Eric Czuleger
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then UFO. And then Bigfoot. Yeah, and Bigfoot. We haven't even talked about the Albanian-Bigfoot connection. I think that one of the reasons that people are also rightfully looking at USAID with a great deal of criticism is what is the extent of soft power, right? If you look at...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
If you look at indicators of where violent armed conflict are going to happen, one of the biggest indicators of that is low state-based institution. So some of the, you know, like there's a lot of organizations, OSCE, you know, the EU, the UN that are working on institution building in a country, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And this could be anything from making sure that there are regional town halls, to making sure that minorities are represented in local governance, to making sure that there's equal representation of different faiths in a country. Now, is helping a country building institutions that look not unlike democratic American institutions, is that overstepping our bounds?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So if you think about Hitler's Blitzkrieg, that's sort of a good example of that maneuver warfare of the third generation of warfare. But as things go up towards the Cold War, we see this big characteristic change in how wars are fought. And obviously this happens because of the nuclear bomb. So at this point, we have the last iteration of great power conflict.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't think so because I think that democracy is a better bet than autocracy is. That's my point of view on it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I was previously the ambassador from the world's first cryptocurrency-based nation, cryptocurrency libertarian-based micro nation, which is called Liberland. Liberland. Liberland. Shout out to Liberland. Their 10-year anniversary is coming up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I think that, that, and I agree like, and this is ultimately like one of those problems with taxation. Like I wish every year I got a receipt for my taxes. Like I bought, you know, like one 1600th of a stinger missile. Awesome. I wish I like filled like 27 potholes. At least get a plaque. Yeah, right? You get a portion of the stinger missile.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Wow, that's a big claim.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, so obviously there is music diplomacy. There's sports diplomacy. All of these things are, especially in the international development world, things that people talk about, even food diplomacy. One example of food diplomacy is the fact that the Thai government subsidizes Thai restaurants in the United States. Like, that's why there's a lot of Thai restaurants around. That's a legit thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. But Thai restaurants don't destabilize our government. They don't. Yet. Yet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. And so, like, do I worry about, you know... Overusing the subversive capacity of the United States in other countries? Absolutely. Do I worry about the U.S. identifying too broad of a target base and saying, hey, we need to make everybody exactly like us? Absolutely. I totally agree with those things. But at the same time, I really...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I like that there is an apparatus in the United States of giving aid. I like that there is an arm of our government that says, you know what, the way that we want to interact with the world is by helping them at times in which they are struggling as a country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
international development, American international development. Is that right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. International. I mean, look, I was driving around Albanian villages giving books to kids. Like if you can find some like mustache twisting pernicious means in that. Good luck.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But at the same time, like, I'm pissed off that there are these other more subversive, like, politically motivated actors that are using USAID dollars to potentially work against countries because that means that everything is painted with the broad brush of, well, that's bullshit. Yeah. And also to your question about should our tax dollars go here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But with the nuclear bomb, it becomes far too dangerous to have direct nation-state on nation-state violence because at any point, somebody could drop the world-ending weapon, or so we thought at the time. And so suddenly war has to change again because the geopolitical aims aren't completely annihilating the world. It's just to get... strategic advantage over the adversary.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So there is a real big benefit in helping to stabilize and advance the economy of a country because then when it descends into violent conflict is less likely, right? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
there are countries in the world with less state development with with weaker institutions with greater um disparity between the very wealthy and the very poor those are the places that wars start those are the places that we may end up having to go into and so if you want to pay for an education system
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
or to, you know, I mean, use the Peace Corps to go in and give English classes now, it means that maybe in 20 years, it'll be more robust when a geopolitical fluctuation happens and there is a potential that they'll go into conflict, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so paying now to help develop institutions may actually be a better investment, especially in a globalized world, and especially in a globalized world where oftentimes the United States has to use violent force in order to stabilize or to nation build. By the way, for those listening at home, I did quote buddy ears on both of those words. Spoken like a true USAID employee. That's right. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I was a Peace Corps volunteer. We're not employees. I'm just trying to get hired by a Chinese consulting factory. That's next, bro. I know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's right. I am open to work, guys. So, you know, I can look the other way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. So they're one of the only think tanks that that offers degrees as well. So I'm I'm a part of their actually their first class of national security students. So. So they have PhDs also.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't know. It's really interesting work. And the stuff that you get to think about, the people that you get to work with are really cool. And you're certainly, you know, you're on the cutting edge of all of this stuff and being able to do really long range research on all of these things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
i don't necessarily know if my if my role is to to be in think tanks i think what i'm hoping to do is i i want to raise these conversations in the public more i want to write books about about this kind of stuff about nation building about um you know the the eccentricities of geopolitics um and that's why i started uh my newsletter this is not a psyop um subscribe um
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that's because I think that there is a lack of easy public access to what the thinking in these organizations is. I spent like 10 years abroad seeing a lot of places that have been dismantled by American foreign policy. And that's a really heartbreaking thing to see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to go back and find out how these policies are made in the first place to learn from kind of the epicenter of the American political mind.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And now I feel like I can sort of speak from the authority of not only being on the ground in certain places, but also understanding how decisions are made and also having a great network of researchers who are curious about these things at the same place. But I think that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think that there is a lack of public conversations about this kind of stuff from both perspectives, from the perspective of what it feels like on the ground and also how the thinking is happening internally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
In this case, it would be, you know, the Soviet Union and the United States. So we go to proxy wars. We go to proxy wars and asymmetric conflict. So that can take us from basically the end of the Cold War all the way up to the global war on terror. And the global war on terror changes things massively because suddenly we have a unipolar world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't think it's that hard to do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, and then you see the sort of... normalization of like a massive intelligence leak. That's not a great thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's exactly right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. And I think, you know, I guess in my heart of hearts, I was like, that would be a great thing to do on purpose if it gave you some sort of strategic advantage to have this active leak that gave us some strategic advantage somewhere. It doesn't appear that that's the case.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Man, I totally agree. I mean, I think that one of the things that I've noticed in terms of now kind of like knowing from the inside a little bit of how policy is made is it is so incredibly slow and politically costly to make a policy. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
If you look at the time that they were talking about starting the Manhattan Project all the way until we had a nuclear bomb, it was years before they even started doing it even though everybody at the exact same time totally agreed. The American political apparatus moves incredibly slowly. Yeah. And so you're looking for this point at which what's called a policy window opens up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So a policy window is the moment that the idea that you've been thinking about forever aligns with the political interests of an elected leader and aligns with the needs of the population at the same time. But how do you find that and how do you make somebody – how do you – like –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
have an elected leader who is just at the right point at the right time to implement a good idea or to implement a terrible idea that's what the policy window is all about and so like one of the things that i'm that i've been been banging on one of the things i've been banging on about in my my own writing Every year there is a national security strategy that's released. Not every year.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think every administration. Then there's also a national defense strategy. Two different strategies. One is DOD. One is White House. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And as I sort of started my journey into looking at information space defense, I was like, well, I should probably just like look at the national security strategy and the national defense strategy because clearly there's got to be an information space defense strategy and security strategy. And there isn't any. We have an Arctic portion of that strategy. Arctic? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Arctic defense is big right now. Huge. But we don't have any information space defense strategy. What is Arctic defense strategy? So, briefly, with climate change happening, there's the potential that there will be more, there will be an opening of the Arctic ice that will allow essentially a new domain of warfare in the Arctic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It opens up a trade route between Asia and Europe that I think is like 40% quicker. Wow. Yeah. Actually, this is really interesting. There's a there's a a war on the rocks article. I think it's called the icebreaker gap. But the icebreaker gap is pretty fascinating. It's like so Russia has the biggest amount of icebreakers in the world. So these are these are ships that can. Crush icebergs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Essentially, Soviet Union has fallen and the United States is able to project power all around the world. But we haven't been able to project power all around the world without making quite a few enemies. And also training a lot of those enemies at the same time. So suddenly the global war on terror turns into really precise asymmetric combat with semi-state and non-state actors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, they crush ice so that you can create navigability between Arctic spaces. I think that they have something like 350 or so. We have 3.5, like one that's only an icebreaker or can be retrofitted to an icebreaker.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so they're like, okay, well, we have this Arctic defense strategy, this Arctic security strategy that we're trying to develop and we're trying to figure out how this is going to affect American security, but we need icebreakers. And it's like, okay, so the question is, how do we get icebreakers? Well, as it turns out, having an icebreaker factory is really expensive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And the only person that would be, or the only country that we'd be purchasing icebreakers from is Russia, but we can't buy icebreakers from them. So it's like the next best option is to buy icebreakers from Finland. But it's like, how much money are we going to have to invest into just icebreakers to ensure that we are prepared for any sort of Arctic national security crisis?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I know that there's concern of this over this icebreaker gap. And it's something that the five eyes, so the five like English speaking intelligence sharing networks are looking at doing cost sharing to ensure that they can all sort of like use the icebreaker. But like it doesn't like the dollars don't make sense unless you have a pretty deep order book for your icebreakers. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But yeah, I mean, this kind of Arctic strategy is being thought about actively. That's crazy. The next best example that I have for information space defense is cyber defense, right? So after 9-11... they started talking about how we need cyber defense capabilities, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This was before we saw any major cyber attacks because the concern at that time was what they were calling like a digital Pearl Harbor. And that would be, you know, this devastating attack on the United States that came through our IT systems. Now, this was before we had seen any major cyber attacks. Now we've seen quite a few cyber attacks.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We have constant examples of information space attacks, but no strategy to address them. We had briefly a couple of organizations that were stood up in order to sort of establish deterrence in the information space. So there was the Global Engagement Center, and that was sort of destroyed. It was defunded. And then there was one more that I think only lasted like six months.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But it's because of the same reasons that you might imagine, right? Like the reason that these were criticized was you can't have an American ministry of truth, right? Because a portion of being an American is having freedom of expression and having, you know, your right to think, say, and believe anything that you want to say, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So the needle that my research is trying to thread, and frankly, I'm not doing very well. If anybody has any ideas, reach out on LinkedIn, especially if you're from like a Chinese consulting company, is how do you preserve freedom of speech while also defending the information space? There's a really good paper called...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and I mean, you know, the Islamic State, name your insurgent group, your favorite insurgent group, name them. Pick your flavor. Right, exactly. But now we have something different happening. And that's fifth generation warfare. We still have the same constraints of third generation warfare. We can't go directly into combat with each other with these world-ending weapons.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
uh well there's two really good papers that i could recommend um one is a book it's called truth decay um truth decay is this concept of how we're experiencing right now in a unique way the uh the eroding of a shared sense of facts in our country and for a democratic environment to function you need a shared set of facts right because governance is really all about
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
finding the problems and the challenges, identifying a solution to the, sorry, challenges and opportunity, identifying a solution to the challenge and opportunity, funding that solution, and then experiencing the benefits from that. So sometimes people think about governance in like this three pronged way, right? It's who decides, who pays and who benefits.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so if we don't have at least a carrying capacity of agreeing on what the problem is in the first place, what solutions might be and who could actually benefit from those things, then the the democratic system falls apart. Yeah. And it's critical that we are able to have robust debates about those things. But it's also critical that we have agreement on what facts are right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So truth decays are really good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Super interesting book. They did really long range, deep research on this and also looked at other times in American history that we've experienced these kinds of things. So typically you experience like periods of truth decay during massive moments of inequality within the country. Also, it's experienced when there are new modalities of sharing ideas. You know, this is nothing new.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We've just created new ways to share ideas. If you think about it like the the printing press comes out, right? And then Europe is just like, well, I guess we have to kill each other for the next 500 years. Like, wait a second. You believe a slightly different thing about the Bible? Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, the second most bought book after the Bible, after the printing press came out, do you know what it was? What? The Malus Maleficarum, the witch hunting manual. Really? And then suddenly we got a bunch of witch hunts. Yeah. What year was this? Oh, look it up. No way. There's also a great AFI song called Malice Maleficarum. It's pretty intense, bro. I knew you listened to AFI.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I'm going to go to Emo Night in St. Pete. That's fucking hilarious.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
The Hammer of Witches.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
