#351 - DARPA Data Hacker: “I Tracked Elite’s Phones to Epstein Island in 2016!” | Mike Yeagley

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #351

Guest: Mike Yagley (DARPA-Linked Data Hacker)
Title: “I Tracked Elite’s Phones to Epstein Island in 2016!”
Date: November 3, 2025
Host: Julian Dorey

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Episode Overview

Theme:
Julian Dorey sits down with Mike Yagley—a data analyst and government contractor with ties to DARPA—to discuss his independent investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case using commercially available mobile device data. Yagley explains how he tracked the presence of influential figures (including CEOs, publishers, and public personalities) at Epstein’s infamous island after 2015, years after Epstein’s initial conviction. The conversation evolves into a deep exploration of surveillance, digital privacy, open-source intelligence, government overreach, and the power of platforms like Palantir, as well as a candid look at how government and big tech manage (or miss) enormous troves of sensitive information.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mike Yagley’s Background & Government Data Work

• Yagley describes himself as having been in the thick of “location intelligence”—collecting and analyzing large commercial mobile device data sets, sometimes in support of contractors or agencies like DARPA (00:50, 101:32).
• He previously helped demonstrate to government leaders how easy it is to inadvertently expose operational security by tracking US special forces and other sensitive locations using public or commercial data (15:05).
• With experience in defense and retail analytics, Yagley frequently bridges commercial and government data work, emphasizing the gray ethics and legalities that come with this (119:02).

“Tech is interesting.” (00:57, Yagley)

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2. Investigating Epstein’s Island: Methods & Findings

• Yagley specifically tracked mobile device dwellings at Epstein’s island beginning as early as 2015, showing that elite figures continued visiting long after Epstein’s legal troubles began (07:45, 09:54).
• The analytic process involved identifying “seed locations” (like Epstein’s island or Manhattan penthouse), then cross-referencing persistent device patterns with public information about home or work addresses, building “probabilistic social graphs” (03:45).
• Notable: These data points, while not definitive proof, yield high-probability identity matches (08:43, 09:54), highlighting the alarming ease of social graphing through commercial data.

“These are not facts—because I’m not looking at this device, [saying] this device identifier belongs to this name. I’m seeing where it sleeps… where it works…so I’m sharpening that hypothesis as to who this device belongs to.” (08:43, Yagley)

• Yagley discovered patterns indicating that even after becoming a public pariah, Epstein’s island received visits from major CEOs, publishers, entertainers, and even some religious figures (18:15).

“CEOs of studios, publishers of major newspapers, some entertainers, some religious folks…” (18:15, Yagley)

• He also mapped the presence of staff (bartenders, maids, groundskeepers) and their intertwined patterns with guests and victims (20:58, 22:06).

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3. Reaction and Official (In)Action

• Yagley claims he made his findings available to contacts who could elevate them to authorities but “the call never came.” (13:00, 15:57, 73:07)
• Multiple administrations (Obama, Trump, Biden) have shown similar inertia or reluctance to prosecute, despite mountains of publicly available evidence and victim depositions (25:15).

“The reaction was, I will push this where I can, but I'm not going to die on this hill.” (73:55, Yagley)

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4. Barriers to Prosecution: The Evidence Problem

• Yagley details that while location data is powerful, it’s considered “probabilistic” and likely inadmissible as the sole source of evidence—defense counsel can easily attack its provenance (37:22, 47:18).
• Theoretically, law enforcement could independently reproduce his findings with their own tools and warrants, yet seem disinterested or obstructed (50:10).

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5. Surveillance, Privacy, and Government Overreach

a. Bulk Surveillance Normalization

• Extensive conversation around how surveillance capabilities, initially justified for national security, create mission creep and threaten the average citizen’s rights (54:38, 120:11).
• Yagley is sharply critical of legal and administrative loopholes (Patriot Act, Rule 1033) that normalize “open APIs” and the slow, iterative loss of privacy (103:33, 125:34, 129:27).

“Surveillance just doesn't pop up one day. It's iterative, it's slow, it capitalizes on... All of these systems are integrated. There are no firebreaks between your bank and potentially Google.” (129:29, Yagley)

b. Politicians and Hypocrisy

• Yagley references senators (like Lindsey Graham) who support surveillance until it’s turned on them—highlighting “rules for thee, not for me.” (54:38, 56:40)

c. Commercial Tech & Data Exploitation

• Yagley warns: The private sector, chasing “convenience,” often creates more powerful surveillance tools than the government. Devices exfiltrate data continuously—airplane mode or not—and big tech firms retain immense power and ability to respond to government subpoenas (140:11).

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6. Intelligence, Influence & The Deep State

• Yagley and Dorey float hypotheses on Epstein’s connections to intelligence agencies (Mossad, CIA), suggesting a shadowy rationale for federal foot-dragging and multi-administration coverups (65:58, 66:45, 67:35).
• They discuss the “deep state” not as a single cabal, but as a metastasizing bureaucracy and mission creep in the security apparatus. In Yagley’s view, it’s a self-perpetuating cancer rather than a centrally coordinated conspiracy (164:41).

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7. Case Studies in Data, Law, and Loopholes

• Discussion of recent surveillance controversies (Durham investigation, FISA courts, DNA collection via abandoned coffee cups—see 51:29) illuminate how public/private data, technicalities, and Fourth Amendment boundaries are increasingly blurred and selectively enforced.

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8. Grindr, CCP, and National Security

• Yagley recounts how commercial data sets revealed a Chinese firm’s interest in acquiring Grindr, showing government employees’ personal data easily trackable through commercial apps—a major national security risk (74:27, 75:05).

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9. Tools of Mass Data Integration: Palantir & AI

• Yagley explains why Palantir became indispensable: it aggregated disparate military and intelligence data sources into common dashboards, building a unified “operating picture” for decision-makers on complex operations (151:20).
• He distinguishes between data collection and analysis: Palantir is not usually the collector but the integrator/analytic layer (148:52, 149:59).
• He raises concerns about predictive policing, the risk of applying these tools against citizens, and the mainstreaming of “Minority Report”-style thinking (157:08).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Elite Arrogance:

  “This may be [what’s] counterfactual about people that are really smart—they think they're too smart and can get away with it.” (10:50, Mike Yagley)

• On Institutional Inaction:

  “All three [administrations]...have sort of exhibited the same outlook about it. I don't know what to read into that, other than there isn't anything for us to prosecute against. So we've moved on.” (24:05, Yagley)

• On Data’s Power and Danger:

  “A multi-decimal, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinate does not lie.” (61:00, Yagley)

• On Probabilistic Evidence:

  “It's clues and leads. They would have to go and take my tips and develop prosecutorial evidence...Because location data is again, it's a probabilistic assessment.” (37:22, Yagley)

• On Over-classification:

  “When we start over-classifying, then the bias is to do something that, you know, maybe you wouldn't normally do, but I can classify it and keep it from transparency.” (89:14, Yagley)

• On the “Normalization of Deviance”:

  “That slips into the normalization of deviance where, hey, there’s been no harm, so there shall be no harm—until there’s harm.” (125:34, Yagley)

• On Surveillance’s Seductive Danger:

  “Surveillance, it’s almost like nefarious. It, it speaks to you in ways that are seductive... But the third order effects...when things are frictionless. That’s when Orwellian society becomes like, no, it’s just the way it is.” (161:59, Yagley)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Epstein Devices Investigation (Methodology & Ethics):
  [02:39–08:43], [09:54–13:00], [18:15–24:05], [47:18–53:39]

• Probabilistic Identification & Social Graphs:
  [03:45–08:43]

• Government Cover-up & Lack of Prosecution:
  [25:15–34:28], [55:15–61:22]

• Surveillance, Fourth Amendment, and Data Loopholes:
  [47:18–56:40], [119:02–129:27], [129:29–135:22]

• China, Grindr, and National Security Risk:
  [74:27–79:12]

• AI, Palantir, and Data Fusion:
  [148:52–157:08]

• DARPA, Total Information Awareness, and Tech Forecasting:
  [101:32–112:07]

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Flow & Tone

The episode balances technical explanations (on open source intelligence, legal evidentiary standards, and digital tracking) with energetic, skeptical banter. Dorey plays an informed, incredulous everyman, while Yagley’s tone is pragmatic, sometimes darkly humorous, and always rooted in a sense of mission—often emphasizing both the potential and peril of new surveillance technologies. Both show a strong distrust of official narratives and are transparently cynical about elite impunity.

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Conclusion: Big Themes

• The technical means to expose criminal elite behavior—especially in the Epstein orbit—exist and are in use, but political will and evidentiary standards present huge barriers to justice.
• The U.S. is dangerously close to normalizing total surveillance of citizens, with government and commercial actors both complicit—too often under the banners of convenience, security, or progress.
• Innovations like Palantir and commercial AI are double-edged swords: while they can focus and simplify oversight, they also risk supercharging abuses if left unregulated and unchecked.
• Ordinary people need to become much more aware of, and insistent about, their privacy rights—lest subtle administrative changes end up controlling the most intimate parts of their lives.

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“Follow the money. Follow the devices. The truth is out there—if you want to look.” (Paraphrased, Yagley’s analytic ethos throughout)

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For listeners wanting to understand how the world’s most powerful people evade scrutiny—and how technology could both help and hinder justice for the rest of us—this is an unmissable, deeply revealing conversation.

Transcript

[Mike Yagley]

So we know that something was going on at this island. That's my seed location when this Epstein case hit critical mass. Despite these being some of the smartest people on the planet, CEOs or publishers of major newspapers, some entertainers, if you saw the intel that I saw.

[Julian Dorey]

What types of people are we talking about there?

[Mike Yagley]

But this was not open access, public availability. Again, people who are public figures who would have a lot to lose. Lots of investigative leads, a lot of witnesses, staff cooks, maids, bartenders, and victims. You know, they carry the phones with them. What does the data tell me as I'm developing this list? This doesn't make sense. I must be wrong. You must be wrong because my cognitive dissonance was he wouldn't be affiliated with this guy.

[Julian Dorey]

But then the data starts painting a story.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

You came into contact with darpa, probably the most mysterious government organization, and did some sort of data work with them.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tech is interesting.

[Julian Dorey]

So what's up, guys? Thank you so much as always for watching my channel.

[Producer Joey Deef]

If you have not hit that subscribe.

[Julian Dorey]

Button, can you please do me a.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Huge favor and hit that right now? I appreciate everyone who's been watching these videos consistently. The number one analytic we need to.

[Julian Dorey]

Get these videos into the algorithm is.

[Producer Joey Deef]

You guys hitting the subscribe button though.

[Julian Dorey]

And when you do that, we get.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Them in and we can continue getting great guests. So thank you to everyone who's already.

[Julian Dorey]

Taken the time to do that and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. Enjoy the episode. That'll do it. So I, I, I see. You're like a one trick pony with the, with the intensity, but it works. So I had said at the end of the last episode that we were going to have to bring you back very soon. So here we are. You're suited up this time. I'm a little afraid.

[Mike Yagley]

I've grown up clothes today, so.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, and you, and you still have the like, like the ties, like a little loose, like you're about to like.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, I' done for the day, so I can, I can, I can let it go a little bit.

[Julian Dorey]

What were you doing up here besides.

[Mike Yagley]

I was in the city seeing a client.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay. Client, Foreign state. No, no, no.

[Mike Yagley]

I wish, I wish.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay, all right. They pay well.

[Mike Yagley]

They pay well.

[Julian Dorey]

That's good. That's good. Well, you had left us with some cliffhangers at the end of the last one. And actually right after we recorded Tommy G, our mutual friend, put out one of the documentaries that features you, which was investigating the Epstein files. In D.C. you were great. Tommy has always did a great job putting that together. But what. How did you get involved with knowing anything about those files? And what was the extent there?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So in terms of the official DOJ files, I don't have. I'm not seeing those. I'm not looking at those. When this Epstein case filled, came into, you know, got real sort of hit critical mass and there was all the speculation, like, I'm in the. I'm a time in the thick of, you know, location data and location intelligence and being able to have a look, I know the island, I know the penthouse. I have the seed locations. What does the data tell me? So in terms of. It's the closest. The best way to describe it would be a probabilistic list. Caveat with these are people that. Or these are devices that dwelled at the island. Now, who knows what they were. I don't know what they were doing there.

[Julian Dorey]

I'm sure they were just laying on the beach. Mike.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, yeah, it was a. It was an executive retreat. Learning about leadership and not commissioned. This was just curiosity because I could and. And wanted to test some. Some theories and, and the, you know, the. The reality is, despite these being some of the most. Some of the smartest people on the planet who probably went through just looking at their travel patterns, they. They weren't. They were trying to be a little evasive, but, you know, they carried the phones with them, same phones they carry with them to work to their kids soccer games. And so it is a probabilistic social graph of people that were sort of in that orbit or devices that were in that orbit.

[Julian Dorey]

When did you first decide? No, I'll take a look at.

[Mike Yagley]

This is 2018.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Oh, wow.

[Mike Yagley]

Early days. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay. So is this 20. 2018? Are you referring to 2018 or 2019? It would have been if, like when. Right when he first got caught or like it was before he got caught, which would be 2018.

[Mike Yagley]

Whenever. Whenever it became critical, you know, the critical volume, the critical mass of the. Probably 2019, which would have piqued my interest. And, you know, and. And it's one of those things where, okay, the feds are involved. If I'm asked, I want to be prepared to either say, you know, I can assist and I can assist in a way that. Because these are US Persons, so no warrant. This. This is commercial data. So I was able to sort of jump start or would have been able to jump start if they wanted to start looking at names, assuming they didn't already have them. And I don't know if they have a list of names. We're told they do. It's on the Attorney General's desk. And then we're told there's nothing there.

[Julian Dorey]

To say, there's nothing that exists.

[Mike Yagley]

So there's an. And resolving identity to those patterns of life. Again because we're talking about the US and the openness of data. Being able to correlate a bed down location where, with a, with a location where a device goes to work regularly makes that a really not easy. But it's a, it's a, it's a more resolved identity resolution.

[Julian Dorey]

Now how do you. I'm trying to picture this because I'm not at all an expert in what you did, but for people who didn't see the last episode, obviously you're going to fill in some blanks again today on some of the tactics you use, but you're effectively at a thousand foot view using publicly available cell data to be able to track devices and then cross reference that with other publicly available data to be able to identify people and where they are. When you're talking about identifying people, let's say with the island though, at the time that you were looking at it, when this is a critical mass, am I understanding correctly that you're looking at, you're looking at back data, meaning you're looking, you could be looking as far back as 2011, 2012.

[Mike Yagley]

I only went back. I didn't go back that far. I didn't need to to come up with a good dense list.

[Julian Dorey]

Wow. How far back did you go? Like a couple years?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. 20, 2015.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

So I was again looking at recency, trying to, trying to get more recency. But so the process. So we know, we know that something was going on at this island. That's my seed location. Then I'm going to look and see what devices were at that location and where were they before and where were they after.

