It’s dark in my apartment, even though it’s morning. I turn on a couple of lamps that approximate the light of soft incandescent bulbs. But they’re not incandescents, they’re LEDs, and they give an uncanny approximation of real light that feels sickly and wrong, even when it’s close enough that it doesn’t seem like it should matter so much.

It does, though. Matter, I mean. How much in our lives has been changed by these compromises we never asked for, made by people who don’t care if it’s what we want or not?

I’m editing video at my desk, cutting and mixing and color grading and correcting the audio dynamics. Through the gap beneath my front door, the one that lets in the light and the leaves and the bugs, I hear the sound of fat raindrops slapping the cement sidewalk. It’s really coming down.

I finish my coffee — my second and final double shot of the morning. I’ve been drinking my coffee with just cream, no sugar, for so many years now that I don’t remember when I started. But lately I’ve been cheating, putting a splash of sweet creamer in with my usual half and half, and I’m as sure that I don’t need it as I am that I love the taste. Too much in my life has been bitter of late. A little sweetness feels almost like a hug.

It’s close to noon, and I’m finally hungry enough to make breakfast. I grab a white ceramic bowl from the drying rack and crack in a few eggs. For my entire marriage, I deferred to my wife on proper egg-making technique. She was particular about them in a way I never was. Couldn’t be overcooked. Couldn’t include cheese. The fact is, she’s an excellent cook, and her eggs almost always came out better than mine, so I acquiesced. But she’d always crack her eggs straight into the pan, then mix them as they cooked with her spatula.

Since we’ve been apart, I’ve gone back to the old ways. I grab a fork and start the rhythmic movement at the universal egg-beating cadence. The one any of us could recognize in our sleep, the sound of fork against bowl, moving through viscous liquid.

“Whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk whisk…”

It’s funny, but every time I hear it, it makes me think of the final scene in the movie Big Night.

Primo and Secondo are two Italian brothers who are trying to save a struggling restaurant they’ve opened in America. Primo is the cook, obsessed with quality and quantity and authenticity and correct pairings. Secondo is the manager, the pragmatist, focused on trying to make his American customers with their American tastes happy enough that the business can make ends meet. As the film draws to a close, they have just put everything they had left into a magnificent banquet at which they expect an appearance from the great American singer and musician Louis Prima. It is their hope that this one event, this “Big Night,” will save their failing business. But Prima, whose visit was promised as a good-faith gesture from their rival restaurateur, Pascal, never shows up — because he was never actually invited at all. It appears to have been an act of final sabotage by their much more successful competitor. Their last resources spent, the brothers get into a big fight in the dark on the beach near their shop, Primo wanting to go home to Italy, Secondo wanting to stay and make the American Dream work. They have been brought to ruin, and each blames the other for what went wrong.

The final scene begins the morning after the feast (and the fight) that failed to save them. Cristiano, their dishwasher, lies sleeping on the counter in the restaurant kitchen when Secondo comes in, placid, resigned to his fate. “Are you hungry?” he asks, as Cristiano rouses himself, then moves as though he will take the task from his boss. “I’ll do it,” Secondo says reassuringly, grabbing a frying pan from the rack.

What follows is five minutes of pure visual exposition, no dialogue, one continuous shot. He adds oil to the pan, and places it over a gas flame. Cracks the eggs. Beats them with a fork. Adds a pinch of salt. Cooks the eggs as Cristiano nibbles on a crust of bread. He plates the eggs just before Primo walks into the kitchen, but Secondo has saved him a portion. He plates the eggs for his brother, then they sit, eventually putting their arms around each other in a mutual gesture of conciliation before the end credits roll.

It’s a scene about life going on, despite loss, despite heartbreak, despite everything. It’s a scene about fraternal love surviving even the toughest conflicts. It’s incredibly moving, if you’re in the right disposition to feel what it’s trying to tell you.

And for me, for some reason, it’s all anchored by the everyday sound of those eggs being whisked in that bowl.

What I’ve learned since surviving my own big night — the one where I had to leave, to let go of my dream, my marriage, my family, after giving it everything I had and discovering it would never be enough — is that scrambled eggs taste better, come out fluffier and with a better texture, if you mix them in a bowl first, get them aerated and properly beaten, before putting them in the pan. They don’t come out the same way when you mix them while they cook.

I’ve learned a lot of other things besides, of course, but the eggs have become, somehow, a condensed symbol of the rest. Things known but forgotten — or left unexamined. Ways of being changed to please another, to fit in, only to lose yourself in the process while never actually becoming more loved or wanted as the end result.

You can spend your whole life trying to be who you think another person wants you to be in the hopes of earning their affection and respect, and only diminish yourself by the effort.

Breakfast made, I return to my desk. I don’t own a kitchen table. I have a little folding kind, but I usually just keep it stowed. My desk is where I work, where I write, where I edit, where I eat.

The rain outside has me thinking about the coast again. It’s the kind of day where nobody else is likely to go. The kind of day where I can brood in peace, savoring a dark mood.

But I keep working, keep doing other things, until it gets so late I know I won’t make it until the sun is already setting. So I don’t go.

Still, the idea has its hooks in me, and I can’t resist the pull forever. On the following Monday morning, staring at screens I’ve been looking at for too many days in a row, the urge becomes overwhelming.

Just go. Just go. JUST GO.

I decide to stop fighting it. I don’t give myself time to second guess. I don’t shower or shave. I grab my keys, my wallet, some water, and an old towel for sitting on, and I head straight to my car.

Read more

And this week, and I take the time to do a deeper dive into what it claims.

The publisher’s description sets the stage for this very unusual book:

For over thirty-two years, Jay Stratton served the U.S. on the battlefield and as a senior member of the National Intelligence Community. He specialized in emerging and disruptive aerospace technologies, including the most classified U.S. capabilities, making him uniquely qualified to identify anything in air and space. But when presented with a video of a mysterious advanced aerospace vehicle over a sensitive nuclear weapon site, Stratton quickly found himself investigating the most significant national security threat he had ever faced.

Determined to uncover the truth, Stratton cofounded the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), the first official U.S. Government program to investigate UAP since the closure of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Confronted by institutional secrecy, Stratton learned that there is a deeply hidden UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program that has been covering up the existence of non-human intelligent life for eighty years—keeping the truth from the public, Congress, and even Presidents. These powerful gatekeepers did not want Stratton to bring about disclosure. Risking everything, Stratton relentlessly pursued his investigation while informing Con­gress of his findings.

Facing obstacles and threats at every turn, he pressed forward and ultimately established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF), the first whole-of-government UAP program, forcing the nation’s leadership to finally confront the unknown and inform the public.

Of course, it gets a lot weirder than than the nuts and bolts investigation of non-human craft interacting with our military assets.

As Stratton goes deeper into his investigation of the phenomenon, the phenomenon deepens its investigation of him. Things…follow him home.

Glowing orbs that physically assault his children in the middle of the night.

7 foot tall bipedal wolves staring into the house from the back yard.

“Balloon head” aliens peering through the windows.

Shadow figures and portals around the house.

Claims that would seem outrageous if they came from a man less serious, less senior, and less obviously worried about what it all means.

From this week’s episode description:

A senior Defense Department official hears a classified briefing on an unidentified craft and tells Jay Stratton: "You're poking demons. You should stop."

Steve and Kale dig into Out of the Shadows: Stratton's account of the legacy crash-retrieval program, Lockheed's alleged 12 nonhuman craft, and the reports that get rewritten on their way up the chain. Then come Skinwalker Ranch, portals in his backyard, a wolf-like creature, and the orb encounter that sent his son to the hospital.

Kale brings Diana Pasulka's critique of Stratton's religious framing; Steve challenges her reading of the Pentagon encounter. What belongs to aerospace engineering, what belongs to religion, and what do we do when the categories overlap?

Also: space as a frontier, the midterms, young men and the Anakin meme, the post-war order, disappearing internships in the age of AI, and the hosts' concerns about Poland.

The latest MTS Podcast is available now!

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

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I got into an online discussion this morning that has me thinking about something I don’t enjoy contemplating — the predicament facing our young men right now.

I have 5 sons, and I don’t know how to guide them no matter how much time I spend on this. The future is a black box.

The discussion today began in response to a growing meme where Gen Z guys appear to be identifying with and idolizing Anakin Skywalker — who, of course, grows up to become Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. An iconic villain. A ruthless authoritarian who does countless unspeakable things in service of maintaining power, even if he is somewhat redeemed in the end.

I think this tweet from a young Catholic brit named Connor Tomlinson helps succinctly set the stage for why this meme has become popular:

Gen Z love the Star Wars Prequels because young men relate to Anakin.

A prodigy who has everything taken from him by alien savages, and is told he can't have a family or aspire to heroism by political institutions which constrain his potential while refusing to solve problems.

The only reason I saw this in my timeline at all is because my old pal replied to it, saying:

I'm GenX and I saw Star Wars ('77) in the theatre a bunch of times and was playing lightsaber battles in the park all summer. And it has taken me til middle age to figure out the Jedi weren't the good guys. The Jedi were the Boomers who set up a society no one could live in.

My interlocutor in the discussion, who I’m not going to drag into this post (because it’s not about her arguments, but the predicament itself), made the sensible case that we need to choose a higher path and find better stories to take our lessons from.

I understand her point of view. I just don’t think it maps to the present situation.

So I’m going to chop up and remix the replies I’ve already written to allow me to explain my concerns here, outside the context of this particular back-and-forth.

First, I don’t think a lot of people over 40 are tracking just how blackpilled with cynicism young men are right now. They don't think there's any hero's journey available to them where they can win.

I’m inclined to think that even Christian boys these days increasingly tend to see Christ's victory as only accessible spiritually. When they're dead. But they have to live in the world of the now, and it's been ruined by politicians and religious leaders who have sold their future for personal gain.

And so, they are turning to authoritarianism as the answer. They have been institutionally locked out of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, as it were. Take away a man's agency to accomplish things that are noble and good, and the only thing he thinks he has left is force.

To stop this turn towards authoritarianism from growing, we would need to work with them to develop a better path forward through the present tangle of seemingly intractable problems.

But I don't think there is a path forward. Not one I can see from here, anyway.

The only way things right themselves, in my opinion, is through a sufficiently catastrophic set of circumstances that we get a “hard reset,” and nature reasserts itself.

The Leftists have captured all the institutions, and they are brainwashing our kids. Some of us are fortunate to have kids who can resist, but most won't. I lost two siblings to the progressive mind virus. They are both smart, and were both very decent people before it happened. Now I find many of the things they say and think to be alien and unrecognizable. One of them has cut off our parents and any siblings who don’t buy fully into her crippled secular religion. And she’s old enough that I don’t see any reasonable hope she’ll grow out of it.

Which leads me to another thing I’ve been wrestling with.

A concept I’ve been developing over the past year is something I call “the impotence of truth.” If someone has chosen to invest in a particular narrative — especially if it secures their identity or framework for looking at the world — it is almost impossible to disabuse them of that view using facts and nuance. We’ve all experienced this with others, whether it’s someone who refuses to take accountability for their own actions, or someone caught up in some ideology we recognize is destructive, or someone in a relationship with someone who is clearly not good for them, etc. No matter how eloquently you try, you cannot talk them into seeing the error. They are fully committed at a precognitive level.

I used to believe that “the truth will set you free.” But as I began encountering the experience of having good faith arguments rooted in fact and evidence rejected outright in favor of a pre-selected narrative with increasing frequency, I have slowly had the notion that the truth does anything at all on its own completely beaten out of me.

The Gospel allegory of seeds falling on different kinds of ground is apropos here. Only on fertile ground can truth grow and flourish. And fertile ground means an epistemological orientation that prioritizes fidelity to reality over confirmation bias. In other words: if you don’t cultivate the humility to admit that something you believed was true turned out to actually be wrong — and most of us struggle with this even at the best of times — you’re going to have a really hard time when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

As someone still going through deconstruction/reconstitution of faith after being somewhat famous for having a very strong set of religious viewpoints, I run into all kinds of reactions from people — including those who fervently want to hold me accountable for changing my views to match more closely with my experience and understanding of the facts.

It’s also why, to use a more out-there example, people in the know talk so much these days about the perceived danger in revealing in a definitive way that non-human intelligences (NHI) are visiting the earth through advanced technology. They warn that it will cause ontological or epistemic shock. If you believe for scientific or religious reasons that NHI cannot exist or cannot be here, what do you do when they show up on your lawn? Does it break your mind? Does it break your faith? Does it break society itself?

So to return to the problem at hand, I think the West is really under a kind of spell. It is the spell of the post-war order, the so-called liberal consensus. Outside of a few rare centenarians, it’s the only world anyone alive has ever known.

And it’s a complete anomaly in human history. It has brought a completely unprecedented period of wealth and stability and security to the world, and we have come to see it as baseline “normal.” But it has become decadent and logistically overcomplicated and self-destructive, and it is now facing imminent collapse — both through shrinking populations and changes in military and geopolitical expressions of power.

