I Dropped the Ball

The world is weird and I neglected to inform you

This post was supposed to go up last Thursday.

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 Kale Zelden 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.