Julian Dorey Podcast - #343 - JSOC Data Hacker Exposes Delta Covert Op & Investigates 2017 Vegas Shooting | Mike Yeagley

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) MOOD: Discover your perfect mood and get 20% off your first order at http://mood.com and use code JULAN at check out! 2) RIDGE: Upgrade your wallet today! Get 10% Off @Ridge with code JULIAN at https://www.Ridge.com/julian #ridgepod PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Mike Yeagley is a data strategist, defense contractor, and one of the early architects of ADINT — Advertising Intelligence. He’s known for showing U.S. intelligence how ad-tech location data, the same data used for marketing and mobile tracking, could expose troop movements, covert facilities, and even Vladimir Putin’s entourage. Yeagley’s work bridges big data, national security, and digital surveillance, redefining how modern governments harvest information in the name of protection — and control. FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Intro 00:55 – Phone Data, Cookies, Ad ID, Tim Cook, Tommy G, Julian 10:58 – Public Info, Gov Use, Who is Mike?, Data Analysis, Yemen, Syria 21:41 – Delta Force Covert Op Exposed 30:35 – $600K Data, Privacy, Gov Defense, Beijing App 40:49 – Tactical Data, OpSec, Privacy Norm, Switzerland 50:45 – UnPlugged, Industry Shift, UTS 59:59 – Putin Bodyguards, Alexa, Amazon Ads, Data = Oil 01:07:42 – Human Behavior, Balance, Compliance 01:19:04 – Data for Good, Digital vs Physical, Prove It 01:25:29 – Roenick, Airports, Passports, Khashoggi, Israelis Arabs 01:33:37 – Israeli Intel, Pegasus, China Data Power 01:51:43 – China Apps, Social Media, Isolation, Chaos 01:59:03 – Tariffs, Fentanyl, Bureaucrats, Evil Path 02:08:01 – TikTok, Morality, COVID, Humanity 02:18:09 – Whistleblower, Gov Contract, 2017 Vegas Shooter 02:26:56 – Vegas Shooter Paddock, HVTs, Buried Story 02:39:26 – Gov Shift, Putin, Metadata, Identity 02:52:46 – China, UFWD, Article 7, Balance 03:10:49 – Poindexter, DARPA, Family 03:17:03 – Mike's Work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 343 - Mike Yeagley Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When I first started this, I was trying to establish transnational links. And Stephen Paddock goes and shoots up Jason Aldeen concert in Vegas. You get that call at 10 o'clock at night, so I'm working with one of the analysts, detected devices that had dwelled at a place called Redstone Arsenal, which is where they teach explosives. And this is where intelligence and data can be very misleading. There was no link to transnational. They were FBI devices.

For 20 years, we owned the airspace because we were basically intercepting cell phone signals. We even got Putin's spokesperson to have to address it. It wasn't tracking Putin. I was tracking his bodyguards as a means of, if I can do it, you know, Khashoggi, he didn't stand a chance based upon how deep they were into his communications. His devices were all exploited over my travels. I have been in meetings with Arabs and Israelis. The Israelis are selling surveillance gear.

And I got to tell you like, Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. All right. So I was on the phone with our mutual friend Tommy G. And he's like, drawing, you got to talk to his Mike Eggling guy. He's out of his fucking mind. So I was like, all right, say less. Let's do it. But I was looking at what you did. I was like, I've never talked to a guy like this before it's not really that special um we all carry these mobile phones and these mobile phones bleed all sorts of data about everything that we do everywhere we go

it's gotten a little tighter but when i first started this um and if you think about it the the kids across the river here that are doing mobile advertising and their skinny jeans jeans and fancy socks, really some of the best geospatial intelligence analysts around. Because they were taking these data sets, these very messy data sets, and creating what are called audiences, people who have, who are signaling, I'm in the market for a new car. Right. Based upon their patterns of life. Seam dwelling on a parking lot of a European car dealership.

Boom. That's a signal. Package that up. And they can sell it to Mercedes, Audi. Porsche say here is somebody that is ready to go fitness lifestyle fast food dining children household dynamics all of these things were foundationally became more targetable yeah based upon where you were going in in the real world when we're browsing we have cookies yeah is what a cookie is can you explain to people who don't

Cookies a little piece of software. Hopefully everybody's got them blocked. It's a little piece. I press allow all the time. Damn it. It's just a little piece of software that sort of sticks on your browsing session and allows whoever, whatever site you're on to sort of track you from that site,

where you go on their site to where you go on other sites. The mobile devices came with, this thing called an ad ID, which was like a virtual cookie. This, you know, one's and series of ones and zeros, but that allowed apps, advertisers to track a single device based upon this advertising ID through time and space. So I see you at the gym, then I see you at, you know, organic food grocery store. And this is because I hit like accept every time I downloaded one of these apps or something like that. This is, yeah, this is about your location. your settings you were allowing the app to track your location yes um and and the interesting thing was

you know back in the day and i'm talking about 10 years ago when people were just completely ignorant not by virtue not by any fault of their own you download a calculator app or a flashlight app need to know where you are no but it would always ask or it didn't have to ask oh they didn't legally have to do it back then no wow oh yeah so you're you're you're in an environment where it's constantly asking you can i track you back in the day which you know we talk about the the rap how how tech is just moving so fast i'm talking 10 years ago back in the day not that long ago these apps, you download and install this app and all of the permissions would be set to accept. So you'd be bleeding your location data to some free shit-ass app like a flashlight app.

And they would then, the app, because it was free or had no value that anybody was spending any money, they would take those datasets, package them up and sell them to this, you know, this deplorable broker, data broker community. who would then create these audiences, these pre-packaged groups of people based upon predilections of intent. Right. So when they, I have so many questions here. I don't want to get like too, too lost in the weeds, but we'll just kind of jump around a little bit. When I would give my data to a flashlight app or something simple like that, even today, but back then as well, wherever it's applicable, am I just an IP address or a cell phone number or like serial? number or am i julian dory you're mostly you're mostly a benign identifier okay uh an ad id which is you know 17475 echo bravo charlie one two five that sounds like my name yeah um and that's what they would use to maintain the protection of your identity but as a browsing session your identity was that

that identifier, that selector. If you have a direct relationship with the app, Uber, Amazon, you're logging in. They know exactly who you are and what you're doing on the app. Yes. But if it's, you know, this sort of an app that doesn't have, there's no reason to have that one-to-one relationship. They are identifying you based upon this ad ID. Right.

So that might be like the one thing where Aval has a little. bit of privacy where they're just like here's the number of the person rather than here's the full Apple ID and all that. Yeah. So in the advertising world or in the marketing world, they're not getting your phone number. They're not pulling your IMEI or your MZ or any of the other meta selectors from your device that are attributable to an identity. You have to subscribe to a mobile phone and that those those selectors march right back to your identity. the ad idea is this privacy compliant way of cross-app tracking you right um and you brought up apple so it's about three years four years ago uh tim cook declared a fatwa on data brokers

oh he it was an actual fatwa remember that episode occurred fatwa yeah yeah or the other one there's another one oh when they were fighting over the Palestinian chicken that one too right yeah yeah You know, the media, or there had been stories about these data brokers and this suggestion that somehow the government was getting involved and, you know, was targeting communities, disenfranchised communities. And so Tim Cook stepped in and Apple had a hypothesis that privacy would sell. And so they went all in on privacy. Similar, it was almost like the counterfactual to the car companies back in the day when they told Congress that safety doesn't sell. Privacy is sort of this modern day version of safety. I remember that ad.

That was fall 2021. We talked about it on the podcast back then. Privacy is iPhone. Yep. And so they've done, but let's keep, you know, everything is they can declare themselves the private phone. but what they've effectively done is just consolidated the duopoly between Google and Apple. Okay. All of the data that Apple isn't letting data brokers or an advertiser get directly,

they're controlling that flow through something called app tracking transparency. Okay, before we get there, because like obviously the reason you come into this story and the reason Tommy G. was interested in talking to you is because you came from the private side as someone who was in the marketing data business, which we'll talk about in a little bit, the exact details of that. But you realize that all these very publicly available tools, there's, I don't know, like ad in or whatever, effectively. We never called it that, by the way, because it's just so gay. They all sound gay. Like, Ocent, human, you know, it's like, whenever I get like the military guys in here, they start dropping like the E4s

and E. I'm like, guys, I don't know what that is. You got to tell me. You know. Right. So that was something that got ascribed to it or somebody dropped that in there. Yeah, I mean, it's creative. Because it's really, at the end of the day, we weren't doing anything related to advertising. It was slices of the data that made advertising more efficient that we were collecting. Yeah. So anyway. But you come into the story because you realize, hey, this is a public utility, meaning like me, a private citizen can go.

get this information and then I can take that data set and extrapolate that into things that would be relevant to a place like a spy agency trying to watch, I don't know, other international leaders or whatever. So we're going to get how all that came down. But I'm interested in you explaining the nuts and bolts things. And one of the examples you were given a few minutes ago about, you know, the kids across the river who put all this data together and then packaged it up and sell it. It's a great visual because when we think of pretty much any industry, there's a product right and of course there's a product with this the product is us and our data and everything but you look at things that are physical products that you can buy you can put it in

your house and you can see it right you look at things that are software products like at google you pull it up on your phone and it's got advertisements on there and all the things you're searching just works you it's a product right most people like i couldn't name you i know there's a fucking billion of them i couldn't name you an ad middleman data collection company even though some of these places are i'm sure without a doubt some of the biggest companies in america yeah you wouldn't you wouldn't um and and there are there are thousands of them um and there are companies you've never heard of yeah but they are the ones who know that uh you're catholic you go to the gym uh you live here you know they have this foundational understanding not just of what you're doing online

on a browser but where you go and and what they are where they see that is they can attribute okay you saw an ad online and what was the effect of that ad did we actually see you um you know visit a store or something like that um so it it provided this new foundational understanding of human behavior, human geography. Right. And that's where the utility for the government seemed a natural fit. Yeah, because the government is using, of course, there's open source intelligence on things, but then they're using human intelligence on the ground or they get assets.

Obviously, we know all about that. And then they're using data amalgamation that they create, but they weren't necessarily taking like the public. utility of it and then using that as like a targeting mechanism that's where you come in right did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door and that they've found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern you can think of well the company I'm talking about is mood.com and their incredible line of functional gummies right now you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com using promo code julian Forget one-size-fits-all supplements that only get you high. Mood's functional gummies are optimized to kick in in as little as 15 minutes and take you directly to the mood you're looking for. Whether that's mind magic gummies for deep work and creativity,

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and let mood help you discover your perfect mood. And once again, don't forget to use promo code Julian at checkout to save 20% on your first order. So before we get there, though, just like, who are you? Like, how did you even, where did you come from? How did you get into this space? Like, how'd you end up now, like, at the forefront of this thing? Yep. Yep.

So 20 plus years in software in the sales, marketing, customer experience business. So I understood software. Right. The market in software that I spent all those years in was in data analysis and had some really good learning experiences with companies that were just either too early in the market, but understanding, okay, how do we make this work? you know, if I had the language that we have now to describe AI and large language models and machine learning, if I had that in 2006, when the value proposition for a national security app capability, if I had the language that we have now to describe the power of this thing, to take a bunch of text-based data and start learning,

about it um i might not be sitting here right now um and darpa had it in well it was and darpa couldn't even come up with the right language i believe you um it was a lot of a lot of interesting stories there um put a bookmark on that show yeah um you know so i have this this experience where um you know you're trying to find weak signals in in day Right. Back in the day, everything was sort of a proprietary data set, a data set that the organization you were selling to had all this data. They needed to slap a front end on top of it to make it easier for their analysts. To make sense. To navigate it. Yep. Palantir. You've heard of Palantir. Never heard of them before. Wouldn't know. You don't work for them, do you? I don't. All right. That's good. I don't think I could pass their employee test to determine how wicked. smart you are. I like this guy. He can stay.

It's true. This podcast is sponsored by Palantir, by the way. Is it really? Yeah. It's not. No. All right. He was about to leave.

So I came from this ability to talk about data and analysis in a way that wasn't so much locked in the ones and zeros, but. You know, I could sit across the table from somebody who knew even less about it than I did and explain to them why this mattered and why this was going to impact what we're doing in these frontier locations where, you know, you're trying to get heads or tails as to what's going on. And you can't fly, you know, you can't have airborne assets flying, collecting. all of this stuff, you need something else that's sort of coming in to hydrate all of that information. Because it's way too obvious. I mean, it's just, it's, we can. And that was, you know, for 20 years, we own the airspace. We could fly and collect against anybody. Sure. Collected really good stuff because we were basically intercepting cell phone signals, right? With these devices that would emulate a cell phone tower. So we could attack these.

phones. But what about the signals? What about the phones that we don't know about? What about the populations that we're not able to understand their patterns of life, their movements, their centers of gravity? How can we get a better sense of what populations in Syria are doing or populations in Libya are doing or populations in Yemen? The, you know, the high traveled destination spots for the first world. Right. Yeah. And I was going to take a vacation. the yemen next summer yeah yeah yeah we need you many coffee place down here it's pretty good i bet it is yemen have you ever been to a yemen restaurant that's what i said i'm like i didn't know this was a thing yeah they feed you i they're great i like them a lot yeah but you know yeah i don't know if

i'm visiting there yeah probably not any time soon right um so i understand how to how to present the value proposition that breaks it down in a way where i'm not sitting here talking about well sir there are these demand side platforms and supply side platforms and ad tech and you know by that time he's like asleep yeah whatever yeah um so i talk about human geography and patterns of life and population movement and um the ability to sort of do this at a really good deal for the taxpayer um to get sort of this this hyper-local sense of how populations behave. All right. That all sounds good.

Prove it. Which sort of leads into how all of this unraveled. I'm giving a presentation to an investor conference. By side quant type, you know, alternative data. Like I'm going to give you the, I'm going to show you the weak signal in data. You may have heard of, you know. Quants like counting cars and parking lots to determine store traffic. I'm like, I'm going to show you this at a more precise level.

It's like at a Four Seasons Hotel or Ritz Carlton. Ain't Qatel goes to those things. Patagonia and Priuses, you know. So sitting in the back, didn't even notice them. You know, I'm done with my presentation. Two dudes approach me. And they look like fucking one percent or something. from an emcee from a what uh one motorcycle a motorcycle a motorcycle bikeer gang they look like fucking

bikers and john doesn't mind me talking about this because me and i are friends now but sleeves they look they're not uh from sandhill road in in the valley but they know data and the questions they're asking me are really different they're asking me about Libya Yemen Syria their data as you've described from these places. I'm like, I don't know. Want to find out? So as that story unfolds, I go to work and I start talking to these data companies, as I've described, these audience attribution companies, data brokers, I have this cover for

action where I'm facilitating analysis for an NGO who wants to know. know about populations that are refugees along the Syrian-Turkish border. At a backstop, I built out. I was talking about, you know, we need to know the distribution between men and women. We need to know what types of facilities we need to have for women. Like, I had this thing laid out. But these are data companies, so it was probably overkill. If I had bank, they were going to sell.