The catastrophic second and third order effects that were forecast as a result of the loss of human labor through depopulation might be forestalled through the rise of robot labor. The jury is still out on that. But either way, The World Order, as we knew it, is going away.

And as we live through the tumult of the interim period, very bad things are happening — and it will likely get worse before it has any hope of getting better. Therein lies the appeal of the Robotopia of Hyperabundance promised to us by the AI bros. Elon Musk keeps telling us we won’t need to save for retirement. Some are saying we won’t need money at all.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

Even if it comes, we’re going to have to go through hell during the transition. Maybe that’s why the big tech bros are building bunkers in far away places. Maybe they know. Maybe they just watched too much James Bond.

But I digress.

My interlocutor today suggested Aragorn from Lord of the Rings as a better replacement model for young men than Anakin from Star Wars. And Aragorn’s certainly nobler. Righteous in his cause.

But I don’t see how he maps to the present moment.

When Tolkien was writing these stories, there was no post-war order. No globalism —not like now. No mass immigration from the third world, no liberal consensus that has turned into a disaster for the average person struggling to find work and a place to live and make ends meet. The world had not fully shaken off the memory of Christendom, nor had it yet achieved the technological advancement of thousands of years in just a century.

We also hadn't yet seen the utter emasculation of institutional Christian religion.

Very few things about our current state map cleanly to the before times. And God hasn't intervened to fix things up until now, so we shouldn't put our eggs in that basket.

These boys are facing a future without jobs, without a home, without the kind of woman they feel they can marry and live a happy life with. They're lonely and angry and assaulted by an endless barrage of sexualized imagery (both online and in person) luring them away from the straight path like a siren’s song. The more they give into that call, the more they resent themselves, and women in general. They are experiencing a felt loss of anything like meaning and purpose. If they're white, they see literally everyone else forcibly put ahead of them in line for anything they want to accomplish. And they're told they're evil for even being something they had no control over — the male descendants of European Christians.

The porn and video games and weed young men have increasingly been caught up are bad, to be sure, but in a way, they were also the things holding back the violent pendulum swing. I'm not sure anything can stop that for much longer now. We have backed these boys into a corner, told them they're privileged at a time where they see no advantage to being who they are, and then, to add insult to injury, we keep punishing them for merely existing.

And though I come at this from a generally “conservative” point of view, people on the Left are seeing it too. Eric Weinstein, who says “I don’t have a Republican bone in my body,” says that boys are being pushed further and further right by this culture, these schools:

Scott Galloway, another loud-and-proud leftist public intellectual, talks about how young men have no way to demonstrate excellence anymore, and how social media and algorithm-driven dating apps are changing mating behaviors in ways that exaggerate hypergamy and diminish opportunities for men to find good matches:

So the anger we're seeing isn't just adolescent rage or victimhood-mindset. They have recognized the injustice of their situation, and the only thing they think they have left is the oldest, most primal impulse a man has — to take it by force.

If you don't have a civilizational reset event of some kind that breaks down feminism's death grip on every door to power and personal development and allows men to be men again, we're cooked, as the Zoomers like to put it. The toxic empathy-derived policies downstream of that asymmetry are actively killing what’s left of the West.

Break that stranglehold, and you've also got a shot at killing the prevalence of critical theory that keeps driving woke ideologies like "institutional racism" and the rest of the excuses for creating a prejudicial prioritization system wearing “equality” as a skin suit.

But this is why I keep coming back to catastrophe.

I think nothing less than an event that is so destabilizing that it forces us back into natural hierarchies will do it. There's no leader, no matter what sign he hopes to conquer in, who can un-zombify the West. The narratives are too strong, the truth too impotent in breaking down their walls. As long as believing in ruinous ideologies is possible while sipping your pumpkin spice latte in peace and relative prosperity, the people who hold to them will remain steadfast until there’s nothing left.

The truth may be impotent in the telling of it, but the reality of a survival situation can only be denied at the cost of your own destruction. Make no mistake — even in such a scenario, some people will hold to the narrative at the cost of their own lives.

I don’t like being cynical. I have no interest in being a doomer. I want hope for the future — not as much anymore for myself, but for my children. And yet, I am afraid that for a hopeful future to one day exist, we may very well have to lose everything we've come to regard as normal.

The odds aren't good that most of us reading this today will live to see the other side of it, even if it happens soon. Whether that’s because it becomes too violent or too impossible to manage or just takes a very long time, I don’t know.

If you think I’m getting this wrong, please talk me out of it.

I would actually like to be shown a way out that isn’t this.

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I can’t stop thinking about the coast.

There’s a constant debate running in the back of my mind about whether I should just drop everything and go. Week in and week out, it suggests itself to me, like a lover trying to gently coax their brooding beloved into softening by looking them in the eyes.

It feels overly indulgent, with everything I’ve got going on, to drive hours to the Atlantic just to sit there for a while and stare at the waters, listening to the surf crashing against the shore, only to turn around again and drive hours back home.

But that’s exactly what I’d do if I went. I don’t go to the coast to surf or to swim or to fish or collect seashells. I go because it’s the only place left in the world that feels like church to me. The closest thing to heaven touching earth; a glimpse of the power and presence of an invisible, ineffable God.

I don’t know when I first realized this, I only know that the revelation came late.

If I had to trace it back, I’d guess it was the time, back in October of 2014, when we’d just found out we’d lost a child to miscarriage only a few months in. It was the first time we’d had a pregnancy go wrong, and on a whim, we grabbed the other kids on a chilly, misty day and drove all the way out to Assateague Island — the first time we’d ever been. We ate lunch in a dark-wooded, dingy pub along the way, flanked by the light and sound of old pinball and arcade games. The kids wore their winter jackets together with shorts as we walked barefoot on the sand and into the bracing chill of the foaming water as it lapped our toes.

I don’t remember if we had told the children what had happened yet, or why we came. But I know that the ocean somehow swallowed up the sorrow and the worry, like it was bigger than all the chaos I had raging inside. I noticed it that day like I never had before, and ever since, I’ve always preferred visiting lonely, deserted beaches on days when the water seems troubled and the skies are swathed in layers of steel gray.

I think I needed something that could take everything I threw at it and more, and remain there, unchanged, implacable, the rhythm of the waves like listening to the slow, steady breathing of some ancient, world-spanning beast.

They say that the noise of the water synchronizes your brain waves to a frequency that calms you, brings you down to level. Brown noise or green noise or ocean-colored noise lying somewhere in between, I don’t know which. I just love the way it drowns out everything else, sucks you in, makes the whole world fade away until it’s just you, being bled of your discontents. Just your mind and your heart and your weary soul, soothed by the steady, soaring percussion of crash, crash, craaaaash.

On the night I was forced to leave for the last time as a daily, integral part of the family we’d built together for the previous 22 years, the coast was my first stop. I rented a room in a neat little motel just a couple blocks from Carolina Beach, and I drove through the darkness for hours just to get to the waves, too numb to even feel the grief. I arrived too late and too exhausted to try to calm myself by the shore, so I waited until morning, when the sun was too bright and the day already too hot, but I still walked over to make my visit before heading out on the long and lonely road.

I stayed with the coast as long as the road would let me, eventually veering inland as I visited friends on my way to Rhode Island — The Ocean State — where I stayed with for the first real stretch of my exile. While there, I took advantage of the proximity, and visited as many beaches as I had time to see.

Five years back, right at the beginning of everything in my life falling apart, we sold everything and moved from Scottsdale, Arizona to Southern New Hampshire. I wanted to get away from the desert, from the people, from everything that had become familiar and normal and suffocating. I wanted my kids to have the seasons and go sledding and play outside in the woods and jump in the piles of leaves. I wanted to recapture the magic of the New England childhood I enjoyed back in Salvation Springs, where I’d spent so many of the most idyllic moments of my own young life.

It didn’t take.

Well, it didn’t take for my wife. She hated it there. The kids and I were pretty okay with it, although I don’t think any of us were made for small town living in the long term. But from where we were, it was a little less than 30 minutes to the coast, and that was a revelation. It was the closest I have ever come to living at the beach. If I had a bad day, I’d just get in the Jeep, put the top down, and drive up Ocean Boulevard, with the big, beautiful mansions of Rye on my left, and the rocky Atlantic shore on my right. I went as often as I could, not knowing I would leave only 9 months after arriving, but still trying to soak as much in as I could as somewhere, deep down, I knew something that good could never last. I’d buy dirt-cheap lobsters straight from the fishermen and take drives through the bright autumn leaves near the rock-strewn shore. Sometimes I’d keep driving up to Portsmouth and walk past the shops. It wasn’t a long time spent there, but it was full of things I needed, and would have liked to have had more of.

I miss that Jeep, so perfect for those drives. But I miss the scenery even more.

My personal happy place is a very specific stretch of California Pacific shoreline called Enderts Beach, just south of the Redwood Forest. It’s craggy and cliff-studded, and the first time I laid eyes on it the sun was setting and I was with my family on an impromptu autumn road trip to the Redwoods after other travel plans had gone wrong. We made so many great memories on that trip. Not just on the way up, but coming back down the Pacific Highway, all the way to San Diego, where we rented a little place so close to the water you could hear the waves through your open window at night. Each morning on the southern end of the trip, we’d get up early while the fog was still clearing out and walk from our little Airbnb to a surf-themed coffee shop around the corner, then walk to the cliffs, steaming cups in our hands.

It was one of the best trips of my life.

When you learn to meditate — something I’m absolutely terrible at — sometimes they tell you to think of a scene that gives you a feeling of peace and serenity. My mind always goes right back to that first evening at Enderts, the scenery looking just like this, except the colors a little more saturated, hues of purple and pink lingering as the sun dips below the horizon, like a synthwave fever dream:

I’ve only been to that spot twice: once on the way up to the Redwoods and once on the way back, that same trip. Maybe it’s all the more special because it only looks the way it does in my mind.

If I could, if I had no people I loved left in the world, I think I would move out to Northern California. There’s not much that’s big or fancy up there, but I could see heading out to Crescent City or Eureka, or maybe even up into Southern Oregon somewhere along the way. I’d write under the soft glow of old-fashioned incandescent lamps and visit weird old book shops and find the best local coffee place and hover over a hot latte as I stared through the condensation on the glass at the rainy gloom. I’ve never felt more at peace than when I’m in the coastal old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. I think it’s the closest thing I’ve found to the environment I was made for.

But made for it or not, maybe it was never meant to be.

The future is a weird place, because it’s so damn hard to see. There’s no map to take you there, and you never know quite when you’re going to run out of road.

But the past is strange, too, full of hazy, half-remembered things about places and people you no longer have before your eyes, at least not the way you used to. All these moments that get burned into our hearts and into our souls, that play like stitched-together reels on an out-of-focus old 8mm machine.

They tell us the stories about who we thought we knew and who we thought we’d be. But they are strangely soundless — or at least they are for me.

All except the memories of the coast. I can hear those every time I dream.

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If I were pressed to explain why I love the band so much, it would be hard to point to any single thing. To my ears, at least, they have a totally unique and irresistible sound. They brought trumpet and naked percussion back to pop music at a time when we were still recovering from a synthesizer hangover.

But more than anything, I think it was the half-sung, half-spoken-word, beat poet-esque delivery of lead vocalist John McCrea. It’s the kind of thing that grabs your attention and won’t let go. And underlying his delivery are songs that tell stories. If I could narrow my favorite songs of all time to a top ten list, Frank Sinatra — with its evocative descriptions and playfully odd themes — would certainly find its place squarely within that pantheon:

If you don’t know it, I strongly recommend that you click here and listen to it. It’s a brilliant piece of writing and musical composition.

But alas, this post is not about Cake. It’s not about Frank Sinatra, either.

It is about a faintly-glimmering radio station.

Now, to set the stage, I’ve been obsessed with radio since I was a kid — not just the medium, but the aesthetics. I’m honestly not sure what started it. I remember being particularly struck, when I was a little boy, by a scene at the beginning of a film that shows a radio production using practically-generated Foley sound effects being performed during a live broadcast.

I loved the sound of the transatlantic accent used by old radio announcers, and I’d listen to my grandmother’s tapes of the lectures of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. I remember scrounging through the basement racks inside Boscov’s department store at the corner of Court St. and Water in downtown Binghamton, New York. It was there that I dug up copies of Orson Welles’ original 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds and a cassette tape called “50 Famous Commercials From Yesteryear” — both of which informed my own voiceover work later in life, and led to me landing the announcer gig for this television show a few years back:

There’s just something magical about radio. I don’t know what it is. It’s not just the audio. It’s the ambience. A man sitting in a little soundproof booth, speaking carefully into a beautifully-constructed microphone, the needles on the monitors moving with his voice as an array of electronics he almost certainly doesn’t understand converts sound into radio frequency transmissions that travel long distances through the vast of night. From tuning in to Art Bell or Delilah on late night drives across the country when no other signal was available to scanning the weird spaces between channels for alien-sounding broadcasts on an old radio up in my attic to recording my own “radio shows” when I was a kid to eventually having a real on-air show of my own at the campus station in college, I can’t remember a time where it wasn’t something I loved.

