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