I'm like, so, but this, you know, there we're not you're not selling nikes in along the syria turkish border you're not advertising for starbucks along the syria hey listen they got to sell some fucking grande um mocha chinas that's right uh no and so you know they're like yeah we've got data usually ends up on the cutting room floor because nobody really we're not monetizing it nobody's advertising but we have data like all right how much One guy goes, how much you got? Like, ask a stupid question I'm going to get, yeah.

So we go through, we go through the process, get a, get a data set, and start lighting up these areas. Like, you know, we've got millions of data points, a data point being a lat long observation of a unique device. Lat long observation of a unique device. Yeah. So this is, so you ask. earlier about IP addresses. Yes. The apps are pulling location

of your GPS location as your phone is detecting where it precisely is. Not an IP address, which is sort of centroid to a city center or wherever the cutout is. This is putting you like in this parcel. Yeah. Which to get that to get that distribution that many

observations of unique devices with that degree of precision. It was like, that was cutting edge. And so we're seeing all of this data and it's like, all right, so what is the use case? Like, I haven't gotten there yet. And, you know, like, okay, we can do this. This is kind of cool, but what's the use case? and so I'm sitting in my classified home office skiff no I was going to say that my my home office in between my master bedroom and my daughter's room you're in mine right now

yeah yeah yeah and usually is probably better you're probably soundproof because I'm sitting in we did kind of soundproof it's nice in here yeah yeah so I'm sitting there like okay I have this data. I have this, um, you know, a user interface of a geospatial user interface a map. I need a use case that's going to matter. I'm like, all right. Where are devices that I know are at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? Where do they go next? Or where else in the world are it? So I draw a little geo fence around Fort Bragg. hit play and the map starts lighting up you know lots of lots of observations in and around the lovely Fayetteville North Carolina right but I'm seeing clusters in Syria from Fort Bragg

from Fort Bragg that's promising so I'm like this is interesting what's this all about So I light up, you know, I start examining, like, where are they? And they are located at this abandoned cement factory. Lafar's cement factory. LaFar's. It's a French company. And they were manufacturing cement there. And if you think about the configuration of it, it's like the perfect forward operating base.

Yeah, you put some bodies in cement. No one ever finds it. That's right. You got lots room. And so I'm looking at this and then I'm like, all right, let's see where do these devices that I know are attributable between Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where nothing goes on related to special operations. Nothing. Nothing. I didn't even know that. Yeah.

where J-Sox is headquartered as well as Delta. They are located kind of down the road a little bit from the main campus. I understand. Anyway, and it's like a Division I football facility. Yeah. Think about, or professional football facility. it's if you've ever been to one of those it's oh they're nice that's they're nice yeah um so where so these devices that are in syria that are affiliated with fort brag where else are they

and i start seeing these devices at residential properties in a town called southern pines north carolina oh still here still here but southern pines north carolina is a really nice sort of upscale residential community where if you make a few extra bucks and you're in the Army, you can afford to live there. All of this, like I have no operandi knowledge. I am not looking for Delta operators. I didn't know what Southern

Pines met. No idea. But you're sitting like in your house with your daughter's bedroom right over there. She's sleeping next door. Looking at open source information going, am I about to find the fucking da Vinci code like is this it i'm thinking all right so what is the use case here and i don't really know what i have which is the beautiful thing about this stuff because you go in with like i'm going to prove something and you'll make it work i didn't know really what i was looking at um develop that uh those those location points such that You know, I'm seeing contractors from other military bases.

I'm seeing how they are moving into Syria, their routes. So they all sort of started Fort Bragg and then some guys go to this airport and other guys go to this airport. And they all end up making cement in northern Syria. So, and that's where I have this meeting. been written about um and i'm about to step you know like this things are about to get hot um because nobody has any idea about this um and so my partner uh my he government a civilian government employee the biker dude that approached me at the four seasons without his patagonia and right us in the parking lot i like this guy yeah john fritchley like and he is not in government

anymore which is one of the read into that what you want but he's one of the guys yeah now he works he's yeah big air quotes there he's he's he's making bank as a as a sales guy um right um you know I'm showing him you know I have this PowerPoint sort of built out like that I can click through quickly he's looking at it you know he's like let it rip this is we need to know this is this is why we are doing this were you uncovering i am tracking here as best i can were you essentially uncovering that like we were using military and some say intelligence related operations that we were doing through a concrete company over in syria and because you track the neighborhood in north carolina that says oh they're definitely a little higher level military there you were

able to say hey guys we're doing shit undercover and if i have this tool and i'm sitting in fucking Saudi Arabia, and I don't like you. I can use this against us to unload it. If I can do it, we must assume that an adversary can do it. Right. And so that was the, that was the, this is what we've, this is what commercial data without any real, we weren't, I wasn't targeting anybody. I was, let's see what we can find out. Yeah.

And so the use case became counterintelligence, OPSEC, identity management, but more of an operational security use case. And you had never really done anything ever involved in the government before. You'd just been in the software business, essentially. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is like a whole new world for you out of nowhere.

For the special operations community, 100%. As I said, you know, you're Delta. So what does that mean? I mean, I kind of knew, right? But it just, this was not, I was not coming from that community knowing what I was looking for. Got it. Which is why this southern, these Southern Pines residences where I'm like, and here's a house in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Anyway, so I'm going through this and I can see like at first, you know, it's a typical presentation.

People are barely paying attention. And I'm like walking through my methodology and, you know. And the Lafarce, and that's, you know, I kind of, I see, oh, this got their attention. Oh. Hello. And then the next slide is, and I, you know, these are the, these are residences that are attributable to the Lafar's cement factory. And, you know, everybody gets a little closer. And they're, one guy's looking at it and, you know, the two guys start whispering to each other.

Did you fuck with them at all? like, oh, you guys are paying attention now. I wasn't, I wasn't dialed in enough to know what I knew. Okay. And then the meeting went, it didn't go high and right, but it was sort of like, stop. How are you doing this? I just told you how I was doing it. You weren't paying attention.

But the immediate, you know, You know, they were, their learning systems or their, their perception was, I must have hacked, intercepted, engineered, or stolen data in order to do this. I'm like, I didn't do any of those things. Let's go back to the first part of the presentation. Yeah. I bought it. That's not. So how expensive was it to buy like that iteration?

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Use code Julian, and you're all set. After your purchase, Ridge is going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them I sent you. So, you know, people say... Who gave you that money again? Yeah, this was J-Soc. Okay. All right.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah, no, this was not so fun. I was going to say, send me money, Mike. Yeah, I need some. Yeah. So this was like the initial sort of proof of concept.

Um, a little bit of money. Let's see what this can do. Um, and... All right. So you have hyper local awareness of the movements. of of special mission unit operators yeah um who get you know trained on all this stuff and counterintelligence and um op sec and and all of these things and they're like so you're telling me that all of this was put together without any oppriory knowledge you didn't have any cheats or

shortcuts or hacks and i'm like my only hack was i know fort brag that was all i needed as my seed location fucking China fuck you know they know there's no secret they own land all around it that's right the united front work department they buy it um yeah they're watching from the farm yeah yeah i didn't talk about that um and so um

and that was sort of the okay you've you haven't proven anything yet but we're paying attention um they probably thought you were a massad or something they thought i was a charlatan they thought I was a snake oil sales I mean they said it like one guy said it to my face and walked down like I don't even after you got the name of the place and their addresses back how could you be a charlatan that's insane you're familiar with remote viewing one guy accused me he's like are you doing that remote viewing stuff so we so you're like so you're admitting that's real I mean I was like no this is I promise you uh I'm a deep thinker, but, you know, not like that. Let's get Elizondo in here, test them out and see what's worth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we've started to build that out a little bit. And this has all been documented and there's nothing. And this is, you know, going back almost 10 years ago. I was going to say so. So we've gotten much better at all of this. The, you know, the devices have gotten much better at just not protecting special mission unit operators and spies and case officers just for population for humanity the platforms of the devices have gotten

better with with privacy and not making it so easy for just anybody to start doing this can you explain how they've done that like some key ways yeah um so anything where for example every time you open up an app and it gives you a you know 70 boxes to check to provide permissions as a matter of getting that app to work on your phone as opposed to the app just loading on your phone and having all of those permissions set like do cross cross app tracking your location all of that stuff but people to be clear though and i'll speak for myself but i'm sure i speak for a lot of people listening right now there's some apps when they ask like if a flashlight app or something like that ass i'm like yeah fuck that but then there's other apps like maybe off the top of my head like a navigator app or something

I'm like, can we know your location? I'm like, fuck, yeah, you have to know my location or it doesn't work. So that stuff is all still, we're still all hitting yes to that. And I, this is, this is the, the choice that we have to make. Like when I, when I'm, when, when I have 3% battery and it's raining outside and I need an Uber, I don't want to be fucking around trying to get my little drop a pin and all this shit. I want it to work. So I make that trade off. And I, we have this trust because.

Uber's relationship or any app where you have that trust, like your, your data is important. And they're not going to be, you know, selling it to anybody and everybody. They don't need to. Firstly, it's too valuable. But they're not going to be doing that. And you have to make those, you have to make those choices. But you're right. When you want, when, when location is fundamental to the app's functionality, yeah, that's, that's a choice.

That's a choice to make. So how does our government now with like the Special Forces guys and stuff like that adequately defend against this when those guys, you know, they have a life too. So they have a phone. They use Uber and stuff like that. How do they set it up so that if they are using those services, you can't track them to LaFars anymore? Yeah. So this is what we have to understand as societies, the capitalization behind being able to segment us into cohorts. into audience groups, that cap structure is so huge that there isn't a silver bullet that's

going to defeat that. It's just, it's just, it's, there's just nothing, there's just nothing that'll allow you to, to, to, to, to, to, to fully fight back. Um, I mean, you, you, you're going to tell me that there's, you know, something you can do on your phone to defeat Google. No. And even when. Um, you know, when a, when a new privacy regulation comes online, um, you know, their ability to pivot into other ways and methods of, of understanding sort of your device behavior and activity, uh, through all sorts of means. I mean, these things are, are, are emitting so much telemetry, uh, data, you know, um, it's, uh, you know, they're packaging up telemetry packs.

And at, you know, two o'clock in the morning, if you were observing the processing, the, the, the CPUs of your device, all of a sudden it would, you know, you'd be like, what, what, what's going on? Because it's, you know, it's transmitting diagnostic information about the device. You know, there was, when did, when did we have the Beijing Olympics? Was it? Oh, wait. The 2020, which got pushed to 2022, but it was supposed to be. 2020 in Beijing because we have it back or was that Hong Kong in 08 I don't remember anyway so the most recent Olympics in Beijing they they every athlete all of the Olympic you know if you were part of the if you were part of the Olympics if you were going to go

and spectate you had to download an app and if you look at what that and there was no Um, you know, select which permissions you want to allow, um, to be, to be collected. It was your location, your battery power, um, processing power. What apps you have open, the full gamut of device behavior. And so, all right, um, I can understand, you know, like all of these conveniences that we, we convince ourselves that it's more convenient to let tech. do these things. So I'm just going to let it autumn. I'm just going to automate it and let it know, you know, where I am so that, so they're, you know, we could, we could make the case that

knowing precise location as you're navigating venues is somehow, you know, to allow access or control or, but at the end of the day, if you look at the data that this app is collecting, they'd be able to segment the differences between the Australian ski teams. device usage from the New Zealand's ski team. And it could be this weak signal, like their battery power at these times is at this level and their, what is that signal? I don't know if there's a signal there, but over time and collected in context with maybe other things, you know, now do we know that there's unusual, there's something unusual

about this cohort based upon some non-examined. obvious indicator that doesn't make sense to anybody else. But when you layer that in with other things, that is a signal of intent. Imagine if like this is one thing I think that gets lost on on people when you have this conversation because people think like, oh, well, there's a million things going on. How could it be figured out so easily? First of all, you guys have incredible tools to do it. Secondly, we now literally have AI to help do it. So even before that, that shit is That shit is faster. Yep.

Than a Stasi trained Roomba on Adderall. Stasi train Roomba on Addera. So wait, the Stazis are training Roombas, too. Do I need to know about that? I haven't bought a Roomba. It kind of freaks me out, but I shouldn't do that. It's really fast. So at scale, to think as a human.

And you asked earlier about what can, you know, what can operators or sensitive cohorts do? yeah it's happening so fast and if you look at the litany of things that you should be concerned about we don't have the cognitive capability to manage all of this that's exactly especially if we are operating yes you can't think about like fucking 150 apps on your phone you're not sitting they're like oh you know right so um it's it's it's not a solution and there's not much to sell when I, you know, talk to these communities, it's about understanding, you know, what is it, what am I, what am I communicating? What am I saying about myself when I do these things? And at least being able to use it against the adversaries, too. So what's, there's a level playing field. So this is, uh, so because of podcasts and because of the availability of former tier one operators to appear on podcasts, I had a few. You've had a few. Um, And this is not a criticism.

I don't want to get into that. Yagley was fucking tracking our podcast every time they were here. It's like, oh, there he is. Talking that asshole in Jersey again. But if you think about it, the tactical cohort or the tactical audience, which is now access to the lifestyle of an operator, what they wear, how they dress, where they go, how they talk, all of these things. has created this new group of consumer who aren't operators, but they wear all the shit and they buy all the guns and they go to the gun ranges and they drive trucks and they do all of this stuff that is the operator lifestyle.

Yes. So for that community, we now have. Cover. Ballast. So you're contributing to the operation. security of all right yeah i'm okay with that yeah i like protect but it's like you know 20 years ago be familiar with 511 the the clothing store i know 711 511 you know 511 would not be it's like this carhart i've been wearing car heart since 1993 nobody you know you were either a working man

to wear car now it's like it's back it's fashionable oh it's back yeah they wear it on like they wear it at Fashion Week. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. What's his name? Wrote a song about it. Kanye?

Was it? Kanye and... I mean, he's written a song about a lot of things these days, but, you know... I won't go down that. Okay. But 511 is like this tactical, you know, clothing store. 20 years ago, like, they would never have had a storefront in, you know, suburban Washington, D.C. And now everybody's wearing 511.

Yep. I see what you're saying. You know, and so this tactical lifestyle, the interest in it, by virtue of the availability, you know, to hear these guys talk, to see what they wear, it's kind of like, you know, I want to be a cool guy too. Yeah. So that provides this sort of this little bit of operational cover because an adversary is going to be like, all right, unless I see, you know, all of these, you know, Unless I'm able to observe them at overt known government facility. Like, I don't know what I'm looking at. Is that an operator?

Is that just the guy that can afford to look like one? Yeah. So, you know, there are, it's not all bad. And everyone had, like, that's the thing. There's like mutually assured blackmail tracking destruction in a way around the world. Now, when you're talking about, like, the best intelligence agencies, they've got your handful. because especially when you're talking about publicly available information they all can get access to it and as long as they know how to read the language now thanks guys like you like they can all do it on each other

it still puts in danger the quote unquote chess pieces that are on the board though because you know that that's a risk you know if you're setting up an intelligence operation now you know your guys still carry iPhones or something now there are some things this is I'm very not well read in this So please just fill in and correct me where I'm wrong. But, you know, I've heard about things like they'll make guys carry Faraday cages and stuff like that. But again, that come to me, I would assume that comes back to the question of like giving up the convenience of even having the fucking thing in the first place. Yeah, the Faraday bags. So here's, this is, and this is really sort of into the weeds.