[Julian Dorey]

So that, that would be able to explain, for example, let's not use names here but you know, schmil schmates. If he were somewhere else with that phone in 2015, even if he's had two phones since then, you would be able to see based on say cross referencing, I'm going to make up a number five to six different places he might have been before that. Clearly that's him.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So if we're talking about that type of, that arch type of character, I'm going to see a device that's at the island and then I'm going to see Devices or device patterns in and around the Seattle, Washington area. Right. There's a big foundation in downtown Seattle where that device might spend a lot of time and start appending identity with probability. These are not facts because I'm not looking at this device. Identifier belongs to this name. I'm seeing the device sleep at this location, which through publicly available information, I can append a name. I see it, then I further filter it, and I see that device at places where it's likely that's where they work based upon publicly available information. So I'm sharpening that hypothesis as to who this device belongs to.

[Julian Dorey]

Right. But that's crazy to me that you would be looking at this and you'd be like, wow, I don't need to go back farther than 2015 or 2016. Six, seven years after he is indicted and found guilty of, you know, underage. Well, it ended up being soliciting a prostitute, but, you know, being a pedophile, let's call it what it is. And after there were already, without me having it in front of me, I know there were multiple lawsuits that had come up by that time as well that had been reported in the news, not as loudly as they should, but have been reported. Wouldn't it be very, very interesting that, say, some extremely powerful people would still have, I don't know, the nerve to go down to the, like, forget going to his townhouse to go to the island. I'm not even, I don't even know if they went on the guy's jet either way to go to that island at that point. Like, how dumb do you have to be? Or how blackmailed do you have to be?

[Mike Yagley]

So this may be counterfactual associated with people that are really smart is they think that they're too smart and can get away with it. I don't know, I don't know what goes into the mind. I, I, the, the, the psychology. I don't understand the draw or maybe I do. And, and it's not that complex, but I think that there was, if you look at this cohort, they're people that have everything they've got, people telling them how great they are, how wonderful they are you know, tending to their every need. They snap their fingers. So, you know, they probably have a mindset that they can, they can, they can do this and sort of be above the accountability. And if you, if you think about it, it's the, the, the, my impetus to look into this was the notion the noise really was about the embarrassment that it would cause Some of these people, like, yeah, embarrassment is the least of your worries.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

But if that is all you are worried about, you know, your public perception and your, you know, it's a public relations crisis and I need my comms team to come in and help. That's the wrong problem to be focused on. And it was a, it was kind of a neat little project to see if I could do it with some degree of volume where, you know, if, if it comes push to shove where we need to put identity because we don't have a black, a black book. But we need some leads, some investigative leads. But that, that call never came.

[Julian Dorey]

Never came to you?

[Mike Yagley]

Never came to me.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay, let me try to piece some of this together.

[Producer Joey Deef]

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[Julian Dorey]

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[Julian Dorey]

You are working on this now, at least several years after you first began doing some contracts for the government with this type of work. You laid out that story last time pretty crazy, that whole thing like potentially tracking Delta Force to Syria and being like, guys, anyone can do this. So now, you know, the government's had you work on multiple different things. You know, basically all different types of stuff as it comes up where your expertise could be used. And I'm. I'm picturing you right now, correct me if I'm wrong once again, like doing this in your bedroom. Bedroom like you talked about.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. The home office. In between the master bedroom and my daughter's room.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So this whole Epstein story is coming out and you're like, I'm going to get this. And you go in and voluntarily say, all right, if called upon. Let me see what I got. Now you said the call never came. Did you tell, I assume, high level people.

[Mike Yagley]

People knew I had it. People knew I had it. But it just, you know, I was in the. My folks were counter terror. And this was not counter terror.

[Julian Dorey]

It wasn't. I could see how it could get.

[Mike Yagley]

Tied into that at the time. This was again, early days.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

So looking deeply into, you know, and that was, that was one of the things I was like, what, what. Why is he so involved in the Limited?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Less waxing.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Because, you know, like I just. It wasn't, it wasn't the headline narrative at the time. And I'm, you know, and so unraveling. That was fascinating.

[Julian Dorey]

So you unraveled the L Brands connection. Can you please.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, I mean he just. So he spent a lot of. Well, he spent time at the headquarters of, of. Of Victoria's Secret, the Limited brand. The. The parent company that owns.

[Julian Dorey]

I got you. Okay, well let me just Google Limited brands us.

[Mike Yagley]

I was trying. It was. So there was a lot of Dwell in Ohio.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, that was in. So there's. Their primary headquarters is in Columbus and then there's a neighborhood outside there whose name is eluding me right now. Epstein, Ohio neighborhood. Let me just get what it's called. So Albany.

[Mike Yagley]

I came into this with. Without any a priori knowledge about him. Right. So again, it was like, that's interesting. What Is the Ohio connection.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

And so that became clear. And the people that were. That he was associating with here in the States, again as another filter, would also dwell with him on the island.

[Julian Dorey]

What types of people are we talking about there?

[Mike Yagley]

So these are CEOs, CEOs of studios, CEOs or publishers of major newspapers, media outlets, Some entertainers, some religious folks.

[Julian Dorey]

Religious folks. Oh, that's interesting.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

I don't know if I've really heard. I mean, there's so much on this case. Some goes in one ear, out the other.

[Mike Yagley]

But again, they may have just been there to, you know. Well, they wouldn't have been doing mass.

[Julian Dorey]

But I was going to say, did he find Christ or something? I must have missed that.

[Mike Yagley]

But this, this is, this was not open access, public availability. You know, these were again, people who are public figures who would have a lot to lose. And it's compelling enough where I was kind of like, yeah, they'll get this. This is too easy to make public to even just issue press like we're investigating. Yeah, these people were not accusing them of anything, but they were at the island, so maybe they should explain themselves.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, had a guy sitting in that seat. It was at the island.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, yeah. The other thing is the, the. What do we want to call them? The victims. Segmenting the people on the island. So a lot of staff, cooks, maids, bartenders and the victims and understanding how that cohort segmented both on the island and back in the States.

[Julian Dorey]

What do you mean by that?

[Mike Yagley]

Just the number of people who, in addition to the victims who were employed.

[Julian Dorey]

Got it.

[Mike Yagley]

Groundskeepers, Etc, separating them from the victims themselves and, and from the client. Clients from whatever. Visitors.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, yeah, clients. Certainly a good word.

[Mike Yagley]

So lots of investigative leads, a lot of witnesses. You know, what did you see and when did you see it and who did you see?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

And. And lots of people to be able to, to, to interview.

[Julian Dorey]

You know what's funny? In all the years of looking at this case, I don't think I've ever heard when it comes to the island about, you know, people reporting on it, referring to say, bartenders, waitresses or maids or stuff like that. Now guys I have heard or, you know, guys working on the power lines, groundskeepers, normal stuff that, you know, would be on any property, let alone a private island. But like, that's interesting because you think of like a bartender or a maid. These are, you know, they're covering the most personal interactions and stuff, meaning they're seeing everyone and they have to have at some point they have to have some idea that something's not right. Something's not right here. So you were also, as you pointed out, you're segmenting those people to kind of put them in their own, you.

[Mike Yagley]

Know, like the bartender. So again, I should say probabilistic, but you know, I see that device working at clubs at the, at other islands or other resorts doing, exhibiting a pattern of behavior, a pattern of life that's typical of somebody who's working late night, you know, not during the day, but dwelling at resort properties and then club like facilities where they would be working as a bartender.

[Julian Dorey]

The people who are coming onto the island, working there, let's separate the groundskeepers and stuff like that, who I assume are from one of the very local places right there. But when we're talking bartenders, we're talking even maids or management of any kind. Were these people also from the Caribbean area right there nearby, or were there.

[Mike Yagley]

Or they were, you know, they would work, they would have, you know, I'm working this place tonight, I'm here on this job for a week.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

But they would have their sort of regular job, but they would spend time on the island. Again, correlated with visitors.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

So they weren't just hanging out. When we didn't have any of our high profile people there. They, they were off doing their other, other jobs.

[Julian Dorey]

Point being, it's not someone sketchy. You're not seeing a lot of sketchy people from flying in from Eastern Europe for this or flying in from New York for this or. Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

No.

[Producer Joey Deef]

All right.

[Julian Dorey]

So that part, it seems like it'd.

[Mike Yagley]

Be, you know, sort of the professional house staff.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes, he had the part a little bit more.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

I guess covered for the window dressing.

[Mike Yagley]

In that department where he wanted to, you know, he wanted to have proper, you know, somebody who knows how to make a drink. Right. Or.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, but they're not spies. Right.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

All right.

[Julian Dorey]

There's a lot, so many questions on this.

[Mike Yagley]

And the, you know, it's, it's kind of. So there's a lot to, there's a lot to unpack with this. But, but it's, you know, my, I think about it today and it's, we've got two administrative administrations. Three administrations, if you count Trump's administration, twice the Department of Justice is responsible for prosecuting. We've had three administrations. All three have sort of exhibited the same outlook about it. I don't know what the, I don't know what to read into that other than there isn't anything for us to prosecute against. So we've moved on. It's like where, where does. Where does that. Where does the investigation go from here? Because you don't have. You don't have a U.S. attorney. You don't have the Attorney General. You don't have a prosecutor pursuing a case investigating. I don't know where to go with it.

[Julian Dorey]

It's obviously a cover up. And I will say the thing. You know the 500 pound elephant in the room is Trump because he's in office and he knew this guy.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Now the first thing in his defense is that this guy unfortunately knew fucking everyone in New York. He just did. It's a fact of the matter. And we've said it a million times in different contexts on this show when it comes up. But all he had to do and all Ghislaine had to do was take a picture with you. You know there's that famous picture of Elon Musk walking by where clearly he's walking with his drink and the photographer goes sir. And he like kind of turns like this. And Guylan just finds her way right here. It's probably completely innocent but there's that.001% that for the rest of his life he's gonna have to answer a question about that.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

You know some of the academics who. You know, the guy I had sitting in that chair who was down at the island was Lawrence Krause, who's an academic. And all these guys are gonna have to answer those questions forever. When I will say this about Lawrence, he was as blunt about it as you will ever get. He's like I'm a scientist. We need funding. The guy brought funding. At the time we thought he was good and he brought funding. And that's what it was. And I'd like to believe him. You know what I mean? But there's always going to be that small question whether it's him or Steven Pinker or any of these guys just because of how he would get into proximity to people. So I have to give Trump the same. I guess understanding with that. However.

[Mike Yagley]

You know what's interesting about that? What you just said.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Go ahead.

[Mike Yagley]

So the character that you referred to that may be in the. Maybe resident in the Seattle area who has a big foundation. That foundation has a intelligence arm, a security arm mostly to vet grant seekers. Are they a charlatan? Are they full of shit? But they do vetting that's pretty exhaustive. Pretty extensive. And they're also responsible for protecting the individual. And another really rich guy that lives in Omaha Nebraska, huh? Warren Buffett.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Oh, yeah. No, no, I thought you were.

[Julian Dorey]

You can say, you can say.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, but so in terms of, you know, the, the foundation would have vetted Epstein's file and would have been. Would have advised their principal to avoid him based upon the whole, the whole portfolio, the whole envelope of everything that he had been involved with, but that didn't matter.

[Julian Dorey]

Do you know the name of that company?

[Mike Yagley]

Which company?

[Julian Dorey]

The security company.

[Mike Yagley]

It's part of. It is. They are part of the foundation.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay. So it's completely internalized, meaning it's under the umbrella. It's not part of the foundation. Hired on a contract basis.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. No, this is, this is one of their entities that does due diligence on. Mostly due diligence on people who are applying for funding.

[Julian Dorey]

Got it. What's their origin? Are these like us, former intel guys?

[Mike Yagley]

Some, yeah, some. I mean, and it's mostly open source type. Type research and they do a lot of his physical security. So if he, if there's a threat against him, you get somebody who's going crazy on social media that, you know, he needs to go. He's the devil. He's vaccinating, he's doing all of this stuff. They're, they're, they're watching those, those voices on, on social media and informing his protective detail.

[Julian Dorey]

Like the Secret Service watch as a president.

[Mike Yagley]

Precisely.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. Same, same methods, same. A lot of the same tools.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, any package that would arrive at the, at the foundation and they get some. He gets some crazy stuff.

[Julian Dorey]

I'm sure.

[Mike Yagley]

But so I interrupted you because you were talking about Trump, how these, how these. There's no way that any of these guys who have these public profiles, who have security people, somebody would have said, right, I can't tell you what to do, boss, but understand that this is what we know about this guy. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

All right, well, I always do my best to give the full picture, and I think you have to do the same thing with Trump for sure. But there's multiple things going on here in his defense that you still have to say is it is pretty verified six ways to Sunday that at least since like oh, 4ish, oh, 5ish, he ceased all contact with Jeffrey Epstein and didn't deal with him. Now, there's been rumors that that was because Epstein came onto a 15 year old towel hand at Mar A Lago, which it does appear that that is true, that he did do that. The other thing that was reported, though, and I believe it was Tara Palmeri in her podcast she did on this back in 2020. I want to say the other thing that was reported through, I think it was Brad Edwards who said this, the lawyer for a lot of the victims, is that Trump and Epstein both wanted the same piece of real estate or something in Palm Beach.

[Mike Yagley]

I think it was. Yeah, they were. Yeah, there was some. He was making a run at some property or something.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Right.

[Julian Dorey]

And. And Trump won. And they're both kind of egomaniacs, so they just didn't talk after that and didn't like each other. I don't care why you don't talk to the guy. Like, if you're not talking to the guy, I appreciate that. You're not fucking talking to the guy.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

But Trump, one of the things Brad Edwards said is that all of the powerful people that he reached out to in 080708, and he reached out to all of them, all of them told him to fuck off, except Donald Trump. And he went, interviewed Donald Trump by the pool, I think, at Mar a Lago or something. And Trump talked about this guy for a long time, which is very, very interesting. And I say all that because we know he was friends with him for a lot of years. We know that people like Maria Farmer have been ignored when she talked about working the front desk at Epstein's office in the 90s and Trump coming in there fucking three, four times a week. People don't like when she gives that testimony. They love it when she gives the Clinton testimony and all the other testimonies, but not that one. And, you know, there's definitely some creepy videos and some creepy things going on. The part that has really, really stuck something in my crawl, though, is the developments this year under his Justice Department and his reaction to it.

[Mike Yagley]

It.

[Julian Dorey]

One thing we know about Donald Trump is that when it comes to polls on issues, the guy knows every fucking poll. He knows where the pulse of the people is on certain things. That's, I think, a large reason why he's been so effective over the last 11 years at winning elections and winning on issues, because he's like, okay, 54% of Americans are pissed about this. That's my issue. Let's dig into it. Yet, when it comes to the Epstein thing, it is the one thing that he appears to be as blind as a fucking bat on. And he goes out of his way to, you know, he started trying to say it was like a Democrat hoax or something. And mind you, this is a guy who had, like, Bill Clinton in his back pocket. So that's definitely not the case, you know, and so, like, what do you make of all that? Considering the fact that he did have inextricable links to him, considering the fact that his original AG, when Epstein died, was, you know, the. The son of the man who gave Epstein his first start? When you consider the fact that there's all these weird connections pointing back to him, Alex Acosta, the whole. What do you make of Donald Trump's reaction this year? Trying to say that, like, oh, there are no Epstein files.

