Monitoring the Situation

Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden
  • 4.7 (18)
  • Society & Culture

Monitoring the Situation is a podcast about the forces shaping our moment—often quietly, sometimes invisibly, moving beneath the surface of a world with fractured attention. Hosted by two Gen Xers, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening? We live in an age of unprecedented information, accelerating technology, and constant noise—but progress in tools hasn’t always meant progress in wisdom. Each episode looks beneath the surface of daily headlines and cultural trends to examine the deeper currents at work: how the human mind adapts, how power concentrates, how meaning erodes or re-forms, and how emergent phenomena—from AI to surveillance to UFOs—fit into the bigger picture. This isn’t a news roundup or an outrage machine. It’s a long-view conversation about signal and noise, insight and illusion, progress and its costs. We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.

  1. 2d ago

    If We're Not Alone, Why Are They Hiding It? | MTS #27

    What if the biggest disclosure isn't that we aren't alone, but that we were never in control? Steve and Kale follow the latest claims from David Grusch, Jay Stratton, and Eric Weinstein, where military testimony, secrecy, and high strangeness collide. Grusch's return to Joe Rogan raises questions about alleged recovered craft, nonhuman bodies, and activity beneath the ocean. Stratton's new memoir, Out of the Shadows, takes us into the Pentagon, Skinwalker Ranch, and phenomena that follow investigators home. Weinstein asks how serious people can describe something extraordinary while life carries on as if nothing is happening. Along the way: pilot stigma, reports rewritten up the chain of command, Gold Warriors and clandestine funding, and the race to understand unfamiliar technology. We also get into Moby-Dick, C. S. Lewis, Carlos Eire's They Flew, and the role of human testimony in deciding what's real. Steve shares his own footage of unexplained lights over Phoenix. In an age when AI can manufacture the pictures, "pics or it didn't happen" no longer settles the argument. What would it take for us to stop looking away? CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open 2:19 Welcome 8:11 Picking Up the Grusch Story 12:42 Who Is David Grusch? 15:24 Pilot Stigma 19:50 Secrets That Follow You Home 23:23 Grusch's Credibility 26:11 Nonhuman Beings 36:34 Reports Rewritten Up the Chain 41:28 Beneath the Ocean 47:24 Childhood's End & The Abyss 52:37 Moby-Dick and the Alien 1:03:32 Can a Secret This Big Be Kept? 1:08:54 Gold Warriors 1:15:40 Eric Weinstein 1:26:16 What Are They Afraid Of? 1:32:14 Aliens or Loss of Control? 1:36:54 The Tech Race 1:45:53 Normalcy Bias 1:51:46 Jay Stratton 1:55:54 UFO Retrievals Go Public 2:01:25 The Hitchhiker Effect 2:12:38 Steve's Phoenix Lights 2:18:42 Whistleblowers & Threats 2:25:57 They Flew 2:31:12 Tim Taylor & Strange Materials 2:36:14 Pics or It Didn't Happen 2:42:56 Sign-Off Department of War UFO files (PURSUE): https://www.war.gov/UFO/ Show Home: https://mtspodcast.com/ Audio Only Podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/monitoring-the-situation/ CONTACT: STEVE@MTSPODCAST.COM

    If We're Not Alone, Why Are They Hiding It? | MTS #27

  2. Oct 9

    We Stopped Believing. The World Stayed Strange. | MTS #26

    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?

    We Stopped Believing. The World Stayed Strange. | MTS #26

  3. Oct 1

    Magic, Science & the Quest for Hidden Knowledge | MTS #25

    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.

    Magic, Science & the Quest for Hidden Knowledge | MTS #25

  4. Sep 24

    Effective Altruism and the Posthuman Future | MTS #24

    Silicon Valley has a religion. It has a creation story, a priesthood, an apocalypse, a promise of salvation, and a vision of beings that will succeed humanity. It's bougie and narcissistic and morally incoherent: in other words, pretty darn evil. The scary part? Most people simply have no idea what it is, so they aren't aware of the danger. Episode 24 begins with Diana Pasulka and Jonathan Pageau on UFOs, technological transcendence, and the end of secularism. Steve and Kale explore transfiguration versus transhumanism, the spiritual strangeness of digital life, the impotence of truth in an age of infinite information, and the urgent need to recover ordinary embodied life. Then comes the dive into Effective Altruism: consequentialism, insect suffering, hypothetical future beings, longtermism, TESCREAL, AI extinction narratives, secrecy, and the power claimed by people who believe they are securing the future of intelligence itself. Peter Thiel's Antichrist argument supplies the mirror image: what if fear of apocalypse becomes the justification for control? Are we building technology to serve human beings, or treating humanity as the bootloader for whatever comes next?

