont Even Want to Let AI Write For Me For Fun!

Do We Have a Right to Know Whats Real? | MTS #18

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-13 | 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.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Kale returns from Oxford
03:40 Blackwell's, Amazon, and physical books
12:11 Narrative nonfiction and lived experience
15:12 Norman Rockwell and popular art
18:33 Performance, audience, and craft
24:10 Can writing be taught?
30:07 Anthropic watermarks and Claude backlash
33:33 When online writing sounds fake
35:04 AI summaries vs AI authorship
40:27 Ghostwriting and the authorship problem
50:48 Writing someone else's grief
57:30 Trusting a public writer's voice
01:00:23 What if the output is synthetic?
01:06:10 AI video clones and fake podcasts
01:09:09 AI images and acceptable tool use
01:15:39 AI video, remixing, and real art
01:21:00 Film as ensemble creation
01:27:55 Brian Wilson, Pet Sounds, and constraint
01:33:28 Friction as creative necessity
01:39:40 Oxford, Lewis, Tolkien, and formation
01:45:13 The strange spirit of writing
01:53:31 Rick Rubin, taste, and receptivity
02:00:00 YouTube incentives and algorithm chasing
02:03:25 Why LLMs make writing feel vulnerable
02:09:02 Fake wisdom and knowing what is real
02:10:06 Jimmy Carr and C.S. Lewis
02:16:38 Interpreting the internet after 20 years
02:18:20 Frictionless tyranny and cheap dopamine
02:24:05 Books, feeds, and responsibility fatigue
02:27:42 WALL-E, DoorDash, and lost agency
02:35:06 Instacart and algorithmic work
02:40:45 Universities and the sacred books
02:48:10 Tech fatigue and surrender by exhaustion
02:54:00 Diffuse power with no single villain
03:00:23 AI companies as Wonka factories
03:05:44 Jurassic Park and the paperclip problem
03:07:30 Pluribus and writing against the hive mind
03:09:20 Provenance, deepfakes, and the right to the real
03:11:06 Signoff

RELATED RESOURCES:

- [Anthropic / Claude watermarking coverage from Axios](axios.com/2026/08/12/anthropic-claude-watermarks-ai-detection)
- [The Verge on Claude watermarks and C2PA provenance metadata](theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/977823/anthropic-claude-ai-watermarks-c2pa-text-images)
- [OpenAI on content provenance, Content Credentials, and SynthID](openai.com/index/advancing-content-provenance)
- [Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, *Zero to One*] (amzn.to/4gb9xAz)
- [Arthur C. Clarke, *Childhood's End*] (amzn.to/3UvYdaI)
- [Modern Wisdom: Jimmy Carr - “We’re At The Beginning Of A Revolution”](youtube.com/watch?v=gAxNYd01I6E)
- [C.S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time" background at CSLewis.com](https://www.cslewis.com/learning-in-war-time/)
- [Rick Rubin, *The Creative Act: A Way of Being*](amzn.to/4xAVvz9)
- [Steve Skojec. *Writing or Building?*] (skojecfile.steveskojec.com/p/writing-or-building)
- [Ojai - Sci-Fi Drama Feature Film (2026)] (youtube.com/watch?v=sSKJNGjVdvs)

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We Have to Look For Signal in the Noise

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-07 | FOLLOW US:
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The Printing Press Shattered Christianity

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-06 | FOLLOW US:
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You Cant Skip Suffering Without a Cost

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

Monitoring The Situation 2026-08-06 | 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?

RELATED RESOURCES:

D.W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny - amzn.to/3SgzmqL

D.W. Pasulka, Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences - amzn.to/3RNtqFG

Diana Walsh Pasulka on *The Joe Rogan Experience* #2533 - youtube.com/watch?v=wo6K0Bav3K0

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - amzn.to/4wK9Id7

The Estate of Marshall McLuhan on "the medium is the message - marshallmcluhan.org/common-questions

The Human Phenomenon: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - amzn.to/459yuHw

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere - encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/teilhard-de-chardin-pierre-1881-1955

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End - amzn.to/4wCFrwE

Bodleian Libraries history -- visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/history-bodleian

Bodleian Libraries spaces, including Duke Humfrey's Library and the Divinity School -visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/our-spaces

John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine - newmanreader.org/works/development

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We Are Creating GODS

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-31 | FOLLOW US:
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Cynicism is a Kind of Nihilism

Art: The Opposite of Doomscrolling

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-30 | FOLLOW US:
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Is AI Anti-Spiritual?

Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-30 | 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.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro
05:00 After last week’s Odyssey episode
06:00 Reading Homer: Fagles, Lattimore, and Ian McKellen
08:40 Taking the kids to see The Odyssey
11:15 Nolan, IMAX, and analog craft as lost technology
17:05 England, online caution, and upcoming topics
19:45 The genetic fallacy and refusing good things for tribal reasons
25:30 The Odyssey as a cultural win, even with imperfections
30:20 Numinous art versus doomscrolling
34:20 Diana Pasulka’s The Others and why it matters
39:40 Technology, transhumanism, and the spiritual cost of digital life
43:40 Teilhard, McLuhan, Vallee, and the nervous system of media
50:20 Obedience, authority, and conscience
59:35 Hospitality, sacred order, and moral intuition in The Odyssey
1:08:50 Crusader zeal and the search for a moral substrate
1:18:30 Rene Girard, mimetic desire, and unlikely messengers
1:28:15 Technology, myth, and the limits of the immanent frame
1:39:20 Formation, literature, and seeing from outside the system
1:49:20 Pasulka’s dark claim about digital life and spiritual sensitivity
1:58:20 Teaching old books to post-literate students
2:07:40 AI as cognition partner, not spiritual companion
2:18:30 Re-enchantment, intelligence, and the temptation to flatten mystery
2:29:40 Telemachus, Menelaus, and why experience cannot be replaced by data
2:39:40 Driving, agency, and what automation takes from us
2:51:00 Choice fatigue, limits, and learning what to leave out
2:59:40 Rick Rubin’s antenna and the problem of cynicism
3:04:40 Friendship as an antidote to the critic’s posture
3:06:40 Vulnerability, receptivity, and missing what is moving
3:08:10 Oxford, color balance, and wrap-up

RESOURCES/LINKS:

The Odyssey by Homer (Lattimore Translation) - amzn.to/4fvA0cQ
The Odyssey audiobook, Fagles translation read by Ian McKellen - amzn.to/4w81t9K
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (Trailer) - youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2ttJD2qQ
Diana Walsh Pasulka, The Others - amzn.to/4xeVW24
Diana Walsh Pasulka, Encounters - amzn.to/4fy1sW0
D. W. Pasulka, American Cosmic - amzn.to/4w2a65F
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media - amzn.to/4h0wl87
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the noosphere - bit.ly/4vZiBhL
Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia - amzn.to/4fG4ho1
Luke Burgis, Wanting - amzn.to/4vQtoKV
Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive - amzn.to/44T994v
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act - amzn.to/3TIScHq
Martin Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness - amzn.to/4wrg3Kb
Charles Taylor and the immanent frame - bit.ly/3REw9Ba
Steve Skojec, The Human Download: Consciousness is Way Weirder Than We Want to Believe - bit.ly/4hFeWlz

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Art is the dojo of the soul.

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-23 | FOLLOW US:
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Is Modernity Like the Trojan War?

Nolans Odyssey: Not Woke, But Liberal

The Unmeasurable Creative Phenomenon

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-17 | FOLLOW US:
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| STEVE SKOJEC |
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IG: steveskojec
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Is Influence a Kind of MAGIC?

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-16 | FOLLOW US:
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Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-16 | 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?

CHAPTERS:

00:00:00 Getting Rolling
00:02:24 Candace Owens and the Problem of Conspiracy Thinking
00:05:57 Profilicity, Audience Capture, and the Online Avatar
00:11:13 Chasing Clicks and Becoming the Profile
00:15:26 Self-Reflection, Consistency, and Public Persona
00:19:50 One-Sentence Persuasion and the Five Levers of Influence
00:24:13 Why Language Still Sounds Like Magic
00:28:19 Influence as Spooky Action at a Distance
00:30:30 Poets, Magicians, and Words That Compel Action
00:34:51 Writing, Teaching, and the Experience of Channeling
00:41:20 Socrates, Daemons, Muses, and the Inner Voice
00:45:47 Hijacking Influence and Leveraging Charisma for Bad Ends
00:48:57 Performance, Stage Presence, and the Unmeasurable Thing
00:54:18 Pickup Artistry, Manipulation, and Milton's Satan
01:00:17 Public Warmth, Private Persona, and Celebrity Charisma
01:07:44 Returning to Candace and the Enigma of Magnetic Influence
01:19:51 Tradistan, Peterson, Authenticity, and the Need to Explore
01:30:00 Drama, Tribes, Teams, and the Social Reward of Conflict
01:36:12 Debate Culture, Profile-Building, and Performative Challenges
01:41:53 Psychic Driving, AirPods, and Sound in the Head
01:50:06 Dreams, the Dead, and Experiences That Refuse Easy Categories
02:00:15 Religious Stories, Family Lore, and Kids Who Remember Other Lives
02:10:14 Podcasts, Attention, Walking, Driving, and Deep Work
02:10:53 Kale's Thesis Story and the Physical Memory of Books
02:20:12 AI "Memory," Human Recall, and Why the Metaphor Breaks
02:30:26 Can an AI Bot Be a Profile?
02:40:23 Reduction, Manipulability, and AI as an External Cognition Partner
02:50:39 AI Goals, Safety Behaviors, and Paperclip Problems
03:00:45 Creativity, Novelty, and What Machines Can Only Infer
03:10:06 Can You Teach a Bot to Love?
03:19:05 AI Adoption, Trust, Saturation, and the Coming Taxonomy
03:22:28 Closing: Audience Questions on AI Reactions