[Mike Yagley]

This is pure conjecture. I think that. Let's look at it. Let's say there's content there and because the behavior of the FBI director and the Attorney General was like a 36180, right from where they were to where they ended up. So what happened in that intervening period of time? Did they see something where. And it spans across this archetype of influencers, shakers, movers in the United States that would tear at the fabric of our society. And they're doing us. They're protecting us, which I think is insulting.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

So that's one scenario. The other scenario is there's. There's not enough. There's nothing there to prosecute.

[Producer Joey Deef]

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[Julian Dorey]

Workout, more than he did five years ago.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Because that's what happens when you get.

[Julian Dorey]

A little bit older.

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[Julian Dorey]

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[Mike Yagley]

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[Julian Dorey]

Spotify how would that. How would there be nothing to prosecute? Especially, especially when there's someone like you, for example, who can use open source intelligence. Meaning you don't need a warrant. It is available to the public to be able to say there's a victim, there's a bartender, there's a dude down there, there's a victim and a dude down there going to a bedroom. That victim's 14 years old. Here's the timestamp and date.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, so my analysis would be impeached and attacked and defense counsel would, you know, say, this isn't a certified sworn law enforcement officer. You know, this is not evidence. It's clues and leads. They would have to go and take my tips and develop prosecutorial evidence, prosecutable evidence, because location data is again, it's a probabilistic assessment. So.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

So I could point them in the right direction, assuming that they needed me to do that. But you also have victim statements.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

That have been deposed.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

In a. By prosecutors. So I don't. Your. Your question was what do I Make of it? I don't. There's one of two scenarios, and that's. They're protecting us from what we can't handle, or everybody's looked at it and said, there. There's nothing that we can. We can't secure indictments on what we have. I don't know.

[Julian Dorey]

Did you see Cash Patel on Joe Rogan back in June?

[Mike Yagley]

Was that his. Was that his mea culpa or was that. Yeah, so he talked about Epstein. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So that was quintessential bro.

[Mike Yagley]

Trust me.

[Julian Dorey]

Like, literally, like, that was quintessential.

[Producer Joey Deef]

From.

[Mike Yagley]

If you just. If you do a semantic analysis of Cash when he was. I don't know if he had been nominated. I think he had been nominated and he went on Rogan with his big cash.

[Julian Dorey]

It would have been. It would have been so much. He probably went on Sean Ryan shortly before being nominated. Rogan was. When he was already in.

[Mike Yagley]

Okay, so there was Rogan when he went to basically go do the. Here's what we have on Epstein as the FBI director. And then he was on Rogan.

[Julian Dorey]

I think it was only on there once. It was in June.

[Mike Yagley]

Okay. You do a semantic analysis of the cash before and the cash after.

[Julian Dorey]

I'm gonna bury the Hoover Building and turn it into a museum.

[Mike Yagley]

The guy is on his back foot. And what do you make of that? And the Attorney General's on her back foot, too. I think that they are trying to manage a narrative that they don't believe.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. And I don't know if that's true, but I suspect that is true. And there's a part of me that says, well, first, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to see the people that have talked to them and what the nature of those conversations is to see how bad it is. And secondly, a part of me does go, what power do they really have? Which is a sad low bar. But, you know, when. When he went on there with Joe, though, this. This was the part that I don't think is defensible. Right. It's one thing if you're being forced through very dark forces to not be able to say what you want to say, because worse things are going to happen because of those dark forces. It's a whole nother thing when you don't know the fucking case. And there was about a 12 minute segment there with Joe Rogan that was just quintessential classic Joe Rogan. Like, why he's the goat, where he just. Just buried Cash or let Cash bury himself. Like a childhood deadpan hamster. I mean, it was, like, horrible in the sense that Cash revealed multiple times in there that he didn't even know some of the basics of the case. And it's like, you're the head of the FBI. You went in there screaming that everything in there is a conspiracy or whatever, and you're gonna get to the bottom of it. It doesn't help that you got one eye hunting and one eye fishing. I'm already, not, like, like, inclined to trust you just looking at that. No offense. Yeah, but, like, then you go in there, and you don't even know where the cameras were on or how long they were allegedly on or where the.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Or.

[Julian Dorey]

Or the whole background, the detail on the staff at the prison when he allegedly killed himself in the whole bit, it's like, dude, you got. You got to give me more than that.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, either that or he. He knows. And it's. It's easier to claim, you know, to be ignorant, I guess, but I guess if you have sworn to take an oath and you're being pressured, coerced, isn't that when you resign and say, I can't, in good faith, execute?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's a fair point, and I'm.

[Mike Yagley]

Not being Pollyannish about it. Like, you have to make decisions all the time that are hard, but for something like this, if. If we do have a situation where a group of people got around a table and said, here's how we need to manage this story and control it, and you two are going to have to go out and take the arrows within six months. You're asking me to violate my oath. If there is. You're the FBI director. If there's information that is. Is. Gives you probable cause to investigate a crime, you know, you don't get to decide whether you should do it or not.

[Julian Dorey]

Now, not to get really dark here, but to get really dark, what if they come to you and say, you like your mom, you like your girlfriend, you like your brother, you want them to live a long, healthy life. I mean, I hate to be that guy, but shit does happen sometimes.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, absolutely. Which is why I haven't rushed out, you know, a substack post with pictures and graphics and, you know, because this is not. This is a. This is a law enforcement. This is a real thing. It's not a marketing. Some. Somebody did. Did do that where they got a data set and they. They wrote a story. It was pretty inconclusive, and there wasn't. There were no names named, but to your point, It's. This is. This is a matter for people that have badges to seek warrants and investigate.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

Not, you know, not citizen sleuths, to hold them accountable and do their job for them. And so. And whether it's dark forces, you know, you start naming names and you expose yourself to all sorts of.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Legal. Legal matters. That. That's not my. It's the responsibility of law enforcement to hold people accountable to the law. If they're not going to do it. You're sitting on a. It's a. It's. It's. It's on the. You're sitting on this device. You know, they're not sticking anything up here. It's only. They're up your ass. No doubt metaphorically.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, you gotta watch your words around there.

[Mike Yagley]

But, yeah, you're. There's a. There's a. I don't know how it's configured, but it's basically, you know, monitoring your. Your reactions by virtue of, you know, tightening your ass.

[Julian Dorey]

I know, but, like, what if. What if you had, like, beans for lunch or something? You just gotta take a. They like your line.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, you might. Or you have to. You have to tell them, but, yeah. And you're sitting there as they're, you know, looking at you through the. Through the glass, and you're like, yeah, okay, Do I look. Do I look like I'm. I'm evading? Do I look cool, calm?

[Julian Dorey]

You would look like you're evading all the time just because you look pissed off, like you're ready to get to your next project and whoever's in front of you is wasting your time. Like, I feel like that wouldn't change if you went into a polygraph.

[Mike Yagley]

You'd be like, oh, God damn it. It's. It's one of the most. I mean, it's designed to be that way because they need to elicit. But I. In my first one, I got into it with the guy to the point where, you know, he's like, you're not in control.

[Julian Dorey]

You're like, I'm not passing.

[Mike Yagley]

And. And I'm like, I. I'm not. I didn't, like, apply. I'm. I, I. I'm. I was asked to be here. I'm doing you a favor. So, you know.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Like, I'm not here because I filled out an application anyway.

[Julian Dorey]

All right, well, let's. Let's get back into where we left off with. With the Epstein stuff. So come a little bit this way if you want.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep, perfect.

[Julian Dorey]

So. So the part about you being. I Want to go back to the part about you being able to track where a phone goes or something like that. And you know, like the example I gave. Okay, person, bartender, person looks like victim. Here's how you track that. With all this backdated person looks like, you know, person is going to take advantage of the victim. Here's how you backed all that data. Victim in person leave. Go to what's clearly a bedroom unit. It stay there both on top of each other for, you know, two hours. One can assume when you then would mix that with depositions taken from victims, I would imagine that is quite a compelling case if a prosecutor wanted to give it. So if you have that type of information, I don't understand how they could ignore that.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, I think it's. So the, the rules of this goes into rules of evidence and is that location data evidence of anything? Can you sort of. Can you prove that, you know, the location of that device is actually the device of the person you are claiming it to belong to? And this gets into a lot of the. There are a lot of commercial companies that do really good things, that can do a lot of good things. And in a lot of cases, they develop information and they're looking for somebody to be able to action it who can conduct inherently governmental functions and go knock on somebody's door. They do an inherently. The job, the tasks that we want somebody who has a badge who knows how to do these things. When you have freelance O centers, open source and the freelancers are really good because they're clever. That, that, that breaks down in, in the rules of evidence because it wasn't conducted on a government computer by a certified investigator. Were the rights, you know, did. Did the rights of the accused, were they violated?

[Julian Dorey]

Because would they be violated if it's open?

[Mike Yagley]

Well, this gets into a lot of the confusion within the government, particularly within law enforcement about where does the fourth Amendment apply when it's commercially available. Open source is different story. Commercially available, where you had to go and purchase or acquire, you know, specific data sets. Carpenter sort of resolved those issues. But it's still very easy for defense to attack the provenance of the information. How did you get this lead? How did you know to go knock on this person's door if it's not following that chain of custody, that rule of evidence, it's difficult to keep that from being suppressed.

[Julian Dorey]

Couldn't it be redone though? That's the thing. The data's there. So let's say you were imperfect. Let's say you, Mike, were put it.

[Mike Yagley]

To you this way. The federal law enforcement agencies have these tools, these systems, these data sets. They could do it, redo it. They could do it on their own.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, yeah, 100% because it's all there. Their phones were already there, the data's.

[Mike Yagley]

Available, the historical take is there. So they, so if the convicted felon.

[Julian Dorey]

Was the one who gathered it from their bedroom or something, they're like well that's not going to play well in court. Then agent so and so could do it. And again I want to make the distinction here. Like if you look, one case I'm thinking about for example is the Silk Road case with Ross Ulbricht who obviously was now has, was pardoned and is no longer in prison after giving a double life sentence. Which that whole thing's crazy, but the way they even got to him was actually illegal. The FBI hacked into a server in Iceland completely illegally and broke the, and broke the fourth Amendment and that was just conveniently ignored. I get that. But like what's not illegal for example, is the. You'll see the FBI or police departments solve cold cases by. There was one, one example I'm thinking of, they, they followed a guy to the Philadelphia International Airport two years ago and waited for him to have a coffee, finish it and throw it out and went into the trash which is publicly available, took it out, DNA tested it and they solved a 30 year old murder.

[Mike Yagley]

I'm. I'm sure they had a warrant to do that.

[Julian Dorey]

They did not.

[Mike Yagley]

They did not have.

[Julian Dorey]

They did not. I let's double check that it was, it was the case in pa Dave Spilotra. Dave Cold case, Pennsylvania Airport. Yeah, it was Dave Sinopoly. I'm going to read this straight from see it from CBS News so that people understand the context, but Lancaster Police arrested 68 year old David Sinopoly for the alleged 1975 murder of a 19 year old woman on Sunday morning. He had been identified through a DNA sample obtained from a coffee cup at the Philadelphia International Airport. Let me skip down to where they got on February 11, 2022, investigators obtained DNA from Sinopoly from a coffee cup he used and threw it into a trash can before traveling at the Philadelphia International Airport. The coffee cup was then submitted to DNA Labs International for testing. It was determined that the DNA on the coffee cup contained a mixture of DNA with one male contributor. Additional blood samples from the 1975 crime scene further matched the DNA sample from the coffee cup. Now it doesn't say it explicitly right there, but I'm 99% sure. They did not have a warrant for this.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So if I. I suppose it'd be interesting case file if they wanted a DNA sample and they were. They would have brought them in and asked him to submit to a DNA sample. So. So be interesting to see what the. What the logic was behind surreptitiously acquiring the DNA sample.

[Julian Dorey]

Because it's Once he. Here's the thing. Trash is public once he throws it into a public trash can.

[Mike Yagley]

And if that's how they. If that's how they argued it and didn't have that evidence suppressed because.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

We just went dumpster diving and.

[Julian Dorey]

Right. You use public. This is what I'm saying. And this is also what's scary about this stuff in this case. It's a good context because were trying to solve a horrible thing. But you could see where this gets a little scary just because people don't realize the data they're giving up. But when I press accept on something I am now putting myself in a position to where things like that could get tracked and later used publicly and openly by someone else in their bedroom. Because I said yes.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Or through. About a month ago the it was revealed to members of Congress that the Durham investigation had subpoenaed cell phone data relating to the special. The special counsel.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

And Lindsey Graham, big supporter of the Patriot Act. Josh Hawley, big supporter of the Patriot Act. A bunch of others were their records. Their cell phone data was collected through the intercept methodologies and the FISA court that they all support. And when they found out their righteous indignation that how dare you.

[Julian Dorey]

Rules for thee not for me.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. I'd love to see Lindsey Graham's and these are particularly. Lindsey Graham is the big. You've got nothing to hide. What are you worried about? You're not a terrorist. What are you worried about? Every camera he rushed to to support the Patriot act was bolstered with this. We're looking for terrorists. You're not a terrorist. You have nothing to worry about. Out. Okay. So fast forward to a period of time in 10 years where things have gone really high and right. And there's an administration that wants to understand all of the cohorts that are Freedom second Amendment pick your political bent and we want to start tracking them because we have the historical data and we can couch it under all sorts of righteous means or we don't even need to. We have the capability so we can do it. So you know senators, you telling us that we should accept all of these surveillance capabilities and methods because we've got nothing to hide. It's not about. We've got nothing to hide. You don't have the right.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Even if I have nothing to hide.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. The road to hell is paved with alleged good intentions.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. It's the counterfactual. All those that are, you know, delivering something through the guise of kindness and virtue.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

Are most susceptible to evil.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

And so it was an interesting, Interesting to see them really losing their minds with Dan Bongino who was. Who was informing them of this and they had hearings about it. And these are the same guys who told us, hey, if you've got nothing to hide, what are you worried about now?

[Julian Dorey]

That's the guy I'm watching.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Dan Bongino. Because he, you know, he was. He was this very partisan conservative firebrand commentator. Had all these big opinions on stuff. Always looked like the vein in his forehead was going to pop and cause an aneurysm. Y And I would say that now the vein looks even bigger for an entirely different reason. Every time I see that guy talk, it is like he is holding in all the trauma of a nation's history. And that dam wants to break but isn't breaking. I do not see the same. That same type of like dam on cash or on what's her face. The.

[Mike Yagley]

The Pam Bondi.

