Monitoring the Situation

About 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? 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.

Publisher

Steve Skojec & Kale Zelden

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

30 Jan 2026

Latest episode

15 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

27 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   15 Oct 2026

   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/ (https://www.war.gov/UFO/) Show Home: https://mtspodcast.com/ (https://mtspodcast.com/) Audio Only Podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/monitoring-the-situation/ (https://rss.com/podcasts/monitoring-the-situation/) CONTACT: STEVE@MTSPODCAST.COM

2. 

   9 Oct 2026

   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?

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   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.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.7 / 5

18 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

7 ratings

Contact Monitoring the Situation

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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