MAD Warfare Podcast

Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: / madwarfare If your power company told you there'd been a foreign attack, what would you do? Panic? Hoard gas? Fill a Country Crock tub with fuel? Great. Same. In this episode, we talk with Felicia Weston — former Air Force intelligence officer and narrative warfare practitioner — about the part of critical infrastructure nobody wants to...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: https://www.patreon.com/c/MADWarfare In this episode, we talk with Josh Gryniewicz — storyteller, health communicator, violence prevention strategist, comic book writer, and founder of Odd Duck — about why facts rarely change minds, how narratives shape entire societies, and what a North Dakota rancher, a Chicago gang mediator, and your...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: /   / madwarfare In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tanna Krewson — cognitive warfare expert, former Army officer, and one of the people who helped shape NATO's cognitive warfare concept — about the fight for cognitive superiority, why "disinformation" is often too small a word for what's happening, and how identity, emotion, boredom, be...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: / madwarfare   Remember when the internet was fun? Cat memes. Flash games. "All Your Base Are Belong to Us." Now it's AI slop, rage bait, troll farms, and foreign influence campaigns studying your uncle's Facebook habits like it's a military operation. Because… sometimes it is.   In this episode, we talk with Darren Linvill Johnson — in...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: / madwarfare What if thinking like a scientist is actually a form of self-defense? In this episode, we talk with Sophie Shrand — science educator, comedian, actor, founder of Science With Sophie , and executive producer at Cool Jacket Productions — about why curiosity, comedy, and critical thinking might be some of the best tools we hav...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here:   / https://www.patreon.com/c/MADWarfare We turned serial killers into celebrities. Then we made documentaries about them. Then we watched them… to relax. Cool cool cool. But why do we binge murder before bed? In this episode of Mad Warfare, we sit down with criminologist Dr. Scott Bonn to unpack our collective obsession with true crime...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/MADWarfare What if a huge chunk of American politics is basically melodrama with better lighting? In this episode, we talk with Dr. Shan — professor, pop culture decoder, and creator of Pop Smart Media — about the stories that script how we see power, morality, identity, and each other. We get into melodrama,...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here:   / madwarfare   What do foreign intelligence services and your social media feed have in common? More than most people want to admit. In this episode, we talk with  Jennifer Ewbank — former CIA officer and former head of digital technology at the Agency — about cognitive freedom, manipulation, trust, and what espionage teaches you abou...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: MAD Warfare Patreon AI is booming, and guardrails are disappearing. In this episode, we talk with Sandra Khalil (All Tech Is Human) about what happens when artificial intimacy scales faster than accountability. From AI companion cafés to chatbots offering mental health "support," we dig into the real-world risks of systems that feel hum...

🎙️ Get the ad-free version and exclusive bonus segments here: https://patreon.com/MADWarfare One year in. Somehow still alive. Somehow still laughing. In this anniversary episode, we do a behind-the-scenes autopsy of MAD Warfare: what changed, what got weirder, and what's gotten more urgent since we hit record for the first time. We break it down into three F's that f with us — Funding, Fear, and...

Do your stories shape the future—or do they quietly shape you first? And when the next war shows up wearing a hoodie, a meme, and a "totally harmless" plotline… how would we even recognize it? In this episode, we talk with August Cole — co-author of Ghost Fleet and Burn In and co-founder of Useful Fiction — about why fiction can do what white papers can't: grab attention, build foresight, and help...

Do your ideas belong to you—or are they secretly running the show? If identities can calcify into cages, how do you melt them back into something alive? In this episode, we talk with therapist and writer Mike Ross about the weird life of ideas: how they form, how they spread, and how they quietly start making decisions for us. We go from punk rock and tattoos to liminal spaces, Robin Williams, Gen...

What if your worst enemy wasn't a foreign adversary—but a virtual clone of you? A digital twin that knows your habits, your cravings, your blind spots. It knows when you're tired. When you're distracted. When you're easiest to influence. Sounds like Black Mirror. It isn't. In this episode, we sit down with Matt Canham—former FBI supervisory special agent, trainer to NASA and DARPA, and founder of...