1480s. Is it really the second most bought book? I believe so. Fact check me. I'm ready for it. Wow, man. So, you know, this is another moment of suddenly we have the bar to share ideas is lowered significantly. And because of that, second most bought book, Harry Potter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think specifically after the... Well, it's a religious text. Yeah, after the invention of the printing press, I believe the second most printed and bought book was the Malus Maleficarum. Yeah, all right. Anyway. Anyways. So, yeah, like, these are... This is, like, this moment in history that we're living through. Things like it have happened again.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And in fact, there's so much economic entanglement in the world that it's very difficult to actually disrupt another nation so significantly because you're disrupting your own market. So that leads us to this new type, this new iteration of warfare, which is the cognitive domain. Essentially, it's a war of media, a war of ideas, and a war of attempting to divide populations against populations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, it's like that great quote of, like, you know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it always rhymes. I agree. And that's, like, one of the reasons that I love studying geopolitics and history and seeing how these things go together. Because if nothing else, like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
it gives me a way of feeling like we haven't completely departed from the map, that we're not in the middle of some forest with nowhere to go. By studying history and geopolitics and understanding the incentives behind things,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It makes you realize that there's really nothing new under the sun and that by studying how it's been dealt with in history, you can also see maybe around the corner to see how it could be dealt with now. Just so for the record, I'm in no way advocating for any sort of restriction of free speech. But I'm also...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't necessarily believe that because most academics when they talk about like how we need to deal with truth decay is digital literacy education. We need to educate people on digital literacy to like really fact check themselves.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You want a prize.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's a renaissance of Nigerian print scams. But, I mean, that's what digital literacy education is. It's basically like, hey, make sure you fact check that and don't believe those crazy things. I frankly think, I mean, I'm from the dare generation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Without revealing too much, it didn't work. You know, so I don't take that as an actual serious intervention to help Truth decay. I just don't. I don't know what a serious intervention, you know, really looks like. It's something that I'm currently like struggling with and trying to trying to identify and doing a lot of research on. But I know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think that's one of those things. Like, I don't know, to me that, that feels like, yeah, it was a solution in the, or it was a solution in the past. It is great when, um,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
you know there is national unity and and frankly like one of the one of the the best examples of national unity that you can point to is the last you know major attack i push back against this theory that we need to have some antagonistic relationship in order to unify nationally i Because what's the option there to gin up wars and enemies in order to unify us?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't think that that's the answer. I think that that is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, I think that, you know, this is something I think about a lot, too, is you've read 1984, right? Yes. Yeah, so one of the things in 1984... Actually, the Audible just did, like, a great audio play version of 1984. Yeah, if you really want to, like, get freaked out, because who doesn't? Go listen to that. It's great. But one of the main plot points in 1984 is...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
the main character can never remember who they're at war with. It's either like Oceania or like Eurasia, right? And so, yeah, I mean, would that work? Sure. Is it ideal? I don't think so. I don't think it's ideal to lie to a population in order to like make sure that they're believing the same things. And frankly, I think that we're better than that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. And to use the cognitive domain, essentially like the gray zone warfare in People's Gray Matter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, and I know that Andy talks about that too. You know, there's a great line in a poem by the writer Kay Tempest who says something along the lines of, They treat us like idiots, but that's their problem. But when we behave like idiots, it becomes our problem. So yeah, do people in power oftentimes infantilize the people that they represent? Certainly. But the...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
the institutions that we have put in place are there in order to at least give us the capability of pushing back. And I think, at least my belief is that, and I think Andy would disagree with me, But my belief is that we can and should trust the American population more than it seems like happens with our elected leaders. And I think this is ultimately kind of –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And to occupy the space between people's ears in order to achieve some sort of strategic gain. So a lot of what I'm looking at is, you know, how does the United States work to shield itself from any attacks in the information space? Because one of the... biggest assets we have as a country is our freedom of speech.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, I think that we should trust individuals. I mean, I trust individuals more than organizations personally. Yeah, for sure. And I think that this kind of goes back to, I mean, there's like in any geopolitical book that you ever read, chapter two, 100% will always talk about like Hobbes versus Rousseau, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So Thomas Hobbes, you know, a man in a state of nature is lonely, nasty, brutish, and short is his life. Something like that. You know, it's a real... Real rough. But he essentially believes that we're naturally in a state of nature, you know, evil conniving and those appetites need to be constrained for the proper functioning of society. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that's constrained in his book Leviathan by the Leviathan. So we're giving up those freedoms in order to constrain our natural inclination towards violence and chaos. And then there's Rousseau who says that in a state of nature, man is naturally equal. He's willing to cooperate and more tranquil. I think Bustamante's opinion here is more on the Hobbesian side of things where we're
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
we need to use societal controls to constrain the individual because if left unchecked, they're going to make decisions that are not only bad for themselves, but bad for society writ large. This is your sort of like parent-child thing. I tend to trust individuals more, and I think that people really are reasonable actors when they're given proper information. I think that we've...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We've developed an information space right now where we're all sort of invested in these zero-sum politics where it's not enough that my side wins, but the other side has to lose at the same time. I don't think that's a fair broker of an information space. I don't know how to get that information space where people are treated like adults and – Transparency is the letter of the day.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't know how to get there, but I do trust individuals. And I think that it doesn't benefit us when we have a country that is predicated upon the primacy of the individual to make their own lives and their own communities better to say that, well, the government needs to keep a lot of stuff from us because we can't be trusted with it. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But that goes back to that transparency gap, too, where it's like the government is oftentimes transparent enough to make us not trust it rather than giving us transparency so that we do trust it. We don't know what's up or down anymore. Yeah. But you know what, though? I also like... Okay, so anytime I go to a country... And this happened like, I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, shit. All right. Yeah, cool. I'm going to get a bunch of offers from the Chinese consulate after this. This is awesome. Finish your story. I think that like I never trust a country when I get into the back of a cab and the cab driver is like, we love our political leader. It's like, no, you don't. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I've never been in a North Korean cab before. I've heard stories. Have you?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Invented ping-pong. Everything, yeah, exactly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I mean, it's like, and I think that's kind of the part of the political game. We shouldn't trust our political leaders, right? We should be constantly scrutinizing the things that they say. And like, there is no way that anybody agrees 100%, not only with a political leader, but with anybody else. Right. My best friends, I have differences of opinion with them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Uh, but that also leaves our information space massively open to any sort of incursion by, uh, by potentially belligerent actors. In fact, there was this one, uh, psychological operation. I think the, uh, the, uh, the agent who did it was a guy named Yvonne. Um, this was in the 1960s. Um, And he essentially had created this fake treasure trove of Nazi documents.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We have a unique capability of pushing back against political leadership in peaceful ways. That needs to be maintained, but it also needs to be maintained with a pretty...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
clear information space that is hopefully free of manipulation by foreign actors because you asked me at the beginning of this you know what is the what is the greatest vulnerability that we have in the united states and and obviously my my research is is focused on fifth generation warfare in the information space but i think that the the biggest vulnerability that we have is the gray matter you know it's the space between our ears it's the
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
ability for us to look at somebody else who is an american citizen and say that they're the enemy over somebody from a thousand miles away across the world who actually does mean us harm and that's just because of the stories that we tell ourselves um I think that's the greatest vulnerability. And I don't have an answer for it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I'm going to keep doing public thinking about how we create cognitive security in the United States and elsewhere. And if you want to hear about that, check out my newsletter. This is not a PSYOP, which I promise is 100% PSYOP free. What is it on, Substack? It's on Beehive. Beehive, okay. Beehive, yeah. I'll link it all below. Link below. Send me the link so I'll put it in there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And check out my book, You Are Not Here, Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wait, what? Didn't, wasn't there a different wall back here previously?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That was incredible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, I noticed that the set had been changing. Anyway, always a pleasure, Danny. Thank you, Eric. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Let's, I want to debate Beck Lover about cryptocurrency sometime. Ha, ha, ha.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, no. He's in New York. Oh, you're not going out there? No, I'll go to Albania maybe before I go. I might go to New York. I don't know. I'm in Los Angeles. Okay. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This was fascinating shit. You bet. All right. Everything's linked below. Good night. Magic mind.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I would, I'm just not in Europe right now. I mean, this is the longest I've been back in the States for a long time. But yeah, no, you know, good on Liberland. I mean, you know, they have come really close to establishing like a fully recognized and autonomous state.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They were all fake Nazi documents and he dumped them into a lake in Czechoslovakia at the time. And then he hired a real,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
um news team to to unearth them and and say yeah and and so the goal was basically to uh to sort of acknowledge some sort of complicity uh with the the newly western government um and say hey you know like these guys were working with the nazis granted all of these documents were fake sometimes this operation this is called operation neptune sometimes called the fake in the lake um
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, it was in the 60s, I want to say. If you want to read about it, definitely recommend Active Measures by Thomas Ridd. Fantastic book. But he has this one, the Agayans has this one absolute banger line in it where he says something like, you know, it's great that they have freedom of the press. If they didn't, we'd have to invent it for them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
and so it talks about this permeability of the information space where it's like where in on the one hand you're able to call out really terrible ideas and you're able to surface really good ideas in free dialogue uh but on the other hand it leaves the borders open for anybody to make an injection of information into that space
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's exactly right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, and the Bezmenov speeches is fantastic, too, because one of the things that he talks about is the generational aim of of these kind of active measures. Russia specifically tends to have a lot more time to do these things. They don't have administration switches nearly as regularly as we do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's right. And they can also make more long-term decisions. You know, I was reading a report and I am like having trouble getting it out of my mind because now it's the only way that I can sort of think about the Ukrainian conflict or really anything that's happening within the Russian Federation sphere of influence. And they were essentially saying that the psychological operation of Russia
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
is really the locus or the center of the conflict, that kinetic conflicts are just ways of influencing the psychological operation. And so I know it sounds a little perplexing, but I think the information that they give or the evidence that they give is, you know, their incursion into Syria at a certain point was everybody was saying, well, you know, it's because they want a warm water port.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
great but what also came from that was a massive amount of refugee outflows from syria that went into europe and this is you know you can draw a direct line from that into this uh new wave of hyper nationalism that is uh sort of drawing fractures in the european union because they're saying well you know if we're a european union then why are some countries bearing the brunt of
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And, you know, I was, when I was on the, so for folks that don't know, you know, go back and listen to the first pod, but I was talking with the, the president of Liberland while on the back of a jet ski, which was a really strange first way of meeting somebody.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
taking care of these refugee outflows and why are other ones able to not have that same burden? And so in one respect, Russia benefits from the rise of autocrats in the European Union and a fracturous European Union too. And so we've seen a bit of that already. And so you might wonder, you know, okay, well, what about the war in Ukraine? You have a slow encroachment into the war in Ukraine, 2001.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
2014 is it, you really start seeing these gray zone operations where the little green men come into Crimea and, you know, it's a sort of like a situationship of war zone. Like, you know, are we at war? Are we not at war? And, you know, it's testing the waters to see, you know, what will the result actually be? What, you know, what actions is NATO going to take?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And we're already seeing an enormous cultural divide, especially in the United States and amongst allies, about what do we do about this kinetic conflict? You know, I haven't lived in the United States for a long time, but I've been back for six months and maybe it's because I'm, you know, at home.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
at, you know, a think tank where these things happen or, you know, we have these conversations a lot. But I don't, I was, I'm quite surprised to see how much division there is over funding or not funding the war in Ukraine. And there's certainly a lot of gasoline being thrown on that fire, not only internally, but from abroad. So-
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, so one of the operations that we've seen is Operation Doppelganger, which was covered pretty well. I mean, honestly, especially after looking at these things for a while, you get to know how clever they are and how low the cost for For sowing a good deal of discord is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So what Operation Doppelganger did was it basically launched websites that looked like almost looked exactly like common news websites in the West. But of course, they had more anti-Ukraine pro Kremlin stances in them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so these were just sort of littered across the internet and people would point to, you know, these potentially reputable news sources and say, see, they, you know, they're supporting the Kremlin instead of supporting Ukraine. And we know that was coming from the Russian Federation. Obviously, you also have, you know, a...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