One of my favorite experiences was with a weekly call-in trivia show broadcast from the SUNY Binghamton campus station, WHRW. It was called, Mad Trivia Party. And I was obsessed with it.

I think I was 16 at the time. I listened every week. Back then, of course, it was the very earliest days of the consumer internet, and there was nothing like Google. Even if you had somehow been given magical access to a good search engine, the odds that you could quickly find the answers to live trivia questions were practically nonexistent. The information simply wasn’t out there back then. Websites were niche, and limited.

So if you wanted to play to win at Mad Trivia Party, it was all about either:

a) Just knowing a bunch of random, interesting stuff, and/or

b) Being really good at looking things up in books on the fly

I remember there was a question once about the spelling of an olde English word pronounced, “Fanshaw.” I think that question lingered for a couple of weeks without being solved, until it was finally revealed to be spelled, “Featherstonehaugh.”

Now, I have no idea if that’s accurate in the slightest or totally apocryphal. But I can tell you that I believed it like Gospel at the time.

One week, against all odds, I managed to win the call-in show. I was elated. The “prize” for getting the most points on any given show was to be a guest panelist the next week. I’d never set foot on a college campus, and I was about to meet these people who had cred in the local nerd culture, which was my native element at the time. Some of them were regulars on the local computer bulletin board systems (BBSes). They were much older than me, and in my opinion at that age, way cooler. I felt very smart, very much a part of something I loved, and very excited.

One of my parents gave me a ride to the station, over 20 minutes away from our rural home up a dead-end road in Kirkwood, which is on the east end of nowhere. In fact, it could be difficult to get the campus radio station at my house because of the limited range of the FM transmitter. I remember always listening to it in the basement — whether because I wanted privacy, or because it was the only place I could pick up the signal, I can’t recall. Maybe it was both.

So I went into the studio and did the show. I met the panelists, who until that time I’d only known by their voices. The only female on the panel went by the pseudonym, “The High Mistress of Mosh,” and I’ve thought about that name every time I’ve heard the word “mosh” ever since. I don’t think I would have been more excited if I’d been invited to go on Letterman — and I was a fan of that show. To my surprise, they had another guest host — a guy who went by the handle “Fox” on the local BBSes. He was a vocal atheist, and I was becoming a zealous young Catholic. We’d tangled any number of times in the online forums when it came to matters of faith. And now I was sitting with him in a studio, and he was very nice to me, and even gave me a ride back to my Grandma’s house in the snow in his mother’s borrowed minivan.

I only ever made it on the show that one time, but it was a formative experience. I loved the participatory style, the camaraderie of the hosts, the inside jokes, the deeply local connection, and the fact that you could trust people to do a call-in trivia show honestly because they genuinely had no good way to cheat.

To this day, I keep this neo-retro-style radio on my bookshelf, just because in my eyes, this style of device is pure art:

Looking back on all this, I suppose it’s no real surprise that I became a podcaster when such a thing became a technical possibility.

But all of this is just prelude. I feel like I’m telling you the unnecessary backstory before you get to the recipe I’ve buried at the bottom of the page. So let me get right to it.

There’s an old radio station that was built around 1940 right here in Raleigh — the suburb of Cary, specifically — that has some cultural notoriety. It’s called WPTF, and though the building looks like it could use some serious TLC, it’s actually still active as a transmission station. It’s a ghost building, in the sense that nobody works out of it. It’s even reported to be the site of an old bomb shelter.

The broadcasts it transmits come from a newer studio quite a distance away in North Raleigh — much closer to where I live, actually — and the old radio tower and art deco building housing the AM transmitter equipment sit almost completely hidden behind a gate, which is itself behind a copse of mature trees, nestled on the other side of a set of railroad tracks, off of a random stretch of East Chatham St.

I’ve driven by it dozens of times without ever even noticing anything was there:

But today, I went looking for it. I’ve been curious about it for a while, because it’s the building that WSQK 94.5 FM, “The Squawk” — the radio station that prominently features in Season 5 of the Netflix hit series, Stranger Things — is directly based on.

Here they are, side by side:

Read more

Had a thought last night about the need for a “culturally-relevant right.”

Today I’m noodling it more.

The context for this is the long podcast conversation and I had last week about You Can See Everything. We were blessed to pull in over 16,000 views and 330 comments on YouTube (and counting). Our audience was engaged, interested, and thoughtful about this topic — one even the two of us were initially worried might come across as a bit obscure.

It was really encouraging.

I haven’t seen many conservatives outside our sphere talking about this film and what it means, other than those who are proud of their disinterest in or outright hostility to it.

As a group, we have this weird tendency to trip over our own feet to countersignal or even take pride in the ignorance of deeply culturally-relevant phenomena like this. The itch to avoid or even boycott anything that smells the slightest bit off, or doesn’t comport perfectly with priors about morality as it applies to art is so strong that it seems to have largely sidelined us as a group in terms of clocking the zeitgeist, let alone influencing where things go.

A lot of this could be explained by personality types. People who are high in openness on big 5 tests are highly correlated with political liberalism -- but also with intellectual curiosity, interest in out of the box thinking, and general social nonconformity.

It also maps to creativity, artistic expression, a fascination with abstract ideas, psychology and human behavior, and cultural curiosity.

I took the Big 5 test 6 years ago, when I was still deep in the tradosphere and caught up in a lot of personal baggage that was negative and screaming to be dealt with. I have a feeling my results would be noticeably different today, as they have been for some of my friends who’ve re-taken it after years of personal development.

But even back then, I scored a 71 out of 100 on openness, and I guarantee that number would be higher now. I felt the shackles come off my thinking in an almost tangible way in the interim. A letting go of the idea that I was only “allowed” to think about certain things in certain ways.

Nevertheless, for lack of a better category, I still identify as a conservative in most ways, and I wonder how many of us have the capacity to break out of tribal thinking and actually develop that relevance-awareness and interest.

It seems like something we could use more of if we want to stop being left behind.

I’m opening up the comments today to all subscribers, free or paid, if you care to discuss. I think it’s an interesting and important topic, and I’d like to hear your thoughts.

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We’ve got thrills, chills, and midweek mayhem!

(I’m only half-kidding.)

This week, we continue our thematic search for truth behind the nested masks of lies in our social imaginary; from actresses changing their faces to narrative reconstructions and microexpressions, why is it that we can all look at the people offering the same information and come away with totally different understandings of what it means?

We also dip our toes into the weird, talking about spiritual parasites, historical accounts of levitation and bilocation, preternatural intuition, and the fact that if you pay too much attention to the things that lurk in the shadows of reality, they have a tendency to start paying more attention to you -- which also describes the egregores that power our online algorithms as they feed us more of what they have observed us interacting with.

We finish up with a return look at You Can See Everything (but with spoilers about the second half this time) and examine the way art can reveal deeper meaning in a way nonfiction can’t.

All of our various ways of pretending eventually rack up a bill that comes due. What happens when the stories we wear as disguises become threadbare, and reality shows through?

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

I’ll be 49 next month.

Some people say that’s still young, but I can feel the lie in my flesh.

Like the Psalm says, “seventy is the sum of our years, eighty if we’re strong.”

Do I have 21 years left on the earth? 31?

What if it’s 5, or 3, or six months?

The mind moves more naturally towards the contemplation of death when one feels there is no longer anything left to live for.

No goals that feel important enough. No bucket list to check off. No central organizing principle around which your life is oriented any longer. No reason to get out of bed in the morning except to sustain the torments for one more day.

No daily presence of the people you love.

In those moments, death can look a lot less like a jagged-toothed, gaping maw, and a lot more like the sweet embrace of final relief.

And yet even in her most appealing moments, Lady Death’s seduction has an uncomfortable edge. Who truly knows what’s on the other side? We like to believe that consciousness lives on after death, but in what state? What if it does, but what we find there is anything but good — or at least, not good for us in particular? What if it’s nothing at all, and we never even get a chance to know it? If the consensus on the most likely options are only these: heaven, hell, or annihilation — then sifted evenly, there’s only a roughly 33% chance of getting the one we’ve all been waiting for. And Christian Eschatology, if nothing else, tells us that the odds aren’t random at all.

“‘Lord, are they few that are saved?’ But he said to them: ‘Strive to enter by the narrow gate; for many, I say to you, shall seek to enter, and shall not be able.’” (Lk. 13:23-24)

33% is apparently optimistic.

I think too, about the actual experience of dying. Will it be a surprise, or take me slowly and painfully? Will I die in my sleep, or get cancer, or have a heart attack or stroke? Will I get rear-ended by a runaway truck, or perhaps choke on some food in my apartment, all alone?

It’s hard to think of a desirable way to go. Many think that going in your sleep would be the best kind of departure, but others insist they’d rather know it’s coming so they have more time to prepare.

"She could never be a saint,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick."

We don’t have a satisfactory answer for this fear, so most of us attempt to avoid the subject altogether. We don’t like thinking about it, anticipating it, or allowing ourselves to really, deeply accept that “it’s really going to happen to me.” We all know that none of us is getting out of here alive, and yet one of the greatest blessings each and every one of us has is being blissfully ignorant about the day and the hour. It would ruin whatever time we have left if we were counting down days on a calendar, putting X-marks through each box with a thick-tipped Sharpie, black as a hearse, always aware in each moment that we are inching, inching closer to the end; the grains of sand slipping through the glass faster than we care to know.

We even avoid confronting the reality of death in the animals that become our food, every piece of meat we purchase pre-cut and pre-packaged in pristine plastic wrap, devoid of any recognizable characteristics, nestled cleanly on its little absorbent pad so no unsightly fluids escape to slosh around atop the crisp white foam. We don’t think about the creature, we focus on the cut. Breast. Thigh. Wing. Chop. Loin. Steak. We don’t say “pig,” but “pork,” not “cow,” but “beef.” It’s not “calf,” it’s “veal.” Even “chicken” and “turkey” are “poultry” in pleasant company. (Many of us do still say “chicken,” but have you ever met a chicken? They’re not likely to be missed.) In our sanitized society, we’ve managed to ensure that we’re always at least a couple of degrees removed from even the death that fills our bellies. We do not whisper prayers of gratitude over the bounty of the hunt, but treat each slab of meat as though it was extruded from some assembly line. Not even the most enthusiastic meat enjoyers — myself included — could stomach the daily carnage of a modern industrial slaughterhouse.

And so we blind ourselves to the fact that death is all around us. It takes our loved ones. It’s in the news. It comes for the actors and musicians we grew up watching on the television and steals our beloved pets, leaving their unseen ashes on our mantles sealed up in tiny wooden boxes. It startles us when death comes for that classmate we went to high school with or that neighbor we knew growing up. We are entirely powerless before its seemingly random selection process, like some kind of macabre NFL draft. “Who is going to go in the first round?” We speak in low tones to one another about the news, “Did you hear that so and so died?”

I accidentally killed a deer with my car last month. First time that’s ever happened to me. I’ve had razor sharp eyes until very recently, a subtle blur now creeping in around the previously crisp edges of my 20/20 vision. I always used to see them in plenty of time, lurking in the underbrush, silhouetted like statues in the almost-dark, still like stones until they made their suicide runs. But I also used to be less distracted. These days, I get so lonely that I spend my mindless work miles checking notifications at every stoplight, or talking to a robot who lives on my phone and speaks in an almost human voice, just to feel connected to something that talks back. There used to always be a person in my passenger seat. Now there’s a canned voice issuing thinly from a tinny speaker.

So there I was, on a weekday evening, taking an empty exit ramp off the highway as twilight dimmed to dark, annoyed at being lectured by my captive nonhuman about something I’d mentioned that wasn’t politically correct. I didn’t see the little fawn until it was already too late. Just a baby, I noted, as I saw his limp body skidding to the side. So small that the only damage he did was to take out the bezel around my fog light. No major structural damage, just another blemish, an ugly vehicular scar to remind me whenever I have to go for a drive that I make foolish mistakes, and that everything, eventually, falls apart.

I felt terrible for the rest of that night. It wasn’t a good, clean, intended kill. Anxious and preoccupied with my own life, I ended up taking his before it had really begun.

But I had already been thinking a good deal about dying, and it drove the point home: death comes for us all, and it rarely arrives announced.

In the old days, the monks would keep human skulls where they could see and contemplate them, for the purpose of memento mori — remembering that you, too, will die one day, and you should therefore be prepared.

I’d always associated the memento mori tradition with Christianity, but I recently discovered that it’s a much older practice. The ancient Greeks had mémnēso thanátou, and in the Platonic dialogue Phaedo, Socrates notes that philosophy is truly about "nothing else but dying and being dead." The second-century Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius famously advised, “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”

But what does “live it properly” mean?

That depends on what you believe.

As a quasi-public figure and confessional writer, I’m never short of well-meaning folks lining up to send me emails and messages telling me what my problem is, where I went wrong, and what I’m supposed to do to fix it. They read about my life and are certain they know the prayers I need to pray and the steps I need to take and the ways I need to change to get myself right — and the suggestions are most forceful when they relate to my beliefs.