But so I see a device behaving in a certain way. And then all of a sudden, I don't see it. It's a Monday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon. Normal people, their devices are functioning. I am able to see signal throughout the day. Checking Instagram, fucking off. But these devices that are in the Washington, D.C. area, from time to time, or at very specific times, are not emitting any signal. signal. That's a, that's a jump, but, you know, like if, if you're looking for that non-obvious

indicator, like what devices, if I've got a million devices that behave in a very predictable manner, and then I've got a hundred devices that exceed that predictable parameter, I'm interested in those hundred devices. Right. Because somebody dropped it in a fair day bag. So I just had in Joe Weil, who's the CEO of that Israeli spyware phone, the unplugged phone. I joke, it's, you know, it is kind of run through Israel. But anyway, so he was explaining that when they've used this for some of the tactical guys, like out in the field and stuff like that, they have to have a product that creates a false signal so that they don't stand out for that very reason you just said.

Yep. So when you need your device to continue a pattern of life or a technical pattern of life, you need to, you're posting or you're doing shit on Instagram like once an hour, you need that device to continue to behave that way, which is, you know, there's a lot to go into that to scale it and make it work. But that's the kind of thing you want to maintain that degree of normalcy or usualness. Yeah. You don't want to be that unusual device in and around Fayetteville, North Carolina, Virginia Beach, Washington, D.C., Tyson's Corner, that does weird things. Yep. So how do we maintain that degree of normalcy? and and the idea of the concept that privacy has sort of developed into this normal like you're not hiding something if you are into data privacy that's become a normal sort of trait feature cover again it's because normal people are using proton mail and signal yeah and all of these VPNs it is a normal behavior even if you're not hiding

cheating deal in drugs or whatever right i don't do any of those things definitely not um well would talk because i i'm i may have some other thoughts on that for you based upon your patterns of life oh okay all right those days are behind me yeah um so you know again maintaining that posture of normalcy through privacy which you know that's one of the uh if you think about you know your personal pillars of privacy, like, what is your privacy stack? I use a VPN, okay? Make sure you're using the right one, not one that's free or developed and hosted in Romania.

Use one that's from Switzerland. Yeah. You know, an email service that's based in Switzerland. What is your privacy stack look like? Why Switzerland? Because it's literally Switzerland. Because of all, you know, in terms of their data privacy laws, it, it, it, But, you know, it's rooted sort of in that mindset of their banking, what they were for banking, they have become for data privacy.

Got it. Okay. Shout out Switzerland. Yeah. You know, they don't have a de facto compliance agreement for data seizures. Love that. And, you know, Switzerland has always sort of had this posture of, of. secrecy. Yeah. You need to launder money. That's where you go. You're not laundering it

in Hoboken. That allegedly, but yeah. Yeah. You're going to go to Switzerland. I know a couple guys. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to. So you, you know, everybody should have their sort of pillars of privacy for a whole host of reasons that is more about personal dignity and autonomy and and identity than anything else. It's not about hiding. And so, you know, you look at some of the, um, the operating systems or the unplugged phone as, all right, if I'm going to upgrade my privacy game, maybe I want to, maybe I want to go down this route.

What do you let's actually get a little specific though, just because I literally had Joe in here and the CEO of unplug. What, what do you think of that? I, I, I think it's, um, so from, from, from, from, From a personal, you know, from a personal individual perspective, I think it's, it's all about preference and how deep you want to go. And I think from, you know, an operational perspective, the more we can move tech to tech that is commercially overt in that it's not going to look weird if I have some science and technology. directorate built phone that does weird things, that doesn't look like 10,000 other devices. If we can, if we can mirror all of the tech that is commercially available, that provides

covert communication or protected communication against an adversary that is looking for that outlier, well, it's hard to look for an outlier amongst thousands or millions. versus an outlier like i've never seen this messaging app before oh and i see four other devices that are communicating there and you know they're staying two blocks away from the u.s embassy that's now you're speaking my language as far as like where i was going in my head when i was talking with joe about what the intentions of like joe and eric prince might be and like viewing seeing as eric prince founded it and he's like a long time you know defense military guy and all that I could see him thinking, I don't know this, but I could see him like, all right, well,

if we could get like 5% of the marketplace, that's enough noise. It's enough noise to make our 0.01% we actually care about blend in. I think that that's whatever that market share is, 5% against the Apple, Google, duopoly. That'd be, that's like if I, you know, there are 10 million kids wearing sneakers. If I can just corner 1% of that, I'll be rich. that's 1% is fucking hard oh of course i'm not even talking by the way like yeah i'm sure that's part of it too it's a business they're trying to make money so yeah that'd be great for them in their goals but i'm even talking about it from like the second order effect of all right well

eric prince blown up people in haiti right now so at the government's behest and he's thinking about projects like that that involved intelligence and protecting people and it's like if we had more of these phones on the ground they could blend in um and there are plenty of businesses legitimate not fucking props and you know intelligence entities but like legitimate businesses where protecting data and communications is essential of course uh investment banking you're doing you're you're the you're the investment banker that's fucking organizing the the private planes and the meeting places between company that's going to acquire and company that's getting acquired you don't want that's correct the arbs to come in and and play that against you

you. You want to protect that. Um, you want to have secure reading rooms. You want to have the ability to share documents without, you know, without anybody intercepting them. Um, the movie business is really good at this where they need, you know, their own location and they need the ex-fill, you know, the dailies from their next billion dollar blockbuster with Tom Cruz. They don't want those intercepted. That's right. Um, so there are, lots of there are many commercial applications where secrecy is essential that create that that market share where you know we're proliferating within the consumer industry to create that that ballast that noise that you know somebody who's operational carrying this

phone is can't tell the difference between them or an investment banker or you know somebody that's protecting intellectual property or pharmaceutical research. Oh, there's so much of it. You're making an amazing point. You look at any major industry. It doesn't matter what it is. Even take the conspiratorial hat off. Just regular business that has to happen where there's a lot of dollars and cents on the line.

It's a form of intelligence. 100%. It's business intelligence. People can go and fucking bet on that if they find something out. That's how the public markets work. I mean, they're not supposed to do that. But you know what I mean? You know, my commercial side of the business, you know, I work with a lot of

hedge fund managers i was just gonna bring it up these guys will put fucking drones over farms in china to find out if if you know apple's making a new chip and you know it's really great about they all want their they all want like their own little cia right that's good for you mike's like yeah i'll be three million dollars i can get that yeah it's it's amazing like they all want their guy if you ever watched uh billions billions they all want their uh Iceland. Oh, dude, that show is, is, you know, scarily realistic on something. Yeah. Not all of it, but like, yeah. They all want their fixer, their guy who can do shit. Yeah. And, um, you look like you beat the shit out of people too. I like that. Yeah. That's good. Right as he's saying that, he fucking pulls out, fucking gun one and gun two. Uh, so, so there, so there, the, the, the shift that is occurring that started, you know, when commercial data, you know, became, you know, the community became aware of its, of its risk and of its power. And we do a lot, we did a lot of stuff not, you know, cowering in the corner.

We used it. Yeah. Yeah, we'll get to that. Moving to that sort of commercial mindset, not everything has to be a black box built by Q. We need to sort of, in this data, environment where, uh, maybe you've heard people talk about something called ubiquitous technical surveillance, UTS. Um, actually I have heard UTS, UTS, but fill me in on this.

Yeah. So you, it's everything that we've talked about, but the community refers to it as ubiquitous technical surveillance. So it's the cameras, the Wi-Fi sniffers, ad tech, everything that's sort of ambient, you know, um, the, the, the, the Stasi train Roomba on Adderall. um particularly in environments where surveillance is just part of the deal uh uts has has made it such where it's like i'm going to go down the street and i'm i can never consider myself black so instead of you know i can run an eight hour surveillance detection route and there's no physical

surveillance i don't have you know guys following me but they're following me through my phone right or or through proof of presence based upon the cameras Wi-Fi sniffers everything that sort of makes that talks to each other talks to each other yep yep um and so part of that risk is okay so maybe i got away with something today but when that gets outed the adversary is going to roll back that tape to see every other person you met with, every place you went. And that's, you know, that's, that's problematic because you may not even see what, what you did that revealed or outed your asset. Oh, it only takes one split second, like one step in the wrong place and the whole

thing's going. Yeah, absolutely. How much do you know about, because like you, you 10 years ago got pulled into this world and And then suddenly we're like, the guy to talk to one. And it's really when you're sitting at a table with a bunch of like PhDs and Ciginners and, and they're like, Mike Yagley is the subject matter expert on a little boat. And you're like, like the Drew's giving me? I it's, you know, that's those are those are moments where you're like, okay. Am I the, am I really that guy?

Right. But point being, you did become the guy. Right. And so that's going back 10 years and then you get thrust in this world. And again, we'll go through some of the different things that happen there. Yep. But like now, you know, through your job and through the people you get access to and the jobs you're on, you're also, I'm sure, naturally learning about all the other shit you didn't know about that, you know, how data is collected, technology, all those things. And you've become an expert on that over the years. So how much is it applicable to say like if someone's using. their phone in a restaurant right some random lady right there not associated with anyone she's just some lady and like you're an important person you're sitting at that table talking to someone is there a spy agency that's in her phone and listening to what you're saying like does that kind of thing exist i don't want to say ubiquitously but far more commonly than we might think probably i mean probably not the random person that's in proximity but um so this is you know everybody's is sort of focused on the principal or the target or the the the leader right um as a means of extracting or targeting information but these people and they are locked down like you're not

going to hack you know trump's phone they're not if he no they're not it's just i'm going to go on good faith assumption that somebody has made it such that his phone is no-fail mission, like, you know, it's not going to get happened. Anything's possible, but, um, I've heard about some interesting phone calls he makes. That's just why, you know, I'm wondering. But it's the people that around him that are probably not as obsec, uh, sensitive, um, tracking Putin. So, you know, there were headlines that we were tracking Putin. You were tracking Putin.

Wasn't tracking Putin. I was tracking his bodyguards. Were you doing this from your bedroom again? yeah oh that's awesome yeah yeah yeah uh fuck you slava gotcha and when that came out we even got putin's spokesperson to have to address it so anyway that was so he said in russian like death to yeah he got they didn't name me if if i'd gotten i think i think there was one interview where he was like i don't know who this you know he he totally destroyed my name but i don't fucking mike yigley motherfucker pay this man pay this man pay this

This man, his money. That was a great movie. Oh, the best. Kids got alligator blood. Can't get rid of him. Yeah. Yeah. What was the word he's like?

Niet. Check. Check. He just goes. Oh, yeah. Where he's like, check, check. All night, this motherfucker. Yeah.

Pee, this man needs money. I love that you know that. Yeah. That's great. So. Yeah, the Oreos in the ear. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so I think it's, it's, anything is possible. I also think that, um, you know, the media environment is such that every day of the week, there's some new, uh, thing that we need to be worried about. Um, the most recent one is, uh, you know, Wi-Fi signals as a, as a way of detecting identity based upon body fat. Yeah. What? Yeah. Yeah.

So the density, so, you know, uh, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. are measured based upon these RISI signals, you know, transmit, bounce back. Like, what is the time? And some lab, some university came up with a way of being able to detect your body composition as a means of. This is just an example. Like, you would have to have sort of collected so much data to be able to start determining body types and, you know, figuring out. who's who from from those signals but every day you know i and i get my phone lights up with did you see this like what do we what do we what are we going to do about it you know some company

some research lab has proven that you can detect identity based upon body fat uh body density of an individual based upon the rizzy signals so wait that actually does i'm i'm just adding something in my head tell me if i'm like cooking the wrong thing here but i've been wondering recently. I've talked about on some podcasts about things that I know verifiably. I never typed into Google and I never said out loud. Some things I thought in my head, some things I couldn't remember if I thought in my head, but ads would show up that spoke directly to that thing. And now that I'm thinking about it, most of the ones I'm thinking about are stuff that have to do with like little injuries or knickknacks or like stuff to do with my health or obviously like

it can detect I'm moving and I'm in pretty good shape and stuff I wonder if that is a part of the data tracking could could be I would say I get this question a lot where um you know in fact the secretary of state who is um and I like him and I think he's rubio rubio yep um he was talking to a group, I was there and he was lamenting the fact that he's taking, he's learning Italian. He's doing it online

using, you know, Babel or one of these online language. Antonio Margariti. Yeah. Yeah. He's going to start doing that. And he was talking about how now I'm getting all these ads you know, in Italian or travel to Italy and, you know, how does that, how did that happen? And

I would like to think that our Secretary of State who is negotiating our data Sovereignty, you know, bilateral agreements would know better. And maybe he was just being glib, but, um, it's not a great question. The point being, there's probably, there is no, um, there's probably something that you did. Or there is something within your data streams that has predictable value that landed that ad on your phone based upon some very benign signal. um but in the but in the algorithm world that signal is you know red alert like he is he is managing an injury he is he is primed for us to advertise whatever yeah there's there's always something

trying to do a forensic um breakdown of that is is hard because it is it can be such a weak signal like I could you know or they could be using like because that's crazy yeah I mean I think um you know if you use any of these um home um you know smart home things where you're talking to Alexa yeah I don't either um you know you're it's not you're talking to Amazon's infrastructure yes you don't own that shit like you're going to talk to Alexa Alexa is going to print your voice it's learning from your language. It's predicting your times of when you're telling it to play music or turn the lights off or whatever you're asking it to do. You're feeding a large language model that Amazon will use against you to advertise to you when you are on the Amazon app. And Amazon

is like a $4 billion advertising business. That's it. I mean, it's been around for two years, three years. That's it. Four billion. It's only been around for two, three years? They're advertising business. Really? So Amazon, been around forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They stand up, you know, like, we're good at this. Let's turn it into a business.

So their demand side, their advertising business alone contributes $4 billion. Yeah, first of all, I didn't know that was only two years old. Secondly, $4 billion even seems like that's going to be $40 billion in two seconds or should already be. I mean, it's like, because they own, I mean, look, I ain't going to lie. Amazon's incredible. So think about it this way. Amazon can, you know, used to go, you used to be, you'd go like on Google search for stuff. Yeah, fuck that.

Now you're just, you're searching. So Amazon sees you at the point of interest, how you sort of navigate and do product selection to the point of sale. Yep. They have that full visibility. And this is, this kind of upended Facebook's ad business because Facebook's, uh, or meta's promise was, you know, um, Somebody looking at a, you know, cute cat videos is, is predictive of some other than, you know, other than they like cats. But cat videos don't sell advertising, don't sell product. Understanding, like, this is a person who is buying whatever, dog food, lunchables, you've got kids.

