Monitoring the Situation

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." - KaleSUPPORT MTSSupport the show directly: https://donate.stripe.com/dRm4gy2JJeII7M564Pf7i01CHAPTERS0:00 Cold Open2:31 Welcome2:40 Seeing You Can See Everything4:40 Fielder, Oppenheim and Holmes9:01 The Trailer11:40 What the Trailer Hides15:24 Sixteen Cameras in 4:321:12 The Silicon Valley Myth24:37 Holmes's Two Voices26:00 "A Character I Created"36:39 Perception Is Reality45:35 Who Is Billy?56:56 Who's on First1:01:28 The Unreliable Narrator1:07:13 The Prestige1:10:49 David Blaine1:15:31 C. S. Lewis1:26:40 Narrative Supremacy1:35:55 Shared Reality1:50:12 The Audiobook That Played Itself1:51:39 The Tesla Roadster2:03:09 We Need a Frontier2:09:54 Camille Paglia2:18:32 The Aztec Death Factory2:29:06 A Technological Slave Class2:35:37 Space, the Last Horizon2:47:02 A Massive Experiment2:57:37 The Scapegoat2:58:45 Girard and the High Church3:04:41 Thomas More's Utopia3:09:18 You Can See Nothing3:11:43 Sign-OffBOOKS DISCUSSEDSexual Personae - Camille PagliaOut of the Shadows - Jay StrattonUtopia - Thomas MoreGod in the Dock (includes "Meditation in a Toolshed") - C. S. LewisMONITOR WITH USKale: @kalezelden on XSteve: @SteveSkojec on XShow Home: https://mtspodcast.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMTSPodcastCONTACT: [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?CHAPTERS0:00 Cold Open2:19 Welcome8:11 Picking Up the Grusch Story12:42 Who Is David Grusch?15:24 Pilot Stigma19:50 Secrets That Follow You Home23:23 Grusch's Credibility26:11 Nonhuman Beings36:34 Reports Rewritten Up the Chain41:28 Beneath the Ocean47:24 Childhood's End & The Abyss52:37 Moby-Dick and the Alien1:03:32 Can a Secret This Big Be Kept?1:08:54 Gold Warriors1:15:40 Eric Weinstein1:26:16 What Are They Afraid Of?1:32:14 Aliens or Loss of Control?1:36:54 The Tech Race1:45:53 Normalcy Bias1:51:46 Jay Stratton1:55:54 UFO Retrievals Go Public2:01:25 The Hitchhiker Effect2:12:38 Steve's Phoenix Lights2:18:42 Whistleblowers & Threats2:25:57 They Flew2:31:12 Tim Taylor & Strange Materials2:36:14 Pics or It Didn't Happen2:42:56 Sign-OffDepartment 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?