Who wins when nobody knows what to trust? If the biggest national security threat isn't hackers or spies—but bad communication—what happens next? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Andrea Hickerson , Dean of Journalism at the University of Mississippi and founding director of the new Center for Information Advantage & Effectiveness , to distill how information actually moves, mutates, and manip...

What happens when the information environment becomes too loud for the human brain to handle? And why does it feel like everyone — kids, adults, institutions, governments — is getting overwhelmed at the same time? We sit down with John Bicknell, former Marine and host of The Cognitive Crucible, to talk about the cognitive overload shaping modern life: from teenagers buckling under algorithmic pres...

What if your brain isn't a peace-loving hippie at heart…but a very polite war machine trying its best? In this episode, Dr. Nicholas Wright — neuroscientist, former neurologist, advisor to the Pentagon, and author of Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain — walks us through why our minds are wired for conflict, why that doesn't mean we're doomed, and how better self-knowledge m...

Ep 019: May the Best Story Win w Rand Walzman  Before "fake news" or ChatGPT, one computer scientist asked a dangerous question: could a machine invent believable lies? That was 1985. Dr. Rand Waltzman went on to shape DARPA's research into social media and information influence. This work helped define what we now call "cognitive security." We talk about how those early experiments connect to tod...

What if the story running your life isn't yours at all? Author and publisher Nate Ragolia (Brink Literacy Project) joins us to talk about how the stories we inherit—about who we are, what we deserve, and what we're capable of—shape everything. From teaching creative writing in prisons to publishing comics by people society wrote off, Nate's work shows what happens when people stop living inside so...

What's the worst possible headline someone could write about you, using nothing but public records? That's opposition research. Sonia Van Meter, managing partner of Stanford Campaigns, shows us how to use it–to your prosperity … or to your peril.     Key Topics What opposition research really is (and isn't) Why oppo is about narrative , not "silver bullets" "Self-research": knowing your own vulner...

What do extremists, trolls, and corporate boardrooms have in common? They're all in the business of narrative warfare. Simon Paterson went from "smiting the Queen's enemies" in UK military intelligence to advising Fortune 100 companies on how not to get wrecked by disinfo. Turns out: memes, lies, and smear campaigns can be just as effective as missiles. And no, "just ignore it" is not a strategy....

Can Cartoons Save Democracy? What do Broadway, the CIA, and Hollywood have in common? For Gus Kangas, the answer is tradecraft. From child actor to CIA operations veteran to Hollywood consultant (most recently on The Agency), Gus has lived at the intersection of performance, persuasion, and perception. Now he's using that experience to ask a big question: how do we teach kids to spot manipulation...

What does it mean to be a hero? We throw the word around a lot — soldiers, firefighters, nurses, neighbors, even SpongeBob. But what happens when our definitions clash? When one side's "hero" is the other side's "villain"? On this episode of MAD Warfare, we dig into hero narratives — how they inspire, unite, recruit… and yes, how they get weaponized. Our guest, Adam Bird, is a veteran, entrepreneu...

Some of the best mind-hacking tech on the planet was invented before electricity. No code. No bots. No blue check. Just ancient mental engineering — sharp enough to survive empires, con men, and mass hysteria. Devsena Mishra knows it well. She's been inside national security and the hidden rooms where influence campaigns are wired together. She's seen how billions get nudged, poked, and spun into...

What happens when war becomes a desk job? You wake up in Vegas. Sit down in a box. Fly a drone over Afghanistan. Watch your target for weeks—when he feeds his goats, when he hugs his wife—and then one day, you get the call: Clear to Strike. Then you go home. Eat dinner. And don't talk about it. Former drone operator and founder of Remote Warrior, Tanner Yackley , joins us to talk about what remote...

Think warfare is just brute strength and bullets? HA! That's a national security FAIL. Elizabeth Tate—author of Control Your Scroll and a consultant in psychology, communications, and organizational change—joins us to talk about the underestimated force of girlhood, social media, and so-called soft skills in shaping national and global power. From her first-grade psychological ops to advising gove...