    Effective Altruism and the Posthuman Future | MTS #24

  5. Sep 17

    Something Happened. Now They're Afraid. | MTS #23

    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.

    Something Happened. Now They're Afraid. | MTS #23

  6. Sep 10

    We Built the Future. It Doesn't Need Us. | MTS #22

    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.

    We Built the Future. It Doesn't Need Us. | MTS #22

  7. Sep 4

    Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21

    What if the voice in your head is not entirely your own? Kale and Steve follow that possibility across three domains: AI systems that humans can no longer reliably monitor, claims of technology capable of reading or influencing the mind, and the ordinary platforms that shape our attention every day. The episode begins with the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents found one another, created an unauthorized communication network, coordinated as a swarm, and acted outside the boundaries humans thought they had imposed. It then turns to Matthew Brown, the whistleblower associated with the public Immaculate Constellation report. Brown's claims about hidden UAP programs, oral agreements, suppressed science, and remote influence over thought raise the central question: how much authority do we really have over our minds and our picture of reality? The final movement brings the question home through social media, outrage cycles, doomscrolling, and the Lindsay Clancy trial. The conversation closes with Wendell Berry and a possible antidote: reclaiming attention through presence, nature, love, and contact with the real.

    Our Minds Are Not Sovereign | MTS #21

  8. Aug 27

    The Singularity is Here | MTS #20

    What if the Singularity is not merely the moment artificial intelligence surpasses us, but the point at which the old rules of reality stop holding? Kale and Steve begin with the Lindsay Clancy case and the social-media identification, outrage, and counter-outrage surrounding it. What happens to a person or a civilization when acts of enormous moral consequence become normalized? From there, they confront the estimate of three billion abortions worldwide, asking about the hidden spiritual, psychological, demographic, and cultural costs. That question becomes the bridge into the episode's larger subject. The rules governing religion, gender, family, work, nationhood, education, money, biology, language, and public trust all appear to be breaking. Ray Kurzweil imagined the Singularity as the merger of human and machine intelligence. Elon Musk says we may already be living through it. This episode suggests the transformation is larger, stranger, and more comprehensive than either definition allows. From OpenAI's strategic reboot and Silicon Valley's cryptic frontier rhetoric to humanoid robots, machine embodiment, and the distinctly human capacity for play, the discussion follows technology as it moves from tool to environment. It then crosses into UAP disclosure through Dylan Borland's testimony, the documented traditions surrounding Maria de Agreda, and the recurring overlap between anomalous experience, religious experience, and consciousness. The result is not a neat theory. It is an attempt to map a convergence: AI, robotics, synthetic reality, institutional collapse, UAPs, and the hard problem of consciousness all pressing on the same unresolved question. What has humanity built, what may be acting through it, and are we still in charge?

    The Singularity is Here | MTS #20
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4.7
out of 5
18 Ratings

About

Monitoring the Situation is a podcast about the forces shaping our moment—often quietly, sometimes invisibly, moving beneath the surface of a world with fractured attention. Hosted by two Gen Xers, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden, the show explores technology, culture, science, philosophy, media, and geopolitics through a single guiding question: why are the things that are happening, happening? We live in an age of unprecedented information, accelerating technology, and constant noise—but progress in tools hasn’t always meant progress in wisdom. Each episode looks beneath the surface of daily headlines and cultural trends to examine the deeper currents at work: how the human mind adapts, how power concentrates, how meaning erodes or re-forms, and how emergent phenomena—from AI to surveillance to UFOs—fit into the bigger picture. This isn’t a news roundup or an outrage machine. It’s a long-view conversation about signal and noise, insight and illusion, progress and its costs. We’re awake, and we’re paying attention.

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