660 - Eric Czuleger

Tangentially Speaking with Christopher Ryan

Chris Ryan

Society & Culture, Arts

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Eric Czuleger is an author and geopolitical analyst who has lived, worked, and traveled through 47 countries including conflict zones like Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia. His book You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don’t Exist covers a year of living in unrecognized countries to find out what a nation is in the first place.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Radio Mano, Papa Chango Hey, now. Eric Zoolander is my guest today. Welcome to this conversation. He's a fascinating dude. He's an author. And I don't know if he calls himself a geopolitical
0:42.0	analyst, but I think that's what he is. He's lived, worked, and traveled through 47 countries,
0:49.8	including Iraq, Lebanon, and Somalia. He's been on the podcast before, episode 557.
0:58.9	We met up when I was in Athens a couple of years ago. I think he was in Albania, maybe,
1:06.4	and he flew down to Athens and we hung out a bit. Super interesting guy. He's in Santa Monica now doing some sort of a program, I think
1:16.7	he said, with the Rand Corporation, but not working for them, but doing a program
1:22.5	associated with them or something like that. He has a master's degree from Oxford,
1:29.3	and he writes a newsletter called the Underreport, which is a biweekly intelligence briefing like you might get if you
1:35.2	were a CEO of a company or a senator or something like that. Quite interesting. Just sort of
1:41.5	what's happening, what's important about it, you know, what you might not have thought of, what the mainstream media is not covering.
1:48.9	A little background, a little sort of, you know, deeper look into what's going on in the world at the moment.
1:57.2	And, hey, there's a lot going on in the world at the moment. So well worth checking
2:04.1	out. It's free, by the way, the underreport. There's a link in the show notes to sign up for that.
2:10.6	If you'd like. His book is called, You Are Not Here, Travels Through Countries that Don't
2:17.4	exist.
2:19.4	Man, he told me some story.
2:23.2	I think it was the first episode where he was, he went, there was like some country,
2:29.5	you know, the whole point is he was going to countries that aren't really countries.
2:33.7	You know, like they say there are a country, but other countries don't let them in the party,
2:39.8	you know, so there was some island on the Danube, I think, between, you know, between Serbia and Albania or something.
2:48.0	I don't know, somewhere in there.
2:49.1	And the island declared itself a sovereign country, and there was some sort of association
	...

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