Some say I’ve “abandoned God,” as though I didn’t beg him not to let me go, only for him to do it anyway. They think I should immediately return to my lifelong practice of Catholicism, even though I have good reasons to feel estranged from the church and no longer have any real conviction that it’s true. Others think I should take Orthodoxy for a spin, even when I tell them that it feels alien to me and uninviting. Some say I should just give up on the illusion that one can make religion work at all, and admit that we’re completely on our own until the fateful moment when, at last, we blink out of existence altogether.

None of those things fit neatly. All of them contain fragments of this puzzle I’ve been trying to solve before I go. It’s not the kind of thing that can be rushed, even when I’m acutely aware that I’m that much closer to death today than I was the day before. When you pretend to believe in things you don’t — even ostensibly good things — it’s still a lie. I don’t want to lie. I don’t think that’s a good preparation for living right or dying well.

So instead I take the slow path of seeking truth, and pray that I will find it. But I also know that whatever form of faith I may come to find with some conviction will do little to console me or repair the losses I have already endured. The life I thought I was placed on this earth to live would not return to me, undamaged, nor would I get a refund on the quarter century I invested in the belief that “until death” actually meant until one of us dies.

So I lie in my bed at night, tossing and turning, muttering, “God, I need you. God, please help me. God, are you even there? God, I can’t do this anymore and I don’t know what to do.”

That’s what the only workable version of faith looks like for me these days. It isn’t rosaries or novenas or candles or prayer books. It’s not Sunday liturgies or pilgrimages or retreats. It’s being trapped at the bottom of a well, looking up and yelling as loud as I can, “Is anyone up there? Can someone please throw me a rope? It’s dark and it’s cold down here, and I would really prefer not to be left here all alone.”

Sometimes, in the worst moments, I want to stop trying to figure out what I believe and just revert to my old defaults for a quick exit. Just ask him to forgive my sins and take me before I wake.

After my family moved to Virginia, I went almost a whole month without real human contact. Not a handshake. Not a hug. Certainly not a sit-down conversation with someone in the flesh. It tore open a deeper chasm within me than I knew was there. It forced me to grapple with the very rejection and abandonment I’d so feared since I was a child.

By the third week, I started feeling like maybe my mind was slipping. It’s hard to know how sane you are without another person as a reference point. The practical effect of this kind of isolation feels somewhat like being dead while you’re still alive. As if you are a ghost, floating through a living world where everywhere you look, people are moving through this mortal plane, together with those they love, and not a single one of them can see you as you walk alone in their midst.

I can’t help but notice the beautiful things they take for granted. The couples and their subconscious habits of physical contact. The brush of fingertips on the other’s arm as they pause to look at something; a hand pressed gently on the small of the other’s back as they walk. Parents look past their little ones, babbling away in shopping carts, rolling through the produce aisle. Groups sit together talking in coffee shops like it’s the most normal thing in the world, while I look for a table just for one. Busy restaurants are full of friends conversing or laughing together as I walk by, looking in through windows from the street, on my way to nowhere and no one.

I don’t think any of us want mere human proximity. We don’t want just anyone to embrace us, or sit down for a heart-to-heart. We want to be wanted, not merely tolerated. Desired with particularity, not just treated like a warm, fungible body filling a temporary void. And in our weakest moments, we want to know there’s someone — our someone — to help us up when we fall.

When I get to see them, my kids come to me and embrace me like no one else can. But there used to be someone else waiting to put her arms around me, beautiful and bold, even if I can’t remember the last time she did.

I came to learn, much to my own horror, that I was nobody’s forever, and will likely never be.

I miss her. The version of her who loved me, anyway, back when that was still something I believed was real. I miss having my person, unique to me. Someone who had weathered the countless storms we faced together, each of us knowing parts of the other better than we know ourselves.

To my mind, love like that is the only thing that makes a life marred by unavoidable suffering worth living at all. A shared life. Personal intimacy. The subtleties of knowing just how the other likes their coffee or where the stress sits in the muscles of their shoulders so you can hit the knots on the first press with your thumbs. Being sure before you even ask which new shows they’d like to watch with you, or which music you’ve discovered that you know they would enjoy. Knowing the precise way they laugh, or cry, and the proprietary knowledge of the singular scent of their skin. The memories you help each other recall. The inside references. The solidarity of shared history. The unifying love and pride you feel when you both look together at the wonderful children your love has made.

How do you adapt when every atom of your being is built for personal connection, severed against your will, and every night that you come “home” it’s to a place that’s still and silent as a tomb?

How do you fill the hole left by a life that has been so lived? Not the ambient presence of a roommate or a goldfish, but the reality of knowing and being known? The love I long for is a comfortable love. Broken-in. The kind that is more about presence than performance. The quiet confidence of deep companionship.

Love like that makes being alive feel so much more than just a slow, silent surrender to the grave.

In a very real way, I died the night I was forced to walk out that door. My body just hasn’t fully gotten the memo yet. But I’ve noticed that when it gets dark in my mind, my body starts to reflect it. Ailments pile up. Things go awry. There’s a reason why some people seem to stay forever young, while others grow old before their time.

And yet, something in me still wants to live. Without reason, without hope, without a vision for the future, some part of me still wants to know what happens next.

And lately, despite the seeming irrationality of it, that desire to live has grown stronger than I can explain.

So recently, as I scrolled through my emails, deleting all the piles of junk on a particularly difficult day, it immediately caught my attention when I came across a newsletter I haven’t read in quite a while, with the subject line, “How to say "YES" to life…”

It felt like a message. So I clicked.

And there it was, the frustrating theme of surrendering control of fate once again repeated:

I found myself wondering what life itself would be like if, rather than willing it to conform to our design only to end up in despair, we simply said “YES” to its will, collaborating with rather than resisting the centrifugal force of the heart, the angular momentum of memory, the gravity of change. “YES” to the necessary losses. “YES” to the fear that signals growth. “YES” to the death of the dream of perfection.

“The great difficulty is to say Yes to life,” James Baldwin observed in reckoning with the paradox of freedom not long after Viktor Frankl looked back on surviving the Holocaust to insist that our task here is to say “yes to life in spite of everything.”

Beyond basic physical survival, most of our psychological suffering, when closely examined, is a form of saying “NO” to life — a refusal, vehement or subtle, to bend the idea of how things should be to the raw reality of how they are, the reality that is the only arena in which we can act to change anything. All things not pliant enough to bend will break — fragility is a function of rigidity.

I clicked the link in the text that said, “say ‘yes to life in spite of everything,’” and it took me to a post on “Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning.”

I skipped the post and bought the book the post was based on instead.

And since I was feeling stir crazy, I decided to take it with me for a walk. After a long, hot summer, it was a strikingly beautiful day, sunny but not too warm, the temperature at a comfortable 69 degrees, complemented by a gentle breeze.

At first, my body rebelled against the effort. My walk was taking me up and down hills, and in the process, reminding me how far out of shape I’ve allowed myself to become. Surrender to entropy is easy at the best of times, but this past year has been a headlong rush to the bottom. Grief is an enervating thing, and my default coping mechanisms have never included long sessions at the gym.

But after I got warmed up, I started feeling better. My intended destination was a coffee shop about a mile and a half up the road. I live in the middle of the city, but Raleigh is famous for its trees, and there were some surprisingly bucolic vistas along the way.

The leaves haven’t turned yet here, but they are losing the depth of their green. Early fall was like late summer, but real autumn is finally on its way. You can feel its approach, and the feeling is invigorating.

I am a northern boy, made for colder climes.

When I finally got to the coffee shop, life felt better than it had in quite a while. I ordered a latte and some water, and found a seat at the outdoor patio overlooking a large quad, nestled within tall apartment buildings above first-floor businesses.

And then I read my Frankl.

I think almost everyone has heard of Man’s Search for Meaning. Like many books, I own it, but I’ve yet to crack it open. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything is a related work, drawn from a series of lectures Frankl gave less than a year after he was liberated from the Türkheim concentration camp — a sub-section of Dachau — and discovering that both of his parents and his wife were dead. Both works circle the theme of life retaining its meaning despite even the most intense suffering.

I didn’t know much about Frankl, but I discovered that he was a neurologist and psychiatrist who specifically worked in suicide prevention before the war. Despite experiencing profound personal loss, he immediately turned his attention to producing these works after his release, and he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in just nine days the year after he was freed.

I find this remarkable. I’ve had nearly 11 months to work through my own loss, and I cannot fathom the depth of his resilience, let alone his stubborn optimism.

“The past few years,” he writes, “have certainly disenchanted us, but they have also shown us that what is human is still valid; they have taught us that it is all a question of the individual human being. After all, in the end, what was left was the human being!”

He continues, speaking of the death camps:

What remained was the individual person, the human being—and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down—the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one—the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

So, in the end, was there something like a decision that needed to be made? It does not surprise us, because “existence”—to the nakedness and rawness of which the human being was returned—is nothing other than a decision.

And then he makes his overarching case:

We give life meaning not only through our actions but also through loving and, finally, through suffering. Because how human beings deal with the limitation of their possibilities regarding how it affects their actions and their ability to love, how they behave under these restrictions—the way in which they accept their suffering under such restrictions—in all of this they still remain capable of fulfilling human values.

So, how we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully. And we should not forget the sporting spirit, that uniquely human spirit! What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them? In general, of course, it is not advisable to create difficulties for oneself; in general, suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is thus unavoidable and inescapable.

Fate, in other words, what happens to us, can certainly be shaped, in one way or another. “There is no predicament which cannot be ennobled either by an achievement or by endurance,” said Goethe. Either we change our fate, if possible, or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune. And now we also understand what Hölderlin means when he writes: “If I step onto my misfortune, I stand higher.” How misguided it now seems to us when people simply complain about their misfortune or rail against their fate. What would have become of each of us without our fate? How else would our existence have taken shape and form than under its hammer blows and in the white heat of our suffering at its hands? Those who rebel against their fate—that is, against circumstances they cannot help and which they certainly cannot change—have not grasped the meaning of fate. Fate really is integral in the totality of our lives; and not even the smallest part of what is destined can be broken away from this totality without destroying the whole, the configuration of our existence.

I’m still working my way through the book. But it is an irrepressible apologetic for life, fully lived, even through the worst kinds of suffering.

It feels paradoxical.

And yet it calls back to the symbol that changed my perspective early this summer: the Odysseus of the recent film, confronted by Calypso with the vexing mandate to stop trying to control his fate and surrender to the gods — specifically, to the chaos of the storm.

No matter how many times I re-embrace this idea, I seem to always find that I have laid it back down again. And every time I do, I grow weary, blinded by a future I cannot imagine, seduced by the siren’s song, luring me towards the shoals of despair.

"It told you that what you most want is what you can't have,” he tells his crew, after they unblock their ears and untie him from the mast, “And what you most can't have is what you already had, and lost."

“Either we change our fate, if possible,” Frankl replies, “or we willingly accept it, if necessary. In either case we can experience nothing but inner growth through such misfortune.”

I do not suffer any illusions about constancy. Frankl himself recalls the case of a suicide he was called to attend to. “Words alone are not enough,” he says, recounting that the woman who had taken her own life had done so beneath a saying, framed and hung on her wall: “Even more powerful than fate is the courage that bears it steadfastly.”

Admittedly, there are days when I want to say it, and days when I certainly don’t, but “Yes to life, in spite of everything” is one hell of an ethos. Ballsy and brash. As Dylan Thomas famously wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And so Frankl, who has earned it, gets the final word:

It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it.

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At some point, I even started following her on X, for reasons I can’t recall. At another point, her account interacted with mine. I was given to understand that she was operating her account by proxy through family members.

I found out this week that I was misinformed.

Her longtime boyfriend, Billy Evans, is apparently the guy who runs that account.

How do I know? Because I’ve now watched a movie about her life. Twice in one week.

When I saw this trailer for a new film about Holmes by Canadian comedian turned documentarian Nathan Fielder, I was so intrigued, I realized I had to go see the movie:

It’s a three-hour experience — and again, a documentary — but it may actually be the most riveting film I’ve ever seen.

First of all, it’s gorgeous. The filming, the editing, and the color grading are all magnificent — as is the score, with deep, suspenseful riffs that carry a heavy load throughout the runtime.

But it’s not just a movie about a woman who is about to be separated from her small children as she goes to prison for defrauding investors. It’s a story within a story. It’s an examination of unreliable narrators — including the documentarian himself — and the way we have a tendency to think we can construct an accurate understanding of a person from a sufficiently detailed model of their life.

It’s about the magic of perception, too.

It’s about narratives that overpower facts.

It’s such a perfect film for our time that I don’t think it could have worked nearly this well at any other. Last time I checked, it’s the #1 movie in America right now, even though it’s currently playing in fewer than 1,000 theaters.

So, I did something I never do, and I insisted that go and see the movie.

