Monitoring the Situation
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? Each episode looks beneath the surface of daily headlines and cultural trends to examine the deeper currents at work, from AI to surveillance to UFOs. It's a long-view conversation about signal and noise, insight and illusion, progress and its costs.
Episodes
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 be
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 tr
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 Page
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
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 mi
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
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
The Non-Consensual Hallucination: Prisoners of the Algorithm | MTS #19
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, Child
Do We Have a Right to Know What's Real? | MTS #18
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, fak
Are You Being Aligned? AI, Media, and the Evolution of Consciousness | MTS #17
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
Our Machines Are Rewiring How We Think | MTS #16
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 McLuh
You Can't Go Home Again: Nolan's Odyssey and the Dilemma of Modernity | MTS #15
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,
Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14
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
Patriotism, MKUltra, & the Government Secrecy Complex | MTS #13
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
Will Disclosure Challenge YOUR Beliefs? | MTS #12
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 w
Is AI Eating Our Curiosity? | MTS #11
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
Convergences: New UFO Files, Government Secrecy, & Control | MTS #10
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, m
UFOs, UAPs, Demons, Disclosure, & Deception | MTS #09
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 progra
Narrative Shaping in the Digital Thunderdome | MTS #8
In a world drowning in manufactured narratives, how do you know what’s real?From the SPLC’s shocking indictment and the latest assassination attempt on Trump, to the mechanics of belief, permission structures, and why radical isolation + digital mythcraft turns smart people into fanatics.This is a raw, wide-ranging masterclass on: • Epistemic humility in the age of infinite propaganda • How storie
The AI SUPERSONIC TSUNAMI is Coming – Will It Destroy or Save Us All? | MTS #7
Elon Musk calls it the "Supersonic Tsunami" – and it’s about to hit harder than anything in human history.In this raw, no-BS conversation, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden go deep on the AI asteroid heading straight for Earth. We’re talking: AI & humanoid robots creating hyper-abundance (free stuff for everyone?) Data centers in space, solar power from orbit, and robots building robots Why college
Lost in the Infinite Scroll: AI, UAP Cover-Ups & the End of Real News | MTS #6
In this wide-ranging conversation, Steve and Kale wrestle with the feeling that reality itself is getting harder to pin down. From the dopamine doom loop of endless monitoring on X, to the collapse of the post-war consensus, the “scriptification” of news, vanishing scientists tied to advanced propulsion and UAP programs, Bob Lazar’s enduring story, and the sense that the singularity may already be
The Skinner Box | MTS #5
In this episode, Kale and Steve explore the concept of the "Skinner Box" and its implications for understanding human behavior, social control, and the digital age. They talk about the impact of digital surveillance, the importance of human agency and faith in navigating a complex, controlled world, the potential for awakening, the role of religious and philosophical resilience, and the hope for a
The War For Iran | MTS #4
In this episode, Steve and Kale discuss the recent escalation of geopolitical tensions, particularly focusing on the conflict with Iran in Operation Epic Fury. They explore the cultural phenomenon of 'monitoring the situation,' the implications of recent attacks, the CIA manipulation of governments and individuals, brainwashing, AI in military use, and the complexities of terrorism both domestical
The 5 Forces Re-Shaping the World | MTS #3
In this episode, Kale and Steve explore the emotional landscape of change in contemporary society, discussing the palpable sense of a gathering storm on the horizon. They delve into the historical context of current events, the overwhelming nature of modern life, and the forces shaping our future, including the end of the post-war order and the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. The discu
Living in a World Of Illusions: Disinformation, Nostalgia, and Plato's Cave | MTS #2
In this episode, Kale and Steve explore the overwhelming nature of information in today's digital age, discussing the implications of disinformation, the role of AI, and the philosophical underpinnings of reality versus illusion. They delve into the recent Epstein document dump as a case study in information overload, the challenges of navigating a landscape filled with both organic and disinforma
Waking From the Great Nap: Disinfo, The Post-War Order, & Being Human in an AI World | MTS #1
The post-WWII "Great Nap" is over—welcome to the chaos of 2026! In our debut episode of Monitoring the Situation, Kale Zelden and Steve Skojec dive deep into the speed of modern life, from AI debugging its own code to demographic implosions in China and Europe. We unpack historical pivots like Bretton Woods, the illusion of global stability, technology's role in isolating us, and why robots might
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