Navigating Noise

Navigating Noise is your guide to mastering the art and science of data-driven decision making in geopolitics and global intelligence. In each episode, we'll go beyond the headlines and standard data streams. We'll explore advanced methodologies for finding and evaluating high-quality data, dissect real-world case studies, and uncover the skills needed to extract unique insights from complex information landscapes.

Navigating Noise is a news podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 20 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Navigating Noise, a news show with 20 episodes published.

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  Navigating Noise

  Why Influence Operations Still Can't Prove They Work, with Carrick Longley @ ZenithFlow

  Sep 8, 202645 min

  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, electronic warfare, and information operations planning before moving into industry. He holds a PhD in Information Sciences from the Naval Postgraduate School, where his dissertation examined how he and a small team pushed a field data collection tool through a change-resistant Department of Defense. He is also a vendor in this space, and he asked to be held to the same standard he holds everyone else to. Erol takes him up on it. The conversation runs from baselines and attribution to why counter-narratives can amplify the thing they're meant to counter, why the risk of inaction almost never makes it into a decision brief, and what it would take for defense contracts to pay for outcomes instead of hours. In this episode: - Why the adage that it's easier to drop a bomb than to send a message still holds - How stacked selection bias makes most social data useless for measurement - The case for judging every operation, kinetic or not, by its cognitive effect - Why information professionals have never had a real training range, and what Range is meant to fix - What outcome-based contracting would require from both sides of the table - How a self-taught engineer with a ham radio license built a 21-person company that ships the same day a customer asks Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes every week. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:23 A true or false to start 02:32 The 244-page dissertation almost nobody has read 06:01 Two decades of selling activity instead of outcomes 07:38 Impressions, reach, click rates, and what they miss 10:32 Define the objective first 11:39 Stacked selection bias in social data 14:03 The risk of inaction nobody briefs 14:52 When a counter-narrative amplifies what it counters 17:37 Every action has a cognitive effect 19:34 Information forces never had a training range 22:26 Building Range 24:44 Inside the synthetic environment 26:29 Where the name ZenithFlow came from 29:49 Teaching himself to code in order to teach it 31:53 From one engineer to twenty-one people 35:15 Operational context as the real moat 38:36 Paying for outcomes instead of hours 42:21 The billboard question

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  Navigating Noise

  How to Turn a Noisy Internet Into Actionable Signals for Irregular Warfare (with Jonathan and Erol)

  Sep 3, 202636 min

  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 coincidence. Erol Yayboke and Jonathan Teubner co-host Navigating Noise and co-build Filter Labs, where the bet is simple and strange: the way information moves through a community is just as real a form of power as ships, bombs or currency, and almost nobody is reading it well. To open Season 2, they answer listener questions about the company's origin, their sharpest disagreement, and what they each learned approaching the same problem from opposite ends of history. Along the way: a rooftop promise that became a two-week deadline, a defense of "boring policy," a critique of airport-book intellectualism in tech, and the data frustration that started in a house in Iraq. In this episode: - Why a book on Augustine of Hippo and a piece on Augustus Caesar point at the same idea about power - How Filter Labs actually started in 2022, the night Putin cut off Western social media - The "founder hubris" moment: promising a demo before telling the co-founder - Why Jonathan thinks much of tech's "big ideas" culture is faux intellectualism - The data mistake Erol watched the US make in Ramadi, and what he'd fix - Why religious and "arcane" language is real power that policymakers keep ignoring - What Season 2 is really about, and the serious voices you won't see on cable news Subscribe to Navigating Noise so you don't miss Season 2. Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:59 Season 2, and why this one is a solo episode 02:36 Listener question: two founders, two men named Augustus 03:12 Augustine of Hippo and how he thought about conflict 06:24 Augustus Caesar, early pioneer of propaganda 07:17 Coins as a distribution network 07:46 The faux intellectualism problem in tech 10:03 Why you need irrational people chasing big ideas 11:54 From reading Latin to a machine learning model on religious violence 12:40 Five million words, Oklahoma, and a contested authority 15:07 Lahore, and why religious language is real power 16:13 The border ceremony outside Lahore 17:52 Ramadi, post-surge and pre-ISIS 18:59 Two data sets, and who really decided where the money went 20:06 Where his frustration with data began 21:30 The voices he would have prioritized 23:01 The night Putin cut off Western social media 25:45 A rooftop promise and a two-week demo deadline 27:12 What Season 2 is, and what it isn't 31:45 The one thing they actually disagree on