You know, whatever you are buying is an indicator of your lifestyle. Amazon has the full visibility of that. They understand this is urgent. Oh, yeah. I have no doubt Amazon knows everything. And that's, you know, that's called, you know, that's called sort of the first party data market where in the early days you had, you didn't have a segmentation of third party data, data brokers. And first party data, you know, Uber, Amazon. you just had this amalgamation of data and everybody was trying to figure out how do we monetize this how do we sell product through these data sets and because of privacy because of people getting smarter and because of AI companies that otherwise were like selling data because they had no other means of valuing it they're like this shit is gold oh yeah all the metaphors data is the new

oil they've figured out why and how to use it for the for the benefit of their business yeah i feel like data it i've heard the oil line a lot but data as far as the way it's been monetized and used technically with people's approval now but like let's be honest not really it then when you think about how it's packaged and put back in front of you to tempt you with everything including things that maybe you shouldn't be doing or shouldn't be a part of in a lot of ways they're creating like the new fucking smoking in a way you know they're they're creating the constant scrolling because you're constantly getting things customized to you it's not just the social feeds customizing content that is that because that is literally using these data companies to do that so

back in the day when everything was retail i mean the science behind a physical retail store just in time or or impulse purchasing like those end cap and that shit that's at the register. Yep. That wasn't, you know, like, oh, it's just an afterthought. It's, let's put candy where, you know, the kid's going to start begging for the candy bar. And the mom's, you know, trying to check out, like, fine, here you go. There's a reason why that shit's there.

There's a science behind it, just like there's science in how an online store is configured. Absolutely. To capture share a wallet. What colors sell? Things like, you know what I mean? Yep. Like, you go to the food store. store like i don't ever go to the food store anymore amazon actually delivers it right to my door

but i i eat very clean so when i went down the shore this summer i had to stop at the food store a couple times and i realized consciously afterwards i never went to the middle aisles for stuff i think i went for one bag of brown rice yep right but everything i was getting like wow i am really doing the natural thing because everything in the middle is all the fucking process stuff that has the red blue all the nice colors that makes you go oh i want to buy this yep there's a reason for that And that goes back to, you know, Sam Walton setting up Walmart and how to how to maximize that experience for the customer and maximize spend from the customer. Right. So I think it's it's I think as citizens, as people, we just need to be aware of these things as a means of not, not take.

taking personal agency for granted or thinking that I'm just going to let somebody else do my thinking. well that's the thing and you pointed this out correctly yourself a little bit ago there's always a line somewhere even for the most conscious people that line of convenience just because of the way the world is set and i'd actually liken the psychology similarly to like a parent these days if they have a 16 year old and they still don't let them on social media i get that as a like a that seems like a smart move but then it sets them behind in their social circles forever and you're like fucking over the kid yeah even though you have the right intention you know and it's a similar psychology when you're like i know i don't want to give my data anywhere but that means i also literally can't do anything that i have to do to have a functional place in society every day you know how do you find even if you find that balance aren't you still kind of accidentally accomplishing the same ends that we're talking about if in some places you can't buy a two dollar cup of coffee without having the stupid app on the phone right you can't get on public transit without having an app or paying without you know cashless society so

what do you do well you've got to just you can't i don't think you can have a monolithic attitude i think you have to understand what all of this means and um and just and and know that you are in control uh not the not the tech companies that really benefit from compliance yes and conformity yeah now let's actually go back to that because you were saying very early on when you were going through some of the i don't know the pipeline here or whatever it obviously all comes back to as we know like the apples and the Googles of the world so everything you've been breaking down since then is a lot of the middleman thing in this industry that's form and these people who pull the data and sell it. But like focusing on, let's say Google for a

minute, what is their responsibility these days for the infrastructure that we've created as far as like how ubiquitous everyone's data is? Are they completely in the wrong still? Or are they trying to make some improvements that the government's not making them do to improve people's ability to have some privacy i don't think in their charter uh they have uh obligated themselves to uh humanity's cause of of self economy and governance i don't believe that's in their charter i don't think it is either um what is their charter's like something really weird again yeah i forget what it it was like oh my god what was do no harm do no harm that's it yeah yeah um which you know The kids at at Google use that as their justification to do that walk out and that protest over Project Maven, which Google was helping the Department of Defense basically categorize a bunch of images, you know, to do for image wreck, right?

Image recognition. Oh, recognition. Yeah. So you've got a drone that's, that's doing full motion video, flying over, you know, whatever. And you're tagging, you know, that's a car. That's a truck with a technical. And Department of Defense was having them do this. Yeah.

I mean, the Department of Defense probably created them. So, yeah. So, I mean, this was, this is like, but this is how, by the time the joint artificial intelligence center or whatever the hell they call themselves now could have figured this out. it's this is they need the they need to be able to pull in yeah a google to do these kinds of things because they'll they'll forget more than you know the department of war will ever know yeah um so um in terms of uh you know it we are it is a it is a business relationship between consumer and google consumer and amazon um you don't have forced to use Google right but you know you're going to make choices but they're also and this is this is the

thing about the system i say this is someone who really likes capitalism and thinks it's the best system of all it still is it's flaws right and so google unfortunately through their quarterly forced reporting is incentivized to have to constantly grow it's in the charter of any company that you have to you know serve your shareholders and stakeholders which goes back to they are their business is correct capturing intent behavior and being able to do some to productize that absolutely that is like it's a there's a you know it's uh we call these things super apps so you've got your google mail google maps calendar a bunch of different right they're all effectively the same

you know it's an integrated um application inner infrastructure And, you know, that is, that is Google's responsibility to their shareholders. And this is where I feel like we make it too black and white sometimes when we righteously complain about some of the things these companies do, which I do all the time. But, you know, the intonation can become like, oh, they're evil. And everyone that works, there is evil. I just Googled it. There's 187,000 employees at Google.

I guarantee you most of them aren't evil, right? Now, there are there probably a few who are? I'm sure. That's just the law of numbers. but it's like the intention may be not even bad or good just like all right let's get to the next quarterly how are we improving our business meaning it's at least not a bad intention but the road to hell being paved there on the way is what has led to so many of these problems that we're fucking 40 shoots down the slippery slope on yeah how do we pull ourselves up from that

nose down position how um you know this is uh i i talk to privacy maximalists all the And I'm like, are you going to stand behind the press release that Google releases that says we are now going to charge $15 a month to use Google apps because of all of these data privacy regs and, you know, what we can't do to provide a free app? Are you going to be the ones to say that's a good thing? Because I can tell you that consumers, when Google says it's going to now cost you $15. a month to use all of this stuff because we are we have to make money but if we can't advertise and we can't do all of these things who's who's who's going to take accountability for that and talk about you know talk about rioting in the streets when you have to pay you know 10 bucks to log into instagram as a means of protecting your data you're going to have

riots i agree because it adds up you get a family of four we can all do math and you think about economically where so many people in the country are, you know, live in paycheck to paycheck. These are things that they have been trained to have as a part of their life for free for decades. Yep. Yep. You can't just unring that bell. It's a utility.

And it's, you know, it's not free. You're the product. You are the product. And that's, that's part of the deal. And should, you know, do we wind back to the point where, uh, we don't have mobile devices? in our, you know, all of those conveniences. Do we put that back in the bottom? No, that's not realistic.

But I think from the operational community, from the intelligence community, there are, there are as many opportunities as there are vulnerabilities. Can you explain what you mean? I think I know what you mean. Yeah. So if we can extract very detailed, awareness. information at lower risk, lower cost, lower risk to life about places we're interested in, governments were interested in, communities we're interested in, versus having to deploy case officers who are going to convince somebody to commit treason.

And if we can use it to our advantage, as opposed to constantly, you know, seeing the lurking shadows of it, I think that this is the future of collection. And this goes beyond sort of open source. It's like, you know, we want to have the relationships with the companies that provide, you know, skated devices for, you know, facilities. We want to be able to understand those data sets.

We want to be able to tap into the app store, in Iran that would be nice yeah yeah we want to be able to access commercially we chat data

that would also be good all of these things that's kind of the future of commercial intelligence of commercial data as a means of this goes beyond you know populating sort of the

CIA fact book about demographics this is you know this is a more specific output. So these are the opportunities. The community has to sort of come to grips with.

There is no defeat button to ubiquitous technical surveillance. It is what it is. It's ambient. It's, you know, it's, you're not going to, you're not going to figure out a way of, there's no trade craft to defeat it. You know,

back in the Cold War, you know, They had these things, this thing called Moscow Rules, which was a, was, you know, tradecraft overhaul to be able to operate in Moscow. And they did all sorts of cool stuff. Do you ever see the movie Fargo? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that character was sort of a concealment expert. Mm-hmm.

I think it was called the jack in the box where if you you roll out of the embassy and you know that they're on your tail Russians the Soviets are going to follow you right you got a wave to him you pull out of the embassy you're doing you know you make a right you've timed it and you know that when I make that right hand turn I'm going to have five seconds where they're not going to be able to see me so the guy in the passenger seat. bailes out car keeps going they push a button I think it was called jack in the box and up pops a silhouette and to the

to the Soviets tailing it looks like yep two people are in that car meanwhile you know they've created a gap to be able to to go do their thing that's genius so you know those were the types of things that you could get away with when it was

physical and you had the um you know you had you were operating against humans um operating against pervasive AI and data it's just it's harder uh so we just have to get more clever in how we do things and where we do things um and the cover needs to be perfectly normal and legit yeah and we can do that by understanding like it's perfectly normal and legit for somebody who may be a with the U.S. Embassy to be in a coffee shop with somebody who is doing nuclear research. How do we create that overlap so that from a data perspective, it looks perfectly normal? How would you do that? So understanding, it's not a, you have to go deep into those patterns of life and look for those overlaps.

So I use this scenario or talk about the scenario a lot. there was an asset who was really into those rock climbing walls and so aligning a case officer who's also into rock climbing who could build that pattern of life who could I got a better story I got a better story for you all right let's do a better one like I'm back we're going to roll back to my prove it scenario I'm a hockey player wait you are legit yeah yeah yeah you look like a hockey player yeah that so um you know played through took it as far as one could go as far as i could take it um you went to the n hl no no i no i tap i my

you're supposed to say yes i would have given it to you um but it's when you see like guys you've played with um like i played pee wee hockey with jeremy ronick love dude i'm a flyers fan yeah so seven yeah so yeah So, and he was like, we knew. You just, you just knew. Anyway, so there's this thing called lunch puck. Where, you know, at lunchtime, it's pickup hockey. I'm doing my data analysis of the Russian embassy.

And I see that I've got four guys that play hockey. And they go, they play. you know, lunch puck. And in Russia? No, in D.C. At the rink where my men's league team plays. And these are Russians. These are Russians.

They're attached to the embassy. You know, they're. And so the, the hypothesis is, all right, if I know that they are going to be at this rank and I have every reason to be there. Like, I know how to put on my skates. I know how to hang out in the locker room. I know how to do all this stuff. you're like put me in coach let's go i'm like can i can i put myself in a locker room with four russian

dudes at the appropriate time and be able to you know like develop a relationship with them playing hockey because you've got that you've already had you already have that commonality yes and took me it took on the third day here you could smell them coming before they got you could smell the cigarette smoke on their clothes before they even got in the locker room i'm like and so you know this would be something that they call a bump yes uh so if i wanted to bump somebody and i knew what their patterns of life were and i wanted to have somebody who could who already had commonality with them to be able to strike up a conversation about hockey

and I'm sitting in the locker room with them and I'm like, you guys Russians? You just said it like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want some fucking parogis at? Yeah. I was in the Soviet Union in the 80s playing hockey so, you know, just bonding, right? This is the kind of shit we can do

with this type of data. We can put the right person in the right space to be able to not approach somebody and say, hey, you want to sell out your country but have that yes more of a natural flow and this was again you know and i took selfies with them i'm like here they are here's their you know here's where they come from the wisconsin avenue embassy here are the roots they take uh and i was able to affect this on my third try because i couldn't there wasn't any consistency like it's monday wednesday

Friday was, you know, some days it was Monday, some days it was Tuesday on the third day of placing myself in a location where I knew they frequented. Here they come. My friend Jim DiOrio has been on the show a bunch. He was a West Point special ops guy and then ended up FBI and did a lot of undercover work. He has a phrase where he said, politeness and familiarity breed access. And you're basically creating all the familiarity and you got that done before they go of the door without having to develop it or pretend you know like I know how to tape up my shin pads I'm not like figuring it out right I'll bet that's how or my equipment isn't all brand new you know and I get out there it was like I had every reason and it was just a test yes could I do this is this

is this doable and yeah it's doable you ask him for some nuclear codes I was like, you know, it's kind of like in Slapshot when the guy approaches the Hansons and says, are you guys brothers? You know, I'm like, are you guys Russians? Listen, I love the Russians. Absolutely. Big fan. Yeah. Big fan around here.

Yeah. And they, like, they sucked. I was like, you guys are Russians? Oh, they weren't good. They weren't. They weren't. I thought they were great in hockey. It's cold and shit out there.

He was disappointing. That's, wow. But you're still playing. You're doing a lot of picking hockey? So COVID like took my league out of action and I just I would have to get it back. I would have to drive, you know, and it's like late. And I'm, I'm at a point now where I'm not going out on Sunday night at midnight. Oh, that's a lot.

Yeah. Like, no, not doing that. That's the thing about, like the hockey lifestyle, the kids who come up playing that, mad respect. Yep. They learn crazy discipline because they're up at fucking 4 a.m. going to rinks, five days a week. Yep. I mean, that's why they're so tough, too. I think I'm convinced to that.

I mean, I talked about Jeremy Roneck. So his dad was like the assistant coach, but he, Wally didn't know how to skate. Oh, really? Yeah. But he was on the bench. And this is back in the day, like all three coaches smoking cigarettes, drunk from the night before. It was like old time, you know, you get your bell rung. It's like, shake it off.

Yeah, shake it off. You're a hockey player. What's a concussion? Yeah. But nice family. He was just a nice, like, nice kid, even though people were already at that time, like, you know, showing him how important he was. Yeah, no, he was really, really, that's the thing in Philly, like, we worship our sports teams. And the Philly fans are great at being able to sniff out scumbags and people that are full of shit.

And then they're great at being able to sniff out the guys who were like, yo, one of us. Yeah. Ronick was one of those guys because he had played a lot of his career with the Blackhawks. other teams before and when he got to Philly, he was a Philly guy. People were like, we fuck with this guy. Yep. Yep. You know, the kind of dude that would go out to the bar with the fans after the game. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It was, um, uh, it was an experience. Yeah. That's cool that you played with him growing up. Yep. You play with some other guys too at some point, I imagine. Yeah. Um, probably guys you hadn't heard of, but, um, I went to boarding school in

Massachusetts. So we had a couple guys drafted. Um, um, um, um, you go to Exeter? I went to Governor Dumber Academy. Governor Dumber. Yeah. Now it's they're the branding expert. They brought in, you know, the branding experts came in and said we probably, but William Dumber was one of the founding. He bequeathed his farm back in the 1700s.

He had to quit the name too. Wow. But, um, um, so we put a couple kids into the NHL. Um, um, so. That's cool. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

So one of the things I was wondering, though, because, like, I'm always thinking about where data can be sucked up. And now I'm talking to someone who's worked with this from like an intel and counterintel aspect of it by showing this to the government. And again, we're going to come to some of the specific stories on that soon. But if you're someone who works at any level of the government, you could just be someone who works at the state department. You're not a spy undercover there. you're just a regular kind of administrator, whatever it is, you have access at some point to something that's worth something. For sure, it's just a part of the job. So if on, when your daughter's on spring break, you guys decide to take a trip to France, like a friendly country or something

like that. They still, you know, we all gather intel on each other as far as the countries go, like every country's doing it to each other. When they land at the airport, aren't there tools that Every piece of data in their phone is just sucked up into the ether right there. Yeah. Um, are you, are you referencing France specifically? No, but I, I know the French are pretty fucking good at shit. Okay. So if you've, have you, have you, have you flown into Charles de Gaulle?

