Navigating Noise

For two decades, the information operations community has sold activity. Messages disseminated, impressions served, reach and click rates. Carrick Longley spent his career inside that business and came to a blunt conclusion: almost nobody can point to a single decision that changed. Longley is the founder and CEO of ZenithFlow and a former Marine Corps major who spent years in signals intelligence...

One of these founders spent his twenties reading Augustine of Hippo in the original Latin, watching how a theologian made sense of an empire falling apart. The other spent his career in Ramadi, South Sudan and Anbar, then wrote about how Augustus Caesar built an empire using the oldest propaganda machine in history. They run the same company. This episode is the story of why that's not a coinc...

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner and Erol Yayboke talk to the people working at the edge of intelligence, influence, and strategic competition. Stephen Hunnewell is a Senior Principal within MITRE's Strategic Non-Kinetic Effects Mission Center, w...

On February 4, 2025, ten people were murdered at a school in Örebro, the deadliest mass shooting in Sweden's history. Then came a silence that the internet filled for days. Kristian Ljungberg holds national responsibility for how the Swedish Police communicate on days like that, and his read on what went wrong is not what you'd expect from a serving official: the first error was a decision...

In May, Ukrainians woke up to an avalanche of posts about hundreds of thousands of migrants flooding into their country, exempt from the draft, replacing Ukrainians, even renaming their cities. Influencers made TikToks about it. Public broadcasters ran explainers debunking it. Within four days it was the number one topic in the country. None of it was true. Roman Osadchuk is Head of Threat Intelli...

For 6 years, Tetiana Haiduchyk has run a controlled experiment most people never hear about. Her team goes onto the open market, pays a few hundred euros for fake social media engagement, and measures whether the world's biggest platforms can detect and remove it. Mostly, they can't. Tetiana is Head of Analytics at Trementum, the small Kyiv data-science firm that serves as the analytical e...

For ten years, Dr. Joshua "Bugsy" Segal 's job was certainty. As a US arms-control negotiator and on-site weapons inspector (the Chemical Weapons Convention, UNSCOM in Iraq), he built the machinery that proves whether a country is lying about its weapons. Then, one month after 9/11, he walked out of the Pentagon, put on a Navy uniform, and spent two decades in the one domain with no...

In 2024, Jay Janzen told this show weaponized AI content was "minutes away." Two years later he's back with a blunt update: "We're definitely there." And the adversaries deploying it have no limits. Janzen is NATO's Strategic Communications Director and a former Canadian Brigadier-General, and he sits in the two-star meetings where military strategy and messaging no...

On July 1, 2026, Jonathan Teubner walked out of the CEO seat at Filter Labs and Erol Yayboke sat down in it. This conversation was recorded that same day. Jonathan decided years ago he wouldn't be the lifetime CEO. The founder instincts that keep an early company alive — high risk tolerance, selling a product that doesn't exist yet, chasing every opportunity — become a liability at scale,...

America won the war against Iran on the ground and lost it on the screen. Iran's axis of resistance has collapsed, its proxies are spent, its nuclear program is set back, yet Tehran got the Western internet to laugh along with an AI-generated Lego video that turned its mullahs into cuddly action figures and made American leadership look ineffectual. Tens of millions watched. We called it a mem...

When Trump called a meeting with Xi Jinping "the G-2," he may have admitted something Washington has spent years avoiding: China is no longer a rising challenger. It's a near-peer. Foreign-policy analyst Ali Wyne returns to Navigating Noise to unpack how that admission happened almost by accident, and what it means for the most consequential relationship of the century. Wyne, who wor...

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it wasn't a general who saw it coming first… it was Microsoft. Sensors planted across Ukraine picked up a massive spike in cyberattacks on banks, transport, and command-and-control, and the company picked up the phone and warned the White House. That moment, says intelligence veteran Emily Harding , is when the line between a tech company and a defense company quie...