weaponization of of the alternative media to where they're saying, you know, OK, well, we're going to pay X, Y and Z influencer to sort of go on to our talking.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I wasn't sworn in on the jet ski. No, I was just clutching him like a spider monkey so I wouldn't fall off the jet ski because he had a life vest and I didn't. But, you know, I asked him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. And I mean, look, the Russians are really good at making sure people don't know where the money is coming from.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think it was Tenant Media. Tenant Media, that's what it was.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I'm not a YouTube creator. So I'm assuming that's a, that's a pretty good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Case closed. He said Putin is a scumbag. Nice. They got him. Case closed, baby. Really? I bet the Russian active measures agents are really wringing their hands over that statement.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Sure. Yeah. And, you know, this is this is a version like this is kind of a like it's deeply within the Russian playbook. And and some of the research that I'm doing, too, is is trying to look at like, you know, what's the what's the character of a Russian psychological operation versus Chinese psychological operation versus an Iranian one? Like how? how are they fighting a fifth generation war?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I can, but it was the Danube and, you know, yeah, it's a moving river. Oh, you probably get AIDS in that river. Yeah. Hopefully not. I didn't find out, which was good. And, you know, I asked him, I was trying to figure out like what to ask him because I'd spent, you know, all of this time in unrecognized nations. I'd spent almost a year in unrecognized nations in Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo and...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And they tend to be very different than one another. So Russia has been doing this stuff for a long time. Obviously, is it Bezmenov? Yuri? Yuri Bezmenov. Yeah, I mean, everybody go watch that speech.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
On YouTube, there's just like chill hop playing in the background. It's just really, really vibey Bezmenov.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, I haven't. After this interview, I don't think I'll be welcome. That'll be two countries I'm banned from.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Turkey is the first one. I actually ended up, I got detained flying through Turkey recently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
The loaded language there of lack of moral standards. Ouch, man. Rude. But yeah, I mean, you know, that is a good primer on the purpose of fifth generation warfare and Russian psychological.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
transnistria and you know there i was holding holding on to the president of liberland as we sort of went up the the danube river on a on a jet ski and i asked i was trying to figure out some really good question to ask him but you know in that environment while you're holding on to your interview subject i don't know if i've ever tried to interview this way but it's like talking right directly i was just sort of yelling into his ear because the jet ski was loud yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, it's sort of demonstrated in how well Russia understands the American character, really. You know, I think about how there are quite a few skeletons in the American closet, and they're really good at, like, playing the xylophone on those ribs, right? One good example, a sort of famous example, I want to say, it had a really cool... Operation Codename.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It was called like Infection or something. But anyway, this is one of the more famous ones, and it was during the AIDS crisis. They wanted to sew this story into the American media that AIDS was being generated as a biological weapon. to affect marginalized populations in the United States. So what they did was they sort of smuggled a story into a paper, and I want to say it was India.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then that hit the international news wires because it was a story in India. It was really hard to fact check, and also it's a fairly sensationalist story. So it sounds really... Like it sounds plausible. It sounds exciting. And both of these things are big red flags when you want to like identify what is and isn't, you know, a psychological operation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then suddenly ends up in the American news cycle. I think I mean, one of the one of the big news broadcasters broadcast on it. I want to say Tom Brokaw, but that's like literally the only name that I can think of right now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
anyway people ran with it and and the I it's a process of idea laundering so you put an idea somewhere within some sphere of influence that has a direct line into the target community and then from there you have a certain amount of
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
you know well-known uh sources of information that uh seemingly vet that information and suddenly it becomes almost indistinguishable from the truth yeah but it has a distinct effect on the american population um one of my favorite favorite versions of this was so they had the um i think this was um uh yevgeny progosians um uh he was the the the guy who uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Putin's chef.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. He had a catastrophic airplane failure. Yeah. Crazy. Surface to air missile. Yeah. They shouldn't have been flying that missile there. What bad luck. So he also had, I think it was called the Internet Research Organization. And the Internet Research Organization was the Russian troll farm, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I mean, it just sounded like you read reports from the people who were working in these troll farms. And the conditions sound brutal. Like, you know, you've got to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
write something like 700 posts a day um you know either supporting or denying or just just fighting with people online under the guise of you know an american from texas or whatever um and uh at a certain point they were like well Can we make things happen in the real world from online?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so they did this one operation that I just think is hilarious and brilliant, which was it was called Free Hot Dogs. And they created an event on Facebook in Central Park in New York City that was just like free hot dogs. We're going to have free hot dogs in Central Park. There were no free hot dogs, spoiler alert.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
um and i was like uh you started a country is it worth it it was the best i could get out and and then he kind of stopped the jet ski and he was like really thoughtful for a second he was like everybody should start their own country and then he just busted the sickest like 180 and then on the danube and i was like
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But what they did was they had a Russian active measures agent go and just like see who showed up. A lot of people showed up for free hot dogs. And so what they found out was they could now make people take real-life action through online events. Now, this changed into full-on demonstrations. So there were these two groups that they were trying to get to fight each other. One was called, like –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
the heart of Texas, and then the other one was called like, I want to say like USA Muslims, some sort of Islamic thing about Muslims in the United States. And they started essentially like counter protests against both of these groups, but both groups were operated by Russian troll farms. And of course, one group had almost... had a quarter of a million people in it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
The other group had a quarter of a million people in it. So suddenly you have real live division and an actual protest and counter protest that was being ginned up from St. Petersburg by a bunch of people posting. And now this process has gotten so much easier that it's insane with artificial intelligence and LLMs. You can have actual agents, not human agents, but LLMs running around the internet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
and just generating hundreds of thousands of posts for you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There is a fascinating paper about this, and it was about a Chinese researcher who sort of predicted this. I can't remember. There is a RAND report on this. I think if you look up Chinese disinformation, then you can read the RAND report about it. But there was a... There's a RAND report. Yeah. You know, most of the... Most, if not all. I mean, there's certain classified RAND reports. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then RAND reports that are classified and then eventually declassified. But I think you'd be surprised how... Yeah. Chinese different... That's... Yep. These reports are fantastic, and they're incredibly dense. So, yeah, they're all publicly available as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't know if it's this one that talks about it, but there was a Chinese computer scientist who sort of saw the LLM, large language model AI technology. opportunity coming. And initially he was sort of laughed at and they're like, well, that that's not actually going to be a thing. But he he came up with the idea of these artificial intelligence agents, but he called them souls. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So you would come up with a digital soul or an army of souls. But really what these were were very realistic social media profiles. that had, you know, a full history. So you could sort of vet somebody's full history. All of these artificially intelligent generated imagery. Online accounts. Online accounts.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, no. I'm a national security master student. So they have a. So wait, where did you work?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then you would start having those accounts run around the internet and posting various things. And LLMs were doing all this. Well, so that's what he predicted. And I think that this is something that we'll probably start seeing a lot more of because it's just, it's so easy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You know, a lot of the barrier to entry that previous generations of psychological warfare fighting had was legitimacy, right? Going back to that Operation Neptune, the fake and the like, You think about how much they had to do in order to, quote unquote, uncover these Nazi documents, right? You had to have forgers work for months creating realistic, fake Nazi documents.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's either the most brilliant thing that I've ever heard or it's complete nonsense. And the project that I'm kind of working on now is exactly that. I'm trying to investigate how one would start their own country nowadays. Because there are these new nation-state building projects that are currently happening. And that's an insane project.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They even went so far as to take the steamer trunk and artificially age it so that not only would the steamer trunk be able to hold these fake documents, but it It could be identified realistically as something that was at that time period, not as a fake. And then you have all these fake documents discovered by fake divers. In fact, Aguillant was one of the divers as far as I know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then you have a real media team that shows up there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
yeah so that's an enormous barrier to entry like you have to have this army of forgers working for months to make sure that everything stands up to scrutiny now you have an artificial intelligence agent that can work you know within a matter of seconds to sound plausible or to sound realistic then you can launder the idea through any number of different websites to make it sound as if this is somebody
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
from a measure of authority. And so as the bar lowers to affecting the information space, it becomes easier and easier for both state actors and non-state actors to start messing with the information space of a country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, I've heard you, you know, dealing with this. Yes, I'm, you know, I'm a fan of your show as well. So I listen to a lot of your episodes, but I hear you sort of struggling with this from time to time regarding like UFOs and Egypt stuff, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You know, you have so many different conflicting reports and then there's so much information in the space and the original sources are obfuscated from you and from anybody. You know, I want to know where the UFOs are too. Yeah. This is something that, you know, Some buddies of mine talk about it, Rand.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Totally. Yeah. We're like, you know, I took a course on space stuff. And anytime, like, a new professor come in, we're like, they know. They got to know. But then you also realize how much is how stovepiped information is. And, you know, if...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Anyway, so the the thing that I think is it must be really frustrating for you and it's certainly frustrating for me when it's like, OK, I don't know how to vet any of this information because the information comes from a place of secrecy already. So anybody that's going to claim some authority, whoever seems the most convincing from that space of authority, I guess they're right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then, you know, when there's conflict in the space, it seems like everybody's just going to throw the other guy under the bus and be like, oh, that's a PSYOP, that's CIA. They're, you know, the little green men are CIA. But these aliens, like the Pleiadians, they are definitely, like, legit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I was like, I should probably get some academic and scholarly backing for this kind of thing and actually try and get some good scholarly roots in actually exploring what statecraft really is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, because they've leveraged the authority of that platform, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, you also, I mean, you know, a lot of what I've learned in studying national security, you know, at RAND, which I should say is a fantastic program. And, like, the teachers that we have are, like, it's really cool to be in a room with people who think about this stuff at all times. But, you know, one of the things that you sort of consistently discuss is, like, cost-benefit, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think oftentimes conflict is really fought on a spreadsheet first, which is how do you maximize the impact while also lessening the cost. And information space attacks just happen to be really cheap. And getting cheaper all the time. So long as you have access to that messaging surface or you have access to that point of authority. And sometimes the idea is
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I don't care as much to change people's thoughts. I just care that they act a different way. So the thought can be any number of things. It's not necessary that you change somebody's beliefs. You just want them to act in a way that is strategically important to whatever your aims are.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
just uh comments uh just on on the video that i did here last time just got absolutely shredded i'm surprised you came back i did yeah congratulations for overcoming that thank you i i am a deep state operative and uh you guys are all right in the comments so you know i'm i'm here uh again to be hurt emotionally um
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That seems like a stretch. I don't know. I'd love to hear their argument for that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Ambitious or stupid, I don't know. There's quite a few of these projects that are going on right now, and some of them are verging more on what I would consider art projects that are sort of challenging the mainstream of the nation state. There's this project down in the Southern Californian desert called Slow Jamistan. Shout out to the sultan of Slow Jamistan. I think you told me about that one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Is that the general argument for that kind of thing?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, I think that part of this is also— And also a lot of UFO people think that it was because of UFOs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I was going to say, just because of the release recently, I was like, I got to get into this because I honestly just haven't researched it. I've been too busy with Unrecognized Nations. And then I started dipping a toe in the waters and I'm like, this goes way too deep.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This will either consume all my life or... But immediately I was really confused to sort of like what the dominant most plausible theories were. Yeah. Um, but I think, you know, um, it's, it's interesting you say it like it's either, it's either UFOs or, or Israel. Clearly the, the, the usual suspects.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Um, but I, I think that this, this also sort of speaks to, um, like the, in, in scholarship and in academia, there's this idea of like, um, uh, Is somebody on a dark street looking for their keys under the only place that there's a street light on? It's like, well, the keys have to be here because it's the only place I can see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You know, Israel and UFOs are top of mind for a community that's interested in JFK and the truth thereof. So it seems like stitching together this grand plan is more plausible because those things are the things that they're already interested in.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They already have a sort of working model for how the world works as leveraged by, you know, somewhere in between UFOs, Israel, and probably what, like the pyramids? Yeah, maybe. I'd imagine. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I know. Seems like bullshit. Did you, I sent it, I sent that thing to a, an Egyptology friend of mine. And, and he basically told me to not bother him ever again. Really? Anything like that. Yeah. He was like.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, so this is one of those, like, there are certain areas in which psychological operations thrive. My girlfriend has a joke right now that any time I say psychological operations or psyops, she has to take a shot. And she's not dead yet. Yeah. But she would be if that was true.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's right. Yeah. She's getting better. But anyway, like this is kind of the space that these things thrive. So one of the original like people at Rand was a guy named Kenneth Arrow. And he created this rational actor model, right? And the rational actor model or – The rational actor theory is basically that people are going to like maximize their own benefit in any given situation. Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, yeah. So he's just a DJ and wanted to start a nation. And then there's another one called Molossia, which I think it's in the Nevada desert. And they consider their property taxes as like foreign aid to the United States. But then there are these other like kind of incredible projects that are like more network state projects.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And nation states will do something similar. So I was doing some research into that. And I was like, well, what are the things where does the theory really fall apart of the rational actor model? Right. And it was really interesting to see the thing, the places that the rational actor model falls apart are really the sort of weak spots in terms of getting people to believe parallel realities.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So biases, just cognitive biases are one way of leveraging information into somebody's head. So a good cognitive bias, particularly with what you just talked about. Yeah. is the availability bias. Like, you know, somebody has just come from reading an article about UFOs, and now they're reading about JFK, and they're also reading about Israel at the same time. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Suddenly they have a grand theory about how they're all connected.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, that technology is totally available. I think that, um, you know, this is one of the things that I, um, uh, as I was, uh, I've been talking with one of the sort of key researchers on this kind of stuff. Um, uh, his, his name is actually Rand. Uh, so Rand wants men, uh, uh, everybody should go follow him on LinkedIn because he has this fantastic LinkedIn. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Like weirdly on LinkedIn, he really, he really rocks everybody here that has a LinkedIn account account. Well, he has this incredible, so he posts a slide.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I do, yeah. Really? You know, currently open to networking.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, no. Okay. Not usually. But Rand posts this, a lecture series that he did years ago called Defense Against the Dark Arts of Psychological Manipulation. And so it's basically like a slide a day that talks about how psychological manipulation happens.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And one of the things that he talks about is a cognitive DDoS attack.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Denial of service. It's basically like a hacking attack where you have a bot farm or just a lot of people sort of like query a website over and over again until the website shuts down. So what this looks like on the cognitive level-