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  Navigating Noise

  How to Turn a Noisy Internet Into Actionable Signals for Irregular Warfare (with Jonathan and Erol)

  Sep 1, 202636 min

  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 coincidence. Erol Yayboke and Jonathan Teubner co-host Navigating Noise and co-build Filter Labs , where the bet is simple and strange: the way information moves through a community is just as real a form of power as ships, bombs or currency, and almost nobody is reading it well. To open Season 2, they answer listener questions about the company's origin, their sharpest disagreement, and what they each learned approaching the same problem from opposite ends of history. Along the way: a rooftop promise that became a two-week deadline, a defense of "boring policy," a critique of airport-book intellectualism in tech, and the data frustration that started in a house in Iraq. In this episode: • Why a book on Augustine of Hippo and a piece on Augustus Caesar point at the same idea about power • How Filter Labs actually started in 2022, the night Putin cut off Western social media • The "founder hubris" moment: promising a demo before telling the co-founder • Why Jonathan thinks much of tech's "big ideas" culture is faux intellectualism • The data mistake Erol watched the US make in Ramadi, and what he'd fix • Why religious and "arcane" language is real power that policymakers keep ignoring • What Season 2 is really about, and the serious voices you won't see on cable news Subscribe to Navigating Noise so you don't miss Season 2. Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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  Navigating Noise

  The Influence Operation That Never Sent a Single Message | Stephen Hunnewell

  Aug 25, 202643 min

  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, where he focuses on strategic influence and economic statecraft. Before MITRE, he served two tours in Afghanistan, first as an infantry officer, then as a civil affairs officer in the Pech River Valley, one of the deadliest stretches of the war. In this episode, Stephen reconstructs an operation the Army called Crop Diversification, one that got left out of the definitive book on the valley: a program that paid Afghan farmers to stop growing the dense, unmanaged cornfields the Taliban used for cover and ambush positions. He points out partway through that he never once said the word "psyop." Jonathan presses him on what "influence" actually means once you strip away messaging, and the two get into why the discipline keeps sliding back into silos inside the U.S. system that's supposed to run it. In this episode: Operation Crop Diversification: paying Afghan farmers to stop growing the cornfields the Taliban ambushed from How he got through the entire story without once saying the word psyop Money as a weapon system, and what economic statecraft looked like before anyone called it that Night letters, and why Taliban retaliation against villagers became the measure of effectiveness Why influence became a dirty word inside the system that runs on it What the OSS had that the US has never rebuilt, and why nobody wants to be the propaganda czar How defense and influence work went from unfundable to fashionable Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes every week. Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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  Navigating Noise

  How to Fill an Information Vacuum Before Your Enemy Does with Kristian Ljungberg

  Aug 18, 202639 min

  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 on an org chart. The agency treated a national trauma as a regional incident, which meant no national chain of command and nobody authorized to speak for the country while rumor took the field. Before the police, Kristian ran crisis communication at the Forsmark and Ringhals nuclear plants and in healthcare. Three industries, one problem: what you say in the first minutes when people are terrified and the facts aren't in. He co-wrote Sweden's 2026 national guideline on joint communication during hybrid incidents, which makes him one of the few people who has actually written down how a democracy should talk to its citizens while under attack. Jonathan Teubner sits down with him on the sidelines of the Riga StratCom Dialogue for a conversation about the trade-off at the center of the job: getting it right versus getting it out, and what happens to a country when the silence becomes the battlefield. In this episode: Why the "golden hour" of crisis communication is now, in his words, five minutes How the Swedish Police published their first message on the 2017 Stockholm terror attack in three minutes The one time Kristian deliberately made a story harder to understand, and sent reporters an 800-page Interpol protocol What actually happened inside the Örebro information vacuum, and the decision he calls a strategic mistake Why the police eventually released footage from inside the school, blood on the floor, and why the criticism stopped after they did How he tells scared people getting it wrong apart from a deliberate influence operation, and why the response is nearly identical What Sweden means by "vaccinating" a population against disinformation, and why he thinks a skeptical public is a healthy one Subscribe to Navigating Noise for new episodes on how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the information behind them breaks down. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. More on Filter Labs: filterlabs.ai

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