I have and I lived in Italy, but I never went to France. Okay. All right. Um, and, and other airports. And I can talk about the Emirates, which are really good too. Okay. So, um, at Charles de Gaul, when you are queuing up to go through border control, you are, uh, In this, it's, it doesn't make any sense, but you are like, you know, walking, you're doing this loop to get to, to queue up for the, for the line.

And what they are doing is you are passing through Wi-Fi sniffers, which are collecting your Mac address. And each time you do a pass-by, it's, it's basically a quality check. Like, yep, same device. Yep, seeing it again on this pass, seeing it again on this pass. As a means of, okay, so when you queue up and you present your passport, we have your passport and we also have device identifiers about you. When you are, you know, if you are a government employee, like firstly, you know, and they do briefings before you travel as to what you should do and shouldn't do. but you know a lot of these countries take electronic they they have converged electronic signatures to append right to your passport so a mac address or an ad ID or some benign

character can be attached right to an identity with a picture it is what it is the emirates the Emirates were contemplating looking at somebody's credit report. And if you present yourself and you are in your 40s and your credit report is like a page long, that's a red flag because if you're in your 40s, your credit report is going to be like 15 pages long. They weren't looking at the content of the report. They were looking at the density of it to detect or to determine to predict. like this is what's normal and this is what's abnormal they're wow the um god the way you got to create

legends now if you're like trying to create a spy it's like no it's not doable oh my god yeah so then that goes back to the point of you know how do you operate in a denied area hostile environment you're not cover is just it's too flimsy there's no way to backstop it with well your cover only has a two page credit report nobody in their 40s has a two page credit report you've had a couple mortgages you've had a you know you've got a bunch of credit cards your credit report is going to be should be 15 pages do they use dead people though yeah meaning like do they do like i don't know cia or something if they're trying to send someone into fucking you know saudi arabia yeah could they find if if it's a 42 year old case officer could they find a mid 40s

you know, deceased person that had a credit report and try to tie that report to them, even if they changed the name. Assuming that the Saudis don't have access to to vital records and death certificates. Change the name. I think it's, I think it's, it's too risky based upon, I know that, I know that Google wouldn't buy it. I know that your mobile network operator wouldn't buy your ability, your attempt to, to sort of fraudulently spoof, uh, behavior.

Um, I just, I don't think it's the future. of intelligence operations is now this might get in this is a really specific question and the chances that you actually would have been involved in this probably aren't high but i don't know i'm just thinking of like an enormous uh international incident that occurred where there was like a investigation afterwards in in 2018 you i believe it was 2018 you had the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Turkish, in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. And there's, you know, some security camera footage of guys who win it. Obviously, we see him go in and then we see some other dudes and suits go in who landed on a

certain plane from a certain place, obviously, and then we see them coming out, but we never see the body. We just see bags or anything. But hypothetically, given the fact that those guys were all carrying electronic devices, this is after you started blowing the whistle on this stuff, I would have. imagine at that point the United States probably had the ability to track where those people were going and track exactly where that bag ended up possibly yeah I was not on that okay that's what I would say too if I yeah um um but it's it's possible you know um because shogi was um his devices

were all exploited so he didn't he didn't stand a chance based upon how how deep they were into his communications right which is i have uh over over my travels i have been in meetings with arabs and and israelis oh uh they meet together and it was i was ready for like we're it's a it's a it's a buyer's meeting we are the israelis are selling surveillance gear of course they are and the uh country that i was working with was buying from the israelis from the israeli openly and i got to tell you like the israelis it was in shala and it was the the the uh the uh the right the the the the the king's representative was an air force general and it was you know very the 802 guys were very like deferential yes general yes sir you know and they're in you know like there is no hiding you know we we knew who they were um and it i was expecting there to be some you know uh conflict not at all but so like the israeli obviously are excellent at creating various forms of technology they create a lot like a lot of the

vpns are based there spyware is based there we're going to talk about pegasus in a second obviously that's a controversial one that comes up a lot but like why would a major especially but any country but a major arab country trust people who have demonstrated and credible ability to make technology that they house in their own country for intel purposes so they can keep their nation alive who a lot of people around them want dead like why would they trust that and buy that they did because it's the best that's so interesting it was it was it was eye-opening and so everything that you you know read about like that these people they can't get along you know the Israelis were speaking arabic oh yeah yeah you know um But the collection, the Intercept kit that they were purchasing, and this is, you know, 50, 60 million dollars worth of gear, the business relationship was as cordial as you would have, it was surprisingly cordial. Wow. The Arabs, you know, they knew we need to get a deal. We need this, we need this gear.

This is the best stuff that's on the market. So let's figure it out. Okay. Let's take that quick tangent, though, and talk about Pegasus. And I don't know how much you've dealt with it personally or in your endeavors or whatever. But you have this technology that literally it can just send a text to the phone. You don't even have to open it and boom, they're in and they can open it. I remember Nick Casalucci, my friend who's a hacker, tell me about this in episode 72.

And he's like, they're in. Yeah. I'm like, just from saying, I don't have to do anything. They're in. He's like, yeah, they're in. Like, how crazy is that? That something like that was created and can be operated with impunity around the world. Yeah.

I don't really have anything to say about that other than, like, that's the kind of shit that we should be doing. okay there's the second question do we do this and people don't know about it sure yeah yeah so it's it's back to it comes back to and it's not just us either it probably comes back to a little bit of mutually assured blackmail destruction i think it's um uh as tech as capability evolves it's one of it's one of those seductive like yeah we can do this so let's do it

and I and when it's an adversary yeah absolutely we should be doing it yeah but that's the thing even you and I both know you probably know a lot better than me because you've at least seen this world like everybody does it on each other even friends

you know like Britain spies on us When we spy on Britain? So when it gets, when you cross the line is when, and the work that I was doing, it was a C, a cyber C.T program. And my first RFI, my first tasking was a group of people in another country. Okay. Partner country. And I'm doing my research.

And it's like, this woman's a school teacher. This is a Catholic priest. This guy is a lawyer. What do they all have in common? They were very vocal in dissent of a corrupt government. And we're preparing, we're doing all the engineering to sort of attack this group. And they were thought leaders. Like they were the center of gravity that could have.

online online in the public square okay they were known in this in this shit-ass OPEC but small little African country and I'm like all right so let's make sure that there's something that I'm not seeing here before I get all righteous but that's what they were they were political dissidents and you know the type of person that we want to support um not somebody to attack and discredit oh meaning they were used i don't i just use this term as like a term not to like attack but like useful idiots for whatever you know they they were freedom like legitimate we this is a corrupt government you know our people live on a dollar a day and so let's amplify them the president is like you know just

bought his next you know took a took a delivery of like three may box yep um and uh so they're advocating for you know uh equality and and attacking corruption the president of that country reaches out to his partners in the middle east and says can you help me with this and they're like we got it now how did they help him with that um i don't know if they went that far but they're probably they're probably they were silenced what what kind of methods might they use this prison trumped up charges but okay you know we know where you're going to be we know who you're communicating right so here's the network like got it we're expanding that network got it okay um this was this was written about

out. And because they, this country hired a bunch of, you know, I see U.S. types to go stand this thing up. And it was just, it was bad. Who is the most notorious user of data for intelligence purposes around the world? I'm talking countries. China. By a lot? Yeah. Why? because their policies, you know, if, put it to you this way, if the, if, if there was a explicit policy without warrants or probable cause, but yet Google, Amazon, Apple, you had their cloud, their, their storage systems and went into their their storage systems. And then that same data would go into a government storage

system or the government, the U.S. government had access without, you know, probable cause or... Which they would never do. Which they would never do. Right. In the PRC those data sets are,

it is just part of the... They own it. They own it. Yeah. Yep. And they don't let a lot of our companies operate in there either. Yeah. So this is one of those things when we're in a negotiating with, you know, we're doing a bilateral discussion with China. We don't have access either legally or otherwise. Our companies aren't monetizing WiiChat users.

The Chinese, the great firewall prevents that because they have always known the importance of data as a national asset. this insidious TikTok discussion. Insidious. I mean, just because it's gone on for so many years, it's not, shouldn't be lost on anybody that the ban came into, finally came into a got a floor vote when the algorithm was indicating consensus or trending negatively towards a certain country that wasn't going to have it. that's when the vote

became serious been talking about it for five years going back to the first Trump administration you wouldn't be talking about Israel would you? Oh yeah I was and so but you know we don't have

reciprocity with China in terms of understanding the patterns profiles behaviors of TikTok users in Beijing that's right And that to me is just That's unacceptable Yes I agree

Who is fucking Who is advocating and negotiating These deals and having these discussions With with a nation like the PRC Think about it though Mike too This is the point that I think it's lost Like we make all these jokes Righteously so about

You know name your favorite congressman here Who's suddenly worth $120 million from stock trades Because they get inside information but then think about all the ones who aren't doing it like as deliberately and openly like that who you know they're on a hundred fifty thousand dollar a year salary but you know to them then being worth three four million dollars that's a lot of money right so you take a little bit of money through some weird lobbying in the background and suddenly you're going to vote for things that maybe affect china downstream through three other types of votes in a good way and us in a bad way this is this is the story that's, you know, like, okay, um, Congressman Sanders, uh, help me understand, uh, how you have amassed this constant. Whoa, whoa, whoa, relax, Mike, hold on. Yeah. This constellation of real estate and net worth, really good financial advice. Democratic socialism, emphasis on Democratic. Yeah. Larry David should, should play Bernie Sanders when they sound like, I can't tell different.

Have you seen him on SNL do it? It's incredible. Has he done it? has he done it oh my god he's incredible at it so it's already been done um i think that um when when these things happen right in front of us and we try to assign all of this complexity and explanation to understand what common sense would say the fixes in why is this happening the way it is um you know uh you know you have a congressman who couldn't point to israel on the map and next thing you know they're the biggest god sent them my biggest friend that's right is real like what was what was in that manila envelope yeah that was slid across the desk and you know friends look after friends here's here's the thing mike and this is the part of the conversation that

pisses me off that we don't have because it's legitimate to have all this conversation and wonder what the fuck is going on but like you know there's so many things we can point to that israel's done in the past that are just wrong there's a long list of that and it's like what the fuck are we doing here and then you look at like the apac thing and stuff like that and yeah point to them but they're using the system that we set up and allowed them to use and allow them to use all of our people in dc let them do this so let me just stick myself in their shoes if i were a country that had 10 million people and i had a friend over there that had 350 million with the greatest military in the world i'd invest in a system that allows me to do it as well and let me even bring

this back to china and i want to read what we pulled up there joe that was good We'll get that a minute. But to pull this back to China, you mentioned the TikTok thing as well, which we're going to talk about that and the ties to Israel in a second. But with China, it's like I hate communism. I think it's terrible. This is one place, though. I always point out, I'm like, fuck, they got a little advantage right here. Because the government is communists and therefore their people don't have any freedom, they can do something once in a while that's actually positive.

For example, turn off TikTok on all their kids' feeds at 9 o'clock. before nine o'clock when they're watching the feed instead of like titty videos and and shit like our kids are watching here they're watching nature videos and science videos and shit yeah physically right entropy in physics right so they and they already count really well over there and do math better and i so they're ahead of the curve that's actually scientific why that is but like you look back at our country and it's like they get to use the freedom of our democracy against itself to fight their own battles and it fucking blows my mind yeah yeah the the I think that they built an app.

They didn't invent, you know, like Instagram had been around for a long time. They just, they looked at, and their algorithm feed is informed by interaction. How do you watch the full length of the video? Are you fast forwarding? Are you rewinding? That's their, the signal that they use to amplify and tailor other stuff to you. it's really um pretty pretty smart uh but engagement with with that stuff is is is how they do it um and and then they train you on it they they rewire your brain yes uh which is you know which is a thing

yep um to you know you have to elevate those dopamine levels each and every time and that um you know it's hard to point to and say look at the algorithm like okay show me algorithms where this is happening. We know it's happening, but this is the, this is the, the, the consequences that we will certainly feel in 20 years. 100%. Well, I mean, we're already seeing it. But like in 20 years, you're absolutely right. Like, what are the, how much worse did downstream effects get? Generational. Yeah. You know, when we're able to sort of look at progress or development. I mean, we could start on the, the, the, the, torture that kids today are going through because of this stuff, the isolation. Yes. Exactly. It's, you know, are we going to, are we just going to kind of look at it and say, yeah, it's too bad? Or do we look at it and say, you know, there needs to be, there needs to be, something needs to happen. Yes. Um, you know, discord did not kill Charlie Kirk. Um, you know, um, uh, the,

The dumbest people on the planet talking about Nazism and fascism and that Trump is both did not kill Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson, an isolated kid going through some serious psychological issues killed Charlie Kirk. And what caused that? Isolation? I think we have gotten to a point where. There's a, there's a generation that if they don't get their way, they can't figure out how to move forward to the point where they believe that they are the, the one standing in between, you know, righteousness and evil. They want to be a hero. You know, how much, how much are we going to accept when you've got a 22-year-old kid in a romantic relationship?

with a cisgendered male who's transitioning to female and not wonder not call that out is there's some there's some trauma there's something going on because that's not I mean because at the end of the day he's trying to find himself in a heterosexual relationship but he's going about it really really through the back door sorry that's that's that's going to be a short right there yeah yeah I can't you have to like that's um we'll see but uh you get my point like yes we sort of look at these things and all right um isolation and um this notion that my community is you know a thousand people that i'll never meet that i don't know that really don't care about me but this is my community correct uh like we're humans we we want physical struggle and we want physical interactions um and you know the platforms have inserted have wedged themselves in between what is our natural sort of state of being humans by the way though not to put my tinful hat on here too much but it is interesting that in this modern warfare world we're living in which is warfare of the mind and information

and technology right where everyone's on the battlefield regardless of whether you're a kid or an adult or a civilian or in the military, whatever it might be. You know, I'm just saying, if I wanted to create a downstream generation of trauma, I, you know, I might, I might let something leak from a lab and make everyone freak the fuck out

and send them home for a couple years. That was the A-B test. Right? You know, let's see. That's what it feels like. Let's see what they do. I think that there's, you know, to, if you read,

uh keep that mic close by the way yep if you read things that jing ping says chaos is to their benefit yes injecting chaotic um chaotic circumstances is an advantage that they seek to exploit and um and that's you know that's how they're waging geopolitical warfare. Yes. And they get to sort of stand off as the reasonable perspective. And that's, I think they're playing a different game than we're playing because we're still sort of mapped to this rule of law and...

That's such a shame. Doing what's right. I mean, you want to talk about fentanyl? Oh, or the reverse opium war? I mean, how do... How, so the tariffs were the enforcement mechanism of a presidential finding from January that basically called out the CCP's involvement, complicity in fentanyl, something that kills 200,000 Americans per year.

