Monitoring the Situation

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 th...

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 mind...

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-satu...

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 transcend...

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 ...

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 Sorcer...

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,...

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 bil...

Why did one debate dominate thousands of feeds while AI agents were quietly breaking out of a test environment? Steve and Kale begin with Candace Owens, conspiracy culture, and the epistemic wreckage left by COVID, then follow the same pattern through UAP disclosure, TikTok mimicry, algorithmic therapy, and the pressure to join every noise story.

The conversation widens through Neuromancer, Childhood's End, Babette's Feast, and th...

Kale returns from Oxford, Steve is buying physical books again, and the conversation moves from bookstores, Norman Rockwell, and lived-experience writing into Anthropic's AI watermarking news and the panic over detectable machine prose.

The real question is bigger than watermarking: do we have a right to know what is real? Steve and Kale talk through authorship, ghostwriting, AI-assisted art, fake wisdom, social media capture, fri...

Steve and Kale record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person.

The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAP...

Steve and Kale begin with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing.

But the conversation does not stay with the movie.

It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media ...

Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force.

Kale comes at the film as a longtime teacher of Homer. Steve comes at it as someone who had never read Homer's original poem and encountered the story first through Nolan's version. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, myth, war, guilt, hospitality, the longing for home, and why a 3,0...

Steve and Kale start with Candace Owens, audience capture, and the strange mechanics of online loyalty, then widen the lens into a deeper conversation about profilicity, persuasion, rhetoric, charisma, and the uncanny power of language.

What does it mean to "cast a spell" with words? Why do certain online figures seem able to create loyalty, fear, drama, and certainty almost on command? And what happens when those old human patter...

Steve and Kale return for a massive Episode 13, beginning with World Cup tourists, July 4th patriotism, Heavy Pulp’s retro-Americana, and the difference between media narratives and lived reality.

From there, the conversation turns toward the darker machinery beneath the surface: the CIA, MKUltra, the Church Committee, Allen Dulles, Jolly West, Jack Ruby, Operation Midnight Climax, Epstein-style compromise, UFO disclosure, c...

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day and this past week's UAP press conference on the steps of the US Capitol open the door to a much bigger conversation we're still trying to puzzle out: Are non-human intelligences really here? Are they corporeal (or incorporeal) biological beings? Are they demons? Something else?

What would disclosure do to Christian theology and modern materialism? How should we treat testimony, anomalous eviden...

In this episode, Kale and Steve begin by discussing aging, money anxiety, and the uncomfortable lessons they wish they could send back to their younger selves.

From there, the conversation turns toward AI fatigue, Magnifica Humanitas (the new papal encyclical on artificial intelligence), and the question of whether AI is taking away our desire to learn, to know, and to grow.

They cover classroom life, surveillance work, phones, b...

A new round of UFO/UAP files, Eric Weinstein’s recent comments on Joe Rogan, alleged CIA whistleblower claims, Skinwalker Ranch, White Sands, Epstein, string theory, AI, Mars, and the deeper question underneath all of it: who is actually in control?

In Episode 10 of Monitoring the Situation, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden follow the convergences between government secrecy, scientific gatekeeping, media silence, technological a...

The biggest UAP week in years is unfolding right as the first major Trump-era UFO document dump is expected. Kash Patel says releases are coming “literally in the very near future.” Rumors are bubbling it will happen by the end of the week.

Is this real disclosure — or narrative sabotage?

In this episode, Steve & Kale give a full UFO 101 then dive into the current chaos: deep state, black programs to recover and...