[Julian Dorey]

I do not see that same thing. Bongino looks like he is in pain.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

When he is doing some of these appearances and whatever. So I am very much interested to see if at some point that will break. That said, I have had, I believe now it's four different people, but three prior to last April, meaning like in the year before this past April, stand out there from different contexts, totally different walks of life. But people who are in the know on certain things and assure me that we would never see the Epstein files, which, you know, I wasn't surprised. But you know, what they said to me was off record. But they all, they all gave the same answer as. As to why. And when I see, you know, it was a very broad answer, but I was like, yep. And now when I see the way that the backtracking has happened it to bring some of this back into English so that people can at least understand without me saying specifically anything that they said. When you're talking about a situation where people who are currently in a government fear that something this deep and this widespread would crash the entire system, forget just the government because once people had literal confirmation of everything that they're totally suspicious about, but once it was there on the page and Literally confirmed there could be some sort of enormous civil uprising. And, you know, now we're getting to really big terms here and stuff, but stuff in the country that would be quite unpopular. And I want to know. I'm a citizen, I have a right to know. When I look at that, though, and I listen to some of these people who also want to know as well and want the public to know. I see where the conundrum is, at least for something like this. So I. Bringing this back to you because you're looking at it from the outside and you were at least able to, you know, paint on a page like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at that, look at that, look at that. When you first heard about this case, obviously it was very dark and you're like, oh, my God. And you're like, wow, this guy knew a lot of people. But then when you first start actually working on it and you start to see the data popping up and you're seeing it's in years after he's convicted and you're seeing the types of people it is. Did you, like, have a moment.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Where you were just like, didn't see that coming or 100%. And, and that's. I think the risk is there needs to be this faith or fundamental foundational belief or belief in our systems that, that we have good people who do the right thing and don't need, you know, they know what the right thing is. As I'm sort of developing this list, there were moments where I was like, this is. This doesn't make sense. I must be wrong.

[Julian Dorey]

You must be wrong.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Because my cognitive dissonance was. He wouldn't do something like that. He wouldn't be affiliated with this guy because he's. I have this, this pre. This bias that was running contrary to what the data was saying.

[Julian Dorey]

But then the data starts painting a story.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, I'm, I'm. I'm back testing it and I got to make sure use other data sets. Is it the same, you know, is it this? Am I seeing the same thing? The data. A multi decimal, latitudinal and longitudinal coordinate does not lie.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Did you get mad?

[Mike Yagley]

I think that that was one of the. That's, that's one of those inflection points where you start listening to people and you're like, you're full of. Yeah, but what's. I think the more troubling aspect of this is I don't think they're really afraid of going to jail. I think they're more concerned about their public Image, which, you know, what does that say about, about someone's character?

[Julian Dorey]

I think there's also a lot of people who enjoy, forget just their public image. What's the underlying cause there that it's tied to? They enjoy the power they have going into rooms anywhere, and they know that if they lose the public image, they.

[Mike Yagley]

Will lose the power.

[Julian Dorey]

Right. And so it comes back to basic human, you know, desire, greed, the whole bit. I don't mean to oversimplify it, but I think there's a lot of that. And also, you know, in a first world country like America, this would not be true in some other countries around the world, sadly. But in a country like this, I'm happy to see it. True that if there's one thing there's no coming back from, it's fucking a kid or doing, you know, being a pedophile. It's like the lowest thing.

[Mike Yagley]

Right.

[Julian Dorey]

There's no possibly.

[Mike Yagley]

There's no Charlie Sheen, you know, rehab tour. Yeah. I was thinking, so just look at the amount. The number of people who told us for years that President Biden has never been sharper, never been more on top of the game, who clearly, you know, you know that you're not, you know that that's not the case. You see it every day. But to call it, call, call it out, put your, put your, put your place in the West Wing in, in jeopardy. So you're gonna, you're gonna perpetuate that narrative and toe the line.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. And I also think when you have threats behind the scenes, that has to be taken into account for sure. You know, with this guy, it's very hard for me to not see him being tied to Mossad because there are just what, it's like, how many touch points do you need before it's like, okay, this is just kind of what it is. That said, I also think that at some point along the way, of course, and if you were my educated guess, would be this probably was the late 90s. I think that our intelligence services figured out who he was for sure and realized that because of some of the, you know, compromise that he had built up, they were not as crazy as this sounds. Just hear me out on this, people. They were not in a position to full stop it, which is bizarre. But I could see where that argument comes in from an intelligence perspective. And I think what they probably did is said, you're going to pay a tax, pal. I think they probably went to him and said, we know who you are. We know what you're doing. You. This is Horrible. You know that, that we know that we can't stop it because of some other things and some things that you've done. So that being said, it's like when a bunch of people are holding a gun to each other in a standoff, it's like, like you're going to pay a 10 tax. Now you're getting this information. We want to know some of it. And I think that that also is a part of the reason. And again, this is all a hypothesis. Educated guess. I don't know any of this, but I think that's also some of the reason that there is a covering of tracks. Because at some point it's not like he was a, a guy that CIA had cultivated, but he was probably a guy that they got some intelligence from. And it's like, well, are you going to admit that a dude who was sex trafficking at the darkest, worst, highest levels on your own proper someone that you went to and technically allowed for this to happen?

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. Yeah. There are.

[Julian Dorey]

Ford Blue Cruise hands free.

[Mike Yagley]

Highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in BlueCruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Extra Explorer and Mustang Mach E available feature on equipped vehicles Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details. Some of. If you work in the field, you are going to have to be able to work with people that you find despicable.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

It, it's just you're not there to make friends. You are there to extract intelligence. And some of the people that have actionable, valuable intelligence are terrible. Yes, it's. So there's, there's some, some reality to the business, but I think that this is, this is where maybe they thought they could control it, control him, keep the narrative tight and he goes and gets himself arrested. And then you have a U.S. attorney saying there's nothing here, he's linked to intelligence. And we're not, we're not pressing the issue. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And you're referring to Alex Acosta. Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Who did, who, where, where did that come from? That's. I think he would know.

[Julian Dorey]

Which, by the way, did you hear about the other prosecutor this week and this, this story? Maybe you could use your little cell phone powers on this one. It'd be going back a big ways though. But it was this guy, Matthew Menshell, who was prosecuting him down in Florida and left the prosecution shortly before the deal went through. They found records of him, socializing with Epstein, like in Aspen in the years before that, and then in the years after his conviction, 2011, 2013, 2015, when this guy was now in the private sector, having dinners with him, the whole bit. And it's like, are you fucking. So you knew what he was about. I'll even give you the benefit of the doubt and say when you were in Aspen or wherever, you were in 01 with him, you didn't know. I think you knew, but you didn't know.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

But then you work the case, you had access to everything, and you go to dinners with this guy, like, what are you doing in your personal life that he's got on video? That's what I want to know.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. It's like Harvey Weinstein. Everybody knew he was a pig, but yet, you know, oh, that's just Harvey.

[Julian Dorey]

It's just Harvey. Yeah. I had, I had Sarma Mangalis in here, who wasn't even Hollywood or anything, and she had, she even had a story because she was in the New York scene. She didn't know Harvey at all, but. But she knew who he was. And one day, just walking down the street, just, she's like. Now you're like, oh, my God. He just assumed he could do anything. He said, are you an actress? Like. Like, she's a good looking woman. But she was like, no. Yeah, like that. That. He went right to it. That's what he wanted.

[Mike Yagley]

He's like, I can get you a role. I. I have a trade here. How about I have something to trade.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Now, there was a story I was just getting because we don't have deef in here today, but he gave me the link just now. That's what I was looking for while you were answering that last question. So thank you for your patience here. But there was a story that the Washington Post put out in May 2023. Called, and I'll put it up here for at least you and me to look at, called Bill Gates, Leon Black, Thomas Pritzker, One Day in the Life of Jeffrey Epstein. And what they did is they got access to his calendar on September 8, 2014, and tracked all these meetings and they were able to track where the meetings took place. So I'm remembering this from when I read this a couple years ago. It's a long article, so I'm not going through it right now, but people go through. And you can check this on archive is by copying the link in to get around the paywall for this. That's the Mike Benz trick. But he met with Bill Gates I believe one of the meetings, if I remember correctly, was in the morning at his East 71st street apartment. And then the next meeting was at. Was in midtown that they walked to together or something. Imagine just like going back in time and seeing Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein walking down the street together. It's like Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein, but it's absolutely crazy. But question being, if you looked at something like this, could you go back and buy data and show me everywhere they went that day 2014?

[Mike Yagley]

Sure.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Y. I want you to do that.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And if you get good information, I want you to put a substack out because this is already publicly available. You wouldn't be breaking.

[Mike Yagley]

Do these, do these. So, so Pritzker. That's, that's, that's a name.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, these are all names, man.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Leon Black's on there.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. So, yeah, So I might already have this because Mortimer Zuckerman, he's a big media mogul. Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

Leon Botstein, Barnaby Marsh, Ramsey El Coley, Catherine Rumler. I believe Catherine was JP Morgan, if I remember correctly. Let me see if I get that right.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So I mean this is the. The executive assistants were good about telling their principal exactly where they needed to be and. And when.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes. And you know, the whole. The Leon Black thing's very dark Y. Because he, he financed Jeffrey Epstein in the last seven. Five to seven years of his life to the tune of $257 million. This is a guy who, he and his wife were the chair of MoMA. You know, they. He was the founder of Apollo Global, which also I do have to give a shout out to Josh Harris who gets shit all the time as a shitty sports owner. I know, I don't like him as Sixers owner, but Josh Harris was a co founder of Apollo and he was the guy who was going to take over. Apollo is always known. And then he was pushed out because he wanted Black out of the company because he said this is bullshit and put his foot down. And you don't see enough guys like standing up and doing that. But, but for Josh, I know that was like his lifelong dream to be able to have complete control of the company he founded.

[Mike Yagley]

And he, you know, he had to make a choice.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Yes.

[Julian Dorey]

And he made the right choice. I do appreciate that a lot.

[Mike Yagley]

So, so my. I think I already have this built out.

[Julian Dorey]

This one.

[Mike Yagley]

I mean I have obviously more, but the three specific.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, I mean I got a date for you, I got addresses, I got a lot for you to work with right here. The Wall Street Journal, I should say, has a lot for you to work.

[Mike Yagley]

With, but wouldn't be too difficult.

[Julian Dorey]

I would love to see that. Because the call never came. But you made out outbound calls to people.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Julian Dorey]

And what was the nature, without revealing who you called or maybe some specifics that could be off record, what was the nature of the reaction there? Like, this is too dark, stay the fuck out of this. Or something else?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, the. The reaction was, I will push this where I can, but I'm not going to push it with, with an agenda.

[Julian Dorey]

What do you mean with an agenda?

[Mike Yagley]

I'm not going to die on this hill. I will, I will let people know who are attached to the case that we have a data set. And if they want to call you, they will call you.

[Julian Dorey]

And they never did. Okay, so there was another one. And this one always stuck in my crawl.

[Mike Yagley]

And this was right around. This was right around the time because I was in that building a lot telling them about their Grinder problem.

[Julian Dorey]

Their Grinder problem.

[Mike Yagley]

Their Grinder problem.

[Julian Dorey]

Like the app Grinder.

[Mike Yagley]

The app Grinder.

[Julian Dorey]

Oh, please fill me in on this.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So everybody knows what Grind, the cohort and the audience that Grindr serves. I got involved because a private equity firm with ties to the CCP was acquiring Grindr.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

And that struck me as odd because why would. What's China up to? Just was not. Wasn't like IAC, you know, adding to their portfolio of hotels.com and you know, their other online dating sites, OkCupid or whatever their apps are. And in that data set, because Grindr is not really anybody that wanted to bid place and add. There was a lot of Grindr data in these commercial data sets. And so one of the questions was, why are we seeing so much Grindr? And then the second question is, why? Why is China interested in Grindr? And so I did some analysis in my, you know, national security home office and was seeing dwells of devices originating at sensitive government locations, going to various places in and around the D.C. area for about a dwell time of 20 minutes or so, dwelling with another device. That wasn't necessarily. It wasn't a meeting, an off site meeting between two government employees. Although we did have. We did. We. I did see a hookup between to government employees who probably didn't know they were. That's nice. And so, you know, meanwhile, we're seeing this proliferation of people in national security positions, their patterns of life. I can see them where they start, where they meet, where they go home to other buildings. This is not an App that should be owned by the CCP and cfius, the Committee on Foreign Investment, that. That analyzes acquisitions of national companies of national prominence or national security prominence. They intervened and forced the repatriation of Grindr back to US Ownership. But spending time explaining to the senior. The senior cadre at the FBI what Grindr is, that was. That took a lot of creativity in how I was communicating. And there was, you know, and your folks will appreciate this. My. The inflection of my voice probably dropped to the point that irritates the. Out of them.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Because I'm like, sir, Grindr is not an app you find your. The love of your life on. Well, what are you doing with it, sir? This is. This is aggregation of immediate. Immediate gratification and, you know, sensitive site exploitation.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. So would it kill these guys going Ashley Madison or something? Yeah, I mean, you know, yes, it's more normal, I guess, for, like, blackmail purposes. It's less. It's more like, ah, you got a goombah. But it's like, oh, you got a wife at home, but you're seeing a dude.

[Mike Yagley]

But I was, for us, now, I was work. I was walking the halls with this type of information, you know, these types of data sets and what one could probably, with high probability, infer about patterns of life, people. And. And we weren't. We weren't. It wasn't a witch hunt to out anybody. It was, you know, this is. This is high valuable large language model training data.

[Julian Dorey]

Mike's like, if you're gay, we gonna find you, boy.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you'd see, you know, it's. It's.

[Julian Dorey]

You don't want that in CCP hands. I completely understand.

[Mike Yagley]

I don't think so.

[Julian Dorey]

So you. You were. You assisted in stopping that?

[Mike Yagley]

I think so.

[Julian Dorey]

For you.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

Now, not to let a great American company.

[Julian Dorey]

That's right.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, we got to keep these great American.

[Julian Dorey]

Keep them right here, America. But with all the data that you're getting, you're tracking location stuff, obviously, you're tracking patterns of life and all that. Every great investor investigator I've ever talked with, you know, from any level of anything, whether it be a detective or a guide, FBI or, you know, someone who's tracking stuff for intelligence, they'll always say the phrase, follow the money, right? That's what they're looking for. The money is always going to be the end. All be all answer. I mean, you solve murder cases following the money. How much of that. I mean, I don't even know if that incorporates into anything you do. But how much of that, if it does, incorporates into what you do for you to be able to put like two and two together, where you're like, oh, I can track that. He. He's moving money to this. Can you even track, like, if they're moving money to this bank account or something with the data you look at?

[Mike Yagley]

No, that's, that is, that's an interceptor. That's, that's accessing. And I've been asked to look at, you know, can you detect money laundering or can you detect money layering and, you know, things that are financial in nature. You're not necessarily looking at flow of funds, but, you know, is somebody visiting an ATM machine, you know, seven different ATM machines in the period of an hour because they're layering withdrawals or deposits. And that's, that's hard. That's hard to do because it's like, I need to detect you at this ATM at this millisecond that you're there. And. But flow financial analysis, that's a harder, It's a harder beast because you need to, you need to get into the systems. And you remember, like, I didn't hack, engineer, intercept, or steal. So I'm not hacking into these systems to understand these patterns of life, which, you know, from a, from a cost perspective, like, if I, if I, if I don't have to hack to, to detect the flow of funds, but I can understand patterns of life that give me other avenues. Is that a, A more cost effective, faster way of, of getting to what I'm getting? What. Getting to what I need in order to, to build a, to. To write an affidavit or a request for a warrant.