Probably even more. Yeah. We can't even track it. That's right. So let's just call it 200,000. How do we sit down and have a bilateral discussion? with a nation that is tangentially, adjacently involved in the destruction

of American families and think that that's okay. Because, well, actually, I don't know if it's a because, but it's very interesting to have that conversation. This is where it gets complicated. When we're using Afghanistan or for many years there used Afghanistan stand in its poppy fields to send an inordinate amount of heroin into Iran and Russia,

and maybe even China, but the ones they hear are Iran and Russia. So it's like you're sitting across the table yelling at a country, righteously so, who's doing it to you very clearly, but you're also doing it to other people. And that's where it gets weird. It's like, you know, like, is this the price we pay? And as an American citizen, I'm like, fuck that, by the way. But this is the world that these guys, bureaucracy plays in and if and if we have politicians or people at the state department that

have made those decisions then I don't know how to describe that as anything but evil I agree with you 100% because there's no you know and for years you know we would play this game where we would insist upon, you know, progress in them scheduling these precursors. And they would say things to us like, yeah, we're working on it. And our markers of success were, you know, we're going to have ongoing continued conversations and we're going to keep in touch and have more frequent conversations and Zoom calls and shit like that. And it's like, okay, so one of the adults. It's going to step in and say, this is unacceptable.

If we were seeing fentanyl-related casualties in McLean, Virginia, Potomac, Maryland, Bethesda, Maryland, Anthony Blinken would not be cosplaying a rock star in Ukraine, singing about the plight of the Ukrainian youth. That's right. He would be because he lives in McLean, Virginia. But because these are happening in Appalachia and the inner cities, it's like, it's a cost of business. That's right. Yep. That's how they think.

And that's, um, and that, you know, it's, it's how they negotiate whether it's, whether we're talking about data or American lives, they are negotiating with a China first attitude. And if that means, you know, 200,000 Americans are going to die per year and that causes chaos within that country. Great. It's a casualty. That's what we're here to do. Yep. Yep. So, and I know that, you know, there are a lot of people who are trying to do the right thing in government.

I'll bet there are. Yeah. But you've got this political elite that rules today. I've always said this, Mike, it's like it's this weird paradox we have, right? when you look at human history just over time objectively statistically where it overall the best timeish in human history everything has gotten better from a basic level since the beginning it's progress progress right meaning if we're going to really dumb it down good has won more than evil obviously there's been evil time so evil wins sometimes but like over the long haul good wins the problem is there's something

about evil where it has a much easier time winning in the short term i've never been able to to mathematically balance sheet this in my head, but this is the reality. And I always give the example, if I have 100 people in a room and 99 of them are good and one of them is evil, there is a chance something really bad could happen in there. But if I have a room where there's 99 evil people and one good person, there's a 0% chance something good is going to happen in there. Yep. You know what I mean? Yep. It's the barrier of entry to entry for evil is much, it's a smoother glide yes then so i i think you make a really good point there there's a lot of people who probably do want the right thing even if it's not in their backyard and their kid didn't die of an overdose or

something but there's just enough people in the elite part of it who are like yeah fuck them but that's the thing like if those people if it happened on their door and suddenly their kid died they'd be changing their tune like i said you know let's let's move you know it's when uh who was it that sent the illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard. Oh, like Texas and Florida? Yeah. And listen, I supported that. And the government of Martha's Vineyard was, you know, on before they got all of their busloads of immigrants.

Yeah, take a sip there. We're good. They were. Take that little intermission. Everybody, you know, this is about human rights. But the minute it landed in there on the shores of Motha's vineyard, that was... Not like that. No, no, we didn't mean this.

Put the methadone clinic in McLean, Virginia. Yeah. The residents of McLean, Virginia, aren't going to have it. Yeah, I remember in Bayhead, New Jersey, where I don't spend any time. I had a friend, though, who lived in a town right next to there. There's a yacht club there called the Bayhead. behead yacht club like the kind of place it doesn't let like jews and blacks in like the real old school yeah and right right not on the yacht club but in like the houses next to it where people

probably members of it there were like giant signs during 2020 that are like black lives matter yeah and i'm just like you you probably don't even know any black people right but you're lecturing all of us on whatever you're lecturing us and it's like dude yeah sometimes people to the lack of owning a mirror is incredibly apparent yeah yeah or it's like the ukrainian flags can i center you just a little more sorry i want you comfortable i just watching the cameras i just need to stretch my legs yeah yeah um you know prior to the ukraine people couldn't pick it out on a map now now they're now throwing the flags in their now they got everything what are the priorities you know um yeah you got a ukrainian flag flying in front of your house but on

4th July you don't have an American flag it's crazy that they made that a political statement it's so fucking but again Gadsad refers to some of this stuff as parasitic thinking and parasitic mindsets and I think we have a lot of that I think he's right about that yes you know it's it's these are smart people they're not technically crazy but they've been infected by something that just they they see things differently I think part of it is a little bit of belonging yeah i think people want to feel like they're a part of some it's not the whole explanation to be clear people but part of it is they want to feel like they're a part of something and especially in the covid era where people got separated from

society and they could get behind keyboards and talk to people who thought like them in 280 characters or less online they're like fuck this sounds good now they throw up a sign that says whether it's in their bio or they actually physically put it in their fucking yard that says i'm a part of the team look at me it's like a beacon in your window when you have when your life has no meaning or where you can't really feel like it has meaning. Whatever that is, you're going to find artificial meaning in your life. And you're going to invent crisis and things that you need to be all invested in in order to give your life some degree of meaning.

I want to come back to this just because we had it. You had brought this up, but Joe had pulled this up over here. If you didn't hear, this is going to be coming out within a couple weeks of when we've recorded. But as at the time of this recording, Elon Musk is no longer the richest man in the world. It's a guy named Larry Ellison, who is the founder of Oracle. And now the 80% owner or whatever, somewhere in there, correct me in the comments, please, of TikTok. So this is from WikiLeaks on Twitter. Take that as you will.

But it says, Israeli-aligned billionaires seize TikTok in battle for U.S. narrative control. The White House has announced that the for sale of TikTok will be finalized this week. The new ownership led by Larry Ellison, the largest individual donor to the IDF, which is the Israeli-Def. defense forces will take control of U.S. user data and the algorithm, which the White House says will be retrained. Does that say retrained or retained? Okay, retrained. Ellison, who made his fortune developing Oracle, a database system. He originally built for the CIA. That's nothing crazy about that. Already controls CBS, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime Nickelodeon, which makes kids shows, as well as channel, they probably have the IDF, like, shooting people on there,

as well as Channel 10 in Australia and Channel 5 in the UK. Ellison is also experienced. expected to finalize control over Warner Brothers Discovery, including CNN, HBO, and the Discovery channel before the end of 2005. Even before the forced sale is finalized, censorship of TikTok content, critical of Israel, including of the deal itself, has reached extreme levels as the platform moves to align with its prospective new owners. Fox, a Murdoch asset, is also seeking to join the Ellison Consortium, a move that could enable cross-promotion between Fox and TikTok, further tightening the Israeli-aligned information bubble. Disproval of what Israel is is doing in Gaza has risen to 60% of the U.S. population nearly double the approval rate of 32%.

So I don't need to read the whole thing here. My whole thing is like, I understand this is a very controversial issue in the Middle East. I understand that there's wrong that this whole history has a lot of complexity here, but we can see things that need to be reported on that are wrong right now. There are people in the Israeli government who I'm just quoting what they say out loud. you can watch the videos who are calling for an ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which under the conventions in Geneva is a part of genocide, we can see that even if we put a governor on the data, quote unquote, coming out of Gaza because of some of the sources that give it, whether the saying 70,000 people are dead, you want to divide that in half and call it 35,000 people. It's the same problem here. People of one race are being exterminated by people of another race, which is a genocide, right? And our issue comes into the fact that the current government, there, which is elected by a minority people in Israel. It's the other thing that doesn't get talked about here. The government that is in charge is supported passively or aggressively by some of our people in our country. So when people then see the TikTok, to your point, which was long-touted

as like a CCP asset, correctly so, by the way, that, you know, we needed to fucking take control of, but no one ever did. The minute that it suddenly became a problem for Israel, Well, now we're taking control of it. And people have heard, people have heard that leaked call with, like, Jonathan Greenblatt and some of the other guys. This was, like, right after October 7th where he said, we don't have a generation problem. We have a, we don't have a left or right problem. We have a TikTok problem. And then you see that this becomes a thing, you know, if I were Larry Ellison and I'm not, and I really actually wanted to prove that, hey, let's let information be, I would have.

hire someone who is not pro any side and I would I would do what X does and show that free speech is painful. I mean, when I scroll through X, it's not great for my mental health. But I know the alternative is worse. You know what I mean? Like how it's happening right in front of us. It's kind of crazy. Um, we, it, we, our own attorney general stepped into the most insidious thing I've ever heard a politician say is when Justin Trudeau discussed the truckers and people who had improper thoughts

that needed to be criminalized. That's right. Crazy. So when we start segmenting what is acceptable, proper, and it's a government that's telling, look at what's going on in the UK. You've got people...

Oh, it's nuts. You've got people in prison for talking, you know, saying should we really be investing in Ukraine or should we really be and they're getting a knock and talk on their door I don't

I think that keep that mic up after any when we see this all the time whenever there's some incident the rush is instead of attacking the incident the shooting

we create these complex scenarios as to how to address it and fix it yes And after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a rush to, we need to regulate this hate speech because both sides do it. And the minute you accept that, you have pushed the button, the activate button on deprecating humanity, deprecating, you know, the moral existence, not morality, the moral, the reason why humans. which is we are free will, free beings, free of thought. So to try to inject some complex speech control

sort of distracts us from the fundamental issue. It makes it we're so confused about what we're arguing for. We forget like, okay, let's talk about the shooter or let's talk about What is happening on the ground in Gaza as opposed to all of these complex scenarios that most people can't follow, which is good, because somebody's smarter than me is figuring this out. And that's, you know, we can't say that anymore. We don't use those words anymore. You know, to suggest that, you know, people do things because of the, the. adversarial rhetoric again you know that fits right into the you know that it's right in and if

you accept that premise it fits right into this scenario of you need big government to come in and fix it yep um and you need elites to tell us what we can say what we can't say uh you know if stupid some of the dumbest people in the planet want to equate politicians or charlie kirk to adolf hitler okay if we should be able to read that as this is the stupidest person on the planet and it and it insults and demeans real victims of these regimes absolutely um but instead of calling that out for what it is it's like no both sides need to tone it down no it's crazy um so i think we get ourselves all bottled up in in in these bureaucratic fixes which doesn't address the mental health crisis that occurs when

kids are locked in their rooms watching porn all day long yeah i wonder i wonder what downstream effects i could have i'm sure it's all good yeah and and like we're not it's every generation whether you were a kindergartner when it happened whether you were a fourth grader when it happened like covid coming in eighth grader 10th grader 12th all the way through i've even seen it affect adults i've talked about this before like the weird thing mike is when i was doing when I was building this podcast, I started building at March 13th, 2020, the first day of quarantine. So part of my job is people are coming in and out. I can get to sit with people and socialize with them forever.

So I'm social, but I was separated from the world in my parents' house, just grind in and building. So when I moved up here and was like kind of outside more again, I started to see patterns of like just regular people you pass on the street. And like the lack of base communication that would occur, people would, you know, walk out of your way. It didn't used to do it like that as much. Or people would automatically look down every time you pass them, even if you pass them every day and the same exactly. Yeah.

And I was just like that is, and these are adults. These are people that weren't in college, you know, when this hit or high school or anything like that. I'm like, this is societally wide. Yeah. It has separated us. We've lost the ability to look people in the eye. Mm-hmm.

Because it makes us uncomfortable either, you know, to do it. I mean, the good thing about. COVID there was a good thing about it and that is it it created an environment where the truly insane amongst us would let us know that they're insane when they're sitting in their car by themselves with a mask on yes that was that's you know just let us know you're coming i still see it i saw a door dash driver doing it yesterday i was like the or they're walking out they're outside by themselves there isn't a person near them and they've got a a mask on. Now, maybe they've got, you know, allergies or something and I shouldn't, I shouldn't, you know, be, but I know, but I'm looking at this. I'm like, dude, you survived Somalia and you're wearing a mask in 2025 and the, like, come on. But at least they're letting you know, like, I am, I am really crazy with my, with my mask on. But I do want to bring this back around to what you ended up getting all the way deep into in government, because it's pretty wild. Like, you laid it out. You were the accidental in a way.

like whistleblower of like hey fellas this shit's publicly available here's lafars all your fucking delta guys are going there and the government at first comes to you they try to some people say you're a charlatan other people are like you must have bought this or whatever and then eventually like you prove no this is this is available you as a private citizen though being pulled in now to like contract what did they what did they say to do did they say mike come in and show us all of our vulnerabilities or did they come in and more say mike show us all the ways we can use this against them well i wish that's what they did um so i think as um as the community became more aware um they it's sort of like an oversimplification um you know now we have these

data feeds we have it figured out it's like no you had it you have it figured out for what it was in 2015, you know, what is that environment like today? And are you evolving at the pace that technology evolves? Or are you still looking at data sets that have been truncated because of privacy, that have been, you know, that have just the power of them has, has deprecated a little bit by virtue of time. And we knew that was going to happen. So we need to keep advancing this. And instead of catching up, how do we get in front of it? How do we understand what's coming down? What's coming at us? How do we prepare defensively for it? How do we prepare offensively for it?

Um, you know, the thing, the thing that troubles me is that we have people who are responsible for procuring millions of dollars worth of data, but they've never worked in a data business. They don't know like the ins and outs. They don't really know what to look out for. Um, they don't really know what they're supposed to be purchasing. but yet they're you know they're running the show and i think that that's um if if data is everything that people will metaphorically declare as the next oil we should probably have some wildcatters that understand this shit i would say so um so you know this is kind of um this is this is what happens in big bureaucracies, you know, they sort of push button and say, yeah, we, we have

this figured out. We're buying this data and, you know, check that box. Are you looking at the next sources of data? Are you invoking case officers? Are you fielding case officers who, you know, can data scientists who can win a bar fight? You know, they can talk Python. We talked about Palantir. a little not much we brought it up yeah so i don't trust them as far as i can throw them palantir

arrived like one day palantir was a character in what jr told yeah yeah lord of the rings uh the next day it was you know you have thousands of these kids with their black palantir t-shirts on running around so come how do that how did that happen Christ. Alex Karp, whether it was him, so, you know, here's how we're going to market. We're going to send people who understand the customer's problem. The customer's problem we know is we have all these data sets and I don't have a common operating picture of what's going on in my area of responsibility.

So instead of dispatching sales guys to, you know, talk and look sharp in a suit and, you know, They dispatched these forward-deployed engineer types who could. Okay, sir, I understand your problem. If you give me access to some sample, you know, or to some of your data holdings, we'll solve this for you in a day or two or three. And they did. No, they did it in a way that locked the customer into Palantir with reformatting the data into a structure that could only be read by Palantir.

but they solved the problem. I think that was a good go to market strategy. I think the government could learn a little bit from that. So instead of dispatching somebody who has a degree in, you know, the cultural mating standards and habits of, you know, indigenous societies as a case officer, like, you know, case officer who can write Python. Right. Might be, you know, in this, in this marketplace, might be helpful. to have somebody who understands these things because you're going to talk to assets who are data scientists. Yeah. Like, what do you have access to? You know, how do we do that? How do we pull that out? Let's write some API scripts. Let's make that happen.