Maggie Feldman-Piltch calls herself a propagandist, and she means it. She made stickers of Putin's face with the Barbie movie font that spread to over two dozen languages, and she found out he wasn't happy about them. That, she'll tell you, is the whole point. In this episode, Maggie joins Erol to break down why America is fighting an information war with both hands tied… constrained b...

Nickolas Wilcox is a Senior Program Manager at CACI International and one of the lead practitioners shaping the future of irregular warfare and operations in the information environment. He has spent his career on both sides of the tool: as the Green Beret who inherited the thing that didn't work, and now as the person helping build the next one. His argument is blunt: the bottleneck was never...

In this episode of Navigating Noise , host Erol Yayboke sits down with Chrissy Newton, Founder of VOCAB Communications. They dive into the world of UFOs and UAPs through the lens of data analysis, emotional storytelling, and government transparency. Chrissy shares how her team approaches real eyewitness accounts, the surprising psychology behind belief in the unexplained, and how the UFO community...

A new normal? In this episode, Rorry Daniels, Managing Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, and Erol Yayboke discuss U.S. - China competition and the changing global order. Rorry shares her surprising path from underground theater in LA to China policy leadership, and unpacks the misunderstood layers of the U.S.–China relationship, from national identity and economic anxiety to why both...

The world is changing faster than our assumptions can keep up. In this episode of Navigating Noise , Erol Yayboke sits down with world-renowned demographer and President of the Population Reference Bureau, Dr. Jennifer Sciubba , to unpack one of the most misunderstood forces shaping our future: population change . They dive into: Why most U.S. cities are unprepared for depopulation The myths aroun...

What happens when generative AI floods the internet with content—but journalists are the only ones who can still read between the lines? In this episode of Navigating Noise , Jonathan Teubner sits down with Dmitry Shishkin , CEO of Ringier Media International and one of Europe’s most influential media transformation leaders, to explore how newsrooms are adapting to AI—and why most people are getti...

What happens when the tech industry is no longer built for global scale—but for geopolitical advantage? In this episode of Navigating Noise , Jonathan Teubner sits down with Ansgar Baums, geoeconomics expert, senior advisor at Sinalytics, and author of The Tech Cold War, to unpack the massive, underreported shifts happening at the intersection of technology, national security, and global power. Fr...

Generative AI isn’t just changing technology—it’s rewriting the rules of information warfare, influence, and decision-making. In this episode of Navigating Noise, Jonathan Teubner sits down with Maggie Feldman-Piltch, founder of Non-State Actress, to break down: 🔥 How generative AI is repeating the mistakes of radio propaganda in the 1930s—at lightning speed. 🔥 Why women’s social networks are a...

Jonathan Teubner talks with Azeem Azhar, author of "The Exponential Age," about how to navigate the rapidly advancing world of AI, particularly large language models. They explore frameworks for understanding this technology, building trust in AI systems, and the changing relationship between technology, media, and society. TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Introduction & Azeem's Background in Technology 3:11...

Join us for an insightful conversation with Erol Yayboke, who recently joined Filter Labs as the Chief Research Officer, after holding roles at CSIS, USAID, and the Department of Defense. From his early experiences responding to earthquakes in Turkey to collaborating on Russian propaganda analysis, Erol discusses how to understand complex global challenges through both data and local perspectives....

In this conversation on Navigating Noise, Adrian Pabst explored a fundamental tension in contemporary politics: the disconnect between high-level policymaking and local realities. Drawing from his experience at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Pabst argued that we need to move beyond the false choice between pure idealism and fatalistic realism. Instead, he suggested we focu...

In this conversation on Navigating Noise, Peter Pomerantsev and I explored the shifting landscape of international relations and what it means for America's place in the world. What struck me most was how our discussion lead to a fundamental question: How do nations define friendship in an increasingly transactional world? Watch the full episode to hear how we explore this topic.

The historical evolution of American intelligence offers a lens through which to understand today’s complex national security challenges. As the information landscape becomes increasingly vast and nuanced, tracing the trajectory of intelligence—from its origins to its current form—provides insights into the interplay between secrecy, trust, and the public-private partnerships that define its pract...