[Julian Dorey]

Gotcha. Yeah. Because one of the threads I've never seen someone pull on is the 1992 thread with Robert Maxwell. So when Tara Palmeri did that podcast, she did two. One was called like the Maxwells. The other one was called like Epstein, and they were both eight parts. It was basically a documentary where they just didn't have cameras. She's going around interviewing people, hat she had Virginia Joffre Giuffre coming around with her, who's now deceased, you know, who was a victim of Epstein. But one of the most surreal interviews I've ever heard was she got Juan Alessi, the housekeeper for Epstein. He agreed to go on tape. And so this was one of those situations where she and Virginia showed up to his house that had a gate outside of it and introduced who it was. And Virginia just said, oh, my God, Juan, he Goes, oh, my God. Yeah, come in. And they come in and they ask, like, hey, we're doing an investigation. Would you agree to be recorded? And to his credit, he said yes. And it's one of the. The most painful things to listen to because you simultaneously are like, how the. Could you let this happen? And you also feel bad for the guy at the same time. It's a very strange dynamic. But to his credit, he was very forthcoming about a lot of things. And one of the things he laid out that stuck with me is he goes, you know, he worked for Jeffrey in, like, the late 80s. He's like. He had wealth, nothing crazy.

[Mike Yagley]

That's right. I saw this.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

He lived on, and all of a sudden it's like.

[Julian Dorey]

Like, yeah, right. He said, 1992, something crazy happened, man. Like, you know, he suddenly. He had the plane. He got.

[Mike Yagley]

He got the apartment, and Tony Montana right there.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Sorry.

[Julian Dorey]

But, yeah, you get. First you get the power, then you get the money. But anyway, so he was like, he. And, you know, he started. He was balling, like, hundreds of millions of dollars seemingly came through the door. And the connection here, I'm bringing this up because of some of the L Brands work you did, but Leslie Wexner signed over that apartment, only 71st street, to him, effectively for free. It's the number one townhouse in the United States.

[Mike Yagley]

He signed over power of attorney.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Oh, yeah. More than that. But I'm saying, like, literally his dwelling, and gave it to him.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

At the end of 1991, November 1991, Robert Maxwell died off the coast of Africa and on his yacht. Now, they say he killed himself. I don't think he did. I think Robert Maxwell was a raging narcissist who, you know, we also know was a prolific spy. He was most likely approached by his people, kind of like Frank Pantangeli and Godfather 2, and said, Listen, gotta do.

[Mike Yagley]

The right thing over.

[Julian Dorey]

Gotta do the right thing like the Roman army used to do. And he couldn't do it. And so they probably. I am speculating, but they probably did it for. For him. And ironically, Robert Maxwell left behind, like, a $450 million pension scam and his estate destitute. What's interesting about that is you have a wealthy scion leaving behind a fraud that's not exactly looked upon well by society. And yet his two sons, who were put on trial for it after he died, were found not guilty in British courts. That's pretty. Pretty hard to do. Secondly, whether you like the guy or not, and I see no Reason to like him. But. But he was put in a position to be a very effective businessman. He had major companies that made a lot of money. And the idea that suddenly he was worth nothing and needed to bilk his pension for his employees at the Daily Mail, as the second largest publication in the world, makes. This is when Princess Diana was alive, too. They're printing money left and right. No way. The fact then that Jeffrey Epstein gets all this money funneled to him in the immediate aftermath of that, and we know by estimations is worth somewhere. You know, he was worth at that point, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 or $450 million. And no one knows how this guy ever made any money besides that.

[Mike Yagley]

Given financial advice as whoever he worked.

[Julian Dorey]

For, which no one ever saw him do. That was another thing Juan Alessi said. He's like, I never really saw him work. Never saw him giving advice.

[Mike Yagley]

The guy who's like, you know, the guy who is. Is really good at hiding money. That's. That's a. That's a skill that you don't just, you know, watch a YouTube video.

[Producer Joey Deef]

That's right.

[Mike Yagley]

How to. You're an accountant. Right. And. And you know how to. You know how to do this.

[Julian Dorey]

That's what I'm saying. So no one's ever pulled on that thread. And the problem is, it's before we got iPhones and stuff like that. So I don't. I don't think you could do it. But there has to be someone who's good who could find a way to pull on that thread and find something there, because I have no proof to be able to say definitively this is what it is. But there is a lot of circumstantial evidence when you look at the players involved and who they were involved with that says somehow that got from point A to point B, you know, the.

[Mike Yagley]

Money trail's got to be there. This isn't. You know, we're not funneling $888 to avoid a suspicious activity report. So I think. I think a lot. This is how I. I look at all of this. Like, all right, I have sort of common sense informed by experience. Occam's razor. When you try to assign some complex explanation to something, when in reality it's like what you're seeing is what it is.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

There's no. You don't need to build all this complexity into understanding. So what is all of this?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Experience and common sense telling me there's more to it than just a guy who got lucky and whether it was Mossad or there was definitely an influence operation underway. Because what's the point of all of this? Who, Ben, you know, Kibono. Who benefits? I don't know. But there are too many, too many facts that just don't make sense in, in trying to assign them logical explanations.

[Julian Dorey]

Correct.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, he was, you know, really good or why. And, and if you look at, at like why Epstein, because he was probably controllable and he could be told what to do. But you know, I think that there's, there's more to it than, and common sense saying there's more. There's something here. If we have, you know, I think from a, a, from a government perspective, I think we lean, we, we over classify. You know, the 25 year old OSINT analyst, you know, reads an article in the New York Times and thinks there's something there that should be looked at, you know, that becomes a, you know, top secret thing, artifact.

[Julian Dorey]

That's.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, when we're dealing with, you know, human intelligence and operations where people could get killed because they're working with us, classify that shit like Americans do not need to know. But when we start over classifying, then, you know, the bias is to do something that, you know, maybe you wouldn't normally do, but I can classify it and keep it, keep it out of, keep it from transparency.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

And I just, I think we've, we've gone so far, so far, you know, in, in classifying everything that we don't know how to unravel something like we gotta, we got ahead of ourselves. This was good intentions but you know, this was, this was a, an operation that went bad and we need to shed daylight on that if, if there was involvement.

[Julian Dorey]

Well, that's the thing. It's like, it's like a bad gambler. You get so deep in the hand that you just have to keep doubling down and it feels like they've had to be dishonest so many times about that.

[Mike Yagley]

They believe that. They believe, you know, whatever they've, whatever they're telling themselves.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

I, I don't know. But again, what I do know is.

[Julian Dorey]

That.

[Mike Yagley]

Any common sense person is going to look at this, of course, and say what?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, it's a unifying issue.

[Mike Yagley]

So. Yeah, and I think that, I think the, the administration would be surprised by the public's reaction if there was something to be transparent about that might hurt the fabric or I think they'd be surprised by the reasonableness of Americans to say, okay, the transparency.

[Julian Dorey]

Really?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

You believe that?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. If people violated Laws broke laws. We need prosecutions, not special count. We need people to get prosecuted. We don't have enough of that. But I think that the American people would be able to say, okay, we're not. You're gonna. Somebody's going to be accountable. But this notion that we need to be protected by people who know better, I think is. Is how we get ourselves into these predicaments. Patriot Act. Well, if you saw the intel that I know, tell me the. Show me, Senator, tell me the intel. Show me the intel that you're seeing that necessitates bulk data collection on every American. And don't tell me it's pedophilia and Al Qaeda.

[Julian Dorey]

Yep.

[Mike Yagley]

Show me. Tell what Are. Tell us. And. And you might just find public opinion saying, okay, we agree.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, but they would never want that. They don't want to put power in the hands of the people because it's.

[Mike Yagley]

So powerful to say, if you saw the intel that I saw.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, if you knew what I.

[Mike Yagley]

If you knew, I was read in. I went into the skiff. Okay, yeah. All right. And you see that, you know, one minute they are the proponent of. Of. Of civil rights and privacy, and they get the read on. And now they are all in. Yes, they are. This was cool. You know, I got a classified brief. This is cool. I'm all in. And I think that that's, you know, power is seductive.

[Julian Dorey]

You know, I was watching last weekend, Dark Knight Rises, the third Batman from Christopher Nolan. Hadn't watched that one in years. Which, by the way, underrated movie. Like, it's a. It's a banger of a movie all the way through that one. Got some. Because, like, the Dark Knight was a perfect movie. So people are like, how can you follow that up and everything? But Dark Knight Rises is an incredible movie. But watching it now, it came out in 2012, it was probably written in like 2010. The. The underlying themes socially in that script. This is pre, like this whole era and everything. Yeah, man, did they really nail it. When you're talking about, like, the fact that it's elites versus everybody else. And it is a. There's a growing anger underpinning that that can lead to chaos. I see so many parallels there. And you look at history, this is how societies fall. Like when you get. Get a too concentrated elite that says, we know best and this is everyone, whether it be government or the people that pay them. Right. And the circle of life that exists there, there. There is almost no better example than this case, than the Epstein case. When you are looking at that thematically in society. And when you see the clear, very public cover up that's occurring to protect all of these people, whether it be people in government, but frankly in more cases, in fact, people that are just powerful figures in banking or entertainment, or you insert blank here, these very ultra wealthy people, it's like you're going to disintegrate public trust more and more. Especially when people are seeing less and less opportunity.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Or there are two sets of laws.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

I can tell you if I was where you were in the proximity of a known sexual exploitation ring, you wouldn't be able to keep cops out of your house.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

So I think that that's what is being projected here, is that there are two sets of standards. And if the narrative is, you know, the fabric of society would be torn to pieces if. I don't, I don't. I think that that's a theory. I think they've convinced themselves of that. I don't buy it. Because I think there would be overwhelming support to see people who know better being held accountable. Yes. Notwithstanding their importance to the financial infrastructure of the United States and projecting, you know, doing the work of the treasury overseas under the mantle of a rock that may be black.

[Julian Dorey]

Let's see what he did there. That's good. Yeah. No, the financial terrorism.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Internal financial terrorism is a very, very real thing.

[Mike Yagley]

Absolutely.

[Julian Dorey]

And it puts the government in a very precarious situation, especially when it's a lot of the people they rely on for funding.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. You know what? Another good movie. Is that projected or was prescient in where we are Today Fight Club.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Ah.

[Mike Yagley]

Chuck palace one was like, you know, consumerism and, you know, the haves versus the have nots and the, the, you know, sort of the, the fight back or the pushback by the, you know, the working class privacy. He had a lot of those in. Was that 99?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, yeah. 98, 99. Something like that. That's interesting. Yeah. I agree.

[Mike Yagley]

Too fat.

[Julian Dorey]

Another, another example. I want to know if you ever looked at this, but this was always fascinating to me. So back in 2020, 21 or 2022, Steve Bannon, former advisor to the President, former head of Breitbart, runs that show the war room now prominent, you know, I guess like right wing activists, if that's what you want to call them, who's also come in the crosshairs of the government, which is interesting. Steve Bannon released a 30 second ish video in a trailer, some sort of trailer of Jeffrey Epstein talking with him on Camera. And the only 30 seconds he showed is actually hilarious, where Bannon's, like, actually pressing me goes, you've been accused of doing some horrific, despicable things to women, you know, and. And all this and that. Like, what do you have to say for yourself? It's hard not to laugh. But, like, Epstein was like, I. I actually believe the future is women. I'm. I'm. I'm a big time's up guy. I'm a feminist, like, with the Brooklyn accent. It's almost just crazy in your face, right? So you're just looking at this like, okay, the most prolific sex trafficker in modern history, or just history that we know of, is saying something that comical and thinking we're going to believe it is crazy. But Bannon pressed this as a forthcoming documentary that includes his sit downs with Epstein. The timing of when those sit downs happen, though, is quite fascinating to me. Bannon was fired as advisor to the president in August 2017. And I actually will never forget this day, because I remember it was a cloudy Friday, and I worked near Morristown Airport, where Trump flies into in the summers. And so when he would go there on the weekends, a lot of times on a Friday afternoon, they would shut down fucking 40 roads around there. So I had to go drop off something to a client. And then I was coming up on these roads. I'm like, God damn it. He's flying in. I'm like, you know, it's like this big story that Ben and had been fired, but Steve Bannon got in. I mean, maybe you could find this out. Got in a car or a train or something and went straight up to New York City and spent the weekend with Jeffrey Epstein and interviewed him, according to Steve himself, for 18 hours on camera. Epstein later talked about this with people, and then Bannon teased that this would come out and then never put it out. Now you have 18 hours of footage with the most prolific trafficker at the middle of the biggest conspiracy that I can remember in my lifetime. And you're not putting that out. I would love to know where else they were that weekend.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Just. Just right there.

[Julian Dorey]

I mean, it sounds like they spent a lot of time and time on camera, but, like, where else did they go? Who did they talk to? Yeah, you know, and why has that never been released? I bring that up because I think it'd be very interesting to get Mike Yagley on that, just to, like, track the cell phone data from that weekend and the week afterwards to see where Epstein went and where Bannon went.

[Mike Yagley]

Put that on the list. I did not, I'm not, I was not tracking his, his expose on, on, on Jeffrey. But.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay, well, now it's on your list.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Julian Dorey]

We'll leave that one there. There's a lot here with Epstein. And I'm sure I'll talk to you off camera, but, but I am biased here. I would very much like you to release some of your data. Cause I think that would be in the public's best interest. I'm sure people in the comments are gonna be challenging you to do that. I know you read those things.

[Mike Yagley]

It's having the mirror held up to one's face. You know, you never knew, you never knew what you needed to know about your demeanor. I don't do cocaine, by the way.

[Julian Dorey]

I didn't think you did cocaine. You look like a monster's guy.

[Mike Yagley]

I mean, I, I. Nicotine, yes, but cocaine has not, not even back in the day.

[Julian Dorey]

No hockey player.

[Mike Yagley]

Never.

[Julian Dorey]

Never. Good for you. That's hard to do.

[Mike Yagley]

I've never smoked dope, smoked marijuana.

[Julian Dorey]

Good for you.

[Mike Yagley]

It's just never appealed to me.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, but.

[Mike Yagley]

So nicotine, caffeine.

[Julian Dorey]

All right. Nothing wrong with that.

[Mike Yagley]

That's fine.