RESOURCES/RELATED LINKS:

Candace Owens, Queen Bee (Kale's Substack): kalezelden.substack.com/p/candace-owens-queen-bee

You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity: amzn.to/44tZyAT

Blair Warren, The One Sentence Persuasion Course: blairwarren.com

The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time: amzn.to/44xiVJq

Plato, Apology, especially the discussion of Socrates' daimonion: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_%28Plato%29

Background on Socrates' daimonion: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimonion_%28Socrates%29

Paradise Lost: amzn.to/4gHGlTv

Background on Milton's Paradise Lost and Satan's rhetoric: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost

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| STEVE SKOJEC |
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X/TWITTER: https://x.com/SteveSkojec
IG: steveskojec
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Substack: skojecfile.steveskojec.com

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Rush Limbaugh Changed the Game

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-09 | FOLLOW US:
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| STEVE SKOJEC |
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IG: steveskojec
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Substack: skojecfile.steveskojec.com

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An Honest Man Cant Win

Mind Control: Fiction or Reality?

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-08 | FOLLOW US:
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Patriotism, MKUltra, & the Government Secrecy Complex | MTS #13

Monitoring The Situation 2026-07-08 | 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?

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro
02:09 World Cup fever and Europeans discovering America
05:20 Heavy Pulp, America's 250th, and national pride
08:43 Rush Limbaugh and early counter-narratives
14:35 Media stories vs lived reality
20:05 Watching the Heavy Pulp video
25:30 Gen X, AI art, and memories of the before-times
30:01 Healthy tribalism and why community matters
34:13 The deep state, surveillance, and CIA suspicion
42:25 MKUltra enters the chat
42:35 Congress revisits MKUltra
56:08 Destroyed files, Dick Helms, and black budgets
1:01:36 Gold Warriors and off-book power
1:11:40 Jolly West, Jack Ruby, and JFK questions
1:19:06 Operation Midnight Climax
1:29:49 Allen Dulles and the birth of the CIA machine
1:39:48 Project Hail Mary and impossible moral choices
1:50:14 UFO legacy programs and erased histories
2:00:16 Classified physics, AI, and hidden science
2:10:06 Truth, perception, and epistemic humility
2:16:34 The Enola Gay and dark objects of power
2:20:43 Sacramentality, symbols, and haunted reality
2:29:37 Mexico, spiritual sensitivity, and false holy men
2:40:18 Pattern recognition and MKUltra’s target profile
2:54:50 Mass shootings, pharmaceuticals, and asking dangerous questions
3:00:17 Becoming the “just asking questions” guys
3:01:52 Is the map disclosing, or cloaking?
3:04:49 UFO disclosure and retconning history
3:07:26 The English Reformation as successful conspiracy
3:10:06 Data smog and the flood of information
3:12:25 JFK, Epstein, MKUltra, UFOs, and the battle for truth
3:15:10 Closing thoughts and the fellow weirdos

MENTIONED BOOKS:

CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties - amzn.to/4vlUJEJ

The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences - amzn.to/4wvj4sD

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control - amzn.to/3SL2y9r

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave - amzn.to/3QMExOG

The Return of the Strong Gods - amzn.to/4vcPHtX

The Stripping of the Altars - amzn.to/44j5Fba

RELATED VIDEO LINKS:

"Sweet Land" by Heavy Pulp on YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=kK3ymlosoHY

MKUltra congressional hearing / House Oversight - youtube.com/watch?v=dpQulJS-R50

JFK directed by Oliver Stone - amzn.to/3Tq7a4T

The Manchurian Candidate (original 1962 film) - amzn.to/3R5Nnai

How to Change Your Mind Netflix documentary series - netflix.com/title/80229847

Project Hail Mary (Streaming) - amzn.to/4aISCU5

Jesse Michels interview with Rep. Eric Burlison - youtube.com/watch?v=A2-y_HasHEw

OTHER LINKS:

Heavy Pulp on X - https://x.com/heavypulp

FOLLOW US:
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| STEVE SKOJEC |
YT: youtube.com/@SteveSkojec
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IG: steveskojec
TIKTOK: steveskojec
Substack: skojecfile.steveskojec.com

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Literature Teacher Says Moby Dick is an Alien Work

Monitoring The Situation 2026-06-14 | FOLLOW US:
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Should Clergy Say a Movie They Havent Even Seen Might be CURSED?

Monitoring The Situation 2026-06-12 | FOLLOW US:
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| STEVE SKOJEC |
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