So I think that this is the kind of thing, like, how do we fill these gaps in what our operational reach is into this commercial data environment? So when you were first pulled in, though, and by the way, with this, Mike, just keep it like in front of you so you're not like talking over it like that or anything. Just always have a point there. But when you were first like brought in, they said, all right, Mike, at least like come in here. Who was doing that? Was it a specific agency? Was it like a consortium of people? You obviously talked about the guys who talked to you at the four seasons who wanted it. Like were they your emissaries in? Yeah. So at the time he was. 29 he was a government cert he was a civilian uh jacea employee what was this guy's name again john john fritchley got it yep um this guy was relentless and he was he was he just didn't take no for an answer um and he could talk to he had no fear we briefed uh Scotty Miller early on

CG of J-Soc okay and it was you know you got a 20 year old kid talking to the CG of J-Soc and it was

like sir this is what we need to do this is the future you know so it was people like that who were able to at career risk because people were probably telling him to stand down You know, a room full of people calling his sales guy, a Charleston snake oil salesman.

A lot of people would say that didn't go very well. So, you know, we'll maybe reconvene in a few months or pick this back up next year. We have had people in government that could see through that and push through it at career risk or to really know professional benefit. to themselves. It wasn't like he got a promotion out of it. Um, but it was, you know, he was running the joint intelligence brigade, the jib at JSOC, which was their sort of their intelligence, um, capability. Um, and he pushed through.

And there were others that as this interagency coalition grew to include the FBI, um, supervisory special agent Jeff Crocker, who is not an FBI agent that you want to be sitting across the table from in an adversarial relationship. He's 6-5-66, but like you're not, this is what we want FBI agents to be, what we expect them to be. He is no longer with government. He is no longer. He retired. Okay. But didn't have to retire. But, you know, he just sort of was like, I'm done. There's a lot of guys special from the FBI that were thinking. that for several years there yep he is one of them i've had enough i've seen enough yeah you know i can continue banging my head against the wall or i can you know um and he was a guy who we're still

trying to prove this out as an fbi tool and stephen paddock goes and shoots up a jason aldean concert in Vegas yeah i don't know if i was the first guy he called but it was within hours you know You get that, like, call at 10 o'clock at night. They wanted you working on the Las Vegas shooter in 2017. Yep. Did you? Yep. Okay.

That's a very, very highly controversial debated shooting because it's one of, and I feel like this has not happened a few times since then, but it's one of those like, ah, something happened, nothing to see here, no worries. Oh, by the way, a security guard that went on Ellen the next day, he's gone, no one heard from. Other people are dead. what what the fuck happened there we were trying i was trying to establish transnational links because he was married to a filipino woman and he had traveled to the philippines paddock yeah was there connection to counter was there terrorism connection couldn't establish

it um established the travel patterns to the philippines but nothing that indicated that there had been, that there was this, like, ongoing link. It's funny, like I said, this was early days, and this is where, you know, intelligence and data can be very misleading. So I'm working with one of the analysts, kind of like training in real time. I step away for a minute, and this analyst is like, people are hovered around his workstation looking at his at his screen and they're you know looking they had detected granted this is a day after the shooting occurred they detected they observed devices that

had dwelled at a place called redstone arsenal okay Alabama which is where they teach kinetics and explosives and eOD and so they were rushing, like somebody was at his house who has proficiency in explosives. And I'm like, I look at it, holy shit, that's, that's, that's, that's a big deal. Okay. So this is, this is the day after. So he's dead. Where are those devices now?

Those devices were on another job because they were FBI devices. And they were about to, like, ring the alarm that, you know, there's some connection between, you know, radicalized, um, American who knows how to blow shit up because he spent regular time at Redstone Arsenal, which is where if you're going to be an EOD tech, that's where you go to do your training across, you know, DOD, FBI, ATF, that's where they train. It's not sketchy at all, though. you know what i but it was you know take a breath before you you know you're going to be the hero like time this is the day after he has two houses the other the other guy that that got a knock and talk was a landscaper who was mowing the grass of both of his homes and he was you know like an illegal immigrant who had spent time in el salvador um but we could not there was no link to national terrorism in that what about the fact that there you know even if there wasn't a link to

transnational terrorism why did this why did they push the story under the rug and why were witnesses based i mean let's call it what it is disappeared yeah i don't know i don't know when like how did you're so they pull you in the day after you're pulling up this data they're like oh my god was he working with someone inside on the government and you're like no this is actually overlapping data that makes sense because that's where all these people would go and he went there for training that makes sense at what point like how many days after did they say okay we've had enough of your services thank you once it was almost once uh the special agent in charge handed it back over to Vegas metro because there's no federal statute for the FBI to investigate

you know they they left their forensic team to to assist but once there wasn't uh a terrorism link, it was done. Yeah, there's some weird story out there. I guess I can't shoot anything, no pun intended, but I can't say that nothing's off the table or whatever with that because it's so ambivalent and we literally got nothing out of it. The guy died obviously there and everything. You know, there was some theory, though, that maybe the Saudis did it or something like that.

I forget what was that Joe someone was like in town or something and they're like oh mbos might have wanted him dead because this is when he was taking power or wasn't he on the same floor something like that I don't remember all of it and I'm going to fuck it up so people in the comments I'm sure it can help me out because you know it but like were you ever asked to look into anything like that if there was some if there was we were looking at the hotel and trying to establish who was there when he was there and he was there a lot was there any overlap with anything that just wasn't normal right there was there repeated overlap or was there similar overlap couldn't establish anything um you know there were foreigners there when he was there but they were tourists

now so basically when you're getting pulled in though at these points like it sounds like you were just like oh that's the guy whenever something happens like oh go to him he's the he's the data guy it it seems like it was like that for a while yeah because in in at with the bureau um you had a guy who was like all hands on you know any capability that we have we're bringing i'm bringing to the fight with the with the bureaucracy with the you know at the executive level would they have been thinking like that probably not but this is a guy who was you know sort of tasked at the out of the washington field office with advancing new capability and and he was all in right but that's a domestic thing at what point do you start getting pulled into the international type stuff it

happened it so what was are you allowed to talk about like what the first one was roughly so i will tell how about this um um high profile hvt mm-hmm high value target yep um we are uh the assault force is basically on the x and right up until sort of the point of engagement we're doing what's called the slant trying to understand women children men understanding and communicating like hey you've got 18 non-combatants in there and i was off by one there were 17 so what happened 17 people didn't get killed gave them time to say all right we can't go in there we have we have women and children so we need to be we need to give them an opportunity to oh okay all right that meant sorry that took a minute so i it registered so technically

you overestimated by one, which if you're going to do, you want to be on that side rather than the other side. Yeah, I mean, I was off by one, and I think it was because there was like a second device that was used by, I don't remember, but it was off by one non-combatant defined by. On the conservative end. Yeah. Yep. And as they were coming out, they were like, he's in there.

He's in the back room. He has, you know, he has an AK and the wife has an AK. and they are not coming out. Like, they were giving the assault force intel as they were coming out with their hands up and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the assault force, um, commander. Like, this is what you've got.

Wow. Um, and that was like, they are, they are about to engage. And, like, real time, here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I think. you need to be thinking about because this guy shopped at Nordstrom's and that one shopped at fucking TikTok or whatever and I got them it's it's exactly it's like no this is definitely a female and then that this is definitely a kid and you know they're they're operating at different times

and it's probabilistic but it's like you know here's here's what's probably going on on the other side of those walls now are you are you operating remote from your bedroom on this one or are you actually like an official place while this is going down yeah um this is this is the great thing about this is that those those um requirements were sort of like they weren't uh we had a little bit of flexibility in how information was being shared so like your daughter's in there like watching tv and you're watching motherfuckers get blown up and you're like Nice. Not like, I wasn't, you know, I'm not wearing headphones and, you know.

It's like, that's on Xbox again. Yeah. No, I'm not. Yeah. Yeah. But those, those were the, those were the good times. Like, this is how this is supposed to work. Yes.

And, you know, I hate this, but, you know, did it save lives? It, maybe. Probably. I mean, I would count 17 right there. That's pretty good. You know. It's got to feel good when innocent people. you know aren't being taken off the board that's a huge problem got them got them out

you know had them sort of okay here's here's what we need to do and we need to be we need to be counting you know more than a dozen before right um um and that's uh that's one that you know about yeah i mean the the hvt like that's one that got publicly yeah so bag daddy i don't know No. I didn't like that, no. They looked like a guilty no. I don't know, Joe, pulled the tape back. We've got the really good cameras now.

We can see the souls in your eyes. I'm sure you've seen the comparison between... Oh, Obama and Trump. A boobar, a Baghdadi, is dead. It was great. They just walked through the front door. And then Obama's like, in a mission, it's like that juxtaposition is insane. He just shit talked for like 30 minutes.

Oh, my God, it's insane. It's one of the funniest press conferences we've ever seen. But that's wild. So you're, like, you get, it's almost like to go back to a hockey analogy, not to, you know, talk down what you were doing in the private sector selling ads and doing well for yourself. But it's like, you know, you're playing in the men's league and a scout comes by and goes, hey, flyers need a center tonight. And you're like, all right, cool. What's the game? Stanley Cup game seven.

driver who's also a goalie gets gets you know you got your gear you got your your gear right get it on so what does that feel like when you went like did you ever this is all happening fast you're getting pulled into all these things like did you have a moment where you step back and you're like whoa like i'm i'm the dude like this is crazy at the time probably not um talking about it and like okay that was unusual or that doesn't have happen all the time. Just taking a step back. When you sort of look at it, okay, did this, this missing person, this, you know, this event. Like, yeah, I know about, I know how that unfolded and was tangentially, you know, um, read in to those things. Um, but I don't think it ever really hit that like, right. This is cool. It was kind of like, yeah, of course. What do you need? What about now, though? I mean, now. you gotta be like this is pretty wild yeah it i mean looking back on it but it's sort of um how what i what i what i what i see or what i notice is um how quickly a capability can be the hottest thing around

and a couple of you know a couple of upgrades to technology and it's yeah it's okay right what's next like we can't we can't um you know survive or or sort of rest on those laurels about what we did yesterday like what's what's happened and what's what's the new thing that's yeah how does this translate sure that's going to give us operational advantage um sort of push back on this china on this china dragon um and so I was sort of a you know it was more of a generalist like I was willing to or I was you know whatever the whatever the issue is like get me involved let's like eliminate these scenarios and now i think i'm a little bit more focused on what i think um where i think i can push back on this generational challenge that we've

got with with the ccp okay before i get to the cc thing what was the putin thing when did you get pulled into that because the way I understand it you were you were tracking people like security guards and stuff around him which could then geolocate where he was so if you can say who pulled you in when did they pull you in and what were you doing yeah um so that was a let's let's let's let's build a demo that people will understand from not just a counter terror use case but more of a geopolitical, you know, here's a, here's a modern society and a modern leader. What can we, how can we detect signals about him? There was, there was no, that was not an operational tasking that was.

Let's see if we can do this. What, what, again, how do we explain, how do we de-complex something so that people who are really, involved in the like Russia station or Moscow station or how do we how do we frame this in a way that's relevant to them so it was more like let's let's you know we did it for GRU and FSB

the Russian intelligence agencies Wagner Group oh progosion did you blow up that plane yeah that was that was you yeah you hit button. That had to be fun. But understanding Wagner's deployment, particularly in the African continent, you know, how many, how many boots do they have on the ground there? And what is that a signal of in terms of, you know, order of battle?

Where do we see them? Where do we see the Wagner jet as a signal of, okay, we haven't seen what is it, why is it in this country? What is that signal? again and that's you know invert the use case if I want to know if I'm interested in knowing who's investing in what who's playing golf together as a it's not a it's not a fact I don't know what it means but I know that this this event this co-location occurred what is what can I infer from and what can I now build on top of that where I start to build causation into the correlation you know you then you you look at what's going on in the

news you know yeah um oh my gosh that now that these two isolated data points come together and tell a story that's who do you think that was which one when the when when the plane goes boom i mean i think everybody you know he he stepped out of yeah he stepped over he got over his skis yeah that one i felt like that was straightforward uh and if and what did he think he was flying back to negotiate you know some kind of power structure like really you know you're the like head of wagner how did you not see that coming that can we pull that guy up had a wet progosian head of wagner group he was the most mike ermintrout like a motherfucker i've ever seen in my life you know from breaking bed he's like the same guy except russians he drive the old police

the old Buick police. That's where I pictured him in it. Look at him. Like if Mike were Russian, that's him. Yeah. Yeah. He went rip. Oh, Walter.

That's it. Yeah. Walter. Crazy. So you would use the same tools like where people shop in geo fences. Where are they going? What are their patterns of life to track data on these phones that were 917A4-5-6 or whatever? But you could then, over time, put together, it'd be like, ooh, 9178456 and 17454 are always coming together at this area that's around where the security is.

So they must both be security agents. And then you could use that to be like, okay, well, maybe our intelligence says they're always within 50 feet of Putin. Therefore, he's always within 50 feet of where these two things are blinking. That's it? Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yep. And that's during the war going on, too.

So that was pre-2020. Oh, that was pre. So predicting, we talked to the Secret Service about this, you know, their protective, their advanced teams would basically project where Trump was or where the president was going to be. Yeah, it was, it was. It was Trump first, first term. Right, right. Based upon, I can segment Secret Service agents. And when I see this group in these areas doing their advance work, their scout work, even if it's not on the schedule, it is a predictive indicator that, you know, the president is going to be at this hotel.

He's going to travel these routes. Yeah. As a means of if I can do it. So too can somebody that wants to, you know, get involved in the disrupt. So, you know, the, the canv, you know, data is a can't is, you've got a canvas. It really is, it's about letting that data sort of tell the story that is there. Yes. You can see all sorts of things.

if you want to see, you know, I want to find the bad guy. So I am going to declare, you know, a device that's at a former, you know, at a bad guy's house as some kind of, you know, collusion with when it's really, you know, law enforcement device. Like, you can see all sorts of things, but you have to, you have to sort of pull it back. And what is it, what is that story telling that? you know it's kind of like when you see those pictures where there's a picture inside of a picture and you have to sort of kind of blur your eyes and then you see the other picture yes whatever that's called you kind of have to think about data like that it's pulled pulled the lens back a little bit um and let that let those data points tell you what's yeah let it tell a story what's probable and

what's not and that's you know in a lot of these things it's like i don't don't think there's a methodology for determining non-combatants versus combatants in a facility. But when you think about it from the perspective of an advertiser is going to want to know in a household, how many devices are owned by children and how many devices are owned by adults and what's the smart TV? You're going to segment those things. Apply those same analytical methodologies, change the names to protect the innocent. and you know you've got a you've got a targeting app it's crazy how easily you'd be able to tell such a complex story because like if i just think about like i post on social media very

randomly but let's say i decided for two weeks that i were going to post on every platform whether it's a post or a story depending on the platform i was going to post at three five and seven p.m. every time and I was going to post something let's keep it really simple of the studio or something happening in the studio yeah you could imply like if I did that for four days you could imply that in all likelihood unless I'm delaying every single post which some people do by the way I'm probably in this studio during those times that's literally like two variables now think about you looking at fucking 40,000 variables. The only difficult part is the beginning

where you got to be like, all right, what are the 5,000 that actually matter? Let's get rid of the 35 that don't. But once you do that, you're like, you can paint it down to someone's blood type. Yeah. Crazy, man. What type of apps

are they using? It's a big signal. What times are they using them? You know, the device goes dark during, you know, at 7 o'clock at night. and comes alive again at five in the morning, that's probably a child who goes to bed early and is up at the crack of dawn ready to go. And segmenting that from a lens of probability, not fact, that's the way to do it.