He was resisting. He had other things going on. I told him that the universe dropped this in our laps, and we had to talk about it on Monitoring the Situation this week.

So he went. And before he was even done, I was receiving messages like:

“Omg omg.”

“I’m going to explode.”

“That was a breathtaking wrinkle.”

I saw it again the same day he saw it for the first time, so I could try to deconstruct the magic tricks and discuss it cogently on the show.

Which is exactly what we did.

We did our best to be spoiler-free, but conceptually, certain things we said could frame your perception going in if you’re planning to see it.

But if you’re a cinephile at all, or someone fascinated by human psychology, by the power of story, by the ways in which we deceive ourselves and others…I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

(There is a scene of nonsexual male nudity for about ten seconds in the film, so if that kind of thing would keep you from the theater, you’ve been warned.)

Without further ado, I present to you our discussion of You Can See Everything, the power of narrative, managed reality, and more:

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

It was a lovely time. We had a very tasty dinner at a local burger place I’d been wanting to try out, and then she came back to my apartment, where we discussed and debated the ethics of AI, and how it might be usurping human agency and creativity. She argued from Platonic philosophy, I argued from long experience as a creator and several years as an AI user — and also as someone who thinks about and discusses this regularly on my podcast. Knowing that she’s considering the path ahead for her life, I stopped at one point and suggested that she consider a career in the philosophy and ethics of AI, since it’s a field that sorely needs the thinking of bright minds like hers. It got late, we said our goodbyes, and she headed back to her friend’s house, where she was staying for a few days.

Around the time she was heading out, I suddenly remembered having seen something about a special event that Tesla was supposed to have been holding that evening for a new car model called the “Roadster,” which I knew nothing about. But the hype had made me curious, so I hopped on X after she left and looked to see what I’d missed.

I have to be honest: nothing I’d heard had prepared me for what I was about to see.

About an hour before my daughter left, Elon Musk had staged a tech demo of the latest innovation to come out of the efforts of the electric car company he leads and his combined rocket ship & AI company, SpaceXAI.

The demo showed the much-anticipated Roadster doing things that no car has ever done before — all while driving itself without a human being in control.

In case you missed it, there’s a full 31-minute video (the action starts about 5 minutes in) of the entire presentation for those willing to take the time. For the rest of you, I’ll offer a few brief videos: essentially the CliffNotes version of the event.

If you’re wondering, this isn’t just me being a spergy guy talking about a cool new toy. There’s something deeper at work in society that this points to, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, the upside down ramp:

Then, the kick-flip:

Finally, 0-60 in 1 second (and then at 0.81 seconds):

I have to admit, I was pretty floored by what I saw. Not since Doc Brown’s DeLorean in Back to the Future II had I seen a car do anything this cool, and that one was pure fiction.

There was a meme going around a few years ago of a SpaceX launch tower with the popular Silicon Valley phrase, “You can just do things.” I found myself thinking of that, grabbed a photo of the Roadster doing its thing, fed it through Grok Imagine, and came up with a new twist:

This philosophy speaks to something about the spirit of boldness in the relentless pursuit of innovation, and it’s a reminder I like to consider in my own life when I’m feeling trapped and needing to find a path forward.

I sent a link to the event to my partner in thoughtcrime, , knowing that he’s an early riser and was probably in bed before the videos went live. I said, “Flying cars are finally real!” and headed off to sleep happy to be alive in a time where a guy like Elon is out there making amazing things like this happen.

When I got up, I had a reply from Kale, but it wasn’t what I’d expected:

I’m walking and talking, so understand that this might be a little bit inchoate.

What Elon showed last night is something that is radically masculine. This has got me thinking about the world we all live in, and just how female-coded the internet is versus the male-coded world of things. The UAP story is remarkably male. The tech of things versus the tech of ideas.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of all of this, but the ever-increasing disconnect between men and women, between the masculine and the feminine, has become almost completely disconnected now.

I don’t really know what I mean by all of this, but the flying roadster is a condensed symbol of the bullshit world you and I are trying to navigate as middle-aged men.

I was groggy. It was one of those moments where you look at your phone as soon as you open your eyes to see if any emergencies you need to attend to had transpired overnight. I sat with his observations. I love metaphor and poetic language, but I have a tendency to be overly literal in my interpretation of things, and often miss the symbols that are sitting right in front of me.

I wasn’t sure that I agreed with Kale’s nascent observations, but I decided to sit with them and let them develop — something akin (in my mind) to waiting for a Polaroid photo to make the image visible.

I got up. I made coffee. I sat at my desk and opened X to see the morning’s discussion of current events. And as I started scrolling I saw that my intrepid co-host was already advancing his thesis:

Important to note that last parenthetical. As the discussion continued, some people missed this point. For reactions to a thing to fall along masculine and feminine lines does not mean that the sexes will all line up to play kickball, as it were, for their own team. This is more of a general observation of the different social priorities that tend to align with each sex.

As my own timeline filled up with responses from various people that seemed to indirectly verify Kale’s observations, I chimed in. Most of the guys I was seeing talk about the event could barely contain their excitement. I saw discussion from women (or from men talking about their wives or girlfriends) that questioned the point of the exercise. The leftist point of view seemed to align more with the “female-coded” reactions, though whether this was because of their politically-motivated hatred of Musk or some other reason was not entirely clear. I posted my own thoughts:

And further:

As the day wore on, this pattern repeated again and again. As I said, it didn’t fall cleanly across the divide.

Sex-specific behaviors are observable even in small children, and even in a world where traditional gender roles have been flattened. Women have a tendency, generally, to prioritize the function and protection of the domestic realm — which often spills into pragmatic disputes over domestic labor, childcare, finances, and so on. Men have a tendency, generally, to focus on outside pursuits like exploration, discovery, war, politics, sports, technology, meaning-seeking, and so on. The family unit, when it’s healthy, is where those respective spheres unify to create a cohesive whole.

Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about the need to make some changes to get my life back on track after over a year of grief and survival that has derailed me from building the work I find most important — my writing and and commentary trying to make sense of a pretty crazy world and a life that has unfortunately also been swept along by that tide.

Today, I’m digging into the backend of the site, clearing out the cobwebs, trying to fix things that are broken, working on offering a better experience for all readers of The Skojec File, whether free or paid.

One of the first things I noticed is that all the welcome emails have errors.

They mention things that no longer exist, have duplicate sections, describe things that are out of date, and so on. I have no idea how many people have signed up and received the jumbled versions of these emails that do not track with what you see on the actual site. I don’t ever see these emails, so I don’t think to correct them.

So for the purposes of getting everyone on the same page, I’m going to post the email that goes to all new free subscribers below. These describe the current state of the site, what’s on offer, and why I hope you’ll consider an upgrade to paid.

On that note: you’ll notice that most of the content on TSF is free.

My goal as a writer is to reach as many people as possible. I don’t write about things that I don’t think matter, and I don’t like having to sequester those thoughts behind barriers. But I also have to be able to afford to take the many hours a week that goes into doing this work the right way, because alas, I am not independently wealthy and do not have other more reliable revenue streams. Writing has been my profession and my craft for the past two decades, and every paid subscriber to this website better enables me to do this work for a much larger audience.

In other words: your paid subscriptions constitute patronage of my entire body of work, not just the items that live behind the paywall.

As a reminder, this weekend I’m offering 25% off paid subscriptions to anyone who signs up for an annual plan. This offer ends tomorrow night at midnight (10/18/26), so if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is the time to lock that in.

Below please see the email all free subscribers should have been getting. It outlines the benefits of paid subscriptions as well. (Founding members receive the same benefits as paid, but it offers an opportunity for those who want to contribute more to the writing to do so.)

Thank you for subscribing to The Skojec File!

I’m Steve Skojec. I’m a storyteller, meaning-seeker, and cultural commentator trying to understand the rapidly changing world we live in, the secrets that lie hidden behind the news, and how it’s affecting all of us.

These questions are also explored in my longform podcast, Monitoring the Situation, with my co-host and close friend Kale Zelden. You’ll see posts here about each new episode as they are released — usually every Thursday.

On a personal level, I am also exploring the lived reality of individual transformation: the loss of institutional religious belief while still wrestling with questions of faith; the unwanted ending of a marriage that spanned two decades and produced seven children; and the purpose of a life that was once rooted most deeply in daily companionship and fatherhood when those things have now been cut adrift.

In short, in these pages, I write to deconstruct myself, my life, and the world in which all these changes are happening. I am looking for answers, understanding, inspiration, and hope.

The unifying theme is not a single identifying topic, but rather the search across various subjects and domains through the lens of my personal experience for the universal truths that affect us all.

As a free reader, you’ll have access to most of my biggest, deepest essays and reflections, all podcast-related posts, and much of my cultural commentary. Occasionally, I open the comments to both paid and free subscribers, but most conversations remain behind the paywall to keep the community discussion focused and remove the need for excessive moderation.

With a paid subscription, you get more:

• Exclusive paid subscriber posts.

• All private discussions in the TSF community (comments and chat).

• My personal audio narration of posts (when available).

• Full access to any archived paywalled content.

• Any future paid subscriber perks to be determined.

More important than any perk, paid subscribers subsidize this work for all readers, making it possible for me to take the time necessary to do the deep thinking, research, and writing readers come here for.

If you’re curious, start with a 7-day free trial of The Skojec File.

If you would like to support a real human writer who will never publish AI-written content under the guise of a personal essay, please consider upgrading to paid today.

And as a new subscriber, please check out our “Start Here” page, which gives you an introduction to the content and some good pieces to read first.

Thank you for joining this journey—I’m thrilled to have you here!

Best Regards,
Steve Skojec

PS: If you ever can’t find a TSF email in your inbox, check your spam folder and mark this address as ‘not spam.’ If it’s in your Promotions tab, move it to your Primary tab to ensure you never miss an update.

Thanks to all of you who have put up with me being a nuclear dumpster fire.

You guys are the best.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

It’s Friday.

Friday, for a lot of people, means the weekend. It means looking forward to a couple of days of rest, maybe doing the shopping and other errands, possibly catching a movie with the family or a football game.

For me, Friday means it’s time to switch my brain from high-level concepts like writing and podcasting and cultural commentary over to organ grinder monkey mode.

It means driving down the road, sitting in the parking garage in the perfect spot so my GPS puts me just between Wegmans and Costco, staring at a little app on my phone waiting for grocery orders to come in.

It means accepting jobs that pay very little, require many hours of time, cost me a bunch of money in gas and wear and tear on my car, and send me home at night to an empty apartment, dissatisfied, tired, and bored out of my mind, knowing I’ve got to do it again for the rest of the weekend until my scheduled days for writing and podcast work come again.

It literally means pushing a cart around a store, scanning barcodes as I do a paint-by-numbers scavenger hunt for cilantro and crackers and yogurt and chicken breasts, driving them around town to drop in front of someone’s closed door, taking a photo, and doing it all over again.

A very good day grosses me about $150 before tax and expenses.

A fairly good day is about $100.

On too many days I only bring home about $60.

It’s the luck of the draw. It has nothing to do with intelligence or effort.

There has not been one month this year where I’ve come out ahead because of this work. It’s desperation effort. It’s work I do because I’ve had no luck finding anything better, and because it fills in the gaps left by this Substack and the MTS Podcast until I can fully live on what they bring in. It worked for quite a while to fuel Notes From the Road, but every month that passes, that’s feeling like thinner and thinner gruel.

My life is not where I wanted it to be by any stretch of the imagination, but despite my growing awareness that it’s time to change, it has nevertheless been stuck in stagnation and atrophy. I was made for more than this, and I know it. I survived this year of unwanted separation doing what I had to do to get by, but that’s not enough of a reason to get out of bed in the morning anymore — even if I still force myself to do it.

Yesterday I said I was going to find a way to make time to write more here. humorously asked me what the recipe is for making time. I told her I didn’t know but I was hoping to figure it out.

Today, I decided that the recipe was turning around, driving home from that damn parking garage and working on actively putting in the effort, rather than letting the guilt of “I need to be out there doing what puts cash in my pocket today” steal time from building the things I love to do that I know have real value. That trap has been keeping me from tackling the task of nourishing those things (despite the fear) head on.

My short-term goal for myself was simple: find a way to go make the $100 I would have made delivering groceries today doing something that actually matters and builds towards the future.

My medium-term goal is equally modest: build enough revenue streams that I’m making $5,000 a month.

There was a time in my life when I made multiple times that, doing the same kind of work that seems revenue-resistant now. Maybe someday I’ll get back there, but for now I just need breathing room. It’s not that these efforts can’t work, it’s that they stopped working for various reasons that need to be examined and adjusted to compensate for. And I’ve been so lost in grief and the seemingly endless battle against despair that I haven’t been able to put in the effort necessary to figure out how to fix what’s broken.

Yeah, I may still need to go do the dumb thing sometimes to pay the bills, but I can’t let it keep stealing the time from the smart thing that will actually provide a living if I just nourish it with time and effort. I’m not looking to get rich. I’m looking to live simply but sufficiently off of the gifts I’ve been given and the skills I have honed for over 20 years.