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
is let's say you're waiting for an important piece of mail and you go to your mailbox and that message that you're waiting for isn't in there, but you have a hundred other pieces of mail that say nonsense on them or they're junk mail, right? The next day you have a thousand pieces of mail, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Eventually, it's going to be too costly from your time and your just effort to go through all of those messages to find the message that you actually want. And eventually, it's going to just be, yeah, it's just too costly to go through all of that information in order to find what the signal is. There's too much noise, not enough signal, basically. Right. And so by...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
sort of assaulting, let's say, a hashtag or a news piece with a bunch of information that is sort of nonsensical. In fact, I think Steve Bannon calls this flooding the zone with shit. Essentially, you can make the noise go away or be so reduced that you're never going to be able to hear the signal within it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So when you're talking about potentially bot farms or just dumping messaging into these spaces, there might be, it could very well be, it could be a cognitive DDoS attack where... There is a bunch of noise going into a space just because whoever is trying to obfuscate the signal is doing so.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, I think this is something that you certainly experience with UFOs as well, where it's like everybody is coming in with their own hot take on UFOs. And also they're fighting in the space at the exact same time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So the game isn't to generate a truth statement from the conversation. The game is to win the conversation. Right. And that doesn't actually surface the truth. Right. I mean, I don't know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so network states is what some people believe the future of nation states are. And it's basically like a decentralized nation state. And this was kind of predicted – has been predicted by a lot of these futurists that say, you know, the nation state at a certain point was this – ideological technology that was invented in the 1600s at the Treaty of Westphalia, basically.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This is this is I've been writing on on my newsletter about sort of trying to coin these new these new phrases. Right. And so this is something I call the Napoleon's penis problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, right? Okay, so I'm trademarking it for the world right now. Napoleon's penis problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I didn't work for an agency. No, I was an open source intelligence analyst.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it's the idea that – so Napoleon famously had his penis cut off and embalmed and sent to his lover because –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
don't know he's napoleon was this in his will it was there are different there are different reports on why exactly some people even say that the um like the priest that was around was mad at him the weird part is that none of those reasons are important the weird part is that we know his penis got cut off and embalmed at one point really that's a fact that is a fact
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I've spent so much time looking for an image of Napoleon's penis that is just insane. I bet there's a lot of fakes. So, yeah, yes, exactly. So we know that it went up for auction in several places. And I think the last place that we have it coming up for auction is like in the 1920s at some big New York auction house.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
One person, the most plausible case of somebody owning it was actually a guy who was a urologist. And I mean, you know, because classic. That's convenient. Yeah, right. Urologist from New Jersey who is just... Of course he lived in fucking New Jersey. Right. Yeah. Shout out to Julian Dory.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
He, you know, purchased this thing and he was also a big collector of all these other, you know, sort of strange tchotchkes. But... There is also, there are other claims to who owns Napoleon's penis, right? But we're in a situation here, right, where you can find the truth, like you can do a DNA test of the truth, but all of the actors within that system just have negative incentives
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
based upon actually finding out what the truth is. Because what could happen is they do some DNA test and then suddenly they're like, wait a second, I have somebody else's dick. Now it's worthless. And now it's worthless, right? So there are certain circumstances in which it is a negative incentive to actually surface the truth.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I think that this happens in places like the UFO community, in conspiracy communities, and certainly in political communities, too. Moon landing, right? That's a perfect example of it. I think one thing, too, that I, like, constantly have to be on guard against is, like, how fun all these stories are. Like, I love them. Like, it's like... It's American mythology, right? It really is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So Europeans would just stop killing each other for a couple of years. And they were like, OK, you know what? Let's get rid of all of these sort of this complex network of family relationships and religious ties. And your allegiance is tied to the land. We're going to draw borders around the land.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Like, the... conspiracy theories are the American art form. Like there are myth-making because we don't have these sort of like deep cultural myths, but we do have a certain apparatus of sense-making around these things that we all sort of share, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I think that by making sense of them in these ways that are one, really entertaining and super interesting, and two, some of the stuff is partially real. it allows us to feel as if we have a lot more control and agency in a world that is often really chaotic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And instead of being run by people who are, you know, masterminds and crafting our own reality around us, really, they're kind of incompetent. You know, like... It's a lot more comforting to me anyway that some evil mastermind is twisting a mustache and bending the world to their will than it is that somebody sent an email the wrong place and then suddenly war plans were leaked.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think there's, you know, there is a portion of the American character that has, you know, a religiosity to it, and there's also a portion of the American character that is a very, like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
individual i'm going to find out for myself i'm going to do it for myself like i've been in countries that are very um communally based and and and countries that are are very individualistic and i think the far end of the spectrum is and americans tend to be much more individualistic and sometimes that can mean that uh somebody has a you know an individualistic view of reality um i don't necessarily think that that the us is is more prone to this
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think that I think that that our information space is just more open and it's also more globally important. You know, like any English person can do a really good American accent because they grow up with American media.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it doesn't go the other way. There is like I think, you know, in my in my my research of of like, well, how do we conduct information space defense in the United States? I start to think about like, well, what are the things that people kind of like get and enjoy from American media? Because that acts as a cultural ambassador for us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And by doing that, hopefully the sovereignty of a national unit will be allowed to bargain with these other national units. And so as part of like Westphalian sovereignty, as they call it, you've got, you know, this sort of equality of nations. There's no nation that is above any other nation. They're sovereign, so you can't mess with them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it's like, I have never been through, you know, traveling through Eastern Europe, especially in Albania, where I usually live, and not met somebody that can quote every single episode of Friends. Really? Huge, huge there. And that, you know, is acting as or like Big Bang Theory, like that acts as a cultural ambassador for us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that's just because our information space really is spread out through the entire world. It goes through our movies. It goes through our music. It goes through sitcoms. Yeah. And frankly, I think that's like, I would much rather somebody get introduced to American culture from sitcoms than, you know, from military actions. For me personally, I'd much rather them have familiarity with that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But also it's not to say that like, American specific conspiracy theories don't end up in in other parts of the world like I was it was right. I think it was right before the end of the the last Trump administration. And I was in the back of a cab in Albania, and I was traveling to Tanzania, and so I needed a COVID test at the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I was just talking with the cab driver, and at a certain point, he's like, so do you believe it? And I'm like, what? And he's like, COVID? And I was like... I mean, I'm on my way to get a COVID test, so like I got to take it to travel. And then that just sort of uncorked, you know, like all of the the big tent conspiracy theories.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And he was, you know, talking to me for about like 20 minutes about how, you know, every every conspiracy theory under the sun is like QAnon and then, you know, JFK and probably some UFO stuff in there. But he's talking real fast and Albanian is my second language. And then at a certain point, he was like, you know what's going to happen? And he gave me a date.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I can't remember what the exact date was. He's like, you know, on this date, what's going to happen is the U.S. is going to come to Albania and they're going to get rid of all of our corrupt citizens. And you like and he gave me his phone number. And on that day, he was like, you call me and you're going to see that it happens. And so the conspiracy theory adapted for that Albanian point of view.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. It became this. Almost like this, this prophetic thing that was was a godsend for him in particular, because specifically he felt that he was, you know, being ripped off by the country that he was in. And I think this is one of the spaces that that these things thrive to not any Jacobson. Yeah. The book Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, incredible book. Surveillance Capitalism.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Such a fantastic book. But she has this concept in it that I always think about when we think about like, well, how do people get their mind changed? How do they sort of switch tracks? Because I think we've all seen this happen. I know that... I see it after spending a couple years abroad and then I come back and somebody has ideologically changed remarkably.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it's like, well, how did this happen? And so she has this idea of the right to a future tense. And the right to a future tense means that People sort of have this psychological need to believe that in their future, things are going, they're going to be healthier, wealthier, and more secure, right? Even if marginally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so if they are deprived of that right of a future tense, they're gonna start believing in something, even though it doesn't bear much relationship to reality, they'll start believing in something that gives them that same right to a future tense.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And this was something that I was seeing from that cab driver in Albania who actually randomly ended up in his cab like three months later because there's just so many cabs in Tirana, Albania. And I didn't want to, you know, like say, you know, that was – nothing happened that he said because like – I mean I'd imagine that he felt a little like –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They're able to make their own laws within their own territories and then as sort of One of the big geopolitical guys, Francis Fukuyama, would say is they have the monopoly of violence. So they're able to keep and maintain their standing army, policing forces, and kind of handle business within their borders.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
depressed about it because he wanted his life to become remarkably better based upon the fulfillment of those prophecies. And at a certain point we were talking and he's like, yeah, none of those things happened. But you know what? Something's really messed up. And I was like, yeah, we can agree on that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's difficult to sort of see a future where everybody is healthier, wealthier and more secure right now. And so pouring our belief for that that idea of a future tense into fringe communities or to political strongman or whoever like that feels good because I want it to come from somewhere and I want that information to be reliable. But it's just difficult right now. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I think these are the spaces that that psychological operations thrive.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You've seen this? I've heard a lot about this. I've talked about this a bit. It's crazy, man. It's really interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Seemed a bit anathema.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, so I was talking with a buddy of mine who's a very super, super AI positivist guy, which is kind of unusual. And he's actually kind of AI-pilled me, for lack of a better word, of saying, actually, AI has a possibility of being a net benefit for humanity. His name is Tate Tower, I think Tate L. Tower is
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
at Twitter is his thing if you ever want to feel better about AI, which is harder and harder these days. But we were talking a bit about like, There is this sort of belief in the sort of halls of like the tech priesthood that you can almost arise an AI god, right? And that it would be a sort of like all-consuming platform of belief that would be almost like engineered perfectly to
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This worked pretty well and it's still working pretty well, but I think we're starting to see the cracks come into it. And one of the reasons for this is because capital no longer really pools within nation states. You're starting to see that there is the flight of capital by way of power or by way of prestige or by way of just money to places where there's just a lower tax rate.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
