Monitoring the Situation

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Rumors are building that 2027 will usher in the true explosion of synthetic intelligence. We explore the fears that come along with that: will it be Skynet, or something stranger?

What if the AI takeover doesn't start with machines rebelling and Terminators hunting us down? Was T.S. Eliot more correct than he knew? Will the human world end not with a bang, but a whimper?

What if instead of violent annihilation we just give over more and more of our work and our agency until there's nothing left, because the machines make our lives so much easier that we gladly hand them the keys?

On the other hand, we all sense that human beings were never made to sit in cubicles staring at computer screens all day. What if the bots come for our email jobs and in the process, liberate us to rediscover our humanity?

Steve and Kale start with the AI labs going quiet, Claude Fable 5.2, a possible GPT-6 drop, and the hard lesson in hardware that's coming for the software bros. Will GTA6 -- essentially a degeneracy simulator -- be the last human-made AAA game? If so, could there be any more fitting curtain call?

This episode quickly tosses the prep notes in favor of diving into the questions underneath all of this: what is work for, what are humans for, and what have we lost along the way to this weird future we're living in? What can humans do that is uniquely human? What can the bots never take from us? Along the way: white-collar jobs, the breaking social contract, AI agents scanning LIDAR for archaeological sites, and the forecast that 2027 is when the intelligence explosion takes off.

Full chapters, books and links: watch on YouTube

BOOKS DISCUSSED

Collected Poems (includes "The Hollow Men") - T. S. Eliot: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Collected+Poems+T.S.+Eliot&tag=steveskojec-20

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Do+Androids+Dream+of+Electric+Sheep+Philip+K+Dick&tag=steveskojec-20

Essential Bukowski: Poetry - A Poetry Collection of Raw and Funny Verse (includes "Old Man, Dead in a Room") - Charles Bukowski: https://link.amazon/B0bJd9Qid

The Obesity Code - Jason Fung: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Obesity+Code+Jason+Fung&tag=steveskojec-20

Confessions - St. Augustine: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Confessions+St+Augustine&tag=steveskojec-20

RELATED

Pietro Miotti, "My AI Agents (Re)discovered a Maya Site in 72 Hours": https://pietromiotti.com/latest/maya-site/

As an Amazon Associate, Steve earns from qualifying purchases.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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]

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.