My audience has changed a lot since I started TSF back in 2020. Things that didn’t click with readers a few years ago get more traction now. Several of you made clear in the comments that you’re interested in seeing me write more about the weird topics and I cover on our show. I’m happy to do that if there’s an audience for it. Perhaps that’s the audience I should have been cultivating all along.

The deep, memoir-style personal essays will continue, but I can’t keep cranking out one of those a week under the current circumstances. My life has become too small to write those the way I want. It has become a real challenge to capture the experiences and observations that fuel them walking the same stores, driving the same roads, seeing the same sights day after day. I have to broaden my horizons. I have to get out of town. I am a memoirist and travel writer who can’t afford to leave home, and that’s got to change. But I can fill in with commentary on other topics that don’t require as much personal bloodletting to produce.

In any case, none of this is possible without all of you. Although I leave most posts free for now, every person who has a paid subscription to The Skojec File is a vital contributor to my ability to do that work. I need to collaborate with you to ensure I’m holding up my end of the bargain to provide real value in exchange for your hard-earned money.

That starts with writing more.

So I’m working on a new plan to do just that. I need structure, and I’m bad at creating it, so I’m working with my little menagerie of helper bots to audit this Substack, look for the things that are working and not working, develop a cadence (and maybe a loose editorial calendar that leaves room for spontaneity), and tweak all the backend stuff that needs TLC.

And I have to start looking for small-scale adventures to give the deeper essays new life. Little forays into the wider world, and the lessons it holds in store.

I have been cooped up too long, only leaving to go do work I hate, coming home to a place I don’t want to be, staring into screens to make up for the silence and the loss of human presence. That is a death sentence in slow motion, and if I’m going to survive this awful thing I’ve been forced to endure, I have to rage against the dying of the light, not just whinge about how dark it’s gotten.

And I’m not going to lie to you: I’m scared.

Scared that this momentary burst of agency will fade the next time a surge of grief rises up to consume it. Scared that I’ll panic and go back to the familiar but too-small habits that barely keep my head above water because I’m afraid that I’ll drown if I don’t. Scared that I’ll disappoint those of you who are rooting for me to turn this sinking ship around. Scared that I’ll let myself down and start fading away because I never found a good enough reason not to.

As I sat in that damn parking garage today, engine idling, staring at my cracked phone screen I can’t afford to get fixed, watching lowball orders come in so slowly it was like watching my life tick away one minute at a time, I felt this overwhelming surge of realization that it is time to change this mothereffing situation, right freaking now.

So here I am. Back at the keyboard, burning to find something worth swimming upstream for so I stop being swept away by the current.

And in this spirit, I’ve decided to offer a discount, just for this weekend. From now until Sunday night, annual subscriptions to The Skojec File are 25% off. $60 instead of $80.

Get 25% Off a TSF Annual Subscription!

If I get just two annual subscriptions today, that will justify my decision to come home and focus on this change of course. If I get more, it might buy back my weekend so I can work on more. I’ve got ideas, I just need the time and focus to execute.

I’m not averse to hard work. I love hard work when it gets somewhere. What I can’t stand is the feeling that I’m just running to stand still doing tasks that could be assigned to a mindless automaton. I put in a marathon session from 10AM on Wednesday until 5AM on Thursday working on our latest show, not because I’m getting a paycheck yet, but because it matters and I care about getting it right — and if I keep getting it right, maybe it will help Kale and me keep the lights on and put food on the table somewhere down the road.

Many of you have also acted as patrons, generously supporting the man behind the work as he stumbles through catastrophe in the hopes that I will find my way out of the darkness and back into the light. There is no way to overstate how much this has helped me, and I’m not above saying I need the help. When I lost my faith years ago, I began to believe I just had to go it alone. This past year has taught me just how much I need a community. Other people. And hopefully, assistance from the same God from whom I found myself so estranged. My struggles with the specifics of faith have not resolved, but my prayers have grown deeper through this crisis and much more simple. I fell asleep last night repeating the phrase, “God, help me” again and again. I don’t know what I need, but if he’s listening, he does.

If you feel moved to patronize this work, you can do so in the usual ways. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

It’s time to stop hanging by my fingernails off the edge of this cliff. I know that I’m going to have bad days again. Probably even bad weeks. But it’s time to start clawing my way back. As the character Andy Dufresne famously said in The Shawshank Redemption:

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Thank you all so much for being here. For your readership, for your prayers, for your encouragement and well-wishes and material support.

I may be alone in this city, but you have stood with me from afar.

On Tuesday night, and I were also invited to go on Avoiding Babylon with my old pal Anthony Abbate and his co-host, “Catholic Rob.” We had a great time, a lot of laughs, and an interesting dive into the topics of Aliens and UAPs and AI and where they all seem to meet in the middle. If you’d like to see that, it’s here:

For this week’s episode of MTS, we did our promised deep dive into the most recent appearance of David Grusch, the former Air Force Major and US Intelligence officer who was tasked with investigating secret UFO-related programs inside the Department of Defense and related agencies.

Grusch has now come forward and said he’s seen videos within the classified setting of a UFO crash with non-human bodies. He’s been told stories by colleagues he trusts about battles between various species of non-human intelligence AND battles between US military personnel and some of those species.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s why this conversation is necessary. Very serious people with impeccable credentials are saying astonishing things with no obvious benefit to themselves other than their commitment to get the truth out, and that demands to be taken seriously on its own terms.

And just this week, Grusch’s former boss, Jay Stratton, a man with over 32 years of military and government service who was the top man in identifying aerospace threats for the Department of War and spent over 16 years in an official capacity investigating UAPs for the government released his memoir, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life.

I’m five chapters in and fascinated. Again, very sober people with distinguished careers are saying things that sound absolutely kooky if you filter them through the lens of normalcy bias — which is why we have to adjust our epistemology to try to account for what’s going on.

Here’s Jay on Special Report With Bret Baier earlier this week:

So this week’s episode taps into all of this, as Kale and I try to make sense out of how normal people with jobs and families and religious beliefs and a healthy dose of skepticism for wild claims should approach all of this.

I even include footage I took in 2023 of my own UFO experience.

I’ll be writing more about these topics as I wrestle more time away from my other duties because this is important, it’s ongoing, and it’s seemingly building to a crescendo.

The episode is live now:

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

The thing is, I spent all day Thursday re-editing and re-uploading our weekly podcast because we got copyright blocked for a clip we played on air of a relevant interview. YouTube wouldn’t even let the video go live.

This after spending several hours uploading and processing the first version, only to have to make a new edit, adjust the transcript and timestamped chapters, and upload and process for three MORE hours.

I spent roughly 14 hours on Thursday getting this episode edited, polished, and published. And by then, I was so burned out, that Friday was mostly me sitting at my desk going, “I really need to promote the show. I should really promote the show. You know, I should probably…”

And I just…didn’t.

Saturday, an unexpected in town visit from the lady formerly known as my wife and several of my kids took me out of commission for the next couple days. I hadn’t seen anyone in a month, so I dropped everything to go be with them.

And here we are.

This was one of the most fun conversations and I have had since we started this show. We talked about so much interesting, weird stuff that we ran out of time to get to the weirdest stuff at the end. From the episode description:

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: plague headlines and manufactured narratives, social-media context collapse, crowd behavior, spirits, possession, and the unsettling possibility that groups can begin to act like organisms with minds of their own.

From there, the conversation moves through Skinwalker Ranch, aliens and demons, cryptids, traditional accounts of mythical creatures, and a listener's question about whether Christianity must become wild, miraculous, and strange again. What did the printing press, modern analysis, and the demand for reproducibility teach us to dismiss? Can art and a "second naivete" recover forms of perception that modernity trained us to distrust?

After the break, AI enters the conversation as one more intelligence that does not fit comfortably inside our inherited categories: OpenAI's enormous release of mathematical manuscripts, agentic assistants, software built by machines, synthetic filmmaking, AI confidants that can become instruments of surveillance, and the promise of a future without work. If machines take over the labor, what happens to meaning, belonging, and human purpose?

The episode closes with a remarkable new claim about nonhuman intelligence and a problem that now hangs over every extraordinary piece of evidence: in the age of synthetic media, how will we know what we are looking at?

I’d be interested in hearing from you if you’re interested in hearing from me about this kind of weird stuff in my writing. I’m fascinated by it, but in the past, it never seemed to do much for the audience. That said, this audience is always changing.

If I limit my writing to once-a-week (and sometimes once-every-couple-of-weeks) pieces of memoir/travel-style expositional writing, not much else happens here. Those posts are deeply personal and, as such, incredibly emotionally expensive and time-consuming. As it is, I don’t have nearly as much time to write these days as I’d like, but I could certainly fire off more short posts about items of interest if they are…of interest.

Let me know in the comments.

Anyway, without further ado…the weird world is waking up, and that’s what we talked about on the latest episode of Monitoring the Situation!

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

It’s been a long week. Emotionally and professionally.

Still negotiating time with my kids and parental rights and stuff I don’t even want to go into — but suffice to say it eats me alive.

Still trying to get my weekly essay in.

Still doing the show on Wednesday that burns through Tuesday and Thursday as well.

This afternoon, I finished up all the podcast post-production stuff, and I was on my way to the shower when I just decided to lie down on my bed for a minute.

A minute turned into two hours. There’s just no freaking gas in the tank. We all have to deal with drudgery of various kinds, but I continue to believe that only if your life has a worthy organizing principle is it sustainable to keep digging those ditches.

And yet, just for a moment last night, after I finished recording and was completing my edit of the cold open, I felt like I was alive. I was so consumed by doing a thing that feels like it matters, that for a few hours I forgot to think about all the things that drag me down.

You can’t distract yourself forever, it’s true. But I’m glad there are still things I have my hands on that pull me out of my problems and into a flow state.

And Monitoring the Situation is one of those things.

This week’s episode is different. We’re still riffing on the Effective Altruists and the Rationalists and the Longtermists who are running the AI world — and by extension, much of our economy and future — but we dig deeper, into the history of myth and magic and alchemy and science and where they all meet in a weird, unexpected crossover.

There’s something here. Something deeper and darker and older than we moderns tend to realize. We’re so used to everything being able to be subjected to the scientific method, labeled, packaged, put in an appropriate box, and then the next thing comes.

But the world is getting weird again, and the people who are driving the technology that is rocketing the human race in an entirely novel direction are captured by forces they may not even be fully aware of.

That’s what we tackled on this episode. We laugh, we make fun, but we dig things up, too.

Things are stranger than they seem.

From the episode description:

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 post-mythic technology. How do stories and beliefs shape endeavors and moral permission, and teach people what kind of future they are supposed to build?

The trail begins in our current tech-saturated moment, then runs backward through Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, John Dee's Enochian angels and imperial vision, Isaac Newton's obsession with alchemy, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jack Parsons' fusion of science fiction, rocketry, and occultism. It looks at Jaron Lanier's warning about technological stories, Leslie Kean's accounts of physical mediumship, the weirdness of Skinwalker Ranch, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, the limits of reproducibility, and the possibility that the modern West never became as disenchanted as it imagined.

The nerds are running the world now. The stories and beliefs that formed their worldview matter.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

These days, the light is pale like old cardboard, left out, forgotten, bleached by the sun.

It was mercilessly hot right up until it wasn’t. Then, one day, I stepped outside and stopped in my tracks, pausing to enjoy a cool breeze I hadn’t even considered possible.

The summer heat smelled often of petrichor, the heavy rains pushing the hygrometer towards hellish percentages. 79%. 85%. 92%. Humidity not fit for man nor beast.

When the heat finally broke, the air thinned, too, the slick film of unseen haze no longer fogging up the windows when the air conditioning runs. No longer making even your perspiration start sweating.

I’m a northern boy, born in November after the first snows, and though I’ve adapted as well as I can to southern summers, they will never feel natural to me. Give me 80 degree days and 60 degree nights any time. I’ll take rain half the year if it lets me savor dark moods. Give me the crisp cool air of early falls, where the snow sometimes comes at Halloween. Give me longer winters. I’ll deal with steel-grey skies and crusted, dirty snowbanks, pockmarked like acne scars, lasting almost until May.

I’m a northern boy, always suspicious of anywhere that gets too much sun.

An old colleague and friend of mine, brilliant and wild and utterly unconcerned with the things of this world used to offer me unsolicited, passionately-delivered advice. Among her sayings were, “If you want to be rich, work close to the money” (she never did) and not-unrelatedly, “Never trust anyone who is tan in the winter” (she never was). She talked about the artist’s way. She spoke her mind even when she was the only one willing to say what she was saying.

She died before I had any idea who I was, or how to apply these things.

But she saw me, really saw me, in a way few people ever have.

It’s a strange thing to be weird, to be smart and articulate and gifted in things that don’t seem to matter to most people at all. To keep an entire constellation of eccentricities and anxieties hidden behind a mask of calculated normalcy, only to fall short of normal expectations time and again.