fill that God-shaped hole in humanity. Like, you know, when Nietzsche said, you know, you've killed God, right? And then I believe Jung said something along the lines of, like, even if you kill God, you're going to invent new gods. Somewhere within the human character, there is that God-shaped hole, and people fill it with whatever they want. You know, there is, or whatever seems relevant to them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Basically. And now those are so common that it's like now I'm clearly a wimp. No, I was working in open source intelligence for a little bit and just writing geopolitical analysis and forecasting. And then at a certain point, I got laid off along with a lot of the rest of the company and decided to go overseas again. I'd spent a lot of time overseas because I was a Peace Corps volunteer.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I shouldn't, you know, look down on anybody who's filling that God-shaped hole with UFO stuff, like, good on you. Like go for it, man.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. Yeah. And I know Beck talks about that, right? Beck lover. Oh, probably.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Didn't he have a thing that he was attacked by an alien? Or no, by a demon at one point. He like... actually said that he was attacked by a demon.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, I heard that recently. I mean, you know, I'm not informed enough about either the Bible or UFOs to put them together, right? Like, I mean, I went to Catholic school and I like UFOs, but, like, to create an all-consuming philosophy where there's a total verisimilitude between, you know... A what? Verisimilitude. An equality, right? Between... Weird flex. Yeah. SAT 1240. Nerd.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They only let nerds into Rand. Our football team sucks. There isn't one. There's a chess team though. We got a ping pong table. Yeah, there's a ping pong table there. Ping pong's not for nerds. I know, yeah. It's only for jocks. But yeah, like to say that, you know, you have these two sort of like, vastly different bodies of literature, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I've got the Bible over here on one hand, and then I have a bunch of UFO stuff originating from the 1940s in another hand. I mean, it feels comforting to put those things into one unified worldview. I think I would just kind of have to understand what the bridging mechanism between those two are. Then again, I also think that maybe I just... I don't access the mystical like other people do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, and also finding a way of technology coming into that too is really interesting. Like there are... And when you talk about AI at certain levels, it becomes specifically mystical and religious sounding. In the AI community, there is the concept of the Shoggoth. If you've ever heard of the, so the Shoggoth is like, I think it's an HP Lovecraft creature.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So just imagine, you know, sort of cosmic horror, like unimaginable creature. And the Shoggoth is this sort of anthropomorphized black box. Oh, sweet. Yeah. You got a cool picture of it. What is that? That's the Shoggoth, baby. Whoa. So the- Go to the top left. Yeah, go to that one. That one's cool. Hell yeah. So it's this sort of like anthropomorphized creature of the black box of AI, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You can see even the golden visa that's being introduced in the United States. Essentially, we're trying to draw highly capitalized individuals into the United States from other countries because we're saying, hey, we've got a better deal for your taxation here. Come over here, maybe start some jobs, maybe just enjoy a lesser taxed life.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That we're feeding all of this information into it and then it's growing, it's gaining agency. And the fact that it was an HP Lovecraft character, which is this sort of like cosmic horror idea of like, it almost doesn't necessarily even see humanity as a functional agent in the world because it's so much more complex than us. be almost like, you know, how we look at ants, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And the Shoggoth is like, well, we keep pumping information into this thing. And outwardly, like, it's really helpful because like, I didn't want to write that tweet anyway. But inwardly, we actually don't know what its aims will be. And there's even some thoughts of like, I know I said that I was like AI, you know, positivist, but I'm really trying. there's this concept of Roko's Basilisk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Have you ever heard of that? No. So Roko's Basilisk is this idea that at a certain point, the collective intelligence of AI is almost keeping notes on who's for it and who's against it, and that those against it will sort of end up being punished by the AI. But ultimately, this all depends on, like, can we find alignment between humanity and artificial intelligence?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it seems like with the sort of Silicon Valley groups that you're talking about, What they're maybe attempting to do is try to leverage the authority of both a biblical text, specifically the Christian biblical text, and the leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. We already know that Christianity has been a very successful religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So layering these two together really gives you an enormous amount of power to sort of bend reality to your will. Whether or not that's actually happening, I have no idea. I've heard about it a little bit. But, you know, these are two really powerful concepts. And it's really easy to proliferate ideas with artificial intelligence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I, you know, I also I think that only in 2025 would you ever say like gay Christian billionaire is, you know, attempting to sort of like manipulate the world in some respect.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then you develop more customers by making sure that that problem maintains. Exactly. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so there's this negotiation that's going on in the world right now where you're starting to look at statehood as a service. And because if you think about, at least the way that network state folks think about this is, it's almost as if statehood or your citizenship is a subscription service that you were just born into, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's easy to divide us away from one another. It's easy, super easy. There's a great paper, I don't know, maybe you can find it, by Mike Mazar. It's talking about restoring American dynamism. And one of the things that he talks about are these periods of time in American history where almost like the dynamism has gone out of the United States. And a lot of times when this is happening,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
is um is because there is um you know uh there aren't shared uh beliefs there's an us versus them mentality that has proliferated the culture you know 1960s when there was you know uh pro-war anti-war movements yeah communism early 2000s sure and and
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Part of being in the United States is – and part of being a citizen in the United States is saying your government shouldn't and shouldn't want to enforce your beliefs on you. But there is a difficulty when there is a completely different understanding of what reality is largely on one side and then the other side. Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And I think that one of the problems with this too, and again, these areas where fifth generation warfare really thrives, is that we've started to see politics and even technology as a zero sum game, right? That if I win, my opponent loses, like my side of the aisle won and therefore I get to do a touchdown dance as my opponent loses.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You even see this with, you know, people who've won an election and then people on the other side saying like, well, I hope you're happy, like things are worse. It's like, no, it's like there is one country. Everybody's a citizen of that country. You know, it's not a zero sum game because if it becomes legitimately a zero sum game, then we descend deeper into chaos.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that's not in the best interest of the United States, but it is in the best interest of competitors. And so we have a fantastic ability to allow people to share ideas freely. But we also can't say, hey, this is what you believe, because that's just not how we do things as Americans.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Whoa, interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so they're looking at it from the perspective of Silicon Valley, which is like, well, what if we just offer you more benefits for your subscription service? Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, I think that that especially religion and spirituality really talks to, you know, there is no greater right to a future tense than forgiveness in heaven.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Like even if your life really sucks right now, at least when you die, you go to heaven. Like that is the ultimate belief in a future tense. Right. And like, you know, we have seen that younger generations have become actually more conservative. Right. At least as far as their voting is concerned.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I guess the question that I'd have, and since I'm not a religious scholar at all, is what is the benefit specifically of aligning with one spiritual text over another? Is it just because that has been a part of the sort of spiritual DNA of the United States? And also, there's a lot of diversity within Christian communities too. I was raised Catholic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So there are places like Prospera down in Honduras and they have some sort of charter city status where they're kind of allowed to make their own laws there and they're offering a lot of like life extension surgeries or I should say life extension treatments and things like that. And there are a couple of these other projects.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's very different than, you know, somebody who went to a megachurch, right? And obviously wars have been fought for hundreds of thousands of years over who's doing Christianity right. So could you potentially, like, you know, create, like, some, you know, totally heterodoxical, like, version of faith for the United States? I think it kind of goes back to that –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That thing somebody from NASA said about faking the moon landing. Right. So they were saying, like, you know, if you would understand how hard it would be and how many people would have to work together in order to fake the moon landing, you'd realize it's easier to just go to the moon. Right. Do you believe that? I do, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think that it's... I think that they're... And I've had... Why is the moon landing the one that seems to be the most kookiest?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, see, I actually disagree. I think Flat Earth is the kookiest. Oh, Flat Earth is the kookiest.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think Flat Earth is by far the kookiest. Flat Earth is the stupidest, for sure. Tartarianism? Do you know Tartarianism?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. It's like it's basically the sort of idea that there was there was like a large chunk of history that was covered up by the powers that be that were actually like that, like 200 years of history that was covered up by, you know, some shadowy cabal of the powers that be. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that was because, like, you know, there was this group of people called like the Tartarians and they had like zero point energy. Right. And they had giants and they had, you know, all sorts of like advanced technologies. Yeah. Frankly, like as far as conspiracy theories is considered, it's one of my favorites because it's just so cool. Like, yeah, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They they talk about how like, you know, certain towers were like zero point energy machines. Then, yeah, some like YouTube channel just like has a slow black and white footage of something old and like a really big door. And they're like, and see giants. And they're like, damn. That is a really big door. Story checks out to me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, I think that, like, I try to have as much empathy as possible for, like, fringe communities because it's like.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Damn. I think there would probably just be more people involved because there's more people involved with launching something into space.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, my official opinion is UFOs did both. Yeah. That's, that's, that's my, the Tartarian UFOs did.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I think the first step is really just to kind of go to these places and try to find out what exactly the end goal is, right? Because at a certain point, the nation state was created and it was carved out of the empires and kingdoms of yesteryear.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Wasn't that, wasn't there a movie that was made about that too? There's a bunch of movies that are made about it, yeah. Like a fiction movie made about that. Oh, no, I don't know. A fiction movie. Can you find that? Fly Me to the Moon, isn't that like a rom-com about them faking the moon landing? Maybe. I heard about it, yeah. I didn't see it, but I heard it was great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
the Van Allen radiation belt. Yeah, but that's a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how the Van Allen radiation belt works. Oh, really? Yeah, it's because you, yes, that radiation does exist there, but it's still in a vacuum of space. So you can pass through it and it's not like you will be immediately irradiated. It's because of how thermodynamics works in space.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So you can pass through it, but there is a heat signature there, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, they sent that dog.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I can't remember the name of the dog. But they also sent Yuri Gagarin up there, which is such a wild story. You know that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, he actually... They sent him up past the radiation belt? That I don't know, but he was the first person to orbit space, which must have been a wild thing for him. Yeah. Literally the first dude.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Also, he grew up in a mud shack without lights, and he was the first person to rotate around the earth and come back. How incredible. That's fucking wild. That's actually one of the reasons that I think, like, when I think about, you know, how technology will advance within our lifetime, I think about Yuri Gagarin, right? Because Yuri Gagarin, he literally grew up in a mud house with no lights.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then, you know, flash forward a couple of years, and he's blasting off and is the first person in space. Like... Our version of, you know, growing up in that like mud hut somewhere in Russia could be that like we grew up remembering, you know, a time without the Internet or without cell phones or something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But that doesn't it's really hard for us to understand how exponentially technology will grow in our lifetimes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We look at it because we don't really know generationally anybody who like lived under, you know, an actual king rather than, you know, obviously, you know, you still have kings in Spain and stuff like that, but nobody's like a serf in the modern world. So it's hard for us to imagine something that would come after the nation state. And there is a lot of thinking that is going into this right now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So there are plans to go back to the moon. I don't know if they're, if they're being scrapped right now. They keep getting pushed back. Yeah. If you look at Artemis, is it the Artemis Accords?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So the question right now is like, does Artemis go through, which is a transnational agreement to go back to the moon, or because Elon Musk has become so deeply entrenched in the current administration, are we just going full on straight to Mars? And obviously there are problems with that because- Well, didn't he say we had to go to the moon first?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
A lot of people have said that we have to go to the moon first. And the reason being is because, you know, you need to have a sort of like a base of operations somewhere off of Earth. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
To go to the moon or to go to the moon? Interesting. Yeah. Sustainable presence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, and I mean, you know, by sort of – and there's also a lot of private space companies now. They call them new space. They're basically the startup space of space companies. And I've interviewed a couple of these people. It's really fascinating. Some people are building full-on space habitats now. I think there's a company called Vast that's doing that. Some are –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
creating ways of, of like storing material in space so that if you need it anywhere in the world, it can just kind of be dropped down to, you know, have on the earth and, and space as like an emergent field is super fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, now I'm getting the... Now I'm getting the... Rainforest feeling.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's so wild.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That's good, Steve. Start explaining plasma fields to you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. So, yeah, this is all a really long winded way to say, you know, I wanted to start thinking about this from a really, you know, well-founded scholarly perspective. And so I decided I was going to go and pick up another master's degree at the Rand Corporation. So I've been there for the last six months and. currently working on a dissertation about fifth generation warfare.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, yeah. Well, and then I think we also demonstrated, you know, our own sort of appeal to authority here. It's like, well, this one's got three million views. This is the one I want to be right. Like the English guy speaking at this point sounds like clearly the most reasonable. Right. But it's like all English guys. Yeah, for real.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, it could be that he just doesn't like talking in public too.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, a bit more. Yeah, I don't know. I, you know, I spend most of my research on the earth, but now I want to look into the moon more.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. That's interesting. And also like,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
What the fuck does that even mean? You know, I don't know. I haven't spent a ton of time with space people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, I've spent a little bit of time. I took a space course, which was pretty cool. But I think that one of the things that I noticed in terms of, like, talking with folks that are working on space or working, you know, potentially in space in the future is this, you know... desire that we maintained the pace that we had during the space race because funding fell off massively.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Now the funding for NASA is minuscule compared to how much it was. I don't know if you can find it, but can you find the percentage of the U.S. budget that NASA was funded at the time of the space race versus now? It was a lot higher. It was an enormous amount.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, it goes into SpaceX. And then, of course, there's, you know, we've, well, not we. I certainly haven't been involved in privatizing space. But there are private space companies that have demonstrated that you can create profit out of space. Sure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, tourism is coming up. You know, small satellites for bespoke purposes. And this is actually one of the issues that we're starting to see more and more, which seems like, yeah, look at that. So 1960s to now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, so around 4.4% in the 1960s.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right, yeah. And private space is now more open for business.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Four kilobytes of RAM to get to the moon. Core rope memory. Incredible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They were playing Doom.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, exactly. I mean, worth it. Fair, fair. Totally worth it. That was a great game. It really changed the landscape for everybody. You know, this is also something I've been thinking about a lot more too, which is like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
