Danny Jones Podcast
#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger
Mon, 14 Apr 2025
Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Eric Czuleger is a National Security student at the RAND Corporation who is focused on using emerging technology to solve persistent challenges in emerging economies, conflict zones, and thriving ecosystems alike. Eric has lived and worked in over 45 countries as an aid volunteer, journalist, and tech storyteller. SPONSORS https://AmericanFinancing.net/Jones - Disclaimer NMLS 182334 nmlsconsumeraccess.org http://morning.ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off your first order. https://huel.com/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off your first order + a free gift. https://www.magicmind.com/dannyjones - Use this link for 50% off a subscription. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. GUEST LINKS https://x.com/eczuleger Eric's book: https://amzn.to/3ppXZ6b Eric's newsletter: https://t.co/RQgtbd89rJ FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Everyone should start their own country 11:30 - America's biggest geopolitical vulnerability 13:26 - 5th generation warfare 25:00 - Operation Doppelganger 33:36 - Russia's psychological warfare on Americans 39:28 - LLMs and social media psych warfare 47:30 - Why is Israel blamed for JFK assassination 53:12 - The rational actor model 58:03 - Napoleon's p**is problem 01:11:09 - Christianity is infiltrating Silicon Valley 01:26:37 - The moon landing 01:42:25 - Government transparency 01:52:29 - Kessler syndrome 01:56:29 - Spreadsheet warfare 02:07:37 - Russia manipulating the information space 02:15:28 - Risk of crowd control weapons 02:22:47 - China's police stations in America 02:35:00 - USAID 02:53:55 - Working at RAND corporation 02:58:56 - America's information defense strategy 03:04:19 - Truth decay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the implications of starting your own country?
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.
Off we go. Yeah, baby. So what the were you doing at the Rand Corporation? I'm still there. You're working there.
No, no. I'm a national security master student. So they have a. So wait, where did you work?
We talked about this in the first podcast, but you worked for some sort of other national security agency first.
I didn't work for an agency. No, I was an open source intelligence analyst.
Open source intelligence analyst. And then you started to see like decapitation videos and you quit.
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.
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.
Yeah, are you still the ambassador to Somalia? What's the name of that island that you were in the ambassador of?
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Chapter 2: What is America's biggest geopolitical vulnerability?
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.
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.
Chapter 3: How does fifth generation warfare differ from previous generations?
That's when you were sworn in, right, on the jet ski?
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.
Can you swim?
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...
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
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
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.
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.
God, you got to be really ambitious to want to start your own country. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What is Operation Doppelganger?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: How is psychological warfare being applied in the modern age?
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.
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.
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.
Right. Well, there's, according to, you know who John Mearsheimer is? Yeah, Mearsheimer. So he talks about, I think what he says is there's three things that determine the power of a nation state. And it's like, number one is how big their gun is. Number two, how big their population is. And number three, I forget what number three was.
I think number three might have been like their geographical location.
Probably territorial integrity.
Like us, we're surrounded by two oceans. Other people like Israel are surrounded by all these other adversaries.
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?
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.
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Chapter 6: Why is Israel blamed for the JFK assassination?
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.
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,
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.
So can you explain the generation one through five?
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What is the rational actor model in national security?
Chapter 8: What are the challenges of government transparency?
Off we go. Yeah, baby. So what the were you doing at the Rand Corporation? I'm still there. You're working there.
No, no. I'm a national security master student. So they have a. So wait, where did you work?
We talked about this in the first podcast, but you worked for some sort of other national security agency first.
I didn't work for an agency. No, I was an open source intelligence analyst.
Open source intelligence analyst. And then you started to see like decapitation videos and you quit.
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.
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.
Yeah, are you still the ambassador to Somalia? What's the name of that island that you were in the ambassador of?
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.
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