How easy is it with publicly available information to get from a number to a name? A phone number? No, to get from their, well, actually, I didn't even think of that. put that aside for a second. From the metadata. From the metadata to someone's literal name, this is the person, we can identify them down to their picture and their age and everything. Yeah. Yes. Easy. Not easy, but you can do it. Yeah. So when you were looking hypothetically, when you're looking at some of those Russian security guards, you could translate who they literally. Easier, you know, so that goes back to like the Southern Pines, North Carolina. Like, yeah,

I have the property records to know. Right. how what the mortgages who it is secret service agents like they all live in fredericksburg or they live south of dc or west of dc you know i can i can with high degree of confidence tell you what their names are and what their wives names are um you know russia's you know property records and doing that but um when you start seeing these the patterns you can you can start segmenting, you know, staff who are, you know, like his assistants versus protective detail. They have very different patterns of life. See protective detail at like, you know, uh, jiu-jitsu studios. Yeah. You didn't see the cook at, you know, doing MMA.

where they go to you know you see them at training facilities so you're able to say this is not the cook this is this is where they have a range and you know those kinds of things same with you know our own our own people have you been have you been asked to train like some of our own people on the things a guy like you is looking for yeah all the time yeah we do a lot of training on this. And it's like, I can show you, I can magnify the problem all day long. I can tell you, you know, um, when four people leave the White House to go direct to Dulles and then I see them in Brussels, um, a lot of, you know, a lot of DC people are going to go into NATO headquarters, but when four go direct from the White House to NATO, if I'm an adversary, those

four devices are far more interesting to me because they just came from the White House. That's right. What is the meaning behind that? I don't know. But it's different from everybody else that is, you know, in Brussels that dwells at the State Department all day long or, you know, the Pentagon all day long. These four came from the White House. Who are they? Yeah.

That's the kind of thing where, like, I'm showing you this. I can do it. An adversary is picking you guys up from the minute you get off that plane and they're going to be on you until you leave. God, like you were saying earlier, there's so many things you have to consider now. It's not even possible to. So you know you're operating at a loss no matter where you are and what you're doing, no matter what job you're doing at all times. It's just about minimizing as much risk as possible. Especially as Americans where we let our data get. swept up by anybody.

I guarantee you, like, we're not doing this, you know, against Xi Jinping's protective detail because their data is controlled. We can't get to it at all? Not through the commercial markets like we were doing earlier on. like pre like oh seven yeah yeah right yeah you mean you have to at some point somebody's going to be interested in a we chat data set that is available and we chat is effect for people out there's effectively their do everything app in china it's their super app it's there you know

you you do not survive uh in in china without it yeah um the deal the uh the uh the uh the the diaspora communicates with relatives back home on it. It's just it's right it's it's it's it's almost I don't know if there's a mandate that you have to have it but you know that's where your social credit score and everything else is sort of derived from by the way I already know I'm going to have to have you back because there's a lot of things we're not going to get to today like you're bringing shit up and I'm just like not going to stop you but there's like a million questions on basically every topic you brought up that we can go down a lot of tangents so people

people when there's things we haven't covered we'll get a chance to do that in the future but you keep bringing up china it's come up a few times in this conversation in different contexts we talked about certainly the things we see like the tick-tock thing that was going on forever when we know what that is but like we've also talked about the fact as you just alluded to again that their infrastructure is basically closed off a lot of our google hasn't even been there since like 08 you know they steal a lot of our technology as well and then rebuild it that's why you have the chinese tesla the The different Chinese companies that do it. But you keep talking about without hesitation, this is the number one threat.

This is the number one threat. And to state the obvious, they have the second highest GDP in the world just slightly behind us. They have an enormous population. They have enormous innovation, scale and control, unfortunately, because the CCP controls the country. But like what are the things that maybe people like me don't think about as much that you've had access to that you're like. to that you're like that's a huge fucking issue and we're not paying attention to it and here's what we got to do yeah um so china has something called the united front work department uf wd the ufwd's charter is to uh spread the gospel of how great china is throughout the world

uh through ambassadors uh chinese chinese citizens who live outside of China yeah so the uf wd is the button that they push to activate chinese citizens who live overseas article seven the chinese intelligence law stipulates that every chinese citizen and if you're You're ethnic Chinese, you're Chinese. Article 7 of the China intelligence law obligates citizens to support and assist China's intelligence activities when called upon. I think that this explains when we read about Chinese tourists who get lost and confused and end up driving 500 yards into the compound in Virginia Beach and say they just got lost and they want to take a selfie.

Asian lady driver. Sorry, everyone. Nothing to see. Good luck, everybody. When you have Chinese citizens flying drones over Vandenberg Air Force Base at the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket. Total coincidence. when you have Chinese citizens driving around and mapping military installations in the Philippines with LIDAR gear and Stingrays or MZ catchers. And they are, they are sort of careless.

They are not MSS. They are amateurs, but they've got millions of them all over the world. they buy land everywhere so it can be you know low level kid that's going to drive on to a sensitive onto a military base capture a couple pictures that buys them prestige credibility back home even if they don't collect any useful valuable intelligence it's like your obligation to try and sometimes they and they're the elites within the UFWD that are buying land they they go they get they get awarded at the annual sales conference in Beijing for their efforts and their work and what they what they have accomplished they get

recognized they get a photo op with Xi Jinping himself So when we contemplate the counterintelligence challenge from China, we have to recognize this isn't going to be like catching MSS operators. These are people that are on, you know, their dual sits, they have, you know, their lawful permanent residence. they own a business but let's not you know let's not try to see something beyond

the tourist who drives onto dev groups compound to take pictures and claims that they get lost so this is much more of a throw out an industrial size fishing net from a freighter

and pull up whatever you can versus like try to take out a really nice rod and catch the prize sailfish you never know what you're going to get right um and and this is i think something that we underestimate um because how do you how does the fbi manage that they can't open up a case but when we see these um organizations like the american china friendship association Well, that sounds great. You know, that should be a counterintelligence target, and I'm sure it is. But when they, you know, they will metastasize inside of city councils.

They will buy lots of property, lots of land. This is the kind of thing that, we can we can track through data but again um we need policy and prosecutions instead of you know don't do that again you know what i feel like sometimes i don't know what you would say to this but to be clear i am against any country that's not america pedaling influence in any way surreptitiously not surreptitially whatever in this country we focus so much and righteously so on some things on like the israeli stuff that's happening right now because there's literally a this war going on but that that's kind of very ugly that's

kind of new the the attention of course that is not you know it was almost like if you discussed it or even brought up a suspicion oh yeah you were an anti-semit right and to you know but I think this is that yeah that ship has sailed yeah but you're absolutely right it's it's a new phenomenon because of what's happened over there in the last couple years and people are like what the fuck is this and why are we funding this? That said, sometimes I wonder like just like stepping out at 30,000 feet. I'm like, okay, a lot of these things I'm seeing are true and like, yeah, this influence that's crazy and we should stop this and stop that 100%. But like the whole internet, which has a lot of accounts that operate behind keyboards and you don't know where they

come from is specifically pushing just this one, which it's like they landed on a thing that's actually a problem and said, everybody, look at that. And then I feel like that is also cover for other places that are doing in different ways, different methods, the same thing. And so by the way, like when I see that this was happening through TikTok for a long time, not to take the side of like Larry Ellison buying it now, to be clear, I think the answer's in the middle. But like, I'm like, oh, why, why were they making sure that was pushed while they're, in this case, China, while they're doing shit like this? And no disrespect to Israel. They certainly have a lot of power.

But like, China's got a fucking $20, trillion GDP. Yep. You know? Yep. Billion people. If our, if we were as adamantly invested in confronting the China problem as we are invested in. Israel's security that would be a that would be

that would be a thing yeah um and the this is politics and you know the grownups are at the table and this is how this is how it's being it's how it's being done it it's the reality even though I would like it to be

differently different um that's what it is so what's it going to take for our focus to call shit out like Fentanyl. And you brought the point up earlier. Like we are not innocent.

That's right. We want to know why we have an Iranian problem. That goes back to 1953. That's right. We put the shot in power. Kermit Roosevelt, right? We decided that this, you know, the elected president,

prime minister was not sufficiently cooperative. And so Listen, he wasn't All right, he wasn't. Did you know that the Shaw's Secret Police was a joint effort between Mossad and CIA training?

I actually didn't know the Mossad connection there, but I was well aware CIA was involved. Interesting. Yep. So standing up and building that police force. Anyway, but this is, you know, like how did we get here with Iran or Ukraine? Or, you know, map it back.

okay yeah we don't have the benefit of of future of being able to see in the future but there are third order of effects when we try to do something

that you know country that we share a lot of the same values and they're educated and you know like how many Iranian doctors who are here when their parents had the flee in 79 you know

you have a lot in common with sure This is not a country that at a population level, we should be at war with. The Ayatollah, different story. Theocracy's different story. But if some foreign country decided, let's just say, for a moment that Hillary Clinton was elected president, and some foreign country said, that's unacceptable, we need to overthrow that. even though I'm not a supporter of Hillary Clinton I'd be incensed by another country coming in and saying

we're going to organize reorganize your politics that's right you know death to America yeah I'd be pissed too if America messed with my country even you know the Ayatollah at least he's ours yeah I understand what you're saying

you know as opposed to the Shah you mean the Shah right right yeah I mean the Ayatollah was obviously like he's our he's our he's our choice uh as an iranian as an iranian speaking from the perspective of oh right yeah yeah yeah he may not be great but we i got you we had the agency to be able to insert him as opposed to the shaw which is right it was our revolution we did yeah so i think that this is uh yeah that's where it gets weird it's like our idea we're not great at nation building over here you know what i mean no and like to your point

you got to see it from the perspective of people who want to handle their own business on some things. Does that mean you isolate yourself from the world and don't ever get involved in anything? No, I would say, this is just my argument here, it's amazing to me, even though like we've fucked up things with Russia in the decades since and some of the rebuilding and stuff like that, that's a separate conversation. The way the Soviet Union fell was not, you know, this like invasion of the Soviet Union or throwing a nuke at them or some shit like that. It was getting as much ideological resources into 15% of the population. That's all it took. It was 15% of the Soviet population was enough to then rise up and overthrow it from within. Like, if you're going to do it and get involved, there's your model.

Like, tear down that wall. You know what I mean? Like, why don't we do more of that? Like, ideological subversion in Iran, man, you got a lot of material to work with there. I would think you've had fucking 45 years to do it. Right. Yep. Yep.

Radio Free Moscow. That actually worked. Mm-hmm. And I also, instead of, you know, rhetoric and strong language and, you know, summits, like, we built SDI. SDI? Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars. Oh. We overpowered them with.

innovation so when Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik and Gorbachev's demand or terms for nuclear disarmament included the Americans Reagan divesting from SDI and Reagan said not happening it was kind of like okay we're never going to be able to compete with them militarily, which sort of speaks to the strength through power. Yes. But it was innovation that, you know, is like was legit and real and kind of a, hey, you know, build nukes all you want. We have SDI, which negates your arsenal.

Right. And that was like, all right, how do we compete with this? We need the, that was the beginning of sort of the ratchet down for the, for the Soviet Union. you know and we didn't negotiate like reagan had a a fine line like that is non-negotiable yeah and we are willing to walk no i was he was listen on that on that issue we i mean definitely a successful presidency in that respect he was very very good on that issue so i uh i worked with admiral john pointexter for a little bit back in 96 97 and i'm in his we're sitting in his study. You worked with him in

96 or 97? It was 96. What were you doing? It was, this was the DARPA program. Just, just taught, wait, somehow. Well, yeah. I was, I was in always a DARPA, yeah. But we're sitting in the study, in his

study at his home in in Rockville, Maryland. And he has this picture of, they're at Reckyvic. And Reagan is sitting in like a a chair with his glasses on the bridge of his nose with like papers and point dexter is clearly talking to him and i'm like did the enormity of that moment you're sitting

there like Gorbachev is in the next room you they kind of had a break like all right we need to go and and you know that picture was kind of the moment where they decided like it is not negotiable sdi is not negotiable and point had a lot to do with that as his national security advisor pre-Iran contra. Like, did the enormity of, like, you're sitting there and Ronald Reagan is kind of looking at you, like, are you full of shit? Do you know what you're talking about? And you are, as his national security advisor, giving him this advice about your negotiation

with the Soviets. Like, that was a moment of, you know, clear. right that you were able to you were able to push through but um really interesting guy so why were you in the hallways at DARPA in 96 you just you know um i mean i'm i'm not there a lot but uh i'm there enough yeah but this is 96 this is i'm sorry 2006 not 96 2000 but that's still 10 years before you have the little post uh you know shortly after uh 9 11 right But this is like 10 years before you figure out the whole Fort Bragg data thing. So what?

We're doing data stuff? Doing data stuff. So you were a good candidate to figure out the Fort Bragg thing. I mean, I might have had a head start. Right. All right, yeah. I might have wanted to mention that out front. There was this move to like, can we correlate travel records, rental car records, things like that to be able to predict?

terrorist or unusual activity. Okay. DARPA was working on this. Interesting. Yep. Everybody. At that time, everybody was working on everything.

Yeah, in some way. It's just DARPA, you always think of, you know, the wonder projects, like something that's fucking... Hypersonics. Yeah, exactly.

Like, you don't really think of them. They're a separate bucket from like what you think about with CIA or NSA or something like that. All right. I'm going to, when you come back,

we're going to have to do DARPA. We're going to go way deeper on China. We're going to have to do a lot of Palantir. We're going to have to do a lot of AI stuff, which we didn't talk about today. I could think of like some Saudi stuff I want to get to with you. There's other stuff we got to come back to and ask a few more questions too. But in the meantime, real quick, what is your, you know, this last decade now, like today, I imagine through your private company, you're still doing some of this work and advising on it. Obviously, you've kind of mentioned that. But like, what does your family think about, like,

what you've got going on? Like, you're the big swing and dick. and DC with data? Not at all. Not in your house? No. That's a shame. Not at all. No.

I mean, it's, you're, it's decent. Like, everybody's got, everybody's got a hustle. Everybody's important doing stuff. Okay. You know. I'll take your word for it. All right. Well, Mike, this has been quite eye-opening today.

Surprised we didn't get into Epstein. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. There's like a million things to get to. I'm going to get there. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to be putting this out in I think we're going to put this out in like a week or two. I'm going to put this one out quick

and then people are going to respond to this and I'm going to get your ass back here very quickly. Sounds good. All right? I'll be here. All right. Thanks brother. Thank you. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash

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