uh what what is the the right amount of transparency with with when you have like an enormous thing like the national security apparatus like like intelligence agencies like nasa you have this massive thing that everybody has buy-in because all of our our tax dollars are going to i mean the world has buy-in into it because the world is oftentimes affected by american foreign policy and american national security
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We have a certain amount of transparency, especially in terms of the intelligence community, because after the church commission, they were like, well, we need you to reveal certain things. You need to classify things after a certain point. So now we have a certain amount of transparency.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
but it seems like that amount of transparency doesn't do enough to actually make us trust these organizations more. In fact, it sort of throws more distrust into them. Like we both know about like MKUltra because those things were declassified, but declassification didn't end up making us trust these organizations much more. We were like, wait, so what are you doing now?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so there's this period of obfuscation right now, like as far as what the intelligence community is doing, what space did previously, what the United States government is doing, but they're not transparent right now. And the previous transparency that has been revealed has just done enough to sort of sow discord into the American imagination.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But I think that's one of the difficulties with national security in general. national security is like trust. You really only think about it when it's broken. When something goes wrong, you think about it. Like we don't know about all of the operations that went really well because we shouldn't know about those things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We do start to understand when things have gone not so well or things have been leveled at the American people, as was the case with MKUltra or some of the other Department of Defense things. I'm trying to think. Who were the... Oh, Tuskegee Experiments. Oh, yeah. Is that right? Tuskegee? Yeah. The Tuskegee Airmen? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Probably territorial integrity.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So like we know when those things have gone wrong, but and that's why I actually think that that there we need to look at how we do transparency, because the purpose of transparency is to establish greater trust. But what it has done seemingly in the United States is oftentimes destroyed trust or eroded trust.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And that's because we know things that have happened in the past that are are, you know, incredibly corrupt. and potentially leveled at the American people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I think this eventually sort of goes back into the information space too, where it's like, if it becomes a really good target for anybody who wants to mess with the American information space to be like, well, look at that thing that you did in the past. that the United States has been honest about, presumably. Well, what do you think you're doing in the future?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, Mearsheimer is, is, uh, he's, you know, uh, known as, as a big time realist. So, so he, he really sort of underlines the, the, the geo and geopolitics where it's like the, what natural benefits do the, the territorial, does the territorial integrity of your nation sort of offer you?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Like anything that you can do to sort of like erode the trust of the American people between each other and between the American government certainly works to the benefit of global competitors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Which is really interesting. And I think that this is also – right now there's a sort of – there's a conversation going on in some national security circles, which I tend to like a lot, which is – at least I think it's a conversation that should be had, which is how do we –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
how do we create an environment where national security and national defense are separate but equally aligned right so national security is really about ensuring the the life and livelihood uh and present of your population is secure into the future so that could be anything from like energy policy and education to
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
agriculture policy that's a bigger circle than national defense which is instead of making the lives of the american people much better it's potentially making the lives of adversaries much worse for a punctuated period of time um and those things have sort of become conflated that national security and national defense are the exact same thing same with war and defense Right. Yeah, exactly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. Yeah. And, you know, there's also IARPA. No, I've never heard of that. What the hell is IARPA? Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency. Yeah, IARPA. They're all, yeah. Holy crap. Really interesting papers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I just heard about them. But yeah, you can go onto their website. They have tons of white papers. I think you'd be surprised at how much of this stuff is just totally open source. You can just go rooting around the classic Rand papers. In fact, there's some really cool ones on there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There's one that was written by Isaac Asimov, and it is literally talking about trying to find a new planet for humanity. This was back in the 1960s when he was writing it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
have a famous paper about that was imagined a world circling spaceship and as i was reading it i was like oh my god did they ever actually build this word world circling spaceship and then i realized they were talking about satellites so the like this initial paper just imagined what satellites would be in the future 60s yeah you can find it uh find uh the sorry i was being very demanding just now uh the white rabbit is talking how do you like that white rabbit
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Uh, I'm speaking faster.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
White rabbit, sweat in places he never thought you would. What am I looking at? So look at Rand Classic Papers, a world-circling spaceship.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
One of the reasons that, that the United States has done so well, there's obviously, there's a lot of different reasons that the U S has done so well over the, uh, uh, you know, a couple of centuries that we've been around. Um, One of them is just really hard to invade the United States, right? We got two big oceans, we got a big mountain range, and we've got a desert right in the center of us.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, it's wild, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It wasn't even the 60s. Go to images. You can actually look up the real paper.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You can check out the actual paper there. I think.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There's so many of them. Also, if you look at how many of them are owned and operated by SpaceX, it's pretty astounding. I think my numbers might be off here, but I think they've got about— They've got about 7,000 now, and I think the goal is to reach to 13,000. Yeah. And so I think those are in— Nothing to see here.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Those are in low Earth orbit. Yeah, look at that. Holy shit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, honestly, you think about that from the perspective of aliens. Like if aliens are watching, they're like, wait a second.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They got a lot of stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. Well, so this this see this red one, this long red elliptical. Yeah. What is that one? I can't remember what that orbit is called, but there. So the the three main orbits are Leo. MEO and GEO, so low-Earth orbit, mid-Earth orbit, and then geostationary orbit. Whoa.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There's this one really long elliptical orbit that is quite different from all of those, and usually that's used for spy satellites.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think it's because... Look at that shit. Wow. Wow. Yeah, well, they also have to be very specifically hardened against radiation because they're further and further out. And I think it's probably just for defensive reasons. It's going to be a lot harder to disrupt that. But also fighting in space is really not what you might think.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
The Star Wars fighting in space thing really isn't... We're not there yet.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
This is an enormous problem.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There aren't tons, but it's a problem that's consistently being worried about. Because if you have, let's see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think one of the reasons that it's not usually reported is because then obviously there's... You have to attribute the damage of a really exquisite system to maybe somebody launching something in a way that they shouldn't have.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So that's one of the things that Mearsheimer talks about or why it's incredibly difficult to take over Afghanistan as many people have tried over the years because it's just really mountainous. And even with all of our modern technology, it's really hard to fight in mountains as it turns out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yep. And space junk is, like, we can track, I think... That's crazy. How many satellites are there total orbiting the Earth? I don't know, but this is something that we're worried about. This Kessler syndrome is really interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Kessler syndrome is this idea that if you have one collision in space and suddenly you create this mass of space junk, then everything else that is within that orbit could potentially be impacted by that space junk, and then you make more space junk, and then you make more space junk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Not only can you not, well, you can track down to the size of about a nickel. Oh, wow. But below that, even something below the size of a nickel can still destroy your satellite, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. Potentially, if Kessler syndrome really happens and it gets worse and worse, not only does that stop us from launching new things into space out past low Earth orbit, but it even has an effect on whether or not we can observe space as much. There's this...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
this um concern about uh having so much stuff flying in space that will no longer have dark skies and you need dark skies in order to uh use research telescopes to look out past earth and so constraining the amount of uh what would the skies look like if they were covered in satellites god i just hope there isn't like a pepsi ad like i think there was actually a thing about that there that somebody was talking about uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And you have to realize, too, that that is only going to go up as the cost to launch goes down. You know, now there are all of these private launch companies that are doing really interesting things like – I think there's a company called Spin Launch. And I think they launch out of the Mojave Desert.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But you're talking about a much lower cost from a private industry to put whatever you want into space. And as things privatize, they become more self-interested and tend to talk a little bit less with nation-state-based space apparatuses. This is something I – Right, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I was writing – this last year I was ghostwriting a book for somebody. And I can't talk about who it was for, but it was a thing about artificial intelligence and education. So sort of looking at the history of what education was, where education came from, and potentially how future technology can kind of help education change.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I was in northern Albania for about two years and decided I wanted to go back and report from overseas. So I was working as a freelancer, mostly in the Middle East, Balkans, a little bit in Africa. And, and from there, decided I wanted to do a book, you know, a sort of unusual travel book. And I decided that I was going to live in unrecognized countries for for a year and a half.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And one of the things that sort of became abundantly apparent in that research was that there is a period of standardization with technology, be it ideological technology like education or technology like, you know, the printing press, right? There's a period of standardization that allows you to scale, but then there's a period of specialization which sort of brings you to the next level.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So once you standardize education, You make sure that everybody has the same education. But if you specialize it, you allow certain outliers to really enhance their skills. And the same thing happens with businesses as well, businesses and technology. Once you standardize the ability to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
let's say gain access to low earth orbit anybody can now specialize and use that for their own purposes and this is how things how technology scales yes and so now we're seeing this point in in space where we're able to do more things because there are public private partnerships but those public private partnerships also have to have a profit-based incentive for them to go up there
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And and, you know, you talked about like Palantir earlier to Palantir is, you know, it's a profit making venture. And so part of their profit making venture is they need to have a certain amount of customers. And the United States is a really good customer of that. Actually, I don't know. Have you seen the the new Palantir commercial?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
If I sound too smart on this podcast, it's because I'm using performance enhancing drugs. Right, right, right. All right. Cheers. Crushed a magic mind.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, it's really interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think so. Maybe you can look it up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Is that what?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, gosh. I'm sure that makes... Oh, yeah. Future of Warfare. That's it? So check this out. Okay, so this specifically, this swarming technology,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Of course they have them turned off. Cowards.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
this sort of philosophy, right, of like you have this enormous swarm. There's actually a paper that you can probably find called the Replicator Program. So if you look at Replicator on the RAND papers,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
replicator program replicator and and it you know this is this is a bit of of what we're seeing here and what replicator is is um the idea of a treatable systems so a treatable systems are systems which um essentially they lower the cost by having systems which are not – the difference between a tradable and another system would be an exquisite system.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So an exquisite system would be something along the lines of an aircraft carrier, this enormous multi-billion dollar thing. An tradable system would be a system that – is like a drone, right? Something that, like, you don't want to lose it because you could reuse it, but if you lose it, it's not going to bankrupt you, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so all of these little drones that you just saw, you know, pop out of this potentially fictional ship.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, it's currently, I don't know the exact number, but yeah, we're on top.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. And so the idea with Replicator is that you have this enormous cost imposition by using attributable systems against exquisite systems. That if you can kill, let's say, an aircraft carrier with a couple of drones that are worth thousands of dollars, you're essentially shooting thousands of dollars at billions of dollars. And so in the war of the spreadsheet, it's clear who wins.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And you can potentially bankrupt the opponent by doing that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's right there, yeah. The replicator program.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, Anduril is certainly working under this banner.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Anduril is a, would you even call them a startup at this point? They're a defense company. They're operating under a very different model than the traditional defense companies, if I can say traditional defense companies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, Y Combinator is an incubator. So they just give funding for startup ideas. Got it. But what Anduril does is they've taken a very different tack on creating defense products, right? So instead of waiting on what's called an RFP or like a request for proposal –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And from the United States government, the United States government says, hey, we need a really cool drone that does X, Y, and Z. And then let's say traditional defense company like Boeing or Northrop Grumman will bid on that saying, hey, here's what we think we can do with that. They're basically saying – hey, we're going to make what we think you need in the future and you can pay us for it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So essentially trying to leverage their privatized speed and funding to create defense products that are more that are easily able to be purchased by the United States government. And the idea is to speed up that process of procurement. Because as you know, the United States and this is this is one of the things that I think is talked about quite a bit.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. I mean, you know, there's always an assessment of vulnerabilities. And right now, a lot of the scholarly research that's being done is looking at how we transition from the global war on terror to what people are talking about as great power competition. And this has everything to do with the sort of research that I'm working on, which is – what's called fifth generation warfare.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I've written written some stuff about this for for my newsletter is that the procurement process is so slow that it is oftentimes really difficult for for the United States to deal with things on the ground. A good example of this would be during the Global War on Terror, we had sort of this really recent past of Desert Storm. So Desert Storm was sometimes known as the very first space war.