Anti-Spy Phone CEO on Pegasus, Israel Link Allegations & Erik Prince | Joe Weil • 339
Julian Dorey · 24 Sep 2025 · 3h 17m
Guest: Joe Weil · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
This conversation centers on a former Apple special-projects engineer who now runs a privacy-focused smartphone company founded with backing from Erik Prince. He walks through his years building zero-to-one hardware and software features at Apple, describing the company's culture, its internal politics after 2020, and what he saw as a shift toward struggle-session-style meetings, informal DEI hiring practices, and growing discomfort with dissenting views on COVID and free speech. He then explains, with a live phone demo, how third-party apps harvest and sell location and behavioral data through ad-tech networks regardless of Apple's own privacy settings, and argues this commercial data-broker ecosystem is a bigger everyday threat to civil liberties than government spyware like Pegasus. He details his phone's approach: blocking third-party tracking at the device level, running an independent app center, offering a data-only SIM with no attached phone number, and manufacturing in the US at a higher cost to avoid dependence on Chinese labor. Woven through the technical material is a personal narrative about family business conflict, alcoholism, a described religious conversion experience, and his relationship with his father. He also discusses concerns about Israeli-linked engineering talent, AI's near-term risks and limits, and a demonstration of how easily purchasable ad data can locate and identify a specific individual.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Screen time and ad exposure growth
- Apple/Google symbiotic ad business model
- Guest's path from ad business to Apple
- Alcoholism and addiction spiral
- Religious conversion experience
- Father's death and reconciliation
- Culture shift at Apple post-2020
- Third-party data harvesting demo
- Israel-linked engineering talent concerns
- US-made phone manufacturing economics
- Locating a trafficker using ad data
- AI/LLM risks and limits
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“If it's a female and they've seen a high incidence of deleted selfies, that indicates like a low self-image and they might be a good target for a specific type of”
“You don't need to be faster than the bear. You need to be faster than the other hunter.”
“It took them, bro, 30 minutes. 30 minutes and purchasing some data and they found a clandestine operative in Nicaragua.”