Navigating Noise

Filter Labs
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Politics
  • Updated Weekly

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how critical decisions get made when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner, founder of AI intelligence company FilterLabs, and Erol Yayboke, former Pentagon deputy chief of staff, talk with analysts, operators, and decision-makers working in intelligence and information operations. Each episode asks one question: how do you know what's actually happening in places that are hard to see? Season 2 covers the data supply chain behind info ops, the analyst under pressure, and the future of the craft.

  1. 6d ago

    NATO's StratCom Director Breaks Down the AI Information War | Jay Janzen

    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 now fuse. Recorded in Riga with Erol, this conversation gets into how NATO runs an information war without abandoning its values, why the alliance now treats deterrence as something that happens inside an adversary's head, and why the West's obsession with escalation is exactly the trap Russia wants us in. What you'll hear: Inside NATO's "shark tank" in Rennes, where 100 companies pitched agentic AI for cognitive operationsWhy Janzen rejects fighting disinformation with disinformation, even with one arm tied behind our backThe three spaces where NATO denies Russia advantage so "the math never adds up"How the comms team was asked to shape Steadfast Deterrence 2027 three years in advanceThe Nazi propaganda myth Janzen believed for 30 years, and what it taught him about bias in AIWhat "good data" means when garbage in means garbage out at machine speedThe one message he'd put on a billboard for billions to see Follow Navigating Noise so you never miss an episode. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Filter Labs at filterlabs.ai

  2. Jul 14

    Introducing Filter Labs’ New CEO: Why We Made the Transition and What’s Next

    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, and he wanted out of the seat before that turned existential. A recruiter told him he couldn't hire his way out of it. So he watched his successor grow into the job instead, without telling him it was a test. Erol lays out what he's keeping (the nerdiness, the flatness, the allergy to meetings) and what changes as Filter Labs becomes a Washington company selling into defense, intelligence, finance, and marketing. Then the conversation turns to the reason the company exists: Russia's move against Telegram just made a generation of single-source monitoring tools useless, and a decade of answering data quality problems with data volume is catching up with everyone. Highlights: Why Jonathan started planning his exit two years before it happenedThe exact moment a founder's risk appetite becomes a liabilityHow Erol was tested for the CEO role without knowing itLife in the seat: five years without a single day fully offWhat the Telegram shutdown reveals about single-source intelligence toolsWhy "more data" stopped being the answer, and what good data looks like insteadThe Harvard Square DNA Filter Labs keeps as it becomes a DC company Subscribe to Navigating Noise for conversations on information, influence, and the data underneath both. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about Filter Labs: filterlabs.ai

  3. Jul 7

    How Iran Won the Internet with Memes While Losing the War with Blaise Misztal

    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 meme. They ran it as a campaign. Blaise Misztal has spent two decades on Iran, from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee to running policy at JINSA, where he built the case for a regime-collapse strategy. In this conversation he argues that the United States keeps fighting the wrong front. The most consequential battle isn't centrifuges, it's narrative, and a democracy built for four-year cycles is badly equipped to fight an adversary that has been at war with it for 47 years. He and co-host Jonathan Teubner get into why the data we use to read Iran is a proxy that keeps failing us, why "they survived, so they won" is a dangerous misread, and why America's own movies and music may be doing Tehran's work for it. What you'll hear: Why an AI-generated Lego video beat the most expensive intelligence apparatus in historyHow Iran fights a 47-year war while the U.S. resets every four yearsWhy Blaise moved from "manage Iran" to "collapse the regime"What the analyst's view of Iran's black-box economy actually looks likeWhy "surviving means winning" is propaganda, not analysisHow America's self-doubt became Tehran's easiest weapon to exploitThe closing case that the U.S. has exported freedom and hope, and how it forgot to say so Subscribe to Navigating Noise on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for conversations on how the world's most critical decisions get made, and what happens when the data behind them breaks down.

  4. Jun 23

    Why War With China Is NOT Inevitable with U.S.-China Relations Expert Ali Wyne

    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 works on U.S.–China at the International Crisis Group, makes a counterintuitive case: the goal between Washington and Beijing was never trust, and it shouldn't be. It should be empathy: a cold, dispassionate effort to understand an adversary you may never agree with. Along the way he and Jonathan Teubner dig into why young Americans are "China-maxing," why a generation of students has vanished from each other's countries, and why the popular story about China's all-seeing internet is mostly a bluff. In this episode: Why Trump's "G-2" comment was an accidental concession, not a strategyThe difference between empathy and sympathy, and why it decides foreign policyWhy genuine U.S.–China trust would actually be a red flag "China-maxing" and the sadness driving young Americans toward BeijingHow student exchanges collapsed from ~15,000 to under 2,000What the world gets wrong about dissent and censorship inside ChinaThe college student's question that D.C. would dismiss and Wyne still can't answerSubscribe to Navigating Noise for more conversations on how the world's biggest decisions get made. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  5. Jun 16

    How Microsoft Predicted the Ukraine War Before the Pentagon with CSIS Director Emily Harding