My friend was never like that. She was big and loud and unkempt and a little crazy. She was creative and brilliant and observant and utterly alive. Nobody knew quite how to handle her. Everyone respected the hell out of her all the same.

She told me I was the best writer in the whole place, and considering the caliber of the people I was working with, I found that hard to believe.

But I never doubted for a second that she meant it, or that she was qualified to know.

The morning she died, I came into the office in a good mood, and immediately started joking around with co-workers who already knew she was gone. I remember the looks on their faces. I remember them saying through tears that she had died, the room heavy with grief and loss. I remember being embarrassed that I had tried to be lighthearted and funny because I didn’t have the slightest clue that someone completely irreplaceable was suddenly no longer a part of our lives.

I miss her. I wonder what advice she’d give me now. I’m older, wiser, my talents more proven, and yet I’m just as lost as I was then, 20 years younger than I am now.

I wonder how she’d make sense out of my completely discombobulated life.

I can only imagine she’d furrow her brow beneath the mop of frizzy, dark hair, and peer at me intensely through her rimless glasses. She would shout — not out of anger, but out of love and intensity — something I’d not even considered. Something I didn’t know I desperately needed to hear.

But I don’t have the ability to imagine what it is that she’d say.

I don’t have anything like a mentor anymore. No wise sage to guide me with the pearls of their hard-won experience. Just an overly talkative clanker on my phone and the whispering of dragonflies.

I drive through the outskirts of Wake Forest at sunset, on one of the first nights it actually feels like autumn. It’s beautiful and bucolic and there’s almost no traffic, which is as close as you can get to a small miracle on a Friday night. North Carolina feels like a lover who never fully lets you in. You orbit them, you soak in their beauty, you stay up late talking with them on the couch, but they never lean in for a kiss.

I could have stayed here for years. I could have made this my home. It was missing things I desperately needed, but there’s just something about it. Something I’ve come to love in spite of it all. I should hate it here, since this is the place where the old me came unwittingly to die. The place where the last fatal blow to the only life I ever wanted was struck. The place where the woman I loved for more than half my life looked me in the eyes and told me she didn’t. Not anymore.

But there’s a strange southern serenity here, the sticky summers notwithstanding. The big craggy oaks and the tall skinny pines and the soft rolling hills and the gorgeous kudzu creep. The vestigial vocal twang. The ubiquity of biscuits and cobbler and barbecue I never eat and sweet tea I never drink. The old neighborhoods with their sprawling Victorians planted between the soft light of Sesame Street lamps; the new neighborhoods with their sprawling McMansions done up in luxury farmhouse style. Everything is within reach. 30 minutes gets you just about anywhere. There are more decent coffee shops in a ten mile radius than pretty much any place I’ve lived. The trees here are this magical, deep shade of green.

It’s a weird mix of bougie upscale city and charming small town vibe. It’s everything I ever wanted from a place to live except for the fact that I don’t have people here. It feels like it should have worked out, except for all the reasons that it didn’t.

I need to start looking for places to live in Virginia, but I don’t want to go. Mostly, I’ve been distracting myself from being now-constantly alone. It’s too far to go see my kids more than once a month or so, and my lease here runs through mid-December. I need to start looking for places to live up that way, but I don’t want to live up that way.

Makes it pretty hard to get focused.

I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want another move to somewhere meaningless; a place to live that can never be a home. I don’t want to further formalize my disenfranchisement from the only place I’ve ever belonged: within the same four walls as the woman I married and the children we gave life to. I don’t want to go back to Virginia where it all started, to drive through towns where we used to live together, see the church where we were married, the stores we used to go to. I can’t walk into the crypt chapel beneath the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC without seeing myself on the kneeler there, before the tabernacle, putting a ring on the finger of the woman who would become the mother of my tribe.

I don’t want to be forced remember what it felt like when there was still hope.

The trees there are wrong and the landscape is wrong and the stores are different and the traffic is too much and there are foreigners everywhere now and the data centers fill the landscape. Going back these days feels somehow both like driving by a place you used to live with brand-new tenants who cut the tree down in the front yard and painted the house a different shade and going someplace alien that you’ve never ever been. Like it’s somehow both home and a fever dream.

It’s too much to process, so mostly I just don’t. I procrastinate by being busy. I work. I write. I research. I record and edit my show. I think big thoughts that wouldn’t be missed if I stopped thinking them altogether. I lie in bed with a drink on my nightstand, watching stuff on the TV I don’t actually care about until the wee hours, telling myself it’s fine, because nobody expects anything from you at that time of the night anyway.

I’ve made progress this year, it’s true. But I’m still me. My heart is still shattered into a million pieces, I’ve just got it packed more carefully in custom-crafted protective foam so I can carry it around with me without it falling apart. As soon as I think the grief is over, it finds new ways to arrive. As soon as I think “I’ve got this, I can do this,” I’m reminded that I’ve got maybe 30 years left on this planet, and I can’t think of a single way they are going to feel like they’re worth living when everything I ever wanted is already gone, and there’s nothing I can even imagine wanting instead.

I’m a character in someone else’s choose-your-own-adventure book. I didn’t pick this storyline. It’s just the one I’m stuck in, and I’m decidedly not a fan.

I find myself in the checkout lane at the grocery store, and I can’t get the code on my phone I need loaded to load. The lady working there asks me if something is wrong with my app.

I tell her yeah, it’s not doing the thing for some reason.

“Technology, it’s the devil.” she quips.

“No,” I reply, fumbling with my device. “It’s worse than the devil. You can at least bargain with him.”

She laughs. I laugh. But I also mean what I said.

Can’t bargain with tech. Can’t bargain with a lot of people. Can’t bargain with the universe. And Jesus is not picking up the phone.

I pass a sign for a place called “The Church of God of the Prophecies.” I wonder, absently, how people come up with these names.

I deliver some groceries to a farm with a gate code. The woman sitting on the porch waiting for me smells like she’s already five drinks deep. Her chickens are gathering around the steps behind me, and she anticipates that this will somehow make me uncomfortable, but it doesn’t.

“When you leave, just walk towards them, and they’ll get out of your way.” She says.

“I’m not worried,” I say. “I used to have chickens. Raccoons got to them all. Little suckers could actually open the latch on the coop.”

She registers this information with alarm, but when I turn to go, she repeats herself as if I haven’t just told her it’s not a problem.

“Just walk.” She says again. “They’ll get out of your way.”

“Got it,” I say. No point reiterating.

“Hello ladies,” I say to the chickens. They just cluck and bob out of my way.

“You need to put in the gate code to leave, hon.” The woman says over the porch railing as I’m almost to my car.

Good information. I hadn’t even seen the code box on this side.

“Thanks for that,” I say. “Remind me what the code is again? Now that I’ve dropped off I can’t see that information in my app anymore.”

She does. The code works. The gate is so slow the movement is almost imperceptible at first, and I want to enter the code again before I realize the hydraulic arm has shifted ever so slightly. So I wait.

I make my way to the end of the long driveway, and reach the main road just in time to see the sun slipping below the horizon through the trees.

The light is so bright, I don’t notice the moon hanging low over the little brick house across the street. Within the hour, that moon hangs large and ephemeral in the early twilight, its figure obscured slightly by the swaddling of diaphanous wisps of cloud.

On a suburban dropoff somewhere in midtown after dark, I notice two whitetail bucks standing in someone’s front yard. For a moment, I think they’re just extremely lifelike statues, until I see one of them dip his head for another bite of whatever landscaping foliage drew him to that particular lawn. Neither of them run when I pass slowly by, which is odd, considering how close I am.

I swing a U-turn to go back for another look and maybe, if I’m lucky, a photo. But by the time I make it back, they’ve both vanished somehow into the sparse vegetation of a dense residential area. This is way too far inside city limits to normally see any deer.

On a different road, under a starless night sky, I see a bird dramatically flapping large white wings to slow its descent to the curb. As I approach, it swivels its head to stare at me, and I see the face of a Barred Owl.

It doesn’t move, just stares.

I have never in my life seen an owl just land on the side of the road and look at an oncoming car at night. It feels surreal. Almost symbolic somehow. What it could mean, though, is anyone’s guess.

And that’s kind of the theme these days, come to think of it.

What any of this means could be anyone’s guess.

What is your life for if its not for the people you love?

What is the purpose of suffering if it doesn’t redeem?

Strip away a man’s faith and career and family, and what’s left? The continuation of metabolic processes just for their own sake?

Raging against the dying of the light is a lot more inspiring when you don’t already live each day fully in the dark.

What am I for?

The question rings endlessly in my head. A problem. A puzzle. An indictment.

No answer ever comes.

On the days when I feel most hopeful and optimistic, it’s because I’m not asking that question. I’m just dealing with what’s in front of me, right in the moment. No looking at the future. No trying to find a way for it to feel like it isn’t just a perennial humiliation ritual; an orgy of perpetuated loss.

I’m writing this thing or delivering this order or running this errand or making this meal or doing this podcast or reading this book or….

Eventually, though, you have to pick your head up and look down the road. You can’t just keep driving distracted through life forever or you’re going to crash.

My uncle had to have heart surgery last week. One of the healthiest, most physically active guys I’ve known. Blocked artery. He’s OK. In recovery. But it got me thinking about where I’ll be when I’m his age.

I’ve got nothing. No assets. No retirement fund. No likely access to social security. No real estate. Nobody who will take care of me when I no longer can.

I can’t even afford to withhold money for taxes when every dollar I make comes through a 1099. Things piling up in the dark, waiting to come back to bite me.

I’ll be 49 this November. Which means 50 next year. I don’t have health insurance. I haven’t seen a doctor since 2019.

It’s one thing to strive and grind and hope and pray. It’s another thing to actually get somewhere. We love an underdog story. We love it when someone loses everything and manages to get back on their feet and writes a book and does the podcast circuit to tell us how well it’s all worked out for them in the end.

We don’t hear from the people who get smacked down by life and never recover.

I’m a Schrödingerian conundrum. A complete and total failure at two-thirds of the way through this existence, or a comeback story nobody saw coming?

This is the stuff that isn’t fun to talk about, write about, or think about.

This is the stuff that makes me terrified to spend the rest of my life alone.

I never wanted to be all things to anyone, let alone myself. I need love. I need care. I need someone looking after me who isn’t me. I do an absolutely terrible job.

I am a man without purpose or mission. A rusty tool hanging in an abandoned shed.

No matter how hard I bust my rear end working, I come home to silent emptiness. Nobody to greet me and ask about my day. Nobody to put their arms around me and remind me why doing all the shit I don’t want to do is actually worth it. Just an endless treadmill of pointless maintenance.

It’s not enough. I don’t know how people do this. It’s like being dead while you’re still alive.

I need more out of life and I am so pissed at myself for not being able to figure out what I want, let alone how to get it. I’m not afraid to do the work. I’m afraid of not knowing the work I need to do. I’m getting pretty tired of surrendering to the freaking storm. You can’t get to a destination you can’t identify. If you just start driving without a plan, you’re only going to wind up hopelessly lost.

And when you’re hopelessly lost, that’s when you most need someone to give you directions.

That’s what I’m looking for.

Directions.

To get them, I don’t want to have to bargain with the devil. I’d much rather strike up a deal with God.

But I’ve got to find him first.

And to do that, he’s going to have to meet me halfway.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a great time. I could surely use the support:

Subscribe now

And if you’re open to patronizing my work just to help me keep going, I’d welcome that as well. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage.

But here’s the thing: this podcast is the only standing commitment I have every week. It’s a 3-hour conversation with my best friend. It’s the only substantive interaction I get to have with anyone. And it takes 2-3 days out of my week to make it happen.

There’s the research, the prep, the show outlines. The books/articles/podcasts I have to ingest before going on air.

Then I have to clean up my little cave, because it doubles as my studio. It’s all on camera. Can’t have it looking like a dumpster fire.

Last night, I spent 40 minutes trying to get my camera to handle its stupid white balance and ISO issues, only to have it throw so much noise at the encoder that I look like a Minecraft character for half the episode because of all the big, blocky pixels.

Then we shoot. For three hours.

Then it’s post production for another 6-12 hours. Edits, audio, descriptions, thumbnails, titles, short clips, post everything to social media over the next week while responding to comments coming in.

And the truth is, I love it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s real, and it’s ours, and it’s finally growing. We had over 7,000 views on the last episode. It feels good to get some traction again.

My usual deal is to spend the first three days of the week writing (for the Substack), then prepping, shooting the show, processing. Thursday is normally a mix: podcast stuff in the morning, go deliver orders in the afternoon. Then Friday-Sunday it’s all Instacart, all the time.

Rinse, repeat.

But I just have to hope that if I keep putting in the hours, the real work — this Substack and the companion podcast — are going to become the job. Brick by brick. Inch by inch. I think what we’re doing matters. Not just for us, but for our audience.