[Julian Dorey]

Anyway, but there were other things we didn't talk about last time that I want to get to. We're gonna talk about Palantir, we're gonna talk about AI, But I think to kind of get into that even before we go there. Your background, long before the whole Syria thing is something we didn't discuss. So you just kind of dump this one on me towards the end of the last one.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

In, after 9 11, in the years after that, at some point you came into contact with darpa, which is probably the most mysterious government organization in existence, and did some sort of, as you put it, data work with them. Would you care to explain how you got into contact with them?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So post 9 11, there was a concerted effort to fix the gaps in systems that would have, would have picked, would have been able to detect the plot happening right underneath our noses. It really wasn't a systems problem because we knew about the country, the agencies knew about these guys long before they got here. But, you know, there was this rush to be able to aggregate all sorts of commercial data that would reveal anomalies in anomalies against baseline of typical behavior. So did somebody pay with cash when everybody pays with a credit card, that kind of anomaly? Or did somebody fly into an airport and then go rent a car at a different airport? You know, just those types of things that are not Obvious. Not obvious indicators of anything, but they are outliers. And this was before we had the language of large language models or AI as a. As a system that could. That could do all of these things. So DARPA stood up a program called Total Information Awareness to you.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

And DARPA is, you know, I was. My last pitch to DARPA went down in. In flames. And I. And. And like, I think I'm right about, about the premise, but it's one of those, you know, they were throwing questions and it's like, you know, I. I'm not quite there yet, so. But DARPA is not that mysterious. It's basically a bunch of projects that are either looking 20 years down the horizon as to what the future of warfare looks like, or they're solving the immediate problem today.

[Julian Dorey]

It's got departments.

[Mike Yagley]

It's got departments. Yep. They're in downtown Arlington, so you can walk by the building. It's not.

[Julian Dorey]

There's not a black campus we know about.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. And so the program was really one of the most. Characterize it as the first attempt at building a large language model around these data sets that would provide early indicators and warnings of something unusual or suspicious.

[Julian Dorey]

And this is like 0506.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep, yep. Program got shut down because of privacy. Privacy sensitivities, if you can believe it. It. Because it was, you know, total information awareness. And the logo was like an eye and a panopticon. It just, you know, it looked very 33rd degree. Not good optics. But, you know, back at the time, it was all right, so what are these data sets? How do we get them? What are we even talking about as, you know, a data set that we would put into this machine build algorithms or rules to flag these anomalistic characteristics of transactions. Those system. That is. That is how we are configured. That was, you know, the precursor to kind of how we configure systems today. You talk about Palantir. It was the precursor to a system like Palantir where you've got all of the data and a common operating picture.

[Julian Dorey]

Why did they pluck you to work on this and you know, approximately ballpark like how many other people might be working on something like this?

[Mike Yagley]

There was some right place, right time. But I had been doing this integration of external data sets into operational business commercial systems fuse in these data sets with your point of sale system to give better predictive capability for running your retail operations or supply chain. So I had been doing this before commercial data became this thing that everybody's focused on. And I could talk about It, I could explain it in a way that, that made it easy for people to understand what we were talking about.

[Julian Dorey]

You mentioned you work with like, John Poindexter in there. So John Poindexter was the national Security advisor to Reagan.

[Mike Yagley]

Correct.

[Julian Dorey]

Longtime Navy guy, I think, like a lot of different.

[Mike Yagley]

Admiral Poindexter. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

So he was, he was the, he was the program manager. So he activated himself, I believe after 9 11. He, he had already retired, fired, had already been acquitted.

[Julian Dorey]

So he was acquitted for the Contra.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Yeah. So he was looking to, to get back into the fight after 9 11. And he, he was, he's a really smart guy. He talks about, you know. Yeah. Dr. Teller called me and we had this fight about thermodynamics, and I told him he's all wrong. Dr. Teller?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Like the nuclear physicist?

[Mike Yagley]

Exactly. So he activated himself because he comes from a systems background. He's got a PhD in physics. So kind of the right guy to start developing this system of systems to be an answer to, to the, to the gaps in intelligence post 9 11.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay, so when you, like, what's it, what's it like, though, to be pulled into a place that has access to, you know, the brightest minds from the private sector all coming together to like, work for the government to solve the most complex problem problems? Like, what is that? Like the first day you walk in there and realize you're in the middle of this?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, you, this is, this is the advice that I give to, like, kids, you know, you don't have talking, you're not learning anything. So it's okay to be, you know, to let the grownups at the table talk and learn. Building a system. Like, I'd not done a government system of that proportion with that level of ambition. And I'm just sort of jotting down notes like, okay, how are we going to go? How do we approach American Airlines and ask them for data related to ticket purchases, passenger manifests without hacking their system?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, we're violating privacy.

[Mike Yagley]

We weren't trying to do that. It's like, hey, all hands on deck. This is a counterterror thing. Will you participate voluntarily?

[Julian Dorey]

Will you participate voluntarily?

[Mike Yagley]

Exactly.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, that's, that's about how you did it, right?

[Mike Yagley]

Not, not, not, not quite elbow like that? A little bit. Yeah. Before it could go operational, Congress got word of it and fun. Pulled, pulled funding for it. Huh.

[Julian Dorey]

Was that the end of your work with DARPA.

[Mike Yagley]

For that program? At that point? Yeah. Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

You later did work with them once you got pulled in after the serious Stuff, though.

[Mike Yagley]

So, you know, it's interesting. DARPA I know, has been sort of tangential or adjacently looking at ad tech as a, you know, as a. As a defensive data set. But for the, for the work that I was doing for jsoc, DARPA was not involved in that.

[Julian Dorey]

So when did you come back to them then? In what context?

[Mike Yagley]

I pitch ideas.

[Julian Dorey]

Oh. Oh, got it.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay. So it's like an ongoing. Like, you have that door to go knock on as you're working on things that you think would be relevant, but you haven't necessarily gone in and run a project there since then.

[Mike Yagley]

No, no, no.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay.

[Mike Yagley]

No, I don't, I don't know that I've got the academic credentials to be a BS on staff at darpa.

[Julian Dorey]

I mean, I've heard you listen to Annie Jacobson. They were trying to telepathically talk with dolphins in 1991.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So, like, I want to know, like you mentioned it, you're like, oh, they can work on stuff 20 years ahead. I've heard as much as 30 to 50.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And it makes you wonder, like, what they got. And, you know, you said you were working on an LLM just being pulled in there the first time in 05 06. It's like, how minute is like an open AI to what they have and therefore can we even track what they have? If they were using that in the real world right now, would we even know about it?

[Mike Yagley]

So I think this is the, the, there's been a bit of inversion where the, the advances, like the, the moonshot advances that. I think the moonshot advances are coming out of the commercial sector. I don't think they can keep pace.

[Julian Dorey]

You don't think DARPA can keep.

[Mike Yagley]

I think they're. I think they're tracking and, and, but they're not, they're not inventing the Internet.

[Julian Dorey]

They're not. What makes you so comfortable that they're not in. That they're not at the forefront of that? Because there are some weird ties between some of the founders of these companies. And I'm not even. By the way, that doesn't have to be negative, but, like, it doesn't look awesome.

[Mike Yagley]

So I think it's just, it's the pace of innovation. And DARPA is a government organization. The pace of innovation coming out of OpenAI or any, any of these other companies, compared to their pace of innovation, particularly when we're talking about, like, things that I can implement today, it's. That's a hard thing to scale as a, as a Competitor, as a government competitor, I think, you know, there's, there's, there should be a lot of cooperation between the R D and the S T branches of, of government, because by the time they develop their own version of OpenAI, there'll be, you know, version 10 beyond GPT, you know, 12 by the time we were able to catch up or the government would be able to catch up. So I think there's just needs to be this, There needs to be more openness to commercial innovation because it just, it's. The pace is, it's too fast because.

[Julian Dorey]

Well, also, in like fairness to you, Mike, you're compartmentalized as well. It's not like when you're brought on there, brought in there to darpa, they take you to a big room and say, here's everything we're working.

[Mike Yagley]

Here's our portfolio. Do you have anything on hypersonics?

[Julian Dorey]

No, they, they say, here's a problem we have. We've brought you in to help solve this. This is the place you have access to. You don't have access to other shit that's not. That doesn't involve you. Just focus on this thing. For all you know, you could be being used as a guinea pig to see if, like, all right, let's bring in some people from the private sector, see if they could even figure out what we have right here and see. You know what I mean?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Hypothetically, I suppose it could be that. Because I got to assume. And again, this might not be positive. There's a lot of ways this could be very negative. But I gotta assume the government is hand in hand on things like that. Especially when you look at the power and some of the talent that they bring in to some of these places, you know, like the NSA hacking team, viewed as like the strongest hacking team in the world right there. So why wouldn't we have. Or one of them. Why wouldn't we have, you know, guys who are like the strongest AI guys in the world? Or why wouldn't we have guys who are placed at the top of these companies that look like public figures? I'm not accusing people, but like, as an example, what if, like, Sam Altman were like a guy working for nsa? It's possible.

[Mike Yagley]

His boredom was pretty extensive.

[Julian Dorey]

You know, a lot of. That's what I'm saying, a lot of connections.

[Mike Yagley]

And I think that it's a natural vertical for OpenAI to have threads into national security programs. It's been, like I said last time, if I had the language in 0506 to describe large language models, instead of talking about solving the associative memory scaling problem, I probably wouldn't be sitting here right now. And that wasn't that long ago. And all of the same things in 05, we're talking about looking at these large unstructured data sets and doing pattern analysis of what's in the text to do predictive capability and everything that. When you are using ChatGPT, all of the things that you are using that application for, we were looking at trying to build into the systems almost 20 years ago.

[Julian Dorey]

You were.

[Mike Yagley]

A lot of people were looking at this.

[Julian Dorey]

Wow.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

When you went in there in 0506 and they start presenting you the problem that they're looking for you to solve, and then also, I would imagine, presenting where it's relevant to you, various pieces of evidence or solutions that they've already come up with or ideas that they've mapped out that they think are possible. Did you ever have a moment where you were like, oh, we are entering a brave new world here?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, definitely. Especially when you. When the conversation is about, all right, do we need to call the CEO of Pick your. Pick your Fortune 500 company? Does the White House need to broker that relationship or make that ask? It's like, okay, this got serious. So. But that was, you know, those types of. Those types of projects are the incremental steps to moving the national security enterprise to thinking about data in ways in which you can ask questions, tag, categorize data sets for your special purpose, or whatever you're looking for. You know, we probably needed to have those sort of incremental. I don't call it a failure, but we moved the ship in assigning a potential capability to deal or address a known threat in ways that probably hadn't done before.

[Julian Dorey]

Do you think that the.

[Mike Yagley]

There needed to be a leap? And I think it started where the data that we need and the data that we're looking at isn't necessarily something that we've generated, the government has generated. It's not a proprietary data set. It's external. That was the big leap with the commercial location data. It's like, so we're not generating this. This isn't some special access program. This is commercially available. So we need to be able to adjust our perceptions of value of data based upon. Just because we didn't generate it, just because we didn't go out and collect it doesn't mean it's not valuable.

[Julian Dorey]

I take it from my conversations on and off camera with you, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. I take it that you're a guy who does, does value the Constitution and.

[Mike Yagley]

The rights within it 100%.

[Julian Dorey]

Okay. Not that it's your fault you're running into these worlds, but you are constantly finding yourself in very weird, at best, gray areas of coming on. And you've said it yourself to your credit, coming onto the edge of things where it's like, okay, where does this become the slippery slope that you can't climb back up again?

[Mike Yagley]

Yep. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Just because you can collect against Americans and even though nobody's getting hurt, because nobody has anything to hide, doesn't mean you should be doing it, doesn't mean the government should give itself that permission under the guise of the Patriot act or counterterrorism.

[Julian Dorey]

So I take it you've had plenty of moments where you're like, where something comes across your desk in these various contexts, whether it be in 05 or 06, with Darka, with Darpa, or, you know, in your years after uncovering the whole Syria operation, getting pulled into a bunch of stuff. I take it you've had some moments where you're like this, this is, this is wrong.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. So this, this is the question, this is the issue of surveillance. Right. A surveillance state where we accept these logical fallacies. More surveillance makes us safer. Okay. Who's going to argue that point? It's not necessarily true because surveillance is a good tool for post event apprehension, but it doesn't necessarily make us safer.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

And so, yeah, there have been instances in which I've been asked to do things and I'm, and my, my reaction is, what's the authority to do this just because we can. And you're asking, you're asking me to do it. If, if there is an authority, you will, you will do that type of work in a classified government building where you have an authority to go and do this.

[Julian Dorey]

Do you have some fights with people?

[Mike Yagley]

I didn't pick fights. I would just say I don't think there, I don't think I can, I don't think I can help you. I don't think there's anything there.

[Julian Dorey]

Did you experience blowback, retribution or consequences in any situate consequences of you losing access to projects you wanted to be involved on as a result of some of those conversations?

[Mike Yagley]

No. And I attribute that to the people that I was working with who were as equally skilled and schooled and committed to the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment and following the law.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

But again, when all of this Started, there was a very limited number of people who were aware. So it was like, yeah, we have this tool. You want to have a look at it? But the more. Yep. The more it got proliferated, it just sort of became a de facto, like, yeah, let's have a look and see what we can see about a U.S. person.

[Julian Dorey]

Right. U.S. person.

[Mike Yagley]

U.S. person.

[Julian Dorey]

So if we're, if we're talking about anything related to someone who is not from this country, especially when they're outside this country physically as well, in that case, there's no real question they don't have any constitutional rights. So it's like, this is espionage. If we can do it, we do it.

[Mike Yagley]

It 100% right. Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, that, that, that makes a ton of sense to me. It gets weird with the American thing because also, like. And this, this is where there have been so many oversteps by the intelligence agencies and they should be crushed for it. But there are also some times where I'm like, I see how they got into that situation. They should not have done that. But like, when your job, for example, is to do, like, counterterrorism and protect, you know, the homeland from something, and then someone on the homeland gets involved. It gets. Gets really weird. It's like, are you just going to give that to the FBI then to do it? And then does that violate constitutional rights if you found out that information through espionage? It gets very, very weird. There are other examples where it's like, they clearly are violating constitutional, you know, at every level of it. But there's somewhere, I see how it gets to a point where the conundrum comes up and it's. And it's not necessarily the worst intentions. It's just you get cynical when you see stuff like the Patriot Act.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And things that are sold to the American people with nice and fancy names that in reality are just signing away all their rights.

[Mike Yagley]

Who's going to vote against the U.S. patriot Act?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Save the Puppies Act.

[Mike Yagley]

Really? Yeah. Who's against, you know, saving. Saving puppies? And this is, you know, so something that sounds good or seems reasonable at the time. Again, how long have we been debating the Patriot act and what we talked about a minute ago, we have senators who are the biggest cheerleaders for the Patriot act until that light is shined on them. And now they have the benefit of hauling the fucking FBI director into a hearing to question him on it. Can you do that? Can you hold the FBI accountable? Even if they've swept up your data, they're not looking at it, you have nothing to worry about. What's your right of challenge? How do you challenge the FBI on violating even, hey, there's been no harm. And that, that slips into, that slips into the normalization of deviance where, hey, there's been no harm, so there shall be no harm until there's harm.

[Julian Dorey]

Right?