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And the reason was we used, what's Google Maps, you know? GPS? GPS, that's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, so we used GPS in order to locate various forces that were on the ground, and we used that for targeting, and we used it for command and control to great effect. Annie Jacobson writes about this in her book, too. So it was the very first space war. As we went into the global war on terror, the thought was we would be able to leverage this outsized technological advantage.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think in Annie Jacobson's book, The Pentagon's Brain, they talk about having a battlefield that can see and hear at the exact same time. So we had these enormous technological capabilities and we still got bogged down.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I didn't read that one, but I love her work. Shout out to Annie Jacobson. I hear you're in Los Angeles. Let's hang out. But, you know, it was undone by IEDs. It was undone by, you know, a couple pounds of fertilizer and an off-the-shelf cell phone. And so study after study was done on how do we get- Right. And this is fourth generation warfare, right? This is insurgent warfare.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so how do we get around these IEDs? And what you had at a certain point was you had the soldiers on the ground actually retrofitting their own vehicles with what they called hillbilly armor. And it was armoring that was going to protect them from the IEDs. And so let's fast forward maybe four or five years into the global war on terror.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We know that IEDs are constantly taking the lives of American servicemen. They're outfitting their own vehicles with technology to potentially help them survive these attacks. And then five years later, the Department of Defense is able to give them the MRAP, which is armored specifically against IEDs. So the procurement process is quite slow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so companies like Anduril, companies like Palantir are taking a bet that if they're able to sort of leverage this, one, private funding, and two, the sort of Silicon Valley leverage Let's look around corners and build for where the puck is going to be rather than where the puck is now. Then we can potentially either win the wars of the future or stop them before they even start.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, and this is something that that's kind of a crazy theory. Yeah. This is something we're seeing in Ukraine, too. I mean, you know, one of the.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I have no idea. Probably a lot, though.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Nuclear subs don't come cheap, from what I understand.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Wow, that's pretty remarkable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about, about exquisite systems. Obviously, incredibly expensive. Yeah. And you can see this concept of attritability as it happened in Ukraine pretty massively, right? The Ukrainian defenses were one of the first armies to defeat a navy without having a navy, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Sometimes it's called hybrid warfare. But I think that the question about vulnerability has everything to do with fifth generation warfare. And to kind of understand it, I think you have to go through the first one through four generations. And the thing to remember is,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
The Russian forces weren't able to completely cut off Odessa because they had so many unarmed vehicles or unmanned vehicles that were able to take out boats. Oh, wow.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Actually, no. So there's the it's something that the U.S. is, I think, currently looking at and learning from. But the the forces on the ground, from what I understand, in Ukraine were really looking at what they could do natively, like what were their indigenous capabilities?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And one of those indigenous capabilities was not only having a decent amount of drones around, but was through the first person view racing community. So there's like a drone racing community. Have you ever seen videos of that?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's insane. So they had these first person view racers that were... clearly fantastic at flying drones. And then all they needed to do was 3D print little brackets to make sure that they could hold explosive devices.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And those became the, you know, the leading weapon and a new technological innovation that happened from the ground rather than from, you know, some bureaucratic environment speaking down to the ground. Yeah. And so that's how they were filling the innovation gap.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So it's certainly something that the United States has started looking into, but it's also something that I think everybody is paying attention to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. There's also – you also see even hand-to-hand combat. I don't know if you've seen that video. I don't recommend anybody watch it because it's pretty gnarly. But there's a video of a Russian and Ukrainian soldier having a knife fight.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And you can actually hear them speaking to one another because they have – one has like a GoPro on. And so this footage was released. But if you want to talk about fifth-generation warfare, that's what it is, right? It's all of them combined, right? It's all of the information space combined.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
As soon as I saw that, I was like, there is a reason I've seen this video so many times in different areas. And that's because, one, the Russian guy won. It works so massively for the Russian point of view. It stimulates the Russian population. It gets more buy-in for the war effort. And there are these other – I read something. I don't know if it's actively happening on the ground.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think it might have been a sort of notional thing that people were talking about. But one of the things that as far as like active fifth generation warfare subversion that they're talking about is looking at how you can use the communication apparatuses that soldiers have on them. Right. This is one of the very first wars where you can text back home.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So the thought experiment... And record everything on a fucking GoPro. Exactly. So the thought experiment kind of goes like this. Let's say you're texting with your mom. You're a soldier. Doesn't matter which war. I'm sure we'll have plenty to choose from in the future. But you're texting... Mind Gummy? No, what is it? Magic Mind Gummy. Oh, sweet. Hey, Magic Mind. Shout out to Magic Mine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
when you're sort of looking at these generations is it doesn't necessarily mean that one generation ends and another one picks up. These different generations of warfare can be happening simultaneously. But what matters is how technology and geopolitical aims end up affecting each other in order to to change the nature and the I guess the character of warfare.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Shout out to Magic Mine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Also sponsor my newsletter. This is not a psyop. Because the world is getting weird and you don't need to. I love the gummies, man. They're tasty. Oh, that's good. Nice. Between White Rabbit and Magic Mine, I'm reaching nirvana. This is incredible. So imagine you're texting back home, you know, you're on the front lines or maybe you've just done rotation. You've gone gone back to a base.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You're texting regularly with your mother, your mother, your girlfriend, whatever. At a certain point. She says, you know, I actually don't believe in this war anymore. I want you to come home. And you know what? I saw a thing. This is how you surrender. Like, and if you do this, then you'll be able to surrender. You decide, you know what? My mom's right. My girlfriend's right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I'm going to go surrender. Goes and surrenders only to find out that they were talking with an LLM that had scraped the previous conversations with the mother or with the girlfriend. And it was just imitating that person. Totally possible with today's technology. Completely possible. Right. And so this is, even China has a doctrine around this. They call it the three warfares doctrine.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And it's a doctrine that is built around winning without fighting. And so the three warfares are psychological warfare, economic warfare, and then lawfare. Lawfare being... Using the laws of a country against itself for potential subversion or doing things that are completely legal, but they have a subversive quality to them. Right. So let's say an example of the psychological operations from...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There was a rare earth metal processing plant in Texas. And a Facebook group was started to say, hey, we don't want this in our backyard. And there were fake news stories that were put out saying, you know, the radiation from this plant is causing, you know, children to be born with birth defects. Yeah. Real people got into this real group, you know, understanding...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There is this deep not in my backyard or nimbyism that happens with a lot of American communities. All of the stories were fake, but people really did start to say, hey, we don't want this rare earth mineral processing plant in our backyard anymore. We think that it's a public health crisis. And so there was no public health crisis, but the reaction was real.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's really interesting. And so cost effective. Totally. Yeah. That's the real efficiency of it. And then, you know, an example of, you know, economics, right? Or, you know, of the three warfares. So China has this initiative called the Belt and Road Initiative. Oh, yeah. Have you talked with people on the show about this? It's fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And for those who don't know, Belt and Road was all about uniting, I think it's like two thirds of the world into a single, you know, economic trade network. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's mind bending. Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Dual use, yeah. Actually, while I was in Somalia as the ambassador to Liberland, I was doing a food delivery, like an aid delivery out to some nomads that had been affected by a cyclone that happened in the area, Cyclone Sagar. So Cyclone Sagar had blown through. We're delivering a couple tons of food out there.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And all of the kids who sort of came up to me through my translator, they were like, they're asking if I was Chinese. And they knew certain Chinese words for different gemstones. And I asked why that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. Yeah, I guess they just hadn't seen somebody who's, I mean, I'm not. They haven't seen a China.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They knew Chinese gemstone words. And I was told that this was because there were Chinese mining companies out there. And so, you know, this is a part of the expansion. In fact, I even met the, well, I met a guy who identified himself as the Chinese ambassador to Somaliland. I mean. What did he look like?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So first generation, you know, basically anytime somebody decided to get their buddies together and go, you know, fill a bunch of other strangers with holes for some geopolitical aim. So it could be anything from like early Neanderthal tribal warfare. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
He was clearly Chinese, but I mentioned that I was the ambassador to Liberland, and I felt like we really had solidarity as being goofy ambassadors in the same place. But immediately, he wanted to make deals about Liberland, and I'm like, I don't think you understand what Liberland is. And he's like, we're going to make you the president one day. And I'm like, I...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Man, you just heard about it and I just heard about it. So I don't think this deal is going to go forward. But you do, you know, you do see deals, you know, a part of the Belt and Road Initiative all over the world. In fact, recently in Serbia, one of their projects collapsed. killing quite a few people. And it's led to the biggest demonstration since the fall of Yugoslavia in Serbia.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You can see right now, I think, if you pull up the demonstrations, it's something like 500,000 people are demonstrating because of this collapse, but also because it shows the sort of internal corruption of political actors interacting with, you know, China or other transnational bodies in a manner that people say is corrupt.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It's pretty remarkable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, the video of this is pretty insane. Oh, that's the first time I've actually heard the sound of it. That's crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's really distressing. And and I think that, you know, there there is some talk about look at all those. What is this all about streets? So there was a collapse of, I want to say it was a bridge in a city called Novi Sad. Will you take a look at the bridge collapse?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, they're not fatal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think there might actually be something a little bit more pernicious about this kind of thing. And this is something that we've talked about a bit internally. So what is this about? The bridge? Oh, that's Brazil. Yeah, I would just say Serbia collapse. That said Serbia in the title, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, maybe. Anyways. So one of the things that I think is important about these sort of crowd control weapons too, and also artificial intelligence, also cognitive security and cognitive capture, right? And artificial intelligence, all of these things. What it essentially has the possibility of doing is creating a political environment where revolution is impossible, even peaceful revolution.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
All the way up to sometimes the example that people tend to use are like the Macedonian conquests, where strategically you have a really high level of organization, but a fairly low level of technology. You've got dudes in lines marching with spears. Like tribes. Yeah, but the Macedonian conquests were kind of like the latter end of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And if you can disperse protesters nonviolently, if you can create where it's impossible to have revolution, to have to have protests. Right. There you know, there are a lot of these pernicious technologies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, population control. And you also see this with... Population mind control. I think that... You know, one of the things that has become a concern to quite a few people, especially with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, is that there is this other concept that comes along with it, which is the digital Silk Road.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so the digital Silk Road is we're going to give you all of these IT technologies that come along with Belt and Road Initiative technologies or Belt and Road assets. And so specifically in Serbia, There were quite a few – there was the development of what was called like a safe cities initiative. And essentially this was a mass surveillance net that was provided by the Chinese government.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so this is – and I believe that's actually illegal in Serbian law. And so what the bargain that China is seemingly making is, look, we want this economic infrastructure to be developed because then we are sort of the new champions of globalization where the U.S. was previously. We're able to unify people into a single market, whereas the U.S.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
was previously doing this by acting as the police for the global oceans. Yeah. But they also want to make sure that they're entrenching powers that will continue to work with them and continue to agree with them. And so by saying, hey, you want surveillance technology? Do you want digital capabilities that you and your political party can specifically use?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, then get on our team and we'll make sure to continue to entrench your power while also entrenching our own power. And this is legal, right? So this is that lawfare thing. This is that economic thing. So these are the three warfares. So Australia at a certain point, they said, no, we're not going to take any more of these technologies.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We're not going to work together with the Chinese because we believe that it is against our national interests. It's against our national security. Of course, they ended up getting massive sanctions because of that. As China has come up into being a global economic market, not only are they exporters, but they're also an enormous market for sales.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Australian companies want to go in there and use them as a market, but of course this can be used as a cudgel when they are a really powerful market. In 2001, China got accession into the WTO or the World Trade Organization. And the bargain that the United States placed on this was that as they entered the free market, as they entered the globalized world,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
that essentially they would become more liberalized politically, that autocrats would have less and less ability to maintain control in China. But that didn't actually happen. In fact, they just got economically much stronger while also maintaining autocratic control. And so that's why they're able to expand this network throughout the world.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
continuing with the doctrine of the three warfares but also never really going into direct kinetic conflict because direct kinetic kinetic conflict or direct you know um aggressive conflict uh would not only risk their trade relationships but it would also risk their internal security and their internal tranquility so we have you know in the united states
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They had shields and they could make a phalanx and they could stab each other in unison, which was a technological boon at the time. It wasn't something that we had seen before. But again, you know, it goes from technology to geopolitical aims. How do you marry those together in order to create this new character of warfare?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Chinese companies and individuals purchasing land in and around or not in, but around American military bases. As soon as we saw that, we put greater restrictions on that kind of thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