Here’s the cold open for this week’s show. I probably spent 3 hours making it. I don’t even care. It helps grab attention from YouTube browsers, and it’s fun, and I’m proud of it:

I started making these little compilations at the beginning because YouTubers were getting stuck our our ineffably cool retro-futurist intro and bouncing before they got to the real conversation:

Anyway, enough of me showing you how the sausage is made. Here’s the description and link to the latest episode. And I’m not kidding, by the way. These Effective Altruists are bad news:

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?

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

A year ago last week, I wrote the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write: I announced that my wife of 22 years and I were separating against my will, and reconciliation looked unlikely.

This Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the worst night of my life: the night I had to leave. I won’t go into the details, but nothing about it was as calm or dignified as I hoped it could be. The rending of a family is an ugly thing.

Many people who go through such things don’t talk about them publicly. But I’m the kind of writer who writes about his experience of life. A memoirist. A confessional writer. There was simply no way to prevent the obvious from showing up unless I quit writing altogether.

And so was born my series, Postcards from Exile, which was about the road trip I took after I had to leave, in the hopes I could ground myself and regain some sense of sanity before I came back “home.” “Home,” in this instance, meaning “in the geographic vicinity of my children so I can have some kind of presence in their lives.”

I’ve spent the past year holed up in a 500 sq. ft. studio apartment that feels more like a cave than a residence. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful to have a place to sleep and eat and work. I was so devastated when this all kicked off, I wasn’t sure if I would even manage that much.

Reducing my needs and expenses to the bare minimum made them almost manageable. I had always imagined that if I were forced to have to do something like this, I’d use the solitary time to build. What I found out instead was that it wasn’t a time for growing, it was a time for mere survival.

For the first few months, other than writing about the experience, I couldn’t work at all. I was so devastated I could barely function. The road trip itself generated a lot of output, but coming back to Raleigh was the real killer. Other than my wife and kids and some old family and work acquaintances I haven’t spent time with in over twenty years, I don’t know anyone in this city.

A year later, I still don’t.

Nobody to sit with and talk with on the worst days. No pastor to receive counsel from. Nobody to grab a coffee or a drink with who didn’t need me to infodump decades of backstory onto to try to get them up to speed.

Just a guy who can’t stand to be alone with his brain in the best of times alone with it literally ALL the time — while going through the worst grief I’ve ever experienced. Just soul-crushing, make you not want to wake up the next morning stuff. When you can no longer see a future worth living in, your mind goes to some remarkably dark places.

But bit by bit, day by day, incremental progress unfolded. The setbacks have been innumerable — they still happen even now. I spent most of the past weekend in a funk, asking “What am I for?” and “What future could possibly be worth this?”

And yet, despite this, and despite it not being an optimal time to build anything, I suppose I really have grown in ways I didn’t expect. I became stronger. Calmer. More resilient. About two months ago now, my emotional state finally stabilized, like a plane coming out of a tailspin right before hitting the ground. I’ve struggled constantly, but my bills all got paid, if only barely. I’ve fed myself, kept my place relatively clean and well-maintained, I’ve worked a lot of thankless hours without giving up, built a podcast with my friend that is finally getting some real traction (we’re on track to make $42.99 in ad revenue after 23 episodes and 13,000 watch hours, lol!) and have done some of the best writing I’ve ever laid on the page with my Notes From the Road series.

And now, I find myself at another crossroads.

As I’ve written about, my family moved back to Virginia at the beginning of September. My lease isn’t up until the end of the year, so I’m Shanghaied here in Raleigh until then, alone. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I could have gotten through this a year ago. My nerves were like a basket of broken glass. And I’m not going to pretend that it’s pleasant, knowing I won’t have meaningful human contact again for weeks, maybe months, because I can’t afford regular visits up to see them. Because of move and family-related activities, I lost three working weekends in a row in the past month I couldn’t afford to lose. I’ve been busting my rear trying to make up for it, but gig work pays poorly and eats a lot of time and energy, and this Substack, though it keeps me afloat, lost 20 paid subscribers this month, almost all of them on annual plans, which means a pretty significant drop in already insufficient writing income.

And I get it: the economy is brutal, and I’m not writing as often as I’d like. The cycle is real. I spend most of my time and energy chasing low-return work for cash today, and that keeps me from building a business here that is more sustainable. I would prefer to be dropping a couple essays a week, and these days, I’ve been lucky to fire off one good one plus a podcast-related post. (The podcasts, more than anything, help keep me sane. They give me something to look forward to and focus on every week where I’m not just trying to go it alone. And the conversations are always enjoyable.)

I’m actively trying to figure out how to get more productive hours in on the things that matter to me so I can spend less on the stuff that’s just mere survival. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ll just keep grinding until I get there.

And if there’s no way out of the existential disorientation of being a man who identified as being a husband and father right up until those were taken away against his will, there are things I’ve learned over the past year that will stay with me.

First, the marriage, as it was, was unhealthy for both of us. Now, to my way of thinking, that’s not a good reason to end it, because when I said “forever” I meant it and I think our kids deserve the presence and example of two parents who love each other, but that doesn’t take away the fact that while I can’t speak for my wife, I believe we’ve both done a lot of healing over the past year we couldn’t have done together.

I genuinely feel as though I’ve rediscovered the man I abandoned at the altar.

What do I mean by that? Well, for someone like me, who is trauma-shaped into people-pleasing, I have always chased love and validation and acceptance and affirmation from outside of myself, because I couldn’t find any of that within myself. And so, I abandoned who I was in the pursuit of the man I thought she wanted me to be. I wanted her love and acceptance so badly, I was constantly chasing the feeling of, “I’m not good enough and have to change.”

There are good things about that. I was a dumpster fire when we met. I had so much unprocessed anger that was really mostly metastasized hurt from deep childhood and young adult wounds, and my need to be needed was bottomless. I did a lot of stupid things. I made a lot of mistakes I deeply regret. I’ve apologized for everything I’m aware of having done, and I’ve actively tried to correct those behaviors in myself. I think I’ve made a lot of progress. I like who I am a lot better than I did when I left. I like that I feel like the old me, but with a lot more wisdom and maturity than I had when I was 25.

I rarely get angry anymore. I still get terribly lonely, but I’ve learned how to be alone with myself in a way that used to terrify me. It’s certainly not optimal — I still can’t escape the fact that I am absolutely made for relationship, or that the lack of deep personal companionship is an ache that cannot be soothed by any amount of stoic nonsense. But if I have managed solitude poorly, I’ve still done it better than I could have previously believed.

And I don’t hate myself anymore. I no longer believe I am unworthy of love or respect. That doesn’t mean I’m entitled to it, but I hope, inasmuch as I am fundamentally oriented towards a shared life, that I am not precluded from it forever.

My baseline anxiety has dropped exponentially. My life is still frustrating and stressful in a number of significant ways, but I have shrunk my existence and problem set into things I can manage, which creates a stability I didn’t have when I had to accommodate a very different set of tolerances and expectations with someone wired very differently than I am.

I’ve come to better understand — and more importantly, to accept — that my brain is wired differently than most people I know, and the only way to work with that is to lean into it instead of trying to beat it into submission. It took the better part of this year to get me out of the nervous system equivalent of DEFCON 1, but now that I am at say, DEFCON 3, I’ve got some room to stop just reacting and start making course corrections on where things are going.

Something a number of friends and readers have pointed out to me is how much I blamed myself for everything that went wrong. You can see it all through my post from last September. I wanted to put the target on myself, because I knew my failings were many and not insignificant, and I still loved and wanted to protect her. I spent so much of the past year interrogating and accusing myself, tearing myself apart to try to figure out what went wrong, and almost obsessively trying to make sure I wasn’t exonerating myself in any undeserving way, that I feel like I can honestly say I’ve put in the work to try to understand what I contributed — and what I didn’t.

And because of that, I know now, with a certitude I could not access then, that I wasn’t solely responsible for the breakdown of our marriage. Just because those two people can’t agree on the appropriate distribution of accountability doesn’t make it less real. I used to think if my understanding of the story wasn’t validated by her, then I couldn’t legitimately hold it as my working model. I no longer need her sign-off. My epistemology is hard-coded for fidelity to reality. That’s enough for me to trust my understanding.

I also know that despite everything — including some absolutely fundamental disagreements about the whole situation — I don’t hate her. And I don’t believe she hates me. She’s changed so much over the years, but when we get together these days, I still see the girl I fell in love with. My attachment has been broken, but I still feel love for her. Warmth. Recognition. I don’t wish her harm and in fact still find that I have genuine protective instincts towards her. There are moments when I really don’t understand why we couldn’t fix things. I still wish she could see and accept me as I really am, and not only through the filter of accumulated damage. But that damage is real, and I’m grateful that we’ve reached a point where we can deal with each other without animosity. Our kids have gone through enough. They don’t need their parents to be at war.

I have found that my experience of all this loss has re-opened my heart to faith.

When I left Catholicism in 2021, I had reached a point where I was convinced that God couldn’t care less about us. I’d spent so many years begging for help that never came — particularly in my marriage, but also over the state of the Church itself — that I gave up on it ever coming. I came to realize how much I’d outsourced to “providence” that should have taken the form of personal action. I began to believe that I could fix my own life more effectively than an absentee God ever could.

And for a while, that actually worked.

But this past year has taught me the limits of personal action. There are things too big for us to handle on our own. And in desperation, we are forced to return to prayer. The “no atheists in foxholes” line also applies to personal catastrophe, not just war.

Does that mean my confidence in Catholicism has returned? No. But I have become “an agnostic who prays.” Every day. I never strayed very far from the morality I always believed in, because most of it just seems like decency and common sense to me. But in the areas where I still struggle, I’m not purely letting things slide. I’m asking for help. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to re-kindle (or kindle appropriately the first time) a faith in God that is real and substantial, but it feels wrong to expect his help if I’m not willing to put in an effort to live the right way. As any mature person reading this probably knows, we’re all riddled with hypocrisy on this front, but all you can do is take baby steps, I suppose.

And the most important thing I’ve come to understand this year is that my kids still love me very much and want me in their lives. They make me feel so welcome and wanted. They are affectionate and open with me. We talk. We enjoy each other’s company.

This, more than anything else, is what saved me from a much darker path.

But I don’t know what the future holds.

I don’t know for certain if she will finalize the divorce now that the statutory year is over.

I don’t know how my life will change when I move to Virginia later this year to stay close to the kids. I don’t want to go. I like Raleigh, and I’ve made it my own. Virginia is planted thick with memories. We were married there. We had most of our kids there. Every time I go back, I’m reminded of things that are now gone.

But this is where my new mantra, “surrender to the storm,” comes in. Control what you can. Leave the rest to (the) god(s).

As I said above, I’ve spent the past few days really struggling with questions about the future. I no longer have the things that I fundamentally oriented my existence around. I do work that I care about, but I don’t have a sense of mission or purpose anymore. “What is my life even for” remains the open question I can’t answer.

Some people immediately respond to that with, “for your kids.” Yes, I absolutely want to be there for them and for anything they need. But understanding that I’m not with them 99% of the time should help explain why that’s not sufficient. I need something to get out of bed for every day. Something I care deeply about. Something that matters outside of the scope of my own personal tragedy. Something bigger than me.

I don’t know yet how to find that, but I keep getting a quiet little feeling that I’m on the cusp of whatever is next. It’s as fleeting as my dragonflies. It shows up, hovers just long enough to get my attention, then zips away. I think the next chapter will be largely unexpected, and my hope is that it will be better than anything I’ve been able to dream up so far. My powers of imagination have been drastically limited by my circumstances. Still, one of the greatest gifts human beings have is not knowing what the future holds.

I’m choosing to believe it will be better than things have been for the past year. It would certainly be hard for it to be worse!

On a practical note, it was tough to go into my admin panel today and see that I’d lost 20 paid subscribers. As I said above, I get it. Times are tough. I don’t write here as frequently as I’d like. There are any number of reasons.

But Substack fills in what my other work can’t. I only make about $100 a day, before expenses, doing gig work, and I only do that four days a week so I can do work here and on the podcast. My gross annualized revenue from this Substack is only $21,000. I’ll be 50 next year, and I’m frantically arranging deck chairs on the financial titanic. My kids need school uniforms right now and I’m so far behind I don’t know how I’m going to be able to contribute.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a great time. I could surely use the support:

Subscribe now

And if you’re open to patronizing my work just to help me keep going, I’d welcome that as well. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

The more revenue I have to work with, the more time I can spend writing instead of schlepping groceries.

I hope this coming year will mark a striking departure from the last one. It’s time for some changes. It’s time to level up and start getting things done.

Last weekend, while I was walking through the Smithsonian with my kids, I got a text from Kale that only said two words: “Something happened.”

With it came a link to the latest AI fear coming out of the “frontier labs” and has reached all the way to the White House.

On this week’s show, we break it down, and try to look for what’s really going on behind the performative panic.

(We also had our pet clanker make us a ridiculous thumbnail to go with the theme.)

From the show description:

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.

Full episode is here (please don’t forget to like and subscribe!):

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

This week’s episode of the MTS Podcast is out. Happy podcast day to those who celebrate!

From the show description:

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.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.