[Mike Yagley]

And now everybody has the right to leave their past behind and reinvent. And I get all of that. That. But if there is a portrait of you as a, somebody who was, was, was a dissenter or an opponent of a potentially hostile regime, and your intent is, well, you know, I'll just ride this one out. But they want to, you know, they want to target their, their political opponents. They can, they can roll back that tape. And I think that that's where we don't focus on, you know, the, this normal, this normalization of, of deviance where just because nothing. We haven't had that massive, you know, people haven't been rounded up and thrown in, in prison because they voted for one party or the other just because we haven't had that. Not saying it's going to happen, but, you know, what is the, what's a, what's a, you know, similar metaphor or similar analogy to, you know, we're not going to hire you because, you know, we've done a, we've done a deep dive on, you know, your, your patterns of life. That is where, that's where I look at all of the surveillance stuff, stuff that I've built and sold, and it's in, in the proper use case, I'm all for it. But when it's the shortcut to coercion, persuasion, influence by a commercial entity or the government, I'm 100 opposed to any system that allows that. And, you know, there's this, The Consumer Finance Protection Board is under the Biden administration. They, they came up or they, they are implementing a rule, the 1033 rule. Okay, 1033 obligates every financial institution. You know how you, if you have your bank account, you want to, you want to integrate like QuickBooks or some other third party, you can make that happen, right? They want to. This, this rule is, would require all financial institutions to make all of that, that data available to any authorized entity through a standard API application program. So where we have a system now where you've got, got typical traditional banks and emerging fintech or other service providers, and there's a little bit of friction in that space to protect your privacy and your data, this rule seeks to make all of that far easier and this is how the surveillance state emerges because something that's promised as convenience, open banking, you know, the counterfactual to open banking is, yeah, it's open banking, open banking, it's a global movement to make, you know, it's almost like if you want to port your phone number from one carrier to the next, this is, this, this Rule 1033 is meant to, to make that far easier for the consumer to bolt on additional services or move from one account to the next. And it's a standard government enforced API that opens the door to far more.

[Julian Dorey]

Surveillance because it's easier and it's convenient.

[Mike Yagley]

It's convenient. Citizens don't. Did you know that you needed an open API for global banking? Have you been feeling that pain? Because the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is on the case. And so, you know, I talk about this like surveillance does just doesn't pop up one day. It's iterative, it's slow, it capitalizes on. All of these systems are integrated. There are no firebreaks between your bank and potentially Google. Amazon is a big proponent of this Rule 1033, but I'll bet they are. The, the retail federation, the national association of Convenience Stores are backing this rule. What's the intent there? And it won't be long before an open API makes it very easy for the Patriot act to say, we're just gonna, there's an open API, it's easy, we're just gonna tap into that. Surveillance just doesn't pop up one day. It. That's slow, iterative and sort of built into these obscure administrative rules that, you know, people aren't, people aren't tracking. The good news though is that the Trump administration has filed, has asked court to, to terminate it.

[Julian Dorey]

That's good.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep, somebody's paying attention.

[Julian Dorey]

Because that's another problem where you see there are also loophole legal loopholes that the government will go around to avoid having to put things through Congress or to. In some ways, I don't even know how this is possible. But you know, you get really smart lawyers on it, you figure it out, like to usurp the process of having to create laws. I mean, there's famous ones that were in the Patriot act era related to it, not the Patriot act itself where, you know, Dick Cheney and Rich Armitage. Dick Armitage and all these people were coming up with these ways to have to surveil United States citizens and get these waivers like from the ag. And there's, there's a famous story. John Ashcroft, I believe, was the, was the attorney General at the time, maybe this is like oh, three ish. Something like that guy had. Maybe it was his pancreas exploded.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. They had to go get him to sign the waiver in the hospital. Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So they go to the hospital, he's like comatose. Dick Cheney's there, a couple lawyers are there and they go to get the guy to sign the waiver.

[Mike Yagley]

I think that was for enhanced interrogation.

[Julian Dorey]

Something, I don't remember what it was, but something to basically have to go around Congress. And it was a continuation for something illegal that they were allowing to happen ironically. So I guess a broken clock's right twice a day. But the hero was, was Jim Comey. Jim Comey came in and stopped it from happening. I guess, you know, in that situation he was righteous and correct. But you know, it's. Yeah, I don't know about him either. But it's, it's very, it's interesting like that. That's how it went down. But it's scary that people, even if it's people you elect, which, you know, Dick Cheney was elected, he was on the ticket, at least, you know, they can just be like, yeah, you know, I know the legislative branch is for creating laws, but we're going to do that today.

[Mike Yagley]

The War Powers Act.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. I mean, you're talking about the administrative state, right. Where you've got, you know, they're not cabinet level, like the EPA or the CFPB that I just talked about, where they have the authority to issue rules that their subject entities have to follow. Follow. There's no vote, there's no legislative process. They might have, you know, kind of a review process and, but you know, they can, they can implement rules that are not, that aren't laws, but you can't not follow the, follow the rules. And I think that that, and that's, you know, when, when Trump was canceling a bunch of these rules, I think that that was sort of attacking this administrative state that just can, can rule with impunity and fiat and they don't have any. There's no accountability, there's no pushback. And I think this is one of those types of rules where it sounds good. You know, it speaks to, you know, consumer rights and all these things. But when you peel it back and look that, what's it going to be like in 10 years if there is a, like an open, an API is what, you know, that there, this is just, this creates too much ability for bad actors for the government to, yes. Access like, you know, the, the ledger of of human behavior, your financial data. So, so surveillance just doesn't happen over. It's. It. It chips away and seeds itself into the society. So you're, you know, your original question. Yeah. A lot of what I exposed was absolutely for righteousness, you know, but quickly can become sort of a go to quick, easy. Hey, let's just have a look. We're not going to do anything with it, but we can't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And I, and I think, I think the way our senators reacted to their, you know, to the very systems that they have supported and funded is, is very telling.

[Julian Dorey]

For sure. Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

And.

[Julian Dorey]

And that's. It's. What you're pointing to is the worst example ever of, of hypocrisy. When you know you're, you're in an elite position, you're trying to feed the plebs something that just take your medicine.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And then you tell.

[Mike Yagley]

What do you have to. What do you have to hide?

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Then they're told to take it too.

[Mike Yagley]

What do you have? What's. Why are you so acutely.

[Julian Dorey]

I mean, is it even hidden at this point? Everyone knows.

[Mike Yagley]

I don't know.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. There's been so many whistleblowers on that, it's like. No. No pun intended.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Yeah. He was not in my Grinder data set that I'm willing to discuss.

[Julian Dorey]

I forgot to ask you if you check the RNC for that because apparently there's a real hotspot when the RNC happens for Grindr data.

[Mike Yagley]

Wouldn't surprise me. Wouldn't surprise me. So I think this is the kind of thing that normal people, when they hear surveillance, they need to be educated. They need to know what that means. I think, you know, privacy goes beyond just trying to defeat annoying ads, even if you're not, you know, you're not necessarily trying to hide anything or keep secrets. Your privacy is like foundational.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Privacy enables you to think freely. And, and from a geopolitical perspective, influencing is all about data. And without privacy, it's very easy for adversaries to start doing a cohort analysis. We're going to influence target this group. We've seen it. This is how it happens. It's what I would do.

[Julian Dorey]

Did you come across programs or have access to information at any point during any of your work over the years that discussed the ability to use technology to spy on people? And specifically what. I mean, of course you came across technology where people are spying. But like, for example, activate your camera. Yeah, this, this camera right now. On my laptop that's looking at us right now with the production screen. But there is an open camera right there and even my phone that's on airplane mode. Is there someone on the other end that at any given moment can be looking at me right now?

[Mike Yagley]

No. They would have to. There would. If they're, if they're doing that, you have bigger problems than the fact that they've activated your cameras.

[Julian Dorey]

What do you mean by that?

[Mike Yagley]

If they're, if they have, if they have activated your cameras and attacked your devices, then you're already in the crosshairs.

[Julian Dorey]

But for the average person, they're not necessarily doing that, but they have the power to.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, they, the, the, the capability is there and it's not necessarily a government limited to a government who can tap into an IP camera or any, any of your peripherals.

[Julian Dorey]

Meaning the private corporations can do it.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. I, I, I have not come across a situation in which a decision was taken to activate one's camera without you knowing. Because they don't need to do that. Yeah. You have Alexa in your house. I own, Amazon owns that. I don't need your permission to tap into everything that's going on.

[Julian Dorey]

I don't have an Alexa, but. Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

Or any of these other, you know, smart, smart devices. And that's, Yeah, I love that I.

[Julian Dorey]

Say that as, like, look at me with an ion, like 40 of these.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, at the, at the end of the day, like 99.9% of everybody that works in government is trying to do the right thing.

[Julian Dorey]

There is 99.9. Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

I mean, I'm most, maybe it's 96. Yeah. But I, I think that it's far easier for a commercial enterprise to offer you something that promises convenience. That is a welcomed, invited. You pay for it. Surveillance apparatus.

[Julian Dorey]

Now let's paint an example of that. This is an Apple product. Right. So if Apple, you know, because they have the power to. And I hit agree on a bunch of that. I didn't read if they were recording us right now we're just talking on a podcast, but they decide, oh, we're going to use AI to like, change things.

[Mike Yagley]

Do you have, do you have Siri activated on this?

[Julian Dorey]

I don't have Siri on that.

[Mike Yagley]

So it'd be interesting. And we can do this. If you want to look at your logs to see when that, that laptop woke up and started firing off data diagnostic information to Apple, which you've agreed to as part of your upgrade terms of service and what is the data that it is examining for diagnostic use purposes and what other data is contained in that.

[Julian Dorey]

This is a real good story about.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.

[Julian Dorey]

We were returning home and one of.

[Mike Yagley]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.

[Julian Dorey]

I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Producer Joey Deef]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Julian Dorey]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Mike Yagley]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Julian Dorey]

Allowing my son to see the flight.

[Mike Yagley]

Deck will stick with us forever.

[Julian Dorey]

That's how good leads the way in.

[Mike Yagley]

That flow of information identifiable data about device ownership. You've named the device, you know, the meta fields that would enable them to determine or append an identity to that device, even though they probably have it already. Because you. Yeah, but take a. Take a third. Take an app that is going to do the same thing where your device is going to wake up at the middle of the night and start exfilling data under the guise of performance diagnostics. You know, all this stuff, even if you have your phone in airplane mode, you know, it is still sensing. And then once you go back online, those files will, will, will be sent.

[Julian Dorey]

Even on airplane. Wow.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

So let me continue that example to build this out. One more layer where it gets weird. Apple. Therefore, let's say the data is firing and they're collecting.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

And so they get. Let's say instead of having to change AI, let's say you and I both talked right now. We said something. Some really horrible stuff for some reason. Not what we're talking about right now, but just use your imagination. We say something horrible.

[Mike Yagley]

Like if we're Republican bros. And talking. I don't know.

[Julian Dorey]

But like you insert whatever.

[Mike Yagley]

You heard about that. The.

[Julian Dorey]

No.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah, they were some kids, the Republicans.

[Julian Dorey]

Oh wait, I did hear about this.

[Mike Yagley]

Some Republican.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes, yes. Who was doing that? Who were they doing that to again? They sent like. Where did I just read this the other day? Who did they send that to?

[Mike Yagley]

They were. It was like a group text.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Yes.

[Julian Dorey]

It was a mass blast or something.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

Saying a bunch of. Yeah, that felt like an op, but whatever.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So yeah, they needed to.

[Mike Yagley]

They needed to distract people from the Attorney General in Virginia.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

The candidate for Attorney General.

[Julian Dorey]

Right. So something like that happens. They were saying like all this like racist stuff and things like that. So if you and I were doing that right now, we're like, oh, well, we can't ever release that, but then, you know, they captured this at Apple. Now they don't do anything with it. They have it back there, but they capture it just because they can. However.

[Mike Yagley]

Later on you've backed up chats to icloud.

[Julian Dorey]

No, that, not even that. But let's play with that in a minute. Later on, someone comes in here that I'm unaware of. Maybe it's, let's use an example like an author or something like that who unbeknownst to me is some sort of wanted person from another country or something like that. CIA or NSA gets a hold of that and they realize, oh shit, they went into this guy Julian Dorey studio and they know I have an Apple device. And now for national security purposes, they may hack Apple for counterterrorism to try to get in there. And now they have you and me saying all this shit as well.

[Mike Yagley]

In that case, they would subpoena Apple for all of your. They would just issue a subpoena.

[Julian Dorey]

Even the intelligence agencies.

[Mike Yagley]

Well, if it's happening here, it would be. Yeah, it would be FBI. The intelligence community should not be.

[Julian Dorey]

But it's a foreign person in here. That's what I'm saying. That's why I use that example. If it's an American, that's a different story. But a foreign person that they've tracked to America out from outside the border that become, that's that gray area where it becomes their jurisdiction.

[Mike Yagley]

And if it's, if it's, if it, if, if, if it's the agency that's tracking that person and he's their guy or somebody that they're interested in, that's the, that's where they have to. And, and he's interfacing with all these Americans. This is where they, they need to, they need to immediately bring in FBI and not try to run this.

[Julian Dorey]

But hypothetically they might not do that. And hypothetically they could go get access to that data because hypothetically that is recording us.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

It's not reassuring. Well, because you're making the assumption and there's nothing wrong with this. You're playing with the example as you should, but you're operating under the assumption that everyone is doing shit by the book and not doing things for what they believe are the right intentions, but breaking the laws in the process or exposing the gray area to try to match what they're doing, even if it's.

[Mike Yagley]

Not going to be, they're going to be to maintain that firewall between the Bureau and something happening in the States. That's pretty high level now what were.

[Julian Dorey]

You going to say? What was the other example you were given about the chats or whatever a minute ago? Or I went to, I took it in the other direction, but you were like, and then they get access to your Apple chats or something.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. I mean, if you're backing everything up to icloud.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, and that's, that's retained, you know, they issue a warrant for icloud and whatever is there. Your calendar, chats, anything that's backed up to icloud, pictures, photos, you know, that would be stipulated in the warrant and Apple would review it. They get, they get a lot of them every day. Google gets a lot of those every day. And if it's, if it's correct, and their legal team, you know, Yep, this is a proper warrant, they comply.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. I had a friend of mine get an email recently, not about him, but related to discovery for some random person who had emailed him once and Google went to him and said, hey, it doesn't involve you at all, but just letting you know that you were on the, on the discovery because you're one of like a million people this person emailed. So when we pull, when we pull that email, we're giving it to FBI, but it has nothing to do with you and there's no action for you to take. Take. And you're not going to hear from FBI. But I was like, that's kind of a spooky email to get, you know, like, yeah, that's.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Do you get a criminal defense lawyer when you get that kind of.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah, yeah, that's what he was saying. And then, and then you talk to someone and they're like, no, you're fine. But that's an example of like the thing they get every day where some of them, they're like, yep, that makes sense. You can hand that over.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

So the other one we haven't really talked about. We didn't get into it last time, made a couple jokes about it. Was. Was Palantir. They're obviously quite in the crosshairs of a lot of things. You got one co founder giving speeches on the Antichrist people.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

And then you got another co founder who has so much tism mixed with, I don't know, sociopathy that it scares the shit out of me when he talks. The Carp guy. And you have a company that essentially was invested in by Coin, what is it? Cointelpro or Inky. In Qtel. Sorry. Yeah. In Q Tel, which is like the CIA's VC branch and they utilize drones and surveillance and AI on top of those things to, you know, assist in war zones. And it seems to be dragging even beyond that at this point, to the point that we are now certainly questioning some of the constitutionality of the tactics that they use. What. So first question, like, have you had any overlap in anything you've done where Palantir is involved?