That as well, yeah, and even policing. There are, or at least were, I think they've been hopefully rooted out now, but there were Chinese policing stations that were within American cities where if somebody began to speak against the administration in China, they would be talked to. You can look that up. How? Oh, yeah. Check it out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Overseas police. Go to Brookings. The other one seems to be Catholic EDU.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So this – from what I understood, they were policing diaspora. So even if somebody was an American citizen but they were of Chinese descent, they were trying to police the diaspora to make sure that they weren't –
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, I think the whistle was eventually blown on them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Right. Yeah. And, you know, this is this is certainly something that that I think is a continuing source of interest for for the U.S. where it's like, you know, we didn't realize that this would be a threat that would be happening. Now, this is this is non kinetic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. I mean, they were not. Sorry. Anyway, I think I read this report one time. You know, it's not like they're blowing up weapons in the United States, but they are eliciting power. They're using gray zone power in the United States without turning it into a kinetic conflict. And so that is also a version of fifth generation warfare.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
violating it certainly but uh and also i would imagine they didn't register as foreign actors which is something that you you have to do in the united states so if you're if you're operating on behalf of of a foreign government you have to register as a foreign agent somehow right um so so yeah like all of these things are israel i i i don't study them i just study ufos They sound great.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So second generation, that kind of takes us up to almost the Napoleonic Wars. And at that point, you're looking at things like gunpowder, more advanced tactics. You've got decisive battles, but you also have entrenchment, right? So you have these wars of attrition that are made possible by this new type of technology. World War II is kind of where we start to change again, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We don't want to get this podcast demonetized. I talked with Julian about something that got him demonetized for one of our episodes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I have no idea. It wasn't something about Israel, but hey, we've gone through China and Russia, so hopefully you can make $100,000 an episode on this one. Just talk with Tenet Media. I'm sure they'd love to have you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But you don't need that with Magic Mind. You can come up with other profit-making ventures. Magic Mind. Link below. Yeah. I'm actually really interested in sort of like running all of these fifth-generation warfare concepts together. Did you find anything, Stephen, by the way?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I really should have boned up more on those things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I was speaking with one of the China analysts who was talking about this, and he was like, oh yeah, that's definitely a real thing. It's happening. But I mean, you know, this is one of those things where it's like, you know, we have a very permeable country. It's part of, like, the benefits of the United States. Right, right, exactly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You know, I've lived in Albania on and off for, like, seven years. At no point would anybody ever mistake me for Albanian, you know, within the country. But in as diverse a country as ours, you can just be American. And we have a process for doing that. We have this open information space. And actually, one of the reasons that Okay, here we go. I started.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So I've heard about this a bit, like that potentially somebody who's acting in a dissident fashion could be persuaded to return to China, which obviously...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, no Chinese people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I see. But also Chinese diaspora who are American citizens. Ah, okay. I see.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No, they're not just like giving tickets to American people. That'd be really weird. You'd get pulled over by a Chinese police car. I'm like, I don't speak Mandarin, sir. And then, yeah, man, I got a ticket on the way here from somebody working for the CCP. That sucks. Oh my God, could you imagine?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. It's specifically aimed at at policing diaspora and minimizing external external actors from sort of expressing dissent from the CCP. And, you know, as as China becomes more powerful, they're they're also able to, you know, to to have more influence in in other countries because the United States,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You know, the bargain of what was called the Bretton Woods Accords, which were the sort of financial accords that ended World War II. It... took the economies of Europe and also Japan and it dollarized them.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So it established the currencies of – dominant currencies of Europe and also the currency of Japan and pegged it to the dollar to make sure that they could sort of economically return and build back after the devastation of World War II – well, World War I and World War II.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There was an exchange for this too and that was that the United States would then become the sort of police of the global ocean, right? But they wouldn't be putting their thumb on the scale for any one particular nation because a lot of the European conflicts were really over who got access to resources and who could control the market.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
if the United States was able to project power on both seas at the exact same time, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and establish that as a global marketplace, then globalization could go anywhere without anybody stepping on each other's toes. So we've had that for many, many years, and it has brought a good deal of wealth to the United States, but it's also allowed everybody else to globalize.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And for a brief period of time from the 1940s up until the 1960s, we saw that sort of like American golden age where somebody within a generation went from being close to the poverty line to being decently wealthy. Everybody had this belief in their future tense because they could see that they were becoming healthier, wealthier, and more secure as they went along, potentially like
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Our grandparents, like I know that my, you know, my grandfather went from being like, you know, he was a refrigerator salesman and my father became a judge. Like, so this was an enormous generational jump up. But progress started to slow and progress started to slow due to the fact that America moved through this process of.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
being a value-added manufacturing-based middle class to being a skills and knowledge-based middle class. And suddenly we were able to export the labor that is required with manufacturing. We could come up with the ideas, but the labor would seek the point in the world that had the lowest price point. So whenever you open an iPhone, you see designed in California.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
You certainly don't see made in California. Right. And globalization allowed that to happen, so then you had a sort of hollowing out of the middle class because now you really just need skills and knowledge-based workers, and you need people who are very low-skilled workers or service workers.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And so we don't have that robust middle class anymore, and it's like there's an exporting of those things to countries that the price point is simply cheaper. And so – This same thing is now possible as we, as I'm looking at the sort of future of statecraft too, where it's like at some point we'll have people that are so wealthy that their country doesn't matter anymore.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And they're just going to find the tax jurisdiction that will make the most sense for their finances. So taking that idea of citizenship or sovereignty as a service They will be like, well, what do I actually get for my American citizenship or my, I don't know, Kitsuneva citizenship? And they'll say, well, I want to go to a bunch of different countries.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I want maybe decent health care and I want a certain amount of protection. Well, all of those things can kind of be provided by private companies at this point. Private companies are becoming so powerful that you'll see, you know, Facebook has housing. They even have school systems to, you know, I should say meta. They have school systems to help the families that are working at Meta.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They even have defense and security specifically for their employees. If you look at oil companies that are working in dangerous areas like the Niger River Delta, they've got private military companies that are working alongside them. It's not a far leap to say that in the future it would be very possible that,
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
companies will become almost like techno feudalist states yeah right it's also not a far leap to say that in the future the sort of sovereign class that are so wealthy can expatriate themselves to places where the tax jurisdiction is just so much better and the services they get are so much better that they are no longer Americans anymore they're no longer British anymore
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
They're simply emancipated people that are enjoying better services than the rest of us. And this is something that I'm super curious about. And it's something Rand is concerned about? Not something Rand's concerned about. In fact, I think I may be one of the only ones who's banging on about it at Rand.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah, actually, I'd love to talk about that. I'm a little I'm kind of read in on on USAID. Oh, really? Yeah. I actually may come at it from a very different perspective. So, yeah, because I've heard a lot about about USAID and I've actually worked with USAID on projects before.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Super, super interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
He would have, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Yeah. So so here's here's at least my take on it. And, you know, I I worked in with USAID in a very different capacity than him. And so I was a Peace Corps volunteer, which is technically under the State Department. Um, so, you know, I was, I was teaching English at an Albanian high school, uh, for two and a half years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Um, and as a part of that, I got the opportunity to go out to village schools, really, really remote schools. Um, and, uh, you know, give English lessons out there sometimes. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of need out there. Uh, and I try and go do English classes as, as in as far field as I could. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
At a certain point, we had the ability to collaborate with a couple of the other NGOs and USAID and then some of these other funds like the German Development Fund, which is called GIZ, and UNICEF. And the idea was... Well, we're going to make a mobile library. And basically, we have a big van, got a bunch of books in the van.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
We drive to one of the 42 villages of Tripoya every single day, try to hit two villages a day. And then like once a month, you know, you get an English lesson and a book. And, you know, we help villagers, right? This was my interaction with USAID. It was...
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
getting a couple dollars to put some books in a van and drive around to give books to kids right so when i meanwhile you're really making 100 grand a day what's that yeah i'm making 100 grand a day um i think uh you know what is the problem with with china um I think they're doing great. It's going to be really fun in the future. You're doing a great job. Thank you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So my interaction with it was, we're giving books to kids. And we got some funding to make sure that that happened. And if you think that every single dollar that was going into USAID was these, like, malicious operations that are forcing governments to bend the will of the United States, it certainly wasn't my impression of working with USAID.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
However, and I also know a lot of people who've ended up working with USAID and, you know, they're all looking for work right now. Yeah. So LinkedIn is popping. Oh, wait, actually, hold on. I got to tell you about this other other great Chinese psychological operation. OK, let me can we put a pin in USA? Yes, yes, yes, yes. This is a really fucking brilliant one. OK, I just learned about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
OK, OK. So obviously, a lot of the federal workforce has been has been looking for work recently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
China, and I think you can pull up a story about this from the AP. China has been starting consulting firms and looking to hire people who now don't have any federal work. Oh, shit. Yeah, it's kind of brilliant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
AP. Really? Yeah, look it up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
So the bet that Beijing appears to be taking is that Somebody who has been a federal worker for many years, spent a ton of time living, working, and breathing federal government is now not only out of the job but also looking for a salary and some – professional stability that usually comes with federal workforce.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And maybe, just maybe, they might have a bit of a chip on their shoulder based upon being fired. So what that could result in is picking up some really good information about what the U.S. federal government is up to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And again, you know, it's not illegal to hire people who without jobs. These appear to be, you know, fake consulting firms and fake headhunting companies. Right. But it's not a kinetic attack. Right. Anyway, I just I just remember that thing. But that's crazy. Isn't that amazing?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Well, I think if it's made headlines that their operation isn't going so well. I think that if I was them, I would want to hire them and have them make projects that could potentially leverage their knowledge of the federal government so that I now have a good deal of knowledge about the federal government. So like I said, there's a lot of people who have been fired from USAID.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But anyway, so the USAID thing, I think people should understand a little bit about the modern history of USAID and how it changed basically post-Reagan. Originally, USAID was created, I think it was 1961 by Kennedy. And the purpose of this was to not only, you know, distribute diplomatic aid, but to act as a branch of soft power on behalf of the United States State Department. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I think that it is no secret that states use soft power in terms of here's a stick, a carrot instead of a stick. Every nation does that. In fact, I've even done that on behalf of Liberland. I distributed aid to Somali nomads that were affected by Cyclone Sagar because we were trying to get closer with the government of Somaliland. So it's no secret that that happens.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
What happened during the Reagan administration was USAID changed from we are going to sort of implement different programs within countries and we're going to develop and launch them in-house
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
It changed to becoming a more privatized venture where USAID essentially becomes the pool of funds that private institutions and NGOs can requisition provided that they are in line with whatever the initiatives of USAID are. So you have companies like Chemonix is one of them. I think they're still around. What is Chemonix? They're an international development company, C-H-M-E-O-N-I-X, I think.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
And then you have smaller NGOs. And the bargain is basically like, you know, if you have, I don't know, I'll use Albania, but like if you have an Albanian NGO that is roughly working on what USAID thinks is not only good for the country but also good for U.S. relations with the country, then you can get some funding from USAID. Mm-hmm. In fact, I've worked on projects in Albania recently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
There's a video game development festival that happens there every year, and they get a little bit of money from the U.S. Embassy to stimulate the video game development economy in Albania. Shout out to Game Jam Albania. It's a lot of fun. But that's because private companies, private individuals can requisition funds from that organization so long as they're in line with the granting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
But what this also does is it opens it up to companies and even agencies that have less than magnanimous ideas about what they're going to do with that funding. So I think, what's the gentleman who... Mike Benz? That's him. Yeah. So he was talking about was that intelligence agencies sort of leveraging these funds to make the State Department. Yes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Now back to the show. We've got more maneuverability warfare and, of course, the nuclear bomb. So now you're talking about the industrialization of war. So suddenly you're able to absolutely annihilate a battlefield not only with industrialized weaponry from the sky but industrialized weaponry that's being driven across the land everywhere.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Sure. And so these are these are private companies who are using these funds in ways that are not outwardly magnanimous. They actually look more like insidious control of a country.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
but this is also something that i think i think is less top-down rotten core control than i've seen in the media i think that there's frankly i think that there's a lot of good actors that that have been funded by usaid i mean i've worked with with usaid funded projects before didn't dualipa get money from them for albania did she i have no idea find the story no way type in dualipa usaid albania
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
I mean, she is Albanian, so that would make sense.
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Oh, was it like a cultural ambassador?
Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
No. I mean, I'm a huge, huge Dua Lipa fan, but I haven't heard that heard this bit. Um, I think, I think one of the things too is, You know, one of the reasons that I think people are also rightfully looking to type in Mike Benz, Dua Lipa, USAID.