Another week, another episode of “Two Nerdy Gen Xers Try To Figure Nebulous Stuff Out” — AKA, the Monitoring the Situation Podcast.
This week’s conversation is as weird and wide-ranging as always. From the show description:
Steve and Kale Zelden record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person.
The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAPs, AI, McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, and the possibility that artificial intelligence may become a new perceptual faculty for human beings. But the episode's center of gravity is alignment: not only whether AI can be aligned with human values, but whether human consciousness is already being altered by social media, invisible AI guardrails, frictionless tools, and the digital systems that shape what we notice, desire, fear, and believe.
From "Chad, Chester, and Charlie" as a way of naming hidden AI control layers to gestalt cognition, Neuralink, post-literacy, disappearing technological friction, and the strange possibility that AI may expose new modes of mind, Steve and Kale ask what happens when the systems around us do not merely assist us, but form us. They also move through Oxford, the loss of the sacred, the temptation to skip suffering, Catholic traditionalism as an oxbow lake, and the need for serious sense-making in a moment that is already here.
This is a conversation about AI, media, discernment, technological friction, sacred attention, and the old question underneath all of it: if you are not choosing what forms you, who is?
As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.
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This makes me SO happy! I've actually been RE-watching all the previous episodes. I can't get enough. I absolutely love these conversations.