    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 quietly disappeared. Harding is a VP at CSIS, a former CIA analyst, NSC Iran director, and architect of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Russia report. She walks host Erol Yayboke through the most destabilizing shift in modern conflict: the data center is now a battlefield, and nobody has agreed on the rules. If Iran hits a server farm in Italy, who got attacked? If China strikes an AWS cloud, does the US go to war? These are the questions keeping deterrence strategists up at night, and the answers aren't written yet. In this conversation: Why Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are now "on the front lines" of three conflicts at onceThe 2014 Sony hack as a failed test case and what the US must do differentlyHow adversaries decide a hospital's data center is "fair game"The World War One alliance trap hiding inside US tech policyWhy Harding is an AI optimist who still calls ChatGPT a "professional mansplainer"How 90% of useful intelligence now lives in open source and why that's dangerousThe free-speech line a democracy can't cross, even to fight propaganda Subscribe to Navigating Noise for sharp analysis of the forces shaping global conflict and information. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  6. Jun 10

    Why Truth Is More Dangerous Than Lies in an Information War | Maggie Feldman-Piltch

    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 by bureaucratic boxes built in 1947, a cultural allergy to the word "propaganda," and a fundamental misunderstanding of what that word actually means. Propaganda, she argues, is morally neutral. It's a tool. And the truth told better than a lie is the most powerful version of it. In this episode of Navigating Noise: - How a single Barbie-Putin sticker became a global campaign and why Maggie considers getting PNG'd from authoritarian countries a career goal - Why propaganda doesn't mean lies and how America's refusal to use the word is costing it the information war - The National Security Act of 1947 and why the bureaucratic "boxes" it created are hampering U.S. information operations - Why adversaries specifically target women's online spaces, and what that tells us about how they view democracy - The "dupe" vs. "counterfeit" shift and how language changes are used as a tool of influence - What the Knapsack Girl Squad, the Munich Security Conference bathroom, and a bedazzled phone-receiver handbag have in common - Her company Iceberg and why IP theft from consumer brands is a national security issue - The billboard she'd put up for billions to seeSubscribe to Navigating Noise on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Maggie on Substack at Non-State Actress.

  7. Jun 2

    How to (Actually) Apply New Technology to Irregular Warfare, with Nickolas Wilcox @ CACI

    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 the AI, the data, or the platform. It's the planning culture that treats risk as a bureaucratic barrier instead of a design variable. This episode of Navigating Noise is a practitioner's guide to what it would actually take to close that gap and an honest look at why the U.S. keeps not closing it. Highlights from this first episode of Season 2: Why Nick says "technology is the easy part" and what that means for anyone selling tools to the governmentThe concept of "speed of relevancy" and how to build a decision loop that can actually respond in timeWhy the U.S. is brilliant at individual-level influence and structurally unable to operate at scaleHow adversaries fill the narrative vacuum every time and why kinetic action without a story is open to interpretationMarket share of opinion: what it is, why it's the only endgame in irregular warfare, and how you lose it incrementallyWhat micro-targeting going biological actually looks like (and why a Walmart can already do it)How Nick ended up in law school and why learning to argue the law changed how he runs operations Subscribe to Navigating Noise on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  8. 06/17/2025

    → How UFOs, Data, and Counterculture Collide: Chrissy Newton on Alien Encounters & Government Transparency

    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 is becoming a powerful countercultural force for transparency and change. They also explore how AI, policy, and fringe science are converging and why PR in the UFO space might be the most unforgiving in the world. ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 – Intro: The many hats of Chrissy Newton 01:20 – Inside Discovery’s Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction 02:30 – Evidence, psychology, and the Simon Cowell of UFOs 04:36 – How Chrissy applies data analysis to paranormal claims 06:34 – A UFO sighting in Toronto: How she verified it 08:40 – Telling people they’re wrong, without gaslighting them 11:00 – The UFO community as a global counterculture 13:39 – Chrissy’s communications work with Jacques Vallée & The Debrief 15:53 – How to do PR in the most skeptical space on the internet 18:53 – Why transparency is the #1 rule in the UFO world 20:36 – Why the UFO community is so passionate 23:24 – Fringe science, funding, and optimism 27:50 – Where AI meets UFO analysis and government policy 29:55 – Why shaping policy might be Chrissy’s next move 31:06 – The surprising people she meets on planes 35:54 – A Winston Churchill World War II nugget you won’t forget 🎧 Subscribe for more conversations like these #UFOs #AlienEncounters #ChrissyNewton #DiscoveryChannel #TheDebrief #FringeScience #GovernmentTransparency #NavigatingNoise #RebelliouslyCurious #DataAnalysis #AI #UAPs #PolicyChange

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Ratings & Reviews

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About

Navigating Noise is a weekly interview show about how critical decisions get made when the data behind them breaks down. Hosts Jonathan Teubner, founder of AI intelligence company FilterLabs, and Erol Yayboke, former Pentagon deputy chief of staff, talk with analysts, operators, and decision-makers working in intelligence and information operations. Each episode asks one question: how do you know what's actually happening in places that are hard to see? Season 2 covers the data supply chain behind info ops, the analyst under pressure, and the future of the craft.

Information

  • Creator
    Filter Labs
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Filter Labs
  • Show Website
    Navigating Noise