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A senior Defense Department official hears a classified briefing on an unidentified craft and tells Jay Stratton: "You're poking demons. You should stop." Steve and Kale dig into Out of the Shadows: Stratton's account of the legacy crash-retrieval program, Lockheed's alleged 12 nonhuman craft, and the reports that get rewritten on their way up the chain. Then come Skinwalker Ranch, portals in his backyard, a wolf-like creature, and the orb encounter that sent his son to the hospital. Kale brings Diana Pasulka's critique of Stratton's religious framing; Steve challenges her reading of the Pentagon encounter. What belongs to aerospace engineering, what belongs to religion, and what do we do when the categories overlap? Also: space as a frontier, the midterms, young men and the Anakin meme, the post-war order, disappearing internships in the age of AI, and the hosts' concerns about Poland.

A face becomes unfamiliar. A subway video makes the unseen feel present. A convicted fraudster seems sincere—and the people filming her cannot agree on what they saw. Steve and Kale begin with Jennifer Lawrence's changing image and the viral Spiritual Parasites video, then follow the problem into personal accounts of the strange, historical oddities, and the question of what counts as a fact. What can our senses miss—and what happens when a phenomenon seems to notice its investigator? Then they return to Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything. This time, second-half spoilers are on the table: Amanda Seyfried's reenactments, the filmmakers' disagreements, and the dispute over documentary ethics. Rick Rubin, C. S. Lewis and Macbeth help frame the difficulty of knowing another person through a face, a camera, or a story. Along the way: aging and parenthood, egregors, demons, the power of narrative identification, and the cost of pretending. SUPPORT MTS https://donate.stripe.com/dRm4gy2JJeII7M564Pf7i01 RELATED RESOURCES You Can See Everything (A24): https://a24films.com/films/you-can-see-everything Spiritual Parasites (BlotterMonkey): https://x.com/BlotterMonkey/status/2114305976341848364 Reason's criticism (Christian Britschgi): https://reason.com/2026/10/26/nathan-fielder-made-a-dishonest-movie/ BOOKS DISCUSSED They Flew (Carlos Eire): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=They+Flew+Carlos+Eire&tag=steveskojec-20 The Creative Act (Rick Rubin): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Creative+Act+Rick+Rubin&tag=steveskojec-20 God in the Dock (C. S. Lewis): https://www.amazon.com/s?k=God+in+the+Dock+C.S.+Lewis&tag=steveskojec-20

What if the most transparent documentary ever made shows you everything, and you still don't know what's real? Steve and Kale both went to see Nathan Fielder's You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary in which Elizabeth Holmes invites Fielder and co-director Oppenheim into her home in the final weeks before she reports to federal prison. Sixteen cameras, long zoom lenses, a 4:3 frame, and a woman who insists she has never lied to anyone. We do our best to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, so we steer clear of the second half. We get into Holmes's two voices, the fight over "a character I created," Billy's unsettling presence, the Who's on First scene, and Fielder himself as the film's most unreliable narrator. From there: The Prestige and performers who never break character, David Blaine, C. S. Lewis on looking at versus looking along, narrative supremacy, and why people desperately want to be fooled. Then the conversation turns outward: the Tesla Roadster demo and the reaction to it, masculine and feminine coding online, Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, the need for a frontier, and Kale's argument that the Aztecs fell because they had become a death factory. What happens to a civilization that loses its horizon and turns to decadence? "When you say you can see everything, it means you can see nothing." - Kale SUPPORT MTS Support the show directly: https://donate.stripe.com/dRm4gy2JJeII7M564Pf7i01 CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open 2:31 Welcome 2:40 Seeing You Can See Everything 4:40 Fielder, Oppenheim and Holmes 9:01 The Trailer 11:40 What the Trailer Hides 15:24 Sixteen Cameras in 4:3 21:12 The Silicon Valley Myth 24:37 Holmes's Two Voices 26:00 "A Character I Created" 36:39 Perception Is Reality 45:35 Who Is Billy? 56:56 Who's on First 1:01:28 The Unreliable Narrator 1:07:13 The Prestige 1:10:49 David Blaine 1:15:31 C. S. Lewis 1:26:40 Narrative Supremacy 1:35:55 Shared Reality 1:50:12 The Audiobook That Played Itself 1:51:39 The Tesla Roadster 2:03:09 We Need a Frontier 2:09:54 Camille Paglia 2:18:32 The Aztec Death Factory 2:29:06 A Technological Slave Class 2:35:37 Space, the Last Horizon 2:47:02 A Massive Experiment 2:57:37 The Scapegoat 2:58:45 Girard and the High Church 3:04:41 Thomas More's Utopia 3:09:18 You Can See Nothing 3:11:43 Sign-Off BOOKS DISCUSSED Sexual Personae - Camille Paglia Out of the Shadows - Jay Stratton Utopia - Thomas More God in the Dock (includes "Meditation in a Toolshed") - C. S. Lewis MONITOR WITH US Kale: @kalezelden on X Steve: @SteveSkojec on X Show Home: https://mtspodcast.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMTSPodcast CONTACT: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 the emerging AI arms race. If the feed trains our desires and the swarm pursues goals beyond its instructions, what values are these systems serving? The answer may lie in friendship, boredom, books, feasting, laughter, and the embodied life technology keeps making easier to abandon.

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, frictionless convenience, WALL-E, gig work, tech fatigue, deepfakes, and why writing feels different when the machine starts speaking in your voice.

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 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?

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 theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception. The center of the episode is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds. This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.