[Mike Yagley]

Sure. So there's. So I think, you know, there's. There's collection where you're collecting data, whether. Whether it's, you know, through drones or intercepts. And that data goes into a government server and Palantir basically sits on top of that and is the dashboard, the front end to that data. I am not aware of Palantir doing collection, but they. They are, you know, their AI product is, you know, a product that requires training, and that gets into the question of. Of, you know, human in the loop and what is it deciding to do? And, you know, is it. Is the AI launching drone strikes? And I don't. There's. I don't know of any situation in which AI went haywire and launched a strike without a human pushing the button. It may do optimal target selection.

[Julian Dorey]

Or optimal target selection, meaning, like, here's five different options. This is the best one based on the data.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yep. You know, this is. And when I say optimal target selection, it's not, you know, let's pick the guy we want to engage. It's, you know, this is the optimal conditions by which we can engage because it's open area, we have access. You know, it has. It's optimized for maximum effects.

[Julian Dorey]

Do you worry about the reach that they have?

[Mike Yagley]

So I think we talked about this last time, and I. And I know a lot of people on them, and I've never worked for them, and I don't own stock and. But they arrived and became a force because they. They didn't come up with fancy sales presentations. They solved the commander's problem, like, in a day or two. The commander's problem was I have all of this data that we're collecting, ISR data, cell phone data, I have all this data, but I have to go to 10 different systems in order to see what is happening in my theater of operations.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

Palantir solved that by integrating all of those various data sets into a language that could then be rendered in this common operating picture, this dashboard visualization of all of the data that a commander could look and see. I've got this going on. I've got that going on. I have this common place to understand all of these data sets and it's a data fusion capability. And they solved that. They solved that where, you know, nobody else was solving that. And they solved it very elegantly with engineers interfacing with the customer first as opposed to, you know, salesperson giving a fancy presentation, promising that we could do all this. They were like, yeah, we can do this.

[Julian Dorey]

That part doesn't surprise me because it's birthed by people who can't from the venture capital and tech world and Silicon Valley.

[Mike Yagley]

Totally disrupted, you know, and that's why one day there wasn't Palantir.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

And the next day it's like program of record, program of record, program of record.

[Julian Dorey]

But when you have a company that is effectively, literally financially tied to the government, one of the people running it is a dude who funds a lot of campaigns and is highly politically active. And Peter Thiel. And they have the power that they do and then even start openly discussing it in relation to like flying it over protests and inside the United States to collect data.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

You know, and by the way, I'm not even defending people that go to those types of things, but they are the ones that are not violent, are practicing their First Amendment rights. Like, it gets really weird when a tool like that that's supposed to be used to solve commanders issues on the battlefield around the world, which would make sense, is now being used a node for isr.

[Mike Yagley]

And yeah, I, you know, I, I wonder about that. If, if there's, if that's because they are, they're not newly publicly traded, but you know, whether that's part of their, you know, they're publicly traded companies. So you know, they need to, they need to, they need to move that needle every day. But if, if, if law enforcement makes the decision that we're going to fly drones over a protest and the, the way in which we're viewing that data is through Palantir. It's not. Palantir isn't the privacy issue or the violation of your, of your, of your rights. It's the decision to surveil this protest.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes, that's, I see what you're saying.

[Mike Yagley]

And everything, you know, around surveillance, like there are the tools to do it and there will be vendors who will enable that. It's the decision to, to implement these solutions, these, these technologies. And I'm sure when you have a protest and there are going to be 50,000 people. Yeah, you're going to want to have some overwatch, you're going to want to have some airborne ISR keeping an eye on Things because you don't have enough cops to put out there.

[Julian Dorey]

But what is the line on what it keeps on?

[Mike Yagley]

But if by virtue, if you are guilty by being at that protest, and let's say, for example, you decide to attend a protest that might involve trying to stop the steel of an election, and you didn't violate any laws, but you were on the grounds of the U.S. capitol on January 6, law enforcement was, been very aggressive in identifying everybody who most were peaceful. We had a handful of knuckleheads who, you know, sort of trespassed. Yes, if that, if you, you know, I don't even know if those charges stuck because the capital.

[Julian Dorey]

I know what you're saying. Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

But you're talking about everyone else, especially everybody else. The family that was visiting Washington, that happened to be in proximity to the Capitol during that event, who didn't go to the event, but their bank, you know, their credit card purchases were examined to determine whether there's proof of presence that they were there. And do we need to investigate that? I think you start getting into that gray area of just because you were at a protest and you should have the right to protest, but the minute you start burning shit and destroying property, then you've crossed a line.

[Julian Dorey]

Sure.

[Mike Yagley]

But by virtue of being at that protest should not be used against you in the future or should not, you should not be, you should not be concerned that the government is using your right, your, you know, invoking your constitutional right, that they're gonna, that they're gonna use it against you because they can.

[Julian Dorey]

But I think people have now seen the precedents where on, on certain scales they do. So when they hear about an even more powerful outfit like Palantir, they righteously go, this is what maybe 1984 looks like. You can see where people are getting that from, right?

[Mike Yagley]

Absolutely. Absolutely. What was that Tom Cruise movie? Minority Report.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

Where people are getting hauled away because of what they are likely to do based upon the predictive algorithm that says, well, you've invoked these behaviors, you're of this certain character, so we're just going to take you off the street before you even do it. You know, predictive policing has been, you know, a term that's been around for years and that's designed to, you know, place officers in high, high crime areas. But I don't think we should put anything, we shouldn't take any of this surveillance for granted that somebody isn't going to look at this and say, well, I could use it for this because it's in the public, public Interest, I'm preventing crime.

[Julian Dorey]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

I think that's where, I think that's where privacy is beyond, you know, a terms of service guarantee. It's. We have privacy for a reason. Founders didn't describe it as privacy, but, you know, there was a reason why they, they wrote the fourth Amendment into the, into the Constitution.

[Julian Dorey]

That's right.

[Mike Yagley]

Where does that line stop? And the more our systems are all integrated for frictionless commerce, that becomes a gray area for authorities because it's like, I can access this. It's open. It's an open banking portal. We don't have those friction points to make it harder for us to be secure in our, in our papers. But good luck trying to put that back in the, back in the bottle.

[Julian Dorey]

That's, that's the thing. And that's where, you know, I'm an optimist.

[Mike Yagley]

Yep.

[Julian Dorey]

I, there's certain things I'm cynical on because it's like, ah, you know, but when I look at the long term, I look at the data ironically and I'm like, you know, we are living in the best times in human history. There's some things that got to change. There's some poor trends we have right now. But I think when you look at all the times when things are going really shit wrong from a geopolitical, economic, sociological and cultural standpoint, especially in the history, our short history of our country in America, like, we've always found a way, and I think we can find a way. But when I see people concerned, and I see people concerned about this all the time, about some life imitating art, aspects of society that look a little, say, 1984 ish and brave new Worldish, it's impossible for me to shut it down and completely and say, no, no, no, like there's none of that. There are some things that point towards that. What I would like to believe is that there are enough great benevolent people who are maybe of a more elite status, more power and more wealth who will say no? Who will say no?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah.

[Julian Dorey]

In addition to the people who aren't so good. You know what I mean? Like, the people who are good can kind of cancel that out.

[Mike Yagley]

Right.

[Julian Dorey]

You know, and so who knows, Maybe the guys that run Palantir will all turn out to be wrong about them and they'll actually have the right intentions. I'm rooting for that outcome. It just doesn't. When you listen to them talk. I mean, as much as Teal scares me with some things, that Karp guy scares the shit out of me.

[Mike Yagley]

Me.

[Julian Dorey]

I mean, he is a strange bird. Really strange bird. It's like, I hope it's just that he's strange and you know, there's a governor on these mechanisms, but there's no doubt that the mechanisms that they're starting to form and come up with have immense power now and can grow into exponential forms of power beyond that.

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. And that's, they may have the capability, you know, Foundry is their, is their AI engine and maybe they have the ability to do predictive things that are a violation of a constitutional right. Somebody in government needs to say, I'm not buying that. You know, I'm not going to fund that.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

But you know, predictive, you know, in an overseas capacity. Okay. And then you see how it sort of becomes, it blends into a monolithic government capability.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah.

[Mike Yagley]

You know, and keep in mind, you know, like I was saying before, surveillance sort of chips away, it doesn't just show up.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

And so surveillance, it's almost like nefarious. It's almost like, you know, evil. It, it speaks to you in ways that are seductive and doesn't feel like it's wrong or feels good. It feels, you know, open minded and progressive and all these things. But the, the third order of effects when things are frictionless. That's, that's when, that's when the Orwellian state of society becomes like, no, it's just the way it is. I don't have to pay for my train ticket because the transit authority recognized my face and knows that I have a certain amount of money on my account.

[Julian Dorey]

Convenience.

[Mike Yagley]

Convenience. Isn't this cool? Aren't we a progressive advanced society? Okay, so your proof of presence every time you have to use an app to buy a $2 cup of coffee, well, that's proof of presence that your credit card company now knows that you were at this coffee shop or this restaurant to buy a two dollar cup of coffee. Your proof of presence is now irrefutable. Yeah. Is that supposed to be, we're supposed to embrace that as luxury? I don't know. I don't know. I think, I think a little bit of friction in the system is what keeps us autonomous from the big state. But privacy is, I don't view it being where I've coming from, where I've come from and seen, you know, privacy to me is like, okay, this isn't just a consumer feature that I'm gonna depend on Google or Apple to provide for me. Right. It's like Americans need to view, to value their privacy because privacy is, you know, is is a more dignified way to live.

[Julian Dorey]

Yes.

[Mike Yagley]

So I don't think that there's, I don't think that there's anybody in government gangster enough to push the button to make the dystopian state activated tomorrow. But the technologies are there.

[Julian Dorey]

That's what I'm saying. I don't think it's a one person kind of deal. I think it's a road to hell of groupthink and conformity.

[Mike Yagley]

It's like we talk about the deep state. So these things metastasize deep throughout government. Not because there's some committee that makes that decision. It's like starts here, kind of moves over here, gets wind over here. Next thing you know you've got a cabal, a cartel and nobody knows quite what the central authority. There is no centralization. It just, it just.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Right.

[Mike Yagley]

It's like cancer and it spreads. And that's, and that is a function of all of these consumer capabilities that make life easier. We haven't even like talk about sort of adversarial machine learning and training data as a way of influencing a society where it's not. You're not hacking chat GPT, you are creating data that chat GPT trains off of. Yes. That fulfills a narrative that you seek.

[Julian Dorey]

Seen that already.

[Mike Yagley]

China's answer to ChatGPT has been trained to give glowing feedback on China. China is exporting that technology no differently than they try to export Huawei. They seed it into emerging developing economies. Yep. And next thing you know, they have created a society that is all in on the China narrative because that's how they've, that's how they've engaged with technology.

[Julian Dorey]

You hack the library, you control the readers.

[Mike Yagley]

So when the, when the large language model is dirty, it doesn't, you know, the AI is just, the AI is a rule engine. It's just responding. But if it's, if it's, if it's been schooled and learned, you know, we talk about, you know, my learning is, you know, I come from a perspective. Its perspective is that large language model that is one of those easy buttons for influence. I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna do this belt and road deal and I'm going to throw in deep seek.

[Julian Dorey]

Yep.

[Mike Yagley]

And all of that data, all of the, you know, the, the prompts. And this is the other thing, you know, people are concerned that their privacy is being violated because of the, the engagement. It's the prompts like you're, you will. In ChatGPT, you know, your, your privacy in terms of what you're chatting about is locked down. But the questions you ask and the interactions, that is proprietary and that's the metadata that this is what you were asking about. So that almost provides this meta layer. You think Google knows what you're interested in? Yeah, it's different than Google and what they did with their model, but even more, of course, because now they saw that you're interested in purchasing a car, they can see that transaction through. It's almost like you go to a car dealer and you know, the car salesman wants to be your friend and is like trying to cozy up to you and you don't want it. You're just like, no, you don't care about my family. Let's just, you know, let's just put it on the table. But you've been having this interaction with an LLM or a GPT in which it knows you're looking for a car. It knows whether you liked the car because now you're chatting with it about, you know, how do I get out of this lease or how do I unwind this, or what are the aftermarket? You know, what's the, what's the aftermarket for this? So now it knows how you feel about the car, but it's, it's like your friend. So you're revealing things that you wouldn't talk to the salesman about why you want to buy this car. But the GPT knows.

[Julian Dorey]

Gets weird. It gets weird what drives you to do what you do.

[Mike Yagley]

So this thing that everybody is, is very interested in, it's kind of like, it's like a lagging indicator. I did that, I did that. You know, what's next? Or am I, am I one trick pony?

[Julian Dorey]

So do you love what you do?

[Mike Yagley]

I think that I have crafted what I do in a way that allows me to pick and choose what I want to do. I don't walk into an office and like, what's on the queue for today? I get to say no to what I want to say no to. And I think that that's sort of the career of the future because AI is going to automate a lot of these white collar jobs. So until you can find a lane in which there is a very special skill set in which you are uniquely qualified to fulfill and figuring what that out, figuring what that is out early, I think that's what people need to think about. In terms of what do I do, what am I going to do with myself? What, where do I find meaning? You're not going to find meaning and meaning in a job Job pays the bills. It's paycheck. Leave it at that. But this was. This was an evolution. Like, I took a lot of too.

[Julian Dorey]

Yeah. Where can your skills make a difference?

[Mike Yagley]

Yeah. And. And where do. Where is this going to take me? In a direction where I'm just going to get frustrated. So I think it's. I think that tech is interesting, but I think we need to look at it from a. We need to be able to question what is its value and be able to have those conversations without having to apologize for it. I like that, you know, we're entitled to privacy. We need to get serious about it.

[Julian Dorey]

Well, I think you explaining how it works a little better certainly helps people. So I'm glad we could do this again and fill in on some of the things we didn't get to last time in episode 243. But thanks for coming back so soon, Mike.

[Mike Yagley]

My pleasure. I hope the 1033 discussion didn't like, wow, people, that's good. That's a real show sticker right there.

[Julian Dorey]

The 1033 talking about a CFDP rule.

[Mike Yagley]

Like, okay, I'm gonna listen to something else.

[Julian Dorey]

No, I. I think that. I wasn't aware of that, but that's.

[Mike Yagley]

One of those, like, nobody knows about it, and it's boring.

[Julian Dorey]

People want to know.

[Mike Yagley]

That's how it starts.

[Julian Dorey]

I don't think it's boring. I think people are like, what is that? What the. So I appreciate you sharing stuff like that. We'll do it again again sometime.

[Mike Yagley]

All right, sir.

[Julian Dorey]

All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

[Mike Yagley]

Peace.

[Producer Joey Deef]

Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that, like, button on the video.

[Julian Dorey]

They're both a huge, huge help.

[Producer Joey Deef]

And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links.

[Julian Dorey]

Are in my description